Ancient pride. – The specific hue which nobility had in the ancient world is absent in ours because the ancient slave is absent from our sensibility. A Greek of noble descent found such immense intermediate stages and such a distance between his own height and that ultimate baseness that he could barely see the slave clearly any more: not even Plato could really see him. It is different with us, accustomed as we are to the doctrine of human equality, if not also to equality itself. A creature who is not at its own disposal and who lacks leisure is by no means something despicable to us on that account; perhaps each of us possesses too much of such slavishness in accordance with the conditions of our social order and activity, which are utterly different from those of the ancients. The Greek philosopher went through life feeling secretly that there were far more slaves than one might think – namely, that everyone who was not a philosopher was a slave;11 his pride overflowed when he considered that even the mightiest men on earth might be his slaves. This pride, too, is foreign and impossible for us; not even metaphorically does the word ‘slave’ possess for us its full force.