Flattery’s textbook

Abstract A lucky slave was a popular type for Roman readers. It was natural for a master to think that a man was lucky to be his slave or, at least, lucky not to be someone else’s. Sometimes that thought was justified. A loyal slave might be truly lucky, well paid and then freed, often staying on in the master’s house, still telling the master what he liked to hear about himself, maybe more likely to be believed, particularly fortunate if the household was the Palatine and the lucky man could profit from knowing its rules. An unlucky slave could be kept enslaved or cast out into an unwelcoming world, not just profitless but starving. When the writer Seneca was exiled to Corsica by Messalina, he felt hardly better than a slave - and wrote a classic letter to Polybius, a very powerful ex-slave at court to complain.