You need despise no one, even
though he bears a commonplace name, and owes little to fortune. Whether
your immediate ancestors were freedmen, or slaves, or foreigners, pluck
up your spirits boldly, and leap over any intervening disgraces of your
pedigree; at its source, a noble origin awaits you. Why should our
pride inflate us to such a degree that we think it beneath us to receive
benefits from slaves, and think only of their position, forgetting their
good deeds? You, the slave of lust, of gluttony, of a harlot, nay, who
are owned as a joint chattel by harlots, can you call anyone else
a slave? Call a man a slave? why, I pray you, whither are you being
hurried by those bearers who carry your litter? whither are these men
with their smart military-looking cloaks carrying you? is it not to the
door of some door-keeper, or to the gardens of some one who has not even
a subordinate office? and then you, who regard the salute of another
man's slave as a benefit, declare that you cannot receive a benefit from
your own slave. What inconsistency is this? At the same time you despise
and fawn upon slaves, you are haughty and violent at home, while out of
doors you are meek, and as much despised as you despise your slaves;
for none abase themselves lower than those who unconscionably give
themselves airs, nor are anymore prepared to trample upon others than
those who have learned how to offer insults by having endured them.

XXIX. I felt it my duty to say this, in order to crush the arrogance of
men who are themselves at the mercy of fortune, and to claim the right
of bestowing a benefit for slaves, in order that I may claim it also for
sons. The question arises, whether children can ever bestow upon their
parents greater benefits than those which they have received from them.

It is granted that many sons become greater and more powerful than their
parents, and also that they are better men. If this be true, they may
give better gifts to their fathers than they have received from them,
seeing that their fortune and their good nature are alike greater than
that of their father. "Whatever a father receives from his son," our
opponent will urge, "must in any case be lees than what the son received
from him, because the son owes to his father the very power of giving.
Therefore the father can never be surpassed in the bestowal of benefits,
because the benefit which surpasses his own is really his." I answer,
that some things deri