“In the simpler times there was no need of so large a supernumerary force of medical men, nor of so many surgical instruments or of so many boxes of drugs. Health was simple for a simple reason. Many dishes have induced many diseases. Note how _vast a quantity of lives one stomach absorbs_--devastator of land and sea.[29] No wonder that with so discordant diet disease is ever varying.... Count the cooks: you will no longer wonder at the innumerable number of human maladies.”--(_Ep._ xcv.) We must be content with giving our readers only one more of Seneca’s exhortations to a reform in diet:-- “You think it a great matter that you can bring yourself to live without all the apparatus of fashionable dishes; that you do not desire wild boars of a thousand pounds weight or the tongues of rare birds, and other portents of a luxury which now despises whole carcases,[30] and chooses only certain parts of each victim. I shall admire you then only when you scorn not plain bread, when you have persuaded yourself that herbs exist not for other animals only, but for man also--if you shall recognise that vegetables are sufficient food for the stomach into which we now stuff valuable lives, as though it were to keep them for ever. For what matters it what it receives, since it will soon lose all that it has devoured? The apparatus of dishes, containing the spoils of sea and land, gives you pleasure, you say.... The splendour of all this, heightened by art, gives you pleasure. Ah! those very things so solicitously sought for and served up so variously--no sooner have they entered the belly than one and the same foulness shall take possession of them all. Would you contemn the pleasures of the table? Consider their final destination” (_exitum specta_).[31] If Seneca makes _dietetics_ of the first importance, he at the same time by no means neglects the other departments of _ethics_, which, for the most part, ultimately depend upon that fundamental reformation; and he is equally excellent on them all. Space will not allow us to present our readers with all the admirable _dicta_ of this great moralist. We cannot resist, however, the temptation to quote some of his unique teaching on certain branches of humanitarianism and philosophy little regarded either in his own time or in later ages. Slaves, both in pagan and Christian Europe, were regarded very much as the domesticated non-human species are at the present day, as born merely for the will and pleasure of their masters. Such seems to have been the universal estimate of their _status_. While often superior to their lords, nationally and individually, by birth, by mind, and by education, they were at the arbitrary disposal of too often cruel and capricious owners:--