There is no doubt that a slave is able to give a benefit to anyone he pleases; why not, therefore, also to his master? “Because,” you say, “it is not possible for him to become his master’s ‘creditor’ if he has given him money. Otherwise, he makes his master in debt to him every day; he attends him when be travels, he nurses him when he is sick, he expends the greatest labor in cultivating his farm; nevertheless all these boons, which when supplied by another are called benefits, are merely ‘services’ when they are supplied by a slave. For a benefit is something that some person has given when it was also within his power not to give it. But a slave does not have the right to refuse; thus he does not confer, but merely obeys, and he takes no credit for what he has done because it was not possible for him to fail to do it.”
Even under these conditions I shall still win the day and promote a slave to such a position that he will, in many respects, be a free man. Meanwhile, tell me this — if I show to you one who fights for the safety of his master without any regard for his own, and, pierced with wounds, pours forth the last drops of his life-blood drawn from his very vitals, who, in order to provide time for his master to escape, seeks to give him a respite at the cost of his own life, will you deny that this man has bestowed a benefit simply because he is a slave? If I show to you one who, refusing to betray to a tyrant the secrets of his master, was bribed by no promises, terrified by no threats, overcome by no tortures, and, as far as he was able, confounded — the suspicions of his questioner, and paid the penalty of good faith with his life, will you deny that this man bestowed a benefit on his master simply because he was his slave? Consider, rather, whether in the case of slaves, a manifestation of virtue is not the more praiseworthy the rarer it is, and, too, whether it is not all the more gratifying that, despite their general aversion to domination and the irksomeness of constraint, some slave by his affection for his master has overcome the common hatred of being a slave. So, therefore, a benefit does not cease to be a benefit because it proceeded from a slave, but is all the greater on that account, because he could not be deterred from it even by being a slave.