1To rule slaves with moderation is praiseworthy. 1Even with a slave one must consider not how much he can suffer with impunity, but how much the nature of right and good allows you, which bids us spare even captives and those bought for a price. 1How much more justly does it bid us not to abuse men who are free, freeborn and respectable as if they were slaves, but to treat them as those whom you surpass in rank, and whose protection, not servitude, has been entrusted to you. 1Slaves may take refuge at a statue; 2though everything is permitted against a slave, there is something which the common law of living beings forbids to be permitted against a human being.
2Who did not hate Vedius Pollio worse than his own slaves did, because he fattened his lampreys on human blood and ordered those who had offended him in any way to be thrown into his fish-pond, what else but a pond of serpents? 2O man worthy of a thousand deaths, whether he threw slaves to be devoured to the lampreys he was going to eat, or kept the lampreys only to feed them in this way! 3Just as cruel masters are pointed out through the whole city, and are hated and loathed, so the wrongdoing of kings extends more widely, and their infamy and hatred are handed down to the ages; 3and how much better it would have been not to be born than to be counted among those born for the public's harm!