“At one pole is the slave as property and nothing else; at the other pole, the perfectly free man, all of whose acts are freely and voluntarily performed. Neither has ever existed. There have been individual slaves who had the bad luck to be treated by their owners as nothing but a possession, but I know of no society in which the slave population as a whole were looked upon in that simple way. At the other end, every man except Robinson Crusoe has his freedom limited in one way or another in consequence of living in society. Absolute freedom is an idle dream (and it would be psychologically intolerable anyway.)”
– Moses Israel Finley,
“Ancient Economy” p. 67
(Finley was knighted by
Queen Elizabeth in 1979)