Of course, you could leave your family, let your spouse apply for Medicaid; but slaves always had the option to run away too. Which way do you think you will be happier, or less unhappy? And, of course, some people will never be happy unless they are doing what they believe is the honorable thing.

My point: we all have at once both more and fewer choices than we think.

But then I go speak Spanish with my students or Italian with my friends, and I feel better (even though I still suck at Italian).

I think I got the

it also may have been roman slaves, i’m hearing now. slaves in rome owning slaves. except that, being themselves property, slaves could not actually own anything. so i sense a flaw here of some kind. but the situation was, for example, the bosses, say, did not do anything themselves. they had businesses, but had slaves who ran the businesses for them. they themselves did not work. and i suppose the slaves had other slaves who helped them run the businesses, whether they belonged to the slaves themselves, or to the owners, they were at the disposal of the manager-slaves. another point – being a legal institution, slavery may back then have had a slightly different nature than it does now, when it is a crime, or did a while ago, when it was first not a crime and then became one. you know what i mean? so i have to wonder how different these power arrangements in ancient ROME were from those we live in now. probably pretty different, probably. right?