The education he describes is only for the persons whom we call ‘gentlemen’— , that is to say, landholders, living in idleness on the labour of slaves. (The Greek word for slave and servant is the same; our word slave being merely a modern provincialism contracted from ‘Sclavonian.’ See ‘St. Mark’s Rest,’ Supplement I.)
Our manufacturers, tradesmen, and artizans, would therefore be left out of question, and our domestic servants and agricultural labourers all summed by Plato simply under the word ‘slaves’— a word which the equivocation of vulgar historians and theologians always translates exactly as it suits their own views: ‘slave,’ when they want to depreciate Greek politics; and servant, when they are translating the words of Christ or St. Paul, lest either Christ or St. Paul should be recognized as speaking of the same persons as Plato.