In order to determine if the slaves of Greek and Roman societies would endorse the Stoics views on slavery, we must first examine what place in society Stoics regarded slaves and how they defined ones freedom. The Stoics primarily taught that one should seek to be unshackled from his passions through the development of self-control to overcome their destructive nature. Only through these means did the Stoics believe that one could achieve true virtue. Furthermore, to curtail these passions, the Stoics advocated in favour of leading a humble life and believed that no one was a slave by nature. In their view a man is free if he is obedient to his rationality and thus bound to the moral law of the universe, logos, and divine will. As the Stoics believed that people received their ability for reason from the gods, and thus they judged that altogether, humans possess equal capacity to achieve great wisdom and not a single human alive was superior to another in terms of their very nature. This contrasts
with the views of Aristotle, who believed in natural slavery: that if one belonged to another and not to themselves, they were by nature a slave. Hunt comments that meanwhile the Stoics believed that there is no difference in the status between a master and servants, due to every humans place as a citizen of the world, they as such spurned Aristotles argument. Diogenes Laertius reports that the Stoics deem freedom being the ability for someone to undertake independent action, whereas slavery is the lack of such choice, and that slavery in terms of masters and the possession of slaves is an evil aspect of life. Brunt notes that to a modern audience the Stoics had the capabilities and direction to have resisted slavery as a social institution, yet he nevertheless elaborates that since slaves were a valuable commodity to the wealth of Greco-Roman societies, such a statement was inherently fruitless, and the Stoics confined themselves to advocating towards slaves being provided with fair treatment.