 Seneca manages to defend clemency’s claim to the rank of virtue by distinguishing it both from its opposite, crudelitas or cruelty, and from a related disposition, misericordia, pity or compassion, which for the Stoics counted as a vice (2.4.4). The Stoic sage will exercise clemency by attending to the circumstances and causes of the criminal’s act, but also by seeking in various ways to improve the latter’s character (1.14.1–3, 1.16.1–3), an approach that goes back at least to Plato (Prt. 324a–c, Grg.469a–b), doing so with parsimony and discernment between those who are curable and those who are not (again with Plato, Grg.525a–526b). Indeed, Seneca asserts that those who are curable will generally strive subsequently to become worthy of the clemency shown to them by the prince (2.2.1), a principle illustrated by the story of Augustus’ clemency toward the conspirator Cnaeus Cornelius Cinna, who would become his lifelong friend (1.9). In good Stoic fashion, Seneca finally shows that the virtue of clemency is both valuable in itself and also beneficial. It sustains the rule of a prince by inspiring love in his subjects (1.19.6), whereas cruelty augments the number of his enemies (1.8.7). And conversely, whereas misericordia wallows in a wrongful and inefficient emotional pity for the treatment that justice would prescribe of the criminal (2.6.1), clemency improves the criminal more efficiently than cruelty would do (1.22.1), and for this and other reasons better aims at the good of mankind. It is worth noting finally that, while Seneca specifies that clemency should also extend to slaves, his cosmopolitanism stopped short of advocating their manumission or the abolition of slavery (Griffin 1992:  256–85).[15] 