What, then, is just in these circumstances? It is not to exercise a kind of tyrannical authority against the one who holds us, nor, by tearing us away from the holder through the superior abundance of power, to leave any pretext for a just claim to the one who enslaved the human being through pleasure.
For just as those who sell their own freedom for money become slaves of those who buy them, having made themselves their own sellers, and neither they nor anyone else on their behalf may claim freedom for them—even if those who have voluntarily brought themselves into this misfortune are of noble birth—so if someone, out of concern for the one who has been sold, were to use force against the buyer, he would appear unjust by forcibly taking away one acquired according to law. But if he wished to buy such a person back, no law prevents it. In the same way, since we had voluntarily sold ourselves, the One who in His goodness was restoring us to freedom had to devise not a tyrannical but a just mode of restoration.
This mode consists in leaving it to the one who holds the captive to receive whatever ransom he might wish in exchange for the one held.