Spanger addresses the relationship between Greek and Roman comedy mainly on a case by case basis. That is, when he looks at how in Roman comedy a number of slaves are cooks, he’ll then talk about how in Greek comedy a number of slaves are cooks etc. However at the beginning of his book he makes the rather bold claim that while Greek comedies will sometimes wax philosophical about the status of slavery, all such ruminations in Roman comedy are traditional, unoriginal (and he implies that they are hackneyed, but doesn’t quite say that). As evidence he provides the following quote from the Greek comedian Philemon:
ἐμοῦ γάρ ἐστι κύριος μὲν εἶς ἀνήρ,
τούτων δὲ καὶ σοῦ μυρίων τ᾽ἄλλων τ᾽ ἄλλων νόμος,
ἑτέρων τύραννος, τῶν τυραννούντων φόβος.
Δοῦλοι βασιλέων εἰσίν, ὁ βασιλεὺς θεῶν,
ὁ θεὸς ἀνάγκης. Πάντα δ᾽, ἄν σκοπῇς, ὅλως
ἑτέρων πέφυκεν ἥττον᾽, ὧν δὲ μείζονα.
Τούτοις ἀνάγκη ταῦτα δουλεύειν ἀεί.
For on the one hand, my master is a single man,
On the other hand, you have ten-thousand and more in the shape of the law,
And the tyrant has others, in the shape of fear of tyrants.
So slaves are to kings, and a king is to the gods,
And the gods to necessity. So you should see that all things, everywhere,
Have grown to be either lesser than others, or are greater than others.
In this way necessity always enslaves them. (frg. 31 K)
It is true that this speech is rather philosophical, but we should be more cautious in assuming that this is an original position. Rather, Philemon is interacting with the ideas put for by the Stoics in the third century about the nature of freedom and necessity. The Stoics were a group of philosophers who, among many other things, made very strong claims about the nature of fate. According to them, even though humans, and indeed all rational entities, have free will, nonetheless everything in the universe is following a set pattern. As this quote from Philemon shows, the Stoics, and their comic commentators, interacted with this idea of fate by using the metaphor of the relationship between slave and master.