Nature then intends to make the bodies of free persons and of slaves different from each other, those of slaves strong for their necessary duties, and those of the free upright and useless for such forms of work, but useful for the political life.
Aristotle Politics 1254b27-33
It seems to be a law of nature, that slavery is equally destructive to the master and to the slave; for, while it stupefies the latter with fear, and reduces him below the condition of man, it brutalizes the former by the practice of continual tyranny; and makes him the prey to all the vices which render human nature loathsome.
The ex-slave Charles Ball, in Taylor (1999: vol. 1, 265)
While slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Greek world, it is less certain how many of the Greek states should be classified as ‘slave societies’, as that term is commonly used by contemporary historians of a society where slaves formed a significant proportion of the labouring population (say 20-5 per cent or more) or where at least the dominant class or the elite derived the majority of their surplus production and hence their wealth from enslaved labour (see, e. g., Finley 1998: 145-60; de Ste. Croix 1981: 52-7, 133-74; Cartledge 2001: 131-2). It is agreed that Athens (from at least the fifth century bce onwards) was such a slave society, and so probably were a fair number of other poleis, amongst them those famous among the Greeks for the large numbers of their slaves, such as Chios (Thuc. 8.40) Korinth, and Aigina (Athenaios 272B-D, though the numbers quoted there from earlier authors for the slave populations of these states are impossibly exaggerated). One central feature of slave systems was accurately identified by Aristotle: ‘a human being who by nature belongs not to himself, but to another person is a slave by nature, and a human belongs to another who is a piece of property as well as a human, and a piece of property is a tool which is used to assist some activity which has a separate existence from its owner’ (Aristotle Politics 1254a14-18). As we shall see, this dual nature of the slave, conceived both as a tool owned by another, and as a human being, so clearly recognized by one of the greatest of Greek philosophers, is the fundamental contradiction which engenders many problems in any slave society - problems in terms of deciding how to treat slaves and how to justify the institution. This in itself made absurd Aristotle’s sustained attempt in Politics book 1 to justify the institution as natural and legitimate (see the analyses of his treatment by Smith 1983; Cartledge 1993b; Garnsey 1996; Schofield 1999: 115-40). Many modern definitions of slavery follow Aristotle’s lead, focusing on the issues of ownership and absolute power (e. g., de Ste. Croix 1981; Finley 1998); others, equally helpfully, develop analysis of the master-slave relationship in terms of a consequence of such absolute power exercised on alienated persons in the form of the regular imposition of shame and degradation exercised on them by force (see Patterson 1982). Here I explore how this insistence on the distinction between slave and free, and on reminding slaves or serfs of their inferiority, was a constant element in their management, but also how the need for the free to avoid seeming ‘slavish’ created systemic opportunities for some slaves and ex-slaves to attain positions of relative independence and even wealth.
World History
