Slavery

In many enterprises, those of building, mining, manufacturing, and work on the land, slaves carried out much of the labour. Slavery had long been widespread in the ancient world, the common fate, as Homer makes clear, of war captives and their

Families. In the Iliad, Andromache foresees her fate as a slave if Hector is killed. However, as human beings seem to have been one of the few commodities the civilizations of the east would take from the Greeks in return for their luxury goods, a trade in slaves began. Thrace was the most important early provider of slaves (the Black Sea in general was a popular source) and then later the inland areas of Asia Minor. By the end of the fifth century Syrians were the most expensive, apparently on account of their intelligence.

It gradually became more common for the Greeks to keep slaves for themselves, and eventually they may have made up perhaps 30 per cent of the population of many cities. No one was exempt from slavery; even Greeks captured by other Greeks in war could be enslaved. Thucydides gives several examples of the women and children of defeated cities being enslaved after their men had been executed. (Chapters 2 to 9 in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (eds.), The Cambridge History of World Slavery, i: The Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge, 2011) cover slavery in the Greek world.)

The use of slaves was inextricably bound up with the Greeks’ sense of their own exclusiveness. It was considered demeaning to be the servant of others, and by employing slaves the citizen was reinforcing his identity both as a free man and as a Greek. Slave labour also freed the citizen for political life. However, some justification had to be evolved for the practice. For the philosopher Aristotle, who explored the problem in his Politics, it was part of the natural order that there should be an elite who did the ruling and a slave class who carried out the labour on which civilized living depended (although he accepted that some disagreed with this view). ‘One that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and one that can do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave. . . the latter are strong for necessary service, the former erect and unserviceable for such occupations but serviceable for a life of citizenship.’ However, a physical source for this slave labour had to be found, and this left Aristotle with little real option other than to define the difference in status between ruler and slave in ethnic terms. As he continued:

The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbours. The people of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skilful in temperament, but lack spirit so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent: hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions and to be capable of ruling all mankind. (Translation: H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library edition)

According to Aristotle, therefore, slaves ‘deserve’ their position because they are outsiders. Many had, in fact, come in from ‘barbarian’ cultures and so had gone through traumatic experiences even before either set had started work for a Greek master. The slave’s family had usually been broken up and the psychological shock of becoming an owned person must have been severe. What was added to the shock by the experience of day-to-day living as a slave is difficult to gauge. Within the home there were rituals and conventions that offered some protection to the slave.

He or she was welcomed with a ceremony in the new home, the katakhusmata (and, as a symbol of the fresh beginning in life, given a new name). In Athens, thanks to laws of Solon, it was thought an act of hubris, pride, to beat a slave unjustly, and killing a slave brought pollution, not just to the perpetrator but to the community as a whole. In his book on the household economy, the Oeconomicus, Xenophon states that the care of sick slaves is one of the responsibilities of an Athenian housewife. Manumission was possible, by public declaration. These conventions and natural altruism may have combined to make life tolerable, but one cannot be too optimistic. The comedies of Aristophanes suggest casual brutality was common. Sex by men with their female slaves was tolerated and, as the evidence in one lawsuit suggested, was not considered serious enough to justify a wife’s infidelity. Even though it was the convention never to refer to the servile past of a freed man, manumitted slaves in Athens were treated as metics, outsiders, with no right to participate in politics or religious festivals.

Slavery can take various forms. Chattel slavery, the direct ownership of the slave, was the most common, but there were other forms of servitude such as that suffered by the helots in Sparta. Some idea of their status can be seen from a remark by Thucydides that 700 helots who had been raised to campaign with the Spartan king Brasi-das (see p. 299) were rewarded by being made free and allowed to live where they wanted. This implies they were normally tied to the land and were seen as the servants of the state rather than of individual owners. They differed from the mass of chattel slaves, in that they were Greeks, lived in their own communities in lands that had traditionally been their own, and were allowed to retain at least part of their produce (the rest being handed over to the state). In other ways their lives were miserable. Plutarch describes how ‘it was considered best to keep [the helots] constantly employed so as to crush their spirit by perpetual toil and hardship’ At each new election of ephors, there was a ritual by which war was declared against helots in general, and it appears that those who looked like emerging as leaders were systematically killed. One episode in the training of adolescent Spartans for war involved placing them in the countryside and giving them free rein to kill any helots they came across.

With the possible exception of Sparta, there was no distinct slave economy in ancient Greece (as there was, for instance, on the sugar and cotton plantations of the West Indies and the American South). Those slaves with skills could work alongside freemen and even citizens. The status of eighty-six of the skilled workforce is known from the records that survive of the construction of the Erechtheum in Athens. Twenty-four were citizens, twenty-four metics (foreigners of free status), and twenty slaves. The slaves worked as masons and carpenters and their labour was paid at the same rate as free men. The records of one trireme crew showed that it included about a hundred slaves and their owners were fellow members of the same crew. One disgruntled Athenian (the Old Oligarch) grumbled that it was impossible to distinguish slaves from free men in the streets. How far any slave was able to negotiate this lack of rigidity to achieve some feeling of independence is impossible to know.

A large number of slaves worked as domestic servants in the homes and, even if perhaps only 50 per cent of Athenians actually owned any slaves, it certainly seems

To have been the aspiration to have one or two. Here a slave might achieve some identity because of his or her skills or general usefulness. The prices of slaves reflected the skills they could provide and these skills could possibly provide them with manumission granted in return for a promise to continue to fulfil duties. Here again there were some possibilities of a human, if unequal and extremely vulnerable, relationship between owner and owned. Much less secure, however, were those unskilled slaves who found themselves working in larger groups in the fields, in workshops, or, worst of all, in the mines. Here there was little chance of preserving any individual identity and treatment appears to have been harsh. In the mines the slave seems to have been no more than an expendable instrument for obtaining the city’s most sought-after source of wealth. Slaves also made up a large part of the population of common prostitutes.