In the early fourth century, an Athenian defended a metic accused with others, primarily on the testimony of their own slaves, of some serious financial offence; only a few paragraphs have survived of the defence speech which the speechwriter Lysias (himself a metic) wrote to be delivered in court, but they include the following argument:
The trial should not be considered, I believe, as a private affair of these participants, but a matter of common concern to everyone in the city. It is not just these men who have slaves, but everyone else does too; when slaves look at what has happened to these slaves, no longer will they calculate how they may do good services for their masters in order to become free men, but rather what lies they can use to denounce them. (Lysias 5.5)
This asserts as uncontroversial norms that every free man was likely to own one or more slaves, and that manumission as a reward for good behaviour was routinely operated as an incentive. In another Lysias speech a citizen defending his right to continue to receive a disability pension from the state claims that he has
A craft which is little able to help me, which I can myself only work at with difficulty; and I cannot yet afford to buy someone to take it over from me. I have no other source of income apart from this grant; if you take that away from me, I will be in danger of suffering very great hardship. (Lysias 24.5)
He may well be lying about his disability and poverty, but the appeal is again to a general assumption that Athenians bought slaves if they possibly could, and it was an indication of serious poverty if one was unable to do so. How far removed this was from reality is hard to determine, and a matter of much modern debate. But the ideological points remain, that even if half or more of the Athenians owned no slaves, they would all hope to be able to afford one some day, and would like it to be thought they did or might; popular juries, many of whom were probably poor, liked to be
Appealed to as slave owners (see also Demosthenes 45.86), and above all did not want to be thought of as being like slaves themselves.
Evidence from the military sphere also suggests that a good many citizens possessed slaves, and that slaves often attended their masters and fought on campaigns. During the Peloponnesian War, those who were registered as infantry (hoplites; also probably classed as zeugitai), the majority of them farmers, were expected to take a slave with them as attendant and baggage-carrier (Thuc. 3.17 and 7.75). This is good evidence that not only the elite, who might serve in the cavalry or in the navy as trierarchs, but the rest of the registered hoplites as well were likely to own more than one slave (but estimates of the proportion of that group to the rest vary considerably: see, for an innovative, rather minimizing account, van Wees 2001). Similarly in the mercenary army of the Ten Thousand in Asia in 401-400 there were many slave baggage-carriers, some of whom appear to have been promoted to fighting roles in the long retreat (Xenophon Anabasis 2.5.32, 3.2.28, 3.4.32, and Hunt 1998: 165-70). In the navy, many of the rowers and normally the ‘marines’ (epibatai) who were armed came from the poorer Athenians classified as thetes (Thuc. 6.43,8.24); many rowers came from the metic populations, from Athens’ allies, or were slaves, some owned by these poorer Athenians. One inscription lists crews by name, perhaps because they were awarded honours after the battle of Aigospotamoi (405), and reveals over a hundred slaves; in nine cases their masters appear also on the lists, as epibatai or as ordinary rowers (IG13 1032 - with Laing 1965; Graham 1992; Osborne 1995: 29-30). The use of slaves in the military forces of many ancient states including Athens and Sparta has been systematically undervalued or obfuscated in both ancient and modern historiography (see Hunt 1998); some slaves may have resented the compulsion to risk their lives for their masters’ city, but for others it may have helped to cement loyalty and given them hopes of being set free, either by their masters, or occasionally in large numbers by the state, as after the battle of Arginousai (406), when they were also, more unusually, given citizenship as well (see Xenophon Hellenika 1.6.24, Aristophanes Frogs 533, 693-4, with scholia; Graham 1992; Hunt 1998: 87-95).
Most Athenians owned some land, and all who could no doubt employed slaves to help them; on the argument above and others this would surely have included most registered hoplites (who may have numbered perhaps between 5,000 and 10,000 at various times) and the vast majority of rich Athenians, save only those like Demosthenes’ father who chose not to own land. The disputed issue concerns how many of those poorer Athenians ( thetes) who had smaller farms could afford a slave or two to help them. The leading male characters in Aristophanes’ comedies, who seem to represent the ordinary, less politically active, citizen-farmers, and some of whom complain bitterly of their poverty, are shown owning a number of all-purpose slaves, who work on the farm among other duties. For example, Philokleon in the Wasps, who is presented as an old man neither rich nor sophisticated, and obsessive about jury-service (though his son seems comfortably off), often reminisces how he used to run his farm with his four or so slaves, and Chremylos in Wealth, who complains that he like many has been impoverished by the war, still has a faithful slave Karion, and others besides (Wealth 26-7). While this reinforces the idea that the typical citizens were small farmers who had slaves to help them, it does not give us any idea of the proportion, or how this proportion may have varied over time; the total number of slaves will no doubt have varied in relation to times of general prosperity or hardship, and fluctuations in the life-cycle of peasant families, in the number of active members of the family, will have affected the number of slaves needed at any one time. Further, the considerable demand for extra labour at peak times of ploughing and sowing, and harvesting, is likely to have created the demand for short-term hiring of labour (slave or free) by those with larger landholdings, and to have induced neighbourly collaboration among the poorer farmers (see on all this Gallant 1991; Sallares 1991; Jameson 1978; 1992; Fisher 1993; Osborne 1995).
There were few really large estates in Attika; the rich elite, the top 10 per cent, who may well have owned a third or more of the agricultural land (Osborne 1992; Foxhall 1992), seem on the evidence of listings of estates in the forensic speeches to have owned a number of middling estates across Attika rather than a single large one. A consequence may be that slaves who worked on a farm were not organized in large chain gangs, as on latifundia in classical Italy or large plantations in the Americas, but in small groups managed by the owner, or by his slave overseer, or by a farm-tenant (see, e. g., Xenophon Oikonomikos 12-14, with Pomeroy 1994; Osborne 1995: 32-4). Comic presentations of the relations between citizen farmers and their slaves give a plausible picture of the coexistence of contempt, frequent whippings, casual sexual abuse, yet also something approaching friendship, on the side of the slave owners, and an expectation in return of hard work and loyalty, but also of constant pilfering and sabotage, from the slaves. These two addresses to supposedly loyal slaves, from Aristophanes’ poor farming heroes Philokleon and Chremylos, convey well the uneasy comedy to be made of these contradictions:
Won’t you let me go now, you worst of beasts, don’t you remember the time when I found you stealing grapes and I tied you up to the olive tree and flayed you well and manfully, so that every one envied you? But I see you weren’t grateful.
(Aristophanes Wasps 438-51)
Well, I will tell you; for of my slaves I hold you to be the most loyal... and the biggest thief.
(Aristophanes wealth 26-8)
There is as one would expect much advice on kind treatment and providing incentives for slaves in the surviving treatises ofhousehold management, including praise and extra privileges and honours, especially for the overseers, a share in religious sacrifices and festivals, and the hope of manumission (see Xenophon Oikonomikos 9.13-14; Aristotle Politics 1330a26-33; Pseudo-Aristotle Oikonomika 1344a20-1344b11). There are examples of kindness and good treatment of loyal ex-slaves in the orators: e. g., a family’s nurse who had been manumitted, ‘lived apart’ with her husband, then returned when widowed to live again with the former owner’s family, only to die from injuries inflicted when enemies of the household seized valuables in a raid on their farmhouse (Pseudo-Demosthenes 47.52-73). But the consciousness of the danger of slave resistance or revolt produces the repeated recommendation to employ non-Greek (‘barbarian’) slaves from different ethnic origins, and preferably from peoples not supposed to be too courageous; and the centrality of bodily punishments and the physical and symbolic power of the whip is never far from view, in these and in all our other texts:
If you (the jury) wished to look into what makes the difference between a slave and a free man, you would find that the greatest distinction was that in the case of slaves it is the body which takes responsibility for all their offences, whereas it is possible for free men, however great their misfortunes, to protect their bodies. (Demosthenes 22.54)
This distinction runs throughout Greek culture; in comedy: slaves fear or boast about regular whippings, e. g., Aristophanes Knights 53-7, Wasps 428-9, 1292-8, where slaves envy tortoises their protective shells, and an apparently traditional pun plays on the appropriateness of slaves of all ages being called ‘boy’ (pais) because they are always being beaten (paiein = to beat) (see DuBois 1990; 2003; Golden 1992). Slaves may be casually addressed as ‘whip-bait’ (mastigias), and slapstick humour was frequently extracted from protracted flogging scenes: see both Aristophanes’ ironic criticism of such comic exploitation of slave trickeries and savage punishments inflicted on them at Peace 741-7, and his resort to similar humour at Frogs 594-657. Similarly in Menander’s plays characters regularly assume that all slaves are deceitful, may be primarily interested in thieving and sneaking in as much sex as they can, and deserve their whippings (e. g., Dyskolos 459-65). On the other hand Aristophanes’ later plays began to develop the tradition of the loyal and cunning slave, which was greatly expanded in the plays of Menander and his contemporaries into that of the leading character scheming ceaselessly for the interests and concerns of the family - and especially the love-sick young hero - to which he is encouraged to feel he belongs. Any idea that these comic characters - the forerunners of Figaro or Jeeves - were based on a new reality of slave-master relations should be viewed very sceptically (Garlan 1988: 16-18). We should note also that the Greeks were fully aware that excessive bodily punishments inflicted on slaves, punishments inflicted in anger rather in reason, carried moral dangers to the soul of the masters and practical dangers to their security, as unjust savagery might provoke slaves to acts of sabotage, assault or flight (see Harris 2001: 318-38; DuBois 1990; 2003). Such humour and advice seem to rest on the perception, which we find echoed in ex-slave accounts from the Southern States of the USA, that the combination of the constant fear and reality of whippings, along with signs of paternalistic concern and the setting of moral standards by the master, often produced an acceptance of legitimate punishment and a deferential loyalty, as well as a bitter sense of injustice at arbitrary whippings (Genovese 1974: 63-149; Blassingame 1979: ch. 8; Patterson 1982: 11-13).
This bodily distinction is central to the legal system; slavery in Athens, as in Sparta and probably everywhere in Greece, was as institutionally violent and tolerant of the cruelty of masters as any other slave system, and operated with a similar, contradictory, view of the slave-personality (see MacDowell 1978: 79-83; Todd 1993: 184-200). If slaves committed offences outside their own household, the slave owners might be prosecuted and pay the damages, and might deliver the slaves for physical punishment or punish them themselves (e. g., Demosthenes 53.20); here slaves were not seen as legally significant persons. Similarly, they could not normally bring actions themselves, but masters or others would have to bring any action on their behalf, and they could not normally give evidence in the same way as could free adult males. In cases of public or religious concern, such as the investigation into the mutilation of the herms in 415, slaves might be invited to give evidence, with the prospect of freedom if their evidence proved to be true (Thuc. 6.27-8); or they might be compelled by commissioners to give evidence under judicial torture. But in general the principle was that slaves, and only slaves, should have their evidence taken only if they were first subjected to torture; and in legal disputes between individuals, each party had to agree to a challenge from the other for a slave’s evidence to be presented in court after torture. There would naturally be a strong temptation for the challenged party to resist, because he feared what the slave might come up with (and where he was the owner, he might also not wish his property to be hurt or damaged). Hence in all the cases we know of, the challenge was not carried through, and the slave’s evidence not heard; and the usual view is that in practice slave-torture was remarkably rare (e. g., Thur 1977; Gagarin 1996). There is an alternative argument that in cases where slave-torture took place, it was taken as decisive, and hence no further trial took place, hence no speeches survive in such cases (Mirhady 1991; 1996). But it is clear that in a great many cases the challenge to collect slave-evidence by torture was taken merely as a rhetorical opportunity for both sides to rehearse traditional arguments about the reliability or not of slave-torture, and that in general the Athenians subordinated the attempt to ensure that relevant evidence was heard by the court to the preservation of the twin principles that slaves, unlike the free, did not have the mental capacity or the stake in the country to be trusted to tell the truth in the public interest, and that their bodies, unlike those of the free, could be subjected to physical pain inflicted (see also Todd 1990; DuBois 1990; Hunter 1994; Mirhardy 1996).
The laws recognized a need to offer some protection to slaves against ill treatment. Homicide by a slave owner might in theory be prosecuted by another citizen, but it is not easy to imagine this happening in view of the general solidarity among slave owners (see, e. g., Plato Republic 578D-9A; Xenophon Hieron4.3), and the fact that an owner might ask the state to approve the execution of a disobedient slave, or merely perform a ceremony of purification if a slave died after punishment. Killing someone else’s slave might perhaps incur a prosecution, either for homicide, or perhaps only for damages (see Pseudo-Demosthenes 47.70). The serious offence of grievous insult (hybris) envisaged the possibility of slaves (as of women and children) as victims of violent or sexual assaults (law cited in Demosthenes 21.47), and Athenian juries liked to be complimented on their humanity in allowing slaves’ honour to be so protected. There seems an ideological contradiction here, in that permanent dishonour was seen as a defining feature of the existence of Greek slaves, like most slaves (see Patterson 1982); yet the essence of hybris is the infliction of dishonour. It seems that the Athenians did allow in principle that the slave had vestigial honour which deserved signalling by this law; but it should also be argued that one main purpose of this law was to indicate to all how grave an offence hybris was. Possible cases featuring slave victims were doubtless very rare, and where they occurred, they tended to involve either public or otherwise privileged slaves (e. g., Pittalakos in Aischines 1.56-64), or female musi-cians/entertainers, publicly assaulted in ways which also may have humiliated their citizen lovers (see Fisher 1995, and for a rather more optimistic assessment of how much genuine protection these laws offered to slaves, Cohen 2000: 160-7).
The literary evidence gives more abundant evidence for slaves as labour forces in silver mining, in craft workshops, in overseas and retail trade and in banking than in agriculture (e. g., Hopper 1979; Osborne 1985). In the lists of property-holdings from law court speeches we hear of 120 slaves, mostly shield-makers, owned by the very rich metic family of Lysias (Lysias 12.19), thirty-two or thirty-three knife-makers and twenty bed-makers owned by Demosthenes’ father (Demosthenes 27.9-11), and the more typical smaller craft units owned by Timarchos’ father (Aischines 1.97-9). In all, there was a fairly high degree of ‘horizontal specialization’; over 200 different occupational terms, and at least 170 specialized occupations, have been identified, in farming and food production, retail, building, manufacture of clothes and household goods, metalwork, transport, services, banking, entertainment and the arts (see Harris 2002); slaves and ex-slaves might perform almost all of these roles. What is especially notable is that a good number of these slaves were trusted sufficiently to operate on their own in small workshops, as agents in retail or overseas trade, or in money changing and banking operations; they paid agreed amounts of their profit to their owners and might keep the rest. Some such slaves are occasionally described as khoris oikountes, those who are ‘living separately’ (and this phrase is also found of freedmen, or of those whose status is unclear, as at Pseudo-Demosthenes 47.72 and at Demosthenes 4.36); slaves hired out to other operators were labelled as ‘fee-earning’ (andrapoda misthophorounta) and paid their masters a fixed amount (apophora). Examples include the cobblers and weavers owned by Timarchos’ father (Aischines 1.97), the perfumers who are sold to the speaker in Hypereides’ speech Against Athenagoras, and most interestingly a character in Demosthenes 34 called Lampis, who is described as the ‘domestic slave’ (oiketes) of Dion, but who has his own ship, engages in trading, was probably registered as a metic in Athens, and can give evidence in this commercial case (see Cohen 1992: 240). There is, however, a faint possibility that by now he is a freedman, called in the speech ‘slave’, oiketes, to denigrate him, though the point is not developed (see Todd 1993: 192-4). It seems from this case and others that from the mid-fourth century special ‘commercial courts’ were established for the swift conduct of business, and it is likely that slaves engaged in trade and banking could give evidence there as free men did, without torture.
These slaves were also likely to have been among the most likely to be manumitted, often buying the privilege with accumulated savings. Much of our evidence for Greek manumission comes from Hellenistic inscriptions from Delphi and other places in central Greece (see Hopkins 1978: ch. 3; Darmezin 1999); different types of manumission are attested, but many are concerned to define continuing duties which will be owed to ex-owners (the status called paramone); sanctuaries may be involved in the regulation and in some cases slaves end up ‘dedicated’ to various deities. It is very difficult to assess relative rates of manumission, and judge whether in Greece it was on the high side, as for example in Roman Italy, or relatively low, as in the USA. For Athens, the most interesting evidence is provided by a set of inscriptions from Athens of the 320s. What seems to be going on in these obscure documents is the recording of a prosecution brought by a master against an ex-slave for not performing the agreed further obligations (a dike apostasiou), where in all cases the slave is acquitted and thus finally ‘set free’ from all obligations, and then dedicates to Athena a silver bowl (phiale) of a fixed weight of 100 drachmas (though we have no information on which party normally paid this ‘tax’). It is not clear whether these were real cases of genuine disputes between ex-slaves and their former owners (if so there seem to be a surprising number of them handled at once), or, more probably, fictitious cases: this is plausibly seen as one of a number of revenue-increasing mechanisms designed by Lykourgos and his colleagues c. 330, here used to regularize one type of manumission and raise money (Lewis 1959; 1968; Todd 1993: 190-2). Lykourgos is reported also to have passed a law regulating what happened to ex-slaves convicted in this type of lawsuit, but the relation between the measures is unclear (see Klees 1998: 334-54). It is, however, interesting that manumissions, and issues of their continuing relations with owners, were becoming sufficiently numerous to engage the legislative and financial interest of politicians.
The inscriptions usually designate the occupation of the (ex)slave. The majority of women who appear are ‘woolworkers’ (either a general term for their domestic duties, or a sign that they worked in a more commercial operation), and there are a number of ‘entertainers’. The males are mostly divided across a wide range of crafts, small businesses and overseas trade, with a smaller number engaged in farming. Where slaves have a deme of residence indicated it is most commonly in the city or Piraeus; their citizen owners in almost all cases come from a different deme, but it is impossible to estimate from this how many slaves ‘lived apart’ from their masters, since we cannot say of any citizen whether he still lived in the ‘ancestral’ deme in which he was registered for citizenship purposes. In some cases, however, metic slave owners appear as living in different demes from their slaves, and here it seems certain that the slaves had been operating independently before they were set free.
The relative freedom of such richer, independent and ‘luxurious’ slaves, who it was alleged showed no deference towards the free, and were indistinguishable in dress from them, seems to have caused resentment among some traditional Athenians, as is recorded by the ‘Old Oligarch’ (Pseudo-Xenophon Ath. Pol. 1.10-12); his explanation is that in Athens, a strong naval and trading city, it was advantageous for men to let their slaves make money by engaging in direct financial trading with free men; Plato (Republic 563B) linked this trend not very persuasively to ‘democratic freedom’. A fuller explanation would focus on the ideological pressure on free men and especially on citizens to preserve their ‘macho’ honour from the slur of engagement in a ‘slavish’ occupation, by working directly for another individual (the ideal is expressed clearly in Aristotelian aphorisms, as at Rhetoric 1367a30-5, and also at Xenophon Oikonomikos4.1-4, 6.4-8, Memorabilia 2.8; Demosthenes 57.30-4, 45). Hence bankers, traders or manufacturers could get harder and more loyal workers by training their slaves to operate as their underlings or agents, with the gradated incentives of a freer life-style and eventual freedom. Encouraging them to operate separate businesses with separate living arrangements might also prevent the slaves from having a potentially dangerous knowledge of all the owners’ business activities (Cohen 2002). A further advantage was that manumission could always be conditional, and the ex-slaves legally bound to continue indefinitely to offer respect to and perform economic services (paramone) for their former master, now their legal champion and defender (prostates).
World History
