Slavery in Ancient Greece

Fate of Melos, 416 BCE

(Thucydides, 5.116)

Siege operations were now carried on vigorously and, as there was also some treachery from inside, the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. Melos itself they took for themselves, sending out later a colony of 500 men.

Homer, Iliad 6.460-65

“This is the wife of Hector, who was ever the bravest fighter of the Trojans, breaker of horses, in the days when they fought around Troy.” So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief, to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your slavery. But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me before I hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.

~Hector to Andromache

Homer, Odyssey 11.488-91

Let me hear no smooth talk from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man, on iron rations, than lord it over all the exhausted dead.

~Ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in Underworld (Hades)

Aristotle on Freedom (Rhetoric, 1367a32)

One who is in no way under the constraint of another.

Forms of Dependent Labor in Ancient Greece

Latris: “hired man,” “servant,” and “slave” Archaic Greece in “pre-law” stage (M.I. Finley) Greek language does not have a word for “debt

bondage” (Compare the Roman nexum) Doulos: slavery as a permanent condition

Dependent Labor in Pre-Classical Greece

Debt-Bondsmen and Serfs (Thessalian penestes) Gortyn Law Code

Date of Inscription, 480-460 BCE, but probably preserves material going back to seventh century BCE

Social Structure: ruling class, free without political rights, serfs and debt-bondsmen, chattel slaves

“The Code reveals a society in transition to a money economy. Production of exchange values led to the introduction of chattel slavery as an alternative source of dependent labor to patriarchal serfdom.”

~C.B. Champion, Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery

Gortyn Law Code

Acquisition of Dependent Forms of Labor

Debt (Solon and Athens): Individual identity retained

Warfare (Sparta and Helots): Collective identity retained

Purchase as Commodity: Individual and collective identities lost; social death of the individual, interchangeable with others

Chattel Slavery: Developed commercial relations; external sources of human bodies; imperialism

Chattel Slavery

Chattel: movable article of personal property (law)

Etymologically related to “capital” (wealth) and cattle

Commodity: an article of trade or commerce, especially a product as distinguished from a service

Julius Pollux, Onomastikon 83: Messenian helots and Thessalian penestes are “between the free men and the slaves.”

Andrapoda: “man-footed beast”

Slave Scene from Comedy

Fifth-Century AthensEmpire and Slavery

“Numbers Game”: Between 450 and 320 BCE about 80-100,000 slaves out of total population of 250-300,000

Athenian Imperialism: Greater Social and Economic Differentiation; Generation of Requisite Wealth and Access to Slave Recruiting Grounds; Rise of Slave Traders (andrapodistai, andrapodokapeloi)

“The more advanced the city-state, the more it will be found to have had true slavery rather than the ‘hybrid’ types like helotage. More bluntly put, the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression—most obviously Athens—were cities in which chattel slavery flourished.” ~ M.I. Finley

Inscription Recording Sale of Slaves in Athens

Slaves in Classical Athens

Uniformity of legal status; slaves give testimony in law cases under torture

Several hundred public slaves (dēmosioi): policemen, coin-testers in Agora, public clerks in law courts

Privately-owned, skilled slaves; sometimes run their own businesses and keep part of the profits

Household slaves (oiketai), male and female Agricultural and mining slaves (Laurion)

Silver MinesLaurion

Ideology and Slavery in Ancient Greece

Greeks do not enslave other Greeks Non-Greek “barbarians” suited to be slaves Black Sea and Danubian Sources: Barbarian

Stereotype Aristotle and the “Natural Slave”

Binary Oppositions RevisitedOverdetermined Slaves (?)

Greek/Barbarian; Adult/Child; Male/Female; Free/Slave

Important Historical Catalysts Persian Wars (490-479 BCE) and the

Inferiority of the Barbarian (Slave) Rise of Macedonia (mid-fourth century BCE) Conquest of Persia (Isocrates)

Aristotle, Plato, and Slaves

Difference: Essentialism vs. Empiricism Both subscribe to binary knowledge constructs;

Duality Body is inferior to Mind (highest human activity

is contemplation) Superiority of Greek culture Plato presupposes slavery but does not discuss it;

Aristotle gives justification for it in the Politics

Free/Slave Antinomy in Aristotelian Thought

Intellect is to Body as Free is to Slave: “For he that can by his intelligence foresee things needed is by nature ruler and master, while he whose bodily strength enables him to perform them is by nature a slave, one of those who are ruled. Thus there is a common interest uniting master and slave.”

(Politics, 1.2)

Free/Slave Antinomy in Aristotelian Thought

Barbarian = Slave:

“So as the poets say, ‘It is proper that [Greeks] should rule over barbarians,’ meaning that barbarian and slave are by nature identical.”

(Politics, 1.2)

Climatic/Geographical DeterminismAristotle, Politics, 1327b23-33

The races that live in cold regions and those of Europe are full of courage and passion but somewhat lacking in skill and brain power; for this reason, while remaining generally independent, they lack political cohesion and the ability to rule over others. On the other hand the Asiatic races have both brains and skill but are lacking in courage and will power; so they remain enslaved and subject. The Greeks, occupying a mid-position geographically, have a measure of both. They continue to be free, to have the best political institutions, and to be capable of ruling over all others.

Aristotle’s “Natural Slave” (Politics 1.8)

We may...say that wherever there is the same wide discrepancy between two sets of human beings as there is between mind and body or between man and beast, then the inferior of the two sets, those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves by nature. It is better for them...to be thus ruled and subject.

Sir Moses Finley (1912-1986)

Moses Finley’s Views on Greek Slavery

“Spectrum of Statuses”: mining and agricultural slaves; domestic and commercial slaves; resident aliens (metics); debt-bondsmen and serfs; conditionally-manumitted slaves and freedmen; citizens

Social Function in Defining Social Hierarchies; Economic Function secondary

Greco-Roman Non-Productive Mentality (technological stagnation)

Chattel Slavery a Prerequisite for Greek Participatory Democracy

Moses Finley, Slavery, and the Ancient Greek Polis

It is a fact, I believe, that social and political progress in the Greek polis was accompanied by the triumph of chattel slavery over other statuses of dependent labor.

(“The Servile Statuses of Ancient Greece”)

Moses Finley on Greek Freedom and Greek Slavery

The Greeks…discovered both the idea of individual freedom and the institutional framework in which it could be realized. The pre-Greek world…was, in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense in which the west has come to understand that concept. It was equally a world in which chattel slavery played no role of any consequence. That, too, was a Greek discovery. One aspect of Greek history, in short, is the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery.