Transcript Melian Dialogue, Herms, and Sicilian Expedition

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
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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
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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
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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
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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 Athens
Empire and Slavery
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“Numbers Game”: Between 450 and 320 BCE about 80100,000 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
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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 Mines
Laurion
Ideology and Slavery in Ancient Greece
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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 Revisited
Overdetermined Slaves (?)
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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
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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 Determinism
Aristotle, 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
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“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.