THE SCOURGE OF SLAVERY IN ANCIENT GREECE

While the Golden Age of Athens is loudly trumpeted for its achievements in philosophy and government, Greek reliance on chattel slavery often remains in the shadows. Rendered nearly invisible by history, enslaved people were an integral part of life in ancient Greece.

The culture that gave the world the Parthenon, the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and the foundations for representative democracy was also a society dependent almost entirely on slavery. The economy of Greece, and Athens in particular, depended on the labor of vast numbers of enslaved people who hailed from all over the Mediterranean world.

In ancient Hellas—as Greece was known— slaves were everywhere, working in households, the armed forces, civic administrations, agriculture, and silver mining. Fragmentary records have made accurate calculations impossible of the number of slaves in the city of Athens and its surrounding area, collectively known as Attica. Figures range from as low as 20,000 to as high as 150,000 in the classical era. A census from the late fourth century b.c. puts the total number of slaves at 400,000, but that figure is regarded by most historians as an exaggeration. There is, however, some consensus that slaves comprised perhaps a third of Attica’s population.

Some slaves came from Greece itself, as was the case with abandoned children or those sold by destitute families who could not afford to raise them. It was also possible for freeborn adult Greek citizens to become slaves. If an insolvent debtor could not pay his debts, he might become the slave of his creditor. Impoverished freeborn men could sell themselves into slavery. Far more frequently, however—and far less morally troubling for most Athenians—slaves came from “barbarian” lands, the countries beyond the borders of Greece.

Spoils of War

Most slaves originated in lands beyond Hellas. A common source was war. In the classical world, an enemy captured was an enemy enslaved. The Greeks took slaves during their frequent raids and military campaigns in the regions beyond their frontiers and outside their colonies. Accordingly, the Greek slave population abounded in people from lands constituting modern-day Turkey, Balkan countries such as present-day Bulgaria, and Libya and other regions of Africa. There were instances of Greeks enslaved by fellow Greeks during the numerous wars betwee states, although the practice was considered undignified.

The notion that to the victor go the spoils was considered legitimate even by some of classical Greece’s most brilliant minds. In his fourth-century b.c. work on political philosophy, Politics, Aristotle paraphrases dissenting voices, who “detest the notion that, because one man has the power of doing violence and is superior in brute strength, another shall be his slave and subject.” Aristotle himself, however, argues that while in some circumstances slavery may be unjust, slavery is not, in and of itself, “a violation of nature... For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”

Greek society did not turn a blind eye to the suffering of prisoners of war who faced enslavement. In 416 b.c. Athens had invaded and conquered the island of Mílos, whose men were killed and women and children sold into slavery. Some historians believe that the Euripides tragedy The Trojan Women is a commentary against this brutal fact of life. Published in 415 b.c., the play takes place as the victorious Greeks are sacking Troy. Queen Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra, and her daughter-in-law Andromache reckon with the deaths of their husbands and children while dreading the inevitability of their future enslavement. In one heartrending scene, Hecuba laments:

"And who will own me, miserable old woman
that I am,
where, where on earth shall I live as a slave
like a drone, Hecuba the wretched..."

While perhaps not an explicit condemnation of enslaving prisoners, Euripides’ play does show compassion and understanding.

Piracy and Pillage

Another supply of slaves to Greece came through piracy. Pirates would attack other vessels on the high seas and raid coastal settlements. They made money from their captives either by selling them outright as slaves or by offering them up for ransom. Under Athenian law, a ransomed captive became the slave of his liberator until the ransom could be repaid in either money or labor.

Classical Greek society had, of course, grown out of, and been influenced by, the practices of neighboring cultures. Of these, the Phoenicians, great commercial traders from what is now Lebanon and Israel, were seen as especially industrious pirates. A passage from Homer’s eighth-century b.c. epic The Odyssey shows how different cultures could be both slaves and slavers, and how individual slaves could in turn enslave others. A ship of “rapacious Phoenicians, bearers of a thousand trinkets,” arrives at a tiny island in the Aegean. One of the pirates seduces a palace slave on the island, by chance, a fellow Phoenician. The young woman tells her companion of her fate: “I am proud to hail from Sidon [in Lebanon] paved in bronze. Arybas was my father, a man who rolled in wealth. I was heading home from the fields when Taphian pirates snatched me away, and they shipped and sold me here to this man’s house. He paid a good stiff price!” In Homer’s tale, this slave girl and her seducer then kidnap the king of the island’s son, Eumaeus, just as she had been kidnapped as a child. The prince is sold to the king of Ithaca and becomes the servant of his son, Odysseus, and plays a key role in Odysseus’s homecoming.

Slaves were generally taken to the bustling slave markets in Greek ports. The price of slaves varied and depended on variables such as age, gender, place of origin, and specialization. Xenophon, in his fourth-century b.c. work Memorabilia, gives a good idea as to the range of prices, quoting his teacher Socrates: “[D]omestic slave ... may be worth perhaps two minae [a unit of weight or money used in ancient Greece and Asia], another only half a mina, a third five, and a fourth as much as ten.” As a guideline, however, the average price of a slave was roughly the annual salary of a Greek construction worker.

From a legal standpoint, Greek slaves, whether men, women, or children, were considered the property of their masters and had no legal standing. The words used to identify slaves reflected this radical dispossession. A slave would often be referred to as an andrapodon, literally “one with the feet of a man” as opposed to tetrapodon, “quadruped” or livestock. The most common word for slave, however, was doulos, which indicated a lack of freedom, the single attribute that best reflects the Hellenic ideal of a man.

Athens’s treatment of its slaves varied from master to master. A magnanimous owner was often praised, because treating slaves well was seen both as well-bred and as being in one’s best interest. In Aeschylus’ fifth-century b.c. play Agamemnon, Clytemnestra tells her new slave, the Trojan princess Cassandra: “Praise God thou art come to a House of high report / [...] The baser sort / who have reaped some sudden harvest unforeseen, are ever cruel to their slaves.” Xenophon seemed to advocate for kind treatment of slaves in the Oeconomicus, his treatise on household management: “On the one side you shall see them fettered hard and fast ... and yet for ever breaking their chains and running away. On the other side the slaves are loosed, and free to move, but for all that, they choose to work, it seems; they are constant to their masters.

Slaves’ Work

Slave labor was used in almost every facet of Greek life. The most common perhaps were domestic servants, which included highly respected tutors and wet nurses, responsible for educating and feeding the children of well-todo families. The worst job, and often most fatal, was mining. Thousands of enslaved men and boys worked in the mines of Laurium, south of Athens, in appalling conditions which shortened their lives considerably. Many slaves worked in the fields growing and harvesting crops; they quarried stone, guarded forests, and felled trees used for timber in construction. Blacksmiths jewelers, and potters all put skilled slaves to work. In the trades, theyworked as barbers and cobblers. In times of war, the hoplite infantry and navy were also assisted by large numbers of slaves, although typically as workmen, not soldiers, according to a later Greco-Roman author,Pausanias.

Slaves were even employed as policemen. In Athens 1,200 Scythian slave archers policed the city. One special category of slaves was the demósioi,or public slaves,who drafted legal documents, maintained archives, inspected coinage circulating in the agora, and kept public accounts. In his comedy Lysistrata, Aristophanes refers to public slaves acting as magistrates, and Herodotus mentions them running public auctions. Only one profession was closed to the slave: politics, for which one was obliged to be a citizen.

THE TALE OF EUMAEUS

Odysseus’s treatment of Eumaeus in Homer’s Odyssey was often cited as an example of a wise master’s benevolence toward his slave. Eumaeus was of noble birth and came from the same class as his master, which was held up as a cautionary tale of the fate that could befall any man or member of his family.

WHEN HE RETURNS TO HIS HOME IN ITHACA after a two-decade absence, the first man Odysseus meets is Eumaeus. Odysseus passes himself off as a travel-weary foreigner and urges Eumaeus to tell him about his life.

EUMAEUS RECOUNTS HIS INFANCY as the son of an island king, kidnapped by pirates who sold him to Laertes, Odysseus’s father. But, he says, he spent a happy childhood in Ithaca, sharing toys with his lord’s sons and later finding work as a master swineherd for the royal household.

THINKING ODYSSEUS TO BE a stranger who is down on his luck, Eumaeus provides him with a feast. Apart from demonstrating his decency, it also illustrates the unusual power he enjoys as a country slave, with lower-ranked slaves under his command, who help him look after the estate. Touched by his swineherd’s goodness and generosity, Odysseus reveals his identity. Together they plan a raid on the palace to expel the suitors of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who have been trying to usurp him. The nobility of the slave and the magnanimity of the master combine to restore Ithaca to its rightful owner.

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SLAVERY IN THE GOLDEN AGE

8th c. b.c.
Enslavement by Phoenicians and other powers is chronicled in Homer’s poem The Odyssey.

7th c. b.c.
Athens’s slave trade is boosted by Greek commercial expansion around the Mediterranean.

5th c. b.c.
The number of slaves in the Athens area may comprise upward of a third of the population.

4th c. b.c.
In his Politics, Aristotle examines the ethics of slavery but does not regard it as a “violation of nature".

Written by Ana Iriarte in "National Geographic History",USA, August 2018, excerpts pp.17-25. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.