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Oxford Reference 11/11/2020 Slavery - Oxford Reference Oxford Reference The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4 ed.) Edited by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199545568 Published online: 2012 Current Online Version: 2012 eISBN: 9780191735257 slavery Greek From Homer's claim that a man loses half his selfhood when ‘the day of slavery’ comes upon him (Il. 6. 463) to Aristotle's doctrine of ‘natural slavery’ (Pol. bk. 1, 1253b15–55b40), Greek life and thought were inextricably bound up with the ideology and practice of human servitude. Eventually, and incompletely, the notion became established that it was not right for Greeks to enslave their fellow-Greeks, and the correlative idea prevailed that non-Greek ‘barbarians’ were fitted for servitude by their very nature (not just social or political organization). See . But that did not prevent the continuing enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, and the language of slavery in the Greek New Testament was by no means a dead metaphor. ‘Slavery’, however, covered a multitude of sins and life-chances. The ultimate, extreme form of the slave is the chattel, ‘socially dead’ (Patterson) in the sense of ripped forcibly from organic ties of kin and community, transported to an alien environment there to be treated as merely a piece of property or as a factor of production to be used and abused at will, an ‘animate tool’ (Arist. Pol. 1253b32–3) or beast of burden with no sense of self other than that allowed by the slave‐owner and no legal, let alone civic, personality whatsoever (see also , ). Societies with large numbers of such slaves, let alone societies based on them, have been very few. The city of Athens and central Roman Italy for periods in antiquity, and in modern times the slave states of the American Old South, the Caribbean, and Brazil, are the only known instances. But even in Athens there were gradations of status and degrees of exploitation regardless of uniformity of legal status. At the top of the heap were the few hundreds of publicly owned slaves (dēmosioi), who served as a token police force or as other sorts of public functionary such as official coin-tester (dokimastēs) in the Agora or clerk to a jury-court. Below them were the privately owned, skilled slaves who ‘lived apart’ (khōris oikountes) in craft workshops established with start-up capital by their owners to whom they remitted a share of their profits, or who were hired out for specific tasks such as harvesting (sōmata misthophorounta). Then there were household slaves (oiketai), male and female, of whom the males in a smaller household might also work in the fields. Harder was the lot of the agricultural slaves of a rich citizen householder. But worst of all was that of the mine- slaves who were either directly employed by or hired out to work the state-owned silver mines of Laurium: for those who worked underground in shackles (see ) an early death might be considered a happy https://0-www-oxfordreference-com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780199545568.001.0001/acref-9780199545568-e-5969?rske… 1/7 11/11/2020 Slavery - Oxford Reference release; the lot of surface workers was less automatically lethal. Reliable statistics of numbers are not available, but a reasonable guess would be that between 450 and 320 about 80,000–100,000 slaves of all kinds were active in Attica at any one time (out of a total population of perhaps a quarter of a million). The Athenian model of chattel slavery became widely diffused in the Greek world, although the size and complexity of the original were never emulated or even approached. The prevalence of inter-Greek warfare ensured that Greek slave‐dealers (andrapodistai, andrapodokapeloi) had plenty of custom, even if it was rare for a Greek to be removed from his or her native community into permanent servitude elsewhere in the Greek or non-Greek world. On the other hand, the flow of non-Greek slaves into the Greek world continued unabated, giving rise to the popular identification (and Aristotle's flawed justification thereof) of ‘barbarians’ as ‘natural’ slaves. Despite the impression created by imprecision of terminology, or inadequate use of such relatively precise terms as did exist, by no means all those broadly labelled douloi (‘unfree’) in Greece were chattel-slave douloi. The two largest classes of these other unfree persons were respectively those enslaved for debt and the communally enslaved helot-type populations. Debt-bondsmen technically forfeited their liberty only temporarily, pending repayment of their debt; in practice, the condition might be permanent and hereditary, and on occasion prompted violent political upheaval, as at Athens in about 600 . Solon's response to that crisis was remarkable in several ways, not least in that he outlawed debt-bondage for citizens altogether. Elsewhere in the Greek world the practice continued and constituted a principal source of exploited labour-power for Greek propertied classes in default of or as a complement to slave labour. There were apparently some chattel slaves in Sparta, but the overwhelming majority of its servile labour force was constituted by the native helot class (see ). The fact that they were Greek and enjoyed some signal privileges, above all a family life, suggested to one ancient commentator that they ought to be classified as somewhere between outright chattel slaves and completely free people. But this picture of relative privilege is darkened by the knowledge that at any time their masters might legally kill them with impunity. More important for classificatory purposes is that the helots were enslaved collectively as a community, a feature they shared with several other Greek and native servile populations ranging from Heraclea (3) on the Black Sea to Syracuse in Sicily by way of Thessaly and Crete. There may still be room for argument whether Greek civilization as a whole was ‘based’ on ‘slavery’, but the ubiquitousness and centrality of servitude in the Greek imagination as in Greek everyday reality are beyond question.PAC Paul Anthony Cartledge Roman Slavery in the strict sense of chattel-slavery, whereby the slave‐owner enjoyed complete mastery (dominium) over the slave's physical being (Dig. 1. 5. 4. 1), the power of life and death included (Gai. Inst. 1. 52), was evident throughout the central era of Roman history, and in Roman no less than Greek thought was regarded as both the necessary antithesis of civic freedom and the guarantee of their civic superiority to those who enjoyed it. From this structural point of view Roman society, like Greek, was a genuine slave-society. Although for no period of antiquity is it possible to determine accurately the size of the slave population, the necessary statistical information being simply unavailable, modern estimates of 2,000,000 slaves in Italy at the close of the republic conform to a slave : free ratio of roughly 1:3 in evidence from the major slave-societies of the New World. Slave-ownership was a prerogative of the wealthy, although the scale of ownership was larger in the Roman world than the Greek, and the élite could possess hundreds of slaves. Pompey's son Cn. Pompeius Magnus (2) recruited 800 of his personal slaves and shepherds for the war against Caesar (Caes. https://0-www-oxfordreference-com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780199545568.001.0001/acref-9780199545568-e-5969?rske… 2/7 11/11/2020 Slavery - Oxford Reference B.Civ. 3. 4. 4), and the city prefect L. Pedanius Secundus maintained under Nero some 400 slaves in his urban residence alone (Tac. Ann. 14. 42. 45). Slave-owning, however, was not confined to the very rich. There is evidence to suggest that artisans in Roman Egypt regularly kept two or three slaves. The Roman naval veteran C. Longinus Castor identified just three slaves in his possession in his will in 194 (FIRA 3, no. 50). Slave- owning was a mark of status to be sought for its own sake, and even slaves and ex-slaves became slave- owners, especially those at Rome who belonged to the familia Caesaris and prospered from their favoured status (and see Plin. HN 33. 134 for the Augustan freedman C. Caecilius Isidorus, said to have owned 4,116 slaves at his death). While the evidence on slave numbers is obviously no more than anecdotal, it suffices to show that there was no social limit on the desire to exercise absolute power over others. Slaves were procured chiefly as captives in war (see ), as the victims of organized piracy and brigandage, through natural reproduction, and through trade. The growth of the Roman empire in the 2nd and 1st cents. produced vast numbers of prisoners who were transported as slaves to the Italian heartland. Romans, like Greeks, tended to shun enslavement of co-nationals, assimilating slavery to the ‘barbarian’ character of other peoples; consequently Syrians and Jews were peoples born for enslavement (although, unlike New World slavery, classical slavery was never in itself racially grounded). Piracy is best illustrated from the activities of the Cilician bandits of the late republic, notorious for discharging great quantities of enslaved victims in the port of Delos, where traders swiftly redistributed them, particularly to the west (Strabo 14. 5. 2). But a recently discovered letter of St Augustine (Ep. 10) indicates how piracy and brigandage were still rampant in late antiquity, and also how demand for slaves had in no way then diminished. Children born to a slave mother (vernae) were typically themselves slaves (the status of the father was immaterial); so natural reproduction constantly contributed to the slave supply.
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