11/11/2020 - 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 '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 ‘’ 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 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 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 mines of : for those who worked underground in shackles (see ) an early death might be considered a happy

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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 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 , 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 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.

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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 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 ‘’ 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. To judge from random remarks like those of Columella (Rust. 1. 8. 19; cf. Varro, Rust. 2. 10. 6), slave-owners were sometimes prepared to sanction, if not encourage, reproduction among their slaves when it suited them, and they might allow slaves to enter into informal unions of marriage as a prelude. But the degree of conscious slave‐breeding, a highly charged term, is impossible to ascertain in Graeco-Roman society. Slave-traders like A. Kapreilius Timotheus (AE 1946, 229) operated throughout the Mediterranean, in war and peace, as distributors of captives and home-born slaves alike, at times combining their interests in slaves with trade in other commodities (cf. Petron. Sat 76. 6). At no time are complaints heard of slaves being in short supply, even in late antiquity.

Slaves can be observed in almost every area of human activity, the holding of public office apart, and in a world where capitalist ideas were unknown, there was no concept of competition between slave and free labour; in fact it was conventional in certain contexts (e.g. manufacturing) for slave and free to work side by side. In late republican Italy the extensive development of slave-run latifundia consequent on the growth of the empire (cf. App. B.Civ. 1. 7) meant that the rural slave presence was very high (although the survival of independent smallholders is now well attested from archaeological survey), and, to judge from Columella's handbook on farming, which gives more attention to slave management than the earlier treatises of M. Porcius Cato (1) and Varro, it was still high, in some regions of Italy at least, under the Principate (see , ). Domestic labour and the dangerous and heavily exploitative work in the mines were something of a slave preserve; the gold and silver mines in Roman Spain consumed human labour at a prodigious rate.

The slave-owner's prerogative of setting the slave free was frequently exercised in classical antiquity, and at Rome, contrary to Greek practice, the slave could even be admitted to citizenship (see ), although a high frequency should not be equated with a high incidence of , and most slaves were probably not set free; many who were paid their owners a price for their freedom from savings (see ).

Practically all knowledge of classical slavery derives from sources representing the attitudes and ideology of slave-owners. It is impossible therefore to understand fully the nature of life in slavery in Graeco-Roman society. Given the patterns of behaviour observable in New World slave societies, it is likely that ancient slaves were at all times obliged to come to terms with the oppression they constantly endured by adopting strategies of

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accommodation and resistance in their daily lives. Many slaves must have responded with conscious obedience to the rewards for good behaviour—time off from work, superior rations of food and clothing, freedom—that owners offered them as incentives (Varro, Rust. 1. 17. 5–7; Columella. Rust. 1. 8. 15–20; cp. Xen. Oec. 13. 9– 12; Aristotle [Oec.] 1. 5. 3–6), knowing that physical coercion was always predictable if acquiescence were not forthcoming. The element of calculation this required, however, suggests that obedience was not altogether synonymous with passivity, thus offsetting the dominant stereotype. As for resistance, it is most easily recognized in the occasional episodes of open revolt, notably the movement led by Spartacus in Italy in the late seventies . Their object was not to eradicate slavery but to extricate the disaffected from its rigours. Revolt was a dangerous form of resistance, however, jeopardizing prospects of emancipation and the family relationships slaves constructed. Slaves therefore tended to display resistance more commonly by running away, playing truant, working inefficiently, pilfering or sabotaging property—annoying and frustrating tactics for owners, but less personally threatening for the perpetrators (e.g. Columella. Rust. 1. 7. 6–7). Running away was endemic (e.g. Cicero's slave Dionysius: Cic. Fam. 13. 77. 3; cf. the desertion of over 20,000 Athenian slaves as a result of the Spartan fortification of Decelea in 413 : Thuc. 7. 27. 5), and slave-owners had to advertise rewards for the return of their runaways, engage professional slave-catchers (fugitivarii) to track them down, or do the job themselves.

At no time was there any serious questioning of the structural role of slavery in Graeco-Roman society. At Rome Stoicism is said to have mitigated attitudes towards slaves and to have inspired humane legislation rendering slavery more tolerable, especially under the Principate. In reality Stoic moralists (cf. Sen. Ep. 47) were more concerned with the effects of slave-holding on the moral health of the slave-owners than with the conditions under which slaves lived, while Roman legislation, although showing an increasing interest in the public regulation of slavery, was primarily driven by the aim of perpetuating the slavery system as it was and did little to effect permanent improvement. Christianity likewise displayed no interest in social change from which slaves might benefit, and the result of the Christian attitude symbolized by the repeated injunction that slaves should obey their masters ‘with fear and trembling’ (e.g. Eph. 6: 5; Didache 4: 11)—a vigorous reaffirmation that slavery was an institution based essentially on violence—was to make slavery even harsher in late antiquity than in earlier eras. See also .

K R. B

Bibliography

Access to bibliography on classical slavery is provided by H. Bellen and others (eds.), Bibliographie zur antiken Sklaverei (2003). Find this resource:

Annual surveys of new scholarship appear in the journal Slavery and Abolition. Find this resource:

General M. I. Finley (ed.), Slavery in Classical Antiquity, 2nd edn. (1968); Find this resource:

T. Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (1981, sources in Eng. trans.); Find this resource:

G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981, corr. 1983);

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Find this resource:

O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Find this resource:

M. I. Finley (ed.), Classical Slavery (1987); Find this resource:

P. D. A. Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (1996); Find this resource:

M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, rev. edn. (1998); Find this resource:

L. Schumacher, Sklaverei in der Antike: Alltag und Schicksal der Unfreien (2001); Find this resource:

J. A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (2002); Find this resource:

F. H. Thompson, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery (2003); Find this resource:

C. Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (2005); Find this resource:

N. McKeown, The Invention of Ancient Slavery? (2007); Find this resource:

P. Cartledge and K. R. Bradley (eds.), The Cambridge World 1 (2010). Find this resource:

Greece

M. H. Jameson, CJ 1977, 122–45 (agricultural slavery); Find this resource:

M. I. Finley, Economy and Society in (1981); Find this resource:

P. A. Cartledge, in P. A. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (eds.), Crux: Essays Presented to G. E. M. de Ste Croix (1985), 16– 46, repr. Spartan Reflections (2001); Find this resource:

P. Vidal–Naquet, The Black Hunter (1986), chs. 7–10; Find this resource:

Y. Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece (1988, Fr. orig. 1982); Find this resource:

E. M. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (1988); Find this resource:

W. Pritchett, The Greek State at War 5 (1992), 68 ff. (‘Booty’); Find this resource:

P. A. Brunt, Studies in Greek History and Thought (1993), ch. 11 (Aristotle); Find this resource:

A. Burford, Land and Labor in the Greek World (1993), ch. 5; Find this resource:

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P. Hunt, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek Historians (1998); Find this resource:

H. Klees, Sklavenleben im klassischen Griechenland (1998); Find this resource:

P. A. Cartledge, The Greeks, 2nd edn. (2002), ch. 6; Find this resource:

P. duBois, Slaves and Other Objects (2003); Find this resource:

R. Zelnick-Abramovitz, Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World (2005). Find this resource:

Egypt

I. M. Biezunska-Malowist, L'Esclavage dans l'Egypte gréco-romaine, 1–2 10. 1 (1988), 841–911; Find this resource:

R. Scholl, Corpus der Ptolemaïschen Sklaventexte, 3 vols. (1990). Find this resource:

Jewish

C. Hezser, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity (2005). Find this resource:

Rome

W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (1908); Find this resource:

P. A. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971); Find this resource:

P. R. C. Weaver, Familia Caesaris (1972); Find this resource:

K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (1978); Find this resource:

K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (1987); Find this resource:

A. Watson, Roman Slave Law (1987); Find this resource:

J. -C. Dumont, Servus: Rome et l'esclavage sous la République (1987); Find this resource:

K. R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World (1989); Find this resource:

S. R. Joshel, Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome (1992); Find this resource:

K. Hopkins, P&P 1993, 3–27; Find this resource:

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W. Eck and J. Heinrichs (eds.), Sklaven und Freigelassene in der Gesellschaft der römischen Kaiserzeit (1993, sources with Ger. trans.); Find this resource:

K. R. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (1994); Find this resource:

B. Shaw, Spartacus and the Slave Wars (2001); Find this resource:

W. Scheidel, JRS 95 (2005), 64–79; Find this resource:

U. Roth, Thinking Tools: Agricultural Slavery between Evidence and Models (2007); Find this resource:

T. Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity (2008); Find this resource:

B. Strauss, The Spartacus War (2009). Find this resource:

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