Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek AND ROMAN Political Thought 36 (2019) 337-345 brill.com/agpt Review Article ∵ A Note on Paulin Ismard’s Democracy’s Slaves: a Political History of Ancient Greece Mogens Herman Hansen Associate Professor Emeritus, University of Copenhagen, The Saxo Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected] Ismard, Paulin, (2017), Democracy’s Slaves: A Political History of Ancient Greece. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. x + 188 pp. $35.00. ISBN 9780674660076. Originally published as Démocratie contre les experts: Les esclaves publics en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015). The topic of Ismard’s book is the crucial importance of publicly owned slaves in the Greek poleis in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and in particular in democratic Athens. But his study includes a considerable and valuable amount of comparative material about public slaves in other civilizations: in Rome, in African and Asian kingdoms as well as slavery in the colonial period in the Americas, Africa and Asia. In this note I focus on his treatment of the public slaves in democratic Athens, called demosioi, and sometimes hyperetai. Analysing the working of Athenian democracy in the classical period we notice a basic distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘administration’, which cor- responds to a dichotomy between decision-making and administrative institutions. The decision-making institutions were the demos, the boule, the dikasteria and, in the 4th century, the nomothetai. The administrative were © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/20512996-12340213 338 Hansen some seven hundred archai,1 mostly working together in boards of ten and the boule, which was technically an arche viz.