CHAPTER ONE

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM: DEFINITIONS AND APPROACHES

What is the meaning of ‘manumitted slave’? Is it enough to say that this person is no longer a slave? Does ‘manumitted’ or ‘freed’ refer to the act of manumission applied to an individual—the actual trans- fer from the status of slavery to the status of freedom? Or does it describe the person’s status after manumission, thus implying a different category from that of the freeborn? The answers to these questions are not simple for various reasons, the most salient of which is the need to define ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’. This is no easy task in light of the diverse phenomenon of slavery in the ancient world and the long and fervent debates over the concept of liberty in modern times. Moreover, as we shall see, most modern definitions tend to take lib- erty and slavery as their exclusive points of reference, thus under- cutting their significance: slavery is seen by them as the absence of liberty and liberty as the absence of slavery.1 To the extent that we are predisposed to conceive the world in antitheses, ‘slavery’ would be defined as the opposite of ‘liberty’, and the slave as a non-free person. In addition to deriving from a nat- ural inclination, this approach has its roots in the development of communal identification, in which communities define themselves by drawing political, social, and sometimes cultural lines of demarca- tion vis-à-vis other communities and define their communal rights and interests as exclusive of non-members.2 In classical Athens, for instance, since the enactment in 451/0 B.C. of the law proposed by Pericles, only free males born to a citizen and his lawful wife, as well as those granted citizenship by the polis, were considered citi- zens. Only citizens could own landed property and participate in the

1 The difference between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ in modern parlance is not clear. These terms will be used here indiscriminately, as they are employed in modern studies. See Ostwald 1995, 35. 2 Indeed, the development of the polis is one of the explanations offered in mod- ern theories on slavery for the emergence of chattel slavery. See below. 16 chapter one decision-making institutions of the polis; only citizens could benefit from state subsidies, such as corn distribution, and only they could serve on public magistracies and be paid for it. All other residents were excluded from these rights and privileges. But not every non- citizen was non-free. Some were foreigners who visited the city for various purposes and periods; others were free non-citizen residents with certain rights and obligations. The non-free population included chattel slaves of various economic roles and positions. In other poleis and regions, debt-bondage (of the kind that existed in archaic Athens) and other forms of non-free labour were dominant in various eras. All these forms of ‘unfreedom’ were often labeled as doule¤a, slavery. This term was also used in ancient times to describe the status of conquered tributary communities. Liberty, therefore, while present- ing a convenient point of reference, cannot be contrasted to a sin- gle and particular phenomenon of non-liberty. By the same token, manumission was not necessarily the transfer of a person from one pole (slavery) to the other (liberty). Hence, in order to arrive at a more useful definition of the sta- tus of freed-persons we need to first explore ideas of freedom and slavery, both modern and ancient. The following theoretical discus- sion is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but may eluci- date notions essential to the subject of this book.

1.1 Some Modern Definitions

As constant concern with definitions of freedom and slavery in mod- ern times suggests, defining freedom is not an easy task. As Patterson once wrote: ‘freedom, like love and beauty, is one of those values better experienced than defined’ (1991, 1).3 The fact that freedom is taken nowadays to be the ultimate good for humankind reduces its complexity to no more than that of its antithesis, slavery—or, to use a more suitable term, ‘unfreedom’ (Pohlenz 1966, IX; Finley 1982a, 77; 1982c, 119–20)—and does nothing to curtail the debates about its scope and nature. The term ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ embraces various notions, which have changed from one period to another

3 Cf. Berlin 1958, 6: ‘Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term [liberty] is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist.’