Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery E-Book

Peter Hunt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 686

Beschreibung

An exciting study of ancient slavery in Greece and Rome This book provides an introduction to pivotal issues in the study of classical (Greek and Roman) slavery. The span of topics is broad--ranging from everyday resistance to slavery to philosophical justifications of slavery, and from the process of enslavement to the decline of slavery after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The book uses a wide spectrum of types of evidence, and relies on concrete and vivid examples whenever possible. Introductory chapters provide historical context and a clear and concise discussion of the methodological difficulties of studying ancient slavery. The following chapters are organized around central topics in slave studies: enslavement, economics, politics, culture, sex and family life, manumission and ex-slaves, everyday conflict, revolts, representations, philosophy and law, and decline and legacy. Chapters open with general discussions of important scholarly controversies and the challenges of our ancient evidence, and case studies from the classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman periods provide detailed and concrete explorations of the issues. * Organized by key themes in slave studies with in-depth classical case studies * Emphasizes Greek/Roman comparisons and contrasts * Features helpful customized maps * Topics range from demography to philosophy, from Linear B through the fall of the empire in the west * Features myriad types of evidence: literary, historical, legal and philosophical texts, the bible, papyri, epitaphs, lead letters, curse tablets, art, manumission inscriptions, and more Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery provides a general survey of classical slavery and is particularly appropriate for college courses on Greek and Roman slavery, on comparative slave societies, and on ancient social history. It will also be of great interest to history enthusiasts and scholars, especially those interested in slavery in different periods and societies.

Leseprobe

An exciting study of ancient slavery in Greece and Rome

This book provides an introduction to pivotal issues in the study of classical (Greek and Roman) slavery. The span of topics is broad – ranging from everyday resistance to slavery to philosophical justifications of slavery, and from the process of enslavement to the decline of slavery after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The book uses a wide spectrum of types of evidence, and relies on concrete and vivid examples whenever possible.

Introductory chapters provide historical context and a clear and concise discussion of the methodological difficulties of studying ancient slavery. The following chapters are organized around central topics in slave studies: enslavement, economics, politics, culture, sex and family life, manumission and ex-slaves, everyday conflict, revolts, representations, philosophy and law, and decline and legacy. Chapters open with general discussions of important scholarly controversies and the challenges of our ancient evidence, and case studies from the classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman periods provide detailed and concrete explorations of the issues.

Organized by key themes in slave studies with in-depth classical case studies

Emphasizes Greek/Roman comparisons and contrasts

Features helpful customized maps

Topics range from demography to philosophy, from Linear B through the fall of the empire in the west

Features myriad types of evidence: literary, historical, legal and philosophical texts, the bible, papyri, epitaphs, lead letters, curse tablets, art, manumission inscriptions, and more

Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery provides a general survey of classical slavery and is particularly appropriate for college courses on Greek and Roman slavery, on comparative slave societies, and on ancient social history. It will also be of great interest to history enthusiasts and scholars, especially those interested in slavery in different periods and societies.

Peter Hunt is a professor at the University of Colorado where he teaches a wide variety of courses including Greek and Roman slavery. He has written two books: Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians and War and Peace, and Alliance in Demosthenes’ Athens. His previous work on slavery includes chapters in the Cambridge World History of Slavery and the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries as well as the slavery chapter in the Cambridge World History, vol. 4.

To Isabel and Julia

Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery

Peter Hunt

This edition first published 2018

© 2018 Peter Hunt

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The right of Peter Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hunt, Peter, 1961- author.

Title: Ancient Greek and Roman slavery / Peter Hunt, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado.

Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017013713 (print) | LCCN 2017017166 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119421061 (epub) | ISBN 9781405188050 (hardback) | ISBN 9781405188067 (paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Slavery—Greece—History. | Slavery—Rome—History. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical.

Classification: LCC HT863 (ebook) | LCC HT863 .H86 2018 (print) | DDC 306.3/6209495—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013713

Cover image: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design by Wiley

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Modern and Ancient References: Abbreviations

1 Introduction and Historical Context

Greek History and Slavery: An Overview

Rome’s Expansion

Contrasts and Comparisons

Suggested Reading

Notes

2 Definitions and Evidence

What Is Slavery?

Ancient Evidence and Its Difficulties

Actual Practices Versus Ways of Thinking

What Is Typical? When and Where?

Common Sense and Comparative History

Modern Politics and Ancient Slavery

Suggested Reading

Notes

3 Enslavement

Introduction

Warfare and the Sources of Athenian Slaves?

A Sea Change in the Roman Slave Supply?

A Slave Population Equation

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

4 Economics

Introduction

Slave Societies

Economics of Slavery

Roman Expansion

The Cost of Labor in Athens and the Roman Empire

The Slave Trade and Slave Traders

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

5 Politics

Introduction

Athenian Slavery and Democracy

Slave and Freedmen Administrators in the Early Roman Empire

Eunuchs in the Late Empire

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

6 Culture

Introduction

Slave Culture in Classical Athens

Factors in the Retention of Birth Culture

Compatibility and Resistance

Greek Intellectuals as Roman Slaves

Greek Slaves and Culture at Rome

Livius Andronicus

Greek Ex-Slaves and the Lower Classes

Ambivalence

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

7 Sex and Family Life

Introduction

Prostitution in Athens

Neaira’s Story

Coerced Sex and Emotional Relationships

Roman Slave Families

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

8 Manumission and Ex-Slaves

Why Manumission and Ex-Slaves?

How Common Was Manumission?

Reasons for Manumission

Rituals and Processes

Closed and Open Slave Systems

Pasion and His Family

Trimalchio’s Wild Party

Conclusion: Contrasts Between Greek and Roman Practice

Suggested Reading

Notes

9 Everyday Conflict

Resistance and Agency

Weapons of the Weak

The Tools of Oppression

Running Away

Murder and Reprisal

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

10 Revolts

Introduction

Classical and Hellenistic Greece

The Helots

The Roman Slave Wars

Challenges of Revolt

The Ability to Revolt

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

11 Representations

Introduction

Tragedy and Slave Stereotypes

The Clever Slave in Roman Comedy

The Conservative and the Subversive Reading

Paternalism

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

12 Philosophy and Law

Introduction

The Anonymous Opponents of Slavery

Aristotle’s Theory of Natural Slavery

Stoicism and Christianity

The Amelioration of Slavery in Roman Law

Conclusion: Why no Abolitionists?

Suggested Reading

Notes

13 Decline and Legacy

Introduction

The Decline of Classical Slavery

The Legacy of Ancient Slavery

Aristotle in the New World

The Roman Law of Slavery and Modern Slave Codes

Conclusion

Suggested Reading

Notes

References

Index

EULA

List of Tables

1

Table 1.1

Table 1.2

3

Table 3.1

List of Illustrations

1

Figure 1.1

Slaves in the Linear B Tablets? A tablet from Pylos, ca. 1200

BCE

, written in Linear B syllabograms: “At (?) Pylos, slaves of (?) the Priestess, on account (?) of sacred gold: 14 [ ]women” – or perhaps “in exchange for sacred gold.” The word in the box, do-e-ra[i], is the antecedent for the classical Greek word for slave (feminine:

doulai

), but what the term implied in Linear B is not clear. “The Priestess” was an important, religious figure.

Source

: PY Ae 303 translated in Duhoux 2008, 295–296. Illustration from

The Pylos Tablets: Texts of the Inscriptions Found 1939–1954

by Emmett L. Bennett. Copyright © 1955, renewed 1983 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

3

Figure 3.1

Epitaph of Timothea: “To the sacred spirits. For Timothea, his verna, Marcus Ulpius Nicanor made [this]. Sun, I give over to you [for punishment] whoever attacked her.” The slaveholder Nicanor took a familial interest both in the commemoration of Timothea, his deceased

verna

, and in obtaining vengeance for her – through the Sun god – since she was apparently a victim of violence. Historians agree that there must have been far more home-born slaves in Rome than are identified as

vernae

on their epitaphs; presumably, the designation was confined to those home-born slaves who enjoyed some intimacy with their masters. The owner’s name, Nicanor, is Greek, as was common among slaves, ex-slaves, and sometimes their descendants at Rome (see Chapter 8). His full name suggests that he may have been an ex-slave of the emperor Trajan (born Marcus Ulpius Traianus) or a descendant of such an ex-slave (see Chapter 5).

Source

: Palazzo Nuovo, Capitoline Museum,

CIL

6.14099. Line drawing from VROMA: http://www.vroma.org/.

4

Figure 4.1

Slave auction scene. Ex-slaves who were rich enough owned slaves themselves; some even engaged in the slave trade. This scene on the gravestone of a Roman freedman shows an assistant (left) displaying a slave’s buttocks to customers, while the auctioneer makes a large gesture, whose exact meaning is open to interpretation.

Source

: After a drawing by A. Wiltheim, seventeenth century, in Waltzing 1904, 300.

7

Figure 7.1

Greek symposium scene depicted on a vase found in Campania. The hosts of a

symposion

, a drinking party, could rent a

hetaira

to liven up the gathering. They could also hire a flute player, either a free or slave woman. Flute players were obviously musicians – which is why they made more than regular prostitutes – but several passages indicate that their job often included sex acts with guests, perhaps for additional payment. In this vase painting, the masks and instruments on the wall suggest a theatrical context as in Plato’s

Symposium

, set at the celebration of Agathon’s victory in a dramatic competition. In Plato’s

Symposium

, however, the host sends the flute player home, an indication of the group’s intellectual seriousness – and because they were tired from the previous night’s party (176e).

Source

: INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo.

Figure 7.2

Letter about rent for live-in

hetaira

. Early second-century

ce.

Roman Egypt also provides evidence of the long-term rental of a slave woman for sex – and perhaps other domestic work. In this letter, written in Greek on a piece of broken pottery (9 × 12 cm), the slaveholder, Philokles, is angling to increase the amount he is charging a customer to rent a live-in slave

hetaira

. Scholars describe Philokles as “pimp and green grocer” after the two lines of work that his surviving letters frequently mention. In the second line, you may be able to make out the word

draxmas

from the Greek unit of coinage, the drachma.

Source

: Bülow-Jacobsen 2012, 315, #390, reverse. Reproduced with permission of Adam Bülow-Jacobsen.

8

Figure 8.1

Family tree of Pasion.

Source

: Courtesy of Wesley Wood.

Figure 8.2

Columbaria 1 in the Codini Vineyard near Rome. No billionaire ex-slaves displaying their wealth here! Columbaria were communal tombs, either partially or entirely underground, perhaps already a rejection of competitive, public display (Borbonus 2014, 3). They housed many niches, each of which could house two small urns for bone ash. These niches were sometimes decorated with plaques containing short epitaphs. Some columbaria were built to house all the slaves and ex-slaves of a great household, a sign of continued connection within this community and a display of the paternalistic care of the noble master; this particular one contained burials from many different households. It had a capacity of about 900, and was in use during the first and second centuries

CE

(Borbonus 2014, 169).

Source

: Alimari/Art Resource, NY.

9

Figure 9.1

Slave holding chamber pot. Oinokles Painter c. 470 BCE, (Getty Museum). Like Trimalchio when he plays ball (Petronius, Satyricon 27), this Greek master doesn’t want to interrupt whatever he’s doing just to urinate. Household slaves were intimates of their masters to an extent quite foreign to modern ideas of privacy (Hunter 1994). They might remain in a room while a master or mistress was having sex (as on the cover illustration), hold a drunken master as he throws up, or let their master wipe off his hands on their hair. Although archaeologists have identified slave quarters in some large Roman houses – halls or courtyards surrounded with small, low, sleeping cubicles with dirt floors (George 2011, 388) – many slaves just slept on the floor. Personal attendants would sleep right outside the slaveholder’s bedroom door or even at the foot of the bed, so they would be close at hand if their master or mistress wanted something in the night. Source: Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program, http://www.getty.edu/art/collection.

Figure 9.2

Egyptian WANTED poster for runaway slave. “If any person finds a slave named Philippos . . . about fourteen years old, light in complexion, who speaks haltingly, has a flat nose . . . wearing a . . . woolen garment and a used shoulder belt, he should bring him to the army post and receive . . . ” You may be able to make out

Philipon

, in the first line: the lambda and second iota run together, but if you can identify phi and pi, the rest is clear.

Source

: P.Oxy. LI 3616, trans in Shaw 2001. Courtesy of The Egypt Exploration Society and the Imaging Papyri Project, Oxford.

10

Figure 10.1

Coin commemorating the suppression of the second Sicilian slave revolt. The descendants of the proconsul Manius Aquillius were proud even of a victory over slaves. By chance, two of them on separate occasions (70 and 18

BCE

) were in charge of a Roman mint and oversaw the production of coinage commemorating their brave ancestor’s deeds and his service to Sicily – or at least to the slaveholders of Sicily. The front of this coin has the word

virtus

, “manliness”;

III Vir

indicates the “three-man” mint board. The reverse depicts a Roman soldier helping up an injured or ailing woman, identified as the incarnation of Sicily, “Sicil.” It also has the name, M(anius) AQUIL(lius); M(anii) F(ilius) M(anii) N(epos) is his filiation: “son of Manius and grandson of Manius.”

Source

: Courtesy of Gorny & Mosch GmbH.

Figure 10.2

Coin of the slave king Antiochus (originally Eunus). Striking coins was a traditional activity of autonomous states, something to which the Sicilian slave rebels aspired. This coin combines Sicilian themes – the ear of wheat and a veiled face of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture – with a title more at home in the Seleucid Empire: Antioch(ou) Basil(eō), “of King Antiochus.” Numismatists believe that the explanation is that Eunus had coins made with his new name and title together with the traditional Sicilian motifs of the town of Enna, the slaves’ main base.

Source

: Figure from Robinson 1920, 175.

11

Figure 11.1

Grave relief of Hegeso. In this famous and beautiful grave relief of the late fifth century, the deceased, Hegeso, is seated and her slave woman is holding a box, from which Hegeso has taken something, probably a piece of jewelry and is examining it. In such scenes, the slave is much smaller than her mistress – you have to imagine Hegeso standing up for this to be obvious. The slave women have practical, short haircuts, whereas their mistresses have more elaborate hairdos and more complicated clothing. Only Hegeso is named on the inscription even though two women are depicted on the relief, but it is clear who is the important person (the deceased) and who is the slave.

Source

: Chris Hellier/Alamy Stock Photo.

Figure 11.2

Terracotta of a comic slave mask (National Archaeological Museum, Athens). Comic actors wore standard masks for common character types: the old man, the young lover, or the slave. Wiles points out that the masks for slave characters had arched and distorted eyebrows suggesting emotions like fear, surprise, or malice (1988, 63). Their right brows were raised; this asymmetry probably indicated a lack of moral balance. Their mouths were huge, in line with the propensity of comic slaves to eat, drink, and gossip. Comic slaves also wore red hair, marking them as foreign and different. A character describes the slave Pseudolus as “Someone red-haired, paunchy, with fat calves, darkish, with a big head, sharp eyes, a ruddy face, and very big feet” (Plautus,

Pseudolus

1218–1120). Almost all of these physical characteristics were considered foreign or ignoble.

Source

: Yanni Archive/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 11.3

Lararium

in the House of the Vettii. This house is located in the ancient Italian town of Pompeii, buried and largely preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79

CE

. The

lararium

was located in the kitchen and service area of the house and probably was intended for the use of the slaves – that archaeologists did not find another

lararium

for the master’s family is puzzling. Its central panel depicts the house’s Genius, closely associated with the head of the household (

paterfamilias

), who is preparing to pour a libation; he is flanked by two dancing Lares; the snake, which is typical, either represents prosperity or serves a protective function.

Source

: ©2016 Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministerio Beni e Att. Culturali.

12

Figure 12.1

EID MAR Denarius, Roman silver coin (42

BCE

). The Roman goddess Liberty had the staff, the

vindicta

, and the freedman’s

pilleus

as her attributes. Brutus, one of the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar, famously minted coins with daggers, to symbolize the assassination, and the

pilleus

, to symbolize the freedom that this deed had restored. “Eid Mar,” Ides of March (March 15th), refers to the date of the assassination. It is striking that elite Romans were willing to use symbols deriving from the emancipation of slaves.

Source

: Courtesy of John Nebel.

Figure 12.2

Metal slave collar. Almost forty metal slave collars have been found. Their inscriptions often included “I am a runaway. Seize me,” identified the master, and promised a reward for the return of the slave. All date to the late Empire and a number suggest Christian slaveholders. One plausible explanation for the late dates is that Christians considered it blasphemous to disfigure a person’s face with a brand or tattoo, previously a common punishment and way to discourage flight (see Chapter 9). When this practice was outlawed under Constantine (

Theodosian Code

9.40.2), good Christian slaveholders substituted slave collars which, unlike tattoos, can survive to be found by archaeologists. See Trimble 2016 for a fascinating discussion.

Source

: © 2016. Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministerio Beni e Att. Culturali.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Illustrations

Figures

Figure 1.1 A tablet from Pylos, ca. 1200

BCE

, written in Linear B syllabograms.

Figure 3.1 Epitaph of Timothea.

Figure 4.1 Slave auction scene.

Figure 7.1 Greek symposium scene depicted on a vase found in Campania.

Figure 7.2 Letter about rent for live-in

hetaira

.

Figure 8.1 Family tree of Pasion.

Figure 8.2 Columbaria 1 in the Codini Vineyard near Rome.

Figure 9.1 Slave holding chamber pot.

Figure 9.2 Egyptian WANTED poster for runaway slave.

Figure 10.1 Coin commemorating the suppression of the second Sicilian slave revolt.

Figure 10.2 Coin of the slave king Antiochus (originally Eunus).

Figure 11.1 Grave relief of Hegeso.

Figure 11.2 Terracotta of a comic slave mask.

Figure 11.3

Lararium

in the House of the Vettii.

Figure 12.1 EID MAR Denarius, Roman silver coin (42

BCE

).

Figure 12.2 Metal slave collar.

Maps

Map 1 Mainland Greece and the Aegean.

Map 2 The Roman Empire around 150

CE

.

Map 3 The powers of the Mediterranean in 220

BCE

.

Map 4 Origins of slaves at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries

BCE

.

Map 5 Spartacus at large in Italy.

Map 6 After the disintegration of the Roman Empire: Europe and the Mediterranean in 530

CE

.

Preface

I wrote this book with two audiences in mind. I hope it will be a useful resource for college courses on Greek and Roman slavery and a supplementary text for more general classes involving ancient social history. But it should also provide a general introduction for any other reader who wants or needs to know more about this fascinating topic, for example, those interested in comparative slave societies or in other aspects of ancient Greek or Roman culture or history. These two intended audiences have determined many aspects of this book.

In particular, within the main text I have preferred what I consider the clearest and most interesting presentations of a topic rather than the most recent. I have kept references to secondary scholarship sparse and unobtrusive, and I have confined myself to works in English whenever possible. Nevertheless, my citations and “Suggested Reading” sections include recent works and should provide a good start for further investigations of particular topics—for the purpose, for instance, of research papers. I have also not hesitated to cite my own scholarly publications when these provide more detailed treatments of topics or arguments I mention. I do not claim to be a particularly important scholar of ancient slavery, but I am the one with whom I most frequently agree.

The book is organized topically rather than having a Greek and then a Roman half. Each chapter sets out a major issue in the study of slavery and considers theoretical approaches, our ancient evidence, and key controversies. Contrasts and parallels between Greek and Roman slavery usually play a role in either the introduction or conclusion of each chapter. The bodies of most chapters are devoted to case studies from classical Greece and Rome – and Hellenistic examples play a role in several chapters. The focus on particular cases allows greater depth and I have been willing to forgo general coverage for the sake of this goal. For example, in Chapter 7, I focus on slave prostitutes in classical Athens but not at Rome and on slave families at Rome without attempting equal treatment for Greek cases. The quantity and richness of our evidence has often determined such choices. And even in the cases for which we seem to have the best evidence, I’ll need to admit our ignorance regularly.

Despite this selectivity, this is not a short book. I begin with two introductory chapters: an overview of classical slavery within the context of Greek and Roman history and a chapter about the challenges historians face studying ancient slavery and the methods they use. The next three chapters (3–5) consider large-scale issues about the institution of slavery: the supply of slaves, the economics of slavery, and its political ramifications. The next three chapters (6–8) treat aspects of the lives of ancient slaves: their culture, sex and family lives; manumission from slavery and its consequences. Chapters 9 and 10 consider the antagonistic aspects of the relationships between slaves and masters: first slave resistance on an everyday and individual level and then open slave revolts. Two chapters (11 and 12) focus on the perspectives of slaveholders: how they represented slaves in literature and art and then the philosophical and legal justifications, critiques, and ameliorations of slavery. I conclude with a discussion of the decline of classical slavery and its legacy extending to the present.

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have benefitted greatly from the support of institutions, colleagues, friends, research assistants, editors, and family. I have been lucky to have such fine and supportive colleagues in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. I owe special thanks to Noel Lenski – now at Yale – and to John Gibert for their advice and conversation, and for sharing some of their work with me pre-publication – and to Cathy Cameron in the Department of Anthropology, who did the same. My treatment of Epictetus and slavery owes a great deal to an honors thesis that my student, Angela Funk, wrote on that topic. The University of Colorado has supported my research and my writing with a LEAP grant for associate professors, a sabbatical, a fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts, and a College Scholar Award. I am also most grateful for the hard work of several graduate research assistants: the meticulous efforts of Stephanie Krause and Wesley Wood contributed a great deal to tightening the manuscript up for publication; they also drafted the maps; David Kear’s long experience as an editor greatly improved the first half of the manuscript. John Nebel generously allowed me to use a photo of his own EID MAR denarius and arranged the permission from Gorny & Mosch for the image of the Manius Aquillius denarius.

I also owe thanks to several skillful and meticulous editors from Wiley-Blackwell: Haze Humbert first suggested the idea for this book and supervised the project over the years; Deirdre Ilkson edited early drafts of several chapters; and Louise Spencely edited the final manuscript. The two anonymous readers provided constructive criticism as well as many helpful suggestions and improved the manuscript greatly. Sara Forsdyke and David Lewis generously shared some of their forthcoming work with me; I am also indebted to them for valuable discussions of ancient slavery on several occasions. I am immensely grateful to Susan Treggiari for her astute comments and suggestions on several chapters; and to my wife, Mitzi Lee, who read over the material related to her field of expertise, ancient philosophy, and saved me from several missteps there. Of course, I alone am responsible for the mistakes that remain.

Modern and Ancient References: Abbreviations

References to modern scholarship are by author and date – either in footnotes or parentheses – with the full citations in the References section.

I cite ancient authors, by line numbers in drama and poetry or by book, chapter, and subsections in most prose authors. You may be more used to page citations, but those are only correct for one particular edition or translation of an author, whereas the lines, books, chapters, and section are usually the same across all translations and editions – though some translations of plays and poetry do not follow the original line numbers. “Fr.” stands for “fragment” and I refer to the collection of fragments by author and date, which you can look up in the bibliography – except for the Fragmente der griechichen Historiker listed in the abbreviations below.

I have followed the naming and numbering conventions of the Loeb Classical Library whenever possible. I cite the “Attic orators” – Aeschines, Antiphon, Demosthenes, Isaeus, Isocrates, and Lysias – by Loeb speech number alone. As is customary, I cite certain speeches that are probably by Apollodorus as by Pseudo-Demosthenes, [Demosthenes], where the square brackets indicate that the speeches are spurious, that is, falsely ascribed to Demosthenes. I cite other spurious speeches of Demosthenes with square brackets as well as the Constitution of the Athenians, falsely ascribed to Xenophon, [Xenophon], and the Oeconomica, falsely ascribed to Aristotle, [Aristotle]. I refer to Didorus Siculus, Library of History, Herodotus, The Histories, Livy, History of Rome, and Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War by the author's name alone.

Especially in epigraphy and papyrology there are standard modern collections, typically abbreviated. I use the following in this book:

BGU: Berliner griechische Urkunden, 1895–

https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/119344

CIL: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 1853–

http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en/index_en.html

FGrH: Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 1923–

http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-jacoby IG

IG: Inscriptiones Graecae, 1860–

http://www.bbaw.de/en/research/ig

http://epigraphy.packhum.org/

P.Oxy.: Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1898–

http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/

SEG: Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, 1923–

http://www.brill.com/publications/online-resources/supplementum-epigraphicum- graecum-online

Some of these collections are complicated multi-volume collections with publication dates spanning a century and various publishers and editors. Online versions are sometimes available. There's no hiding the fact that these are not easy to use, especially for students getting started. Wikipedia has articles on each of these sources and is often a good place to start. I have also provided helpful web addresses either for online versions or for the current publisher.

For the sake of clarity and ease of use, I have otherwise avoided abbreviations.

Map 1 Mainland Greece and the Aegean. Source: Courtesy of Stephanie Krause.

Map 2 The Roman Empire around 150 CE. Source: Courtesy of Stephanie Krause.

1Introduction and Historical Context

Slaves who love the class of masters provoke a great war with the other slaves.

Euripides (Athenian playwright, ca. 480–406 BCE), Alexander, fr. 50 in Nauck 1889

Slavery is a cruel institution, but it was central to ancient Greek and Roman civilization for around a thousand years. The prevalence of classical slavery justifies the claim that, during some periods, Greece and Rome were true “slave societies” just as surely as the pre-Civil War American South. But reconstructing and understanding Greek and Roman slavery has long presented a tricky and complex, but fascinating, challenge for historians, who have had to rely on elegant arguments, painstaking investigations, and bold inferences from evidence that is often sparse and difficult to interpret. That evidence is also biased since it is slaveholders rather than slaves who wrote almost every text that has survived from antiquity. For example, the Euripides quotation above is the only hint we have of what must have been a common dynamic among household slaves: conflicts between those slaves determined to resist their oppression in small ways or large and those hoping to get ahead by pleasing their masters. And even this single short quotation comes from a play written by a slave master.

Despite the paucity of evidence from slaves themselves, the issues involved have generated passionate debates. Historical interest has also been piqued by a general admiration for the sophistication and historical significance of classical culture and the inevitable question, “how could they have allowed and indeed approved of slavery?” So, instead of giving up, historians have devised ingenious methods to span the millennia between us and the classical world and to get the most out of our recalcitrant evidence. For example, slaves often paid to buy their own freedom. A long series of such payments was recorded on a stone retaining wall below the temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece, in part to publicize the terms of the agreement and thus to prevent either party from reneging. The increase of the average price paid from the third to the first century BCE suggests that the demand for slaves in Roman Italy outpaced the number of people enslaved in Rome’s almost constant wars in the second century BCE (Hopkins and Roscoe 1978, 134–71) – a surprising result we’ll discuss in Chapter 4. Though not all such bold theories have withstood scrutiny, we would not understand Greek and Roman slavery nearly as well as we do were it not for historians willing to try new approaches and to push against the limits of our evidence.

An understanding of Greek and Roman slavery is important for several cultural and historical reasons. First, students interested in the culture of the classical world, ancient Greece and Rome, need to understand its system of slavery, one of its central institutions. In classical literature, for example, you find slaves wherever you turn. Their presence is often obvious: Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel over captive slave women in Homer’s Iliad; near the beginning of Aristotle’s Politics, we find his infamous doctrine of natural slavery; witty, scheming slaves often drive the action of Roman comedies; powerful ex-slave administrators play a large role in Tacitus’ history of the reign of the emperor Claudius. Less obviously, slavery permeated Greek and Roman thinking, as evidenced by their frequent use of analogies to slavery. When the orator Demosthenes appealed to the Athenians not to submit to slavery to Macedonia, he was not saying that the Athenians were in imminent danger of actual slavery – being sold away from their families or whipped for refusing an order. Nevertheless, his metaphorical use of slavery evoked a concrete, everyday, and violent institution familiar to his audience.

Second, classical slavery has had profound effects on modern slave societies, not just in the American South, but also in Brazil, the Caribbean, and elsewhere – some of which we’ll explore in the final chapter. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, the study of the Classics played a huge role in Western education and thus Greek and Roman models were constantly present in the minds of slaveholders in the New World. They were deeply influenced, for example, by the Roman law of slavery. George Fitzhugh, in his infamous defense of slavery in the US South, A Sociology for the South (1854), drew on Aristotle’s doctrine of Natural Slavery to justify slavery based on race. Classical models often shaped the way that modern slaveholders conceived of and justified slavery.

Third, classical styles, ideas, and values have remained important to Western culture in general, so understanding the role of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome can yield insight into ideas and debates important to the modern period. In the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx uses the opposition of slave and master in antiquity as his first example of the class struggle between oppressor and oppressed: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles: Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf . . . ” (Marx and Engels 1955 [originally 1848], chapter 1). Following his lead, several modern communist groups have named themselves after Spartacus, the leader of a great slave revolt against the Romans. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic condemned Christianity as a slavish religion in contrast to Greek and Roman paganism (Nietzsche 1994 [originally 1887], I.8–10). Finally, the West’s cherished ideal of political freedom had its origin in a slave society, classical Greece, where the opposite of freedom was a vivid and concrete reality: slavery.

So far, I have been treating Greek and Roman slavery as if they constituted a natural unit. This may at first appear arbitrary. Linking together ancient Greece and Rome as the “classical” civilizations is arguably an artifact of post-Renaissance Western cultural history and of the important role both Greek and Roman literature, art, and philosophy has played in that history. In fact, the culture and society of the thousand-odd Greek city-states of the classical period or of the later and larger Hellenistic kingdoms was quite different from that of Rome and the enormous empire it eventually controlled. Nevertheless, historical links and cultural similarities justify treating the slavery of Greece and Rome together. Even the contrasts between Greek and Roman slavery – of which there are many – often prove to be illuminating of both.

Over the course of the second and first centuries BCE (from 200–31 BCE) Rome conquered Greece itself and the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean. Greece, however, did not disappear after its conquest. Rather, Greek-speaking elites continued to dominate the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Indeed, this Greek-speaking eastern half of the empire survived as the Byzantine Empire even after the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE. So, Greek history and the history of Greek slavery became part of Roman and then medieval history. For example, papyrus posters advertising rewards for the return of fugitive slaves survive, preserved in the desert. Most of these date from the period when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire and partially subject to its laws, but they are written in Greek, which remained the language and provided the cultural background of the elite in this former Hellenistic kingdom. It is simplistic to categorize slavery in Egypt in this period as purely Greek or Roman – not to mention the Egyptian context.

Although Rome conquered Greece, Greek art, literature, and thought had a profound influence on Roman culture. The embrace and imitation of Greek culture by the Romans has important consequences for the study of Roman slavery. For example, Roman philosophers were all adherents to one or another of the schools of philosophy founded by the Greeks. To understand the views on slavery of Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), a Roman aristocrat and advisor to the emperor Nero, we need to keep in mind that, as a Stoic, he was an adherent of a school of Hellenistic Philosophy. It is still possible to take these considerations into account and to treat either Greek or Roman slavery by itself. This book capitalizes on the benefits of covering the two subjects together and especially on the enlightening contrasts and parallels such an approach allows.

Greek History and Slavery: An Overview

It is not only the connections between Greek and Roman history that are important here; in general, a system of slavery can only be understood within its wider historical context. In the case of Greek and Roman slavery, this context extends over more than two thousand years and, largely because of the extent of the Roman Empire, comprises slavery from Spain to Iraq and from Britain to Egypt. So we are not talking about just a little historical context, but a lot. Here I can only provide a brief sketch of those aspects of Greek and Roman history most relevant to slavery. As I treat particular issues in later chapters, I’ll provide more background. For now, it is just the big picture that we need.

Table 1.1 The periods of Greek history.

Dates

Historical period

1600–1150

BCE

Mycenaean Civilization

Bureaucratic palace governments, writing in Linear B

1150–750

BCE

Dark Age

Decline in population and material conditions, no writing during most of period

750–500

BCE

Archaic Period

Growth in population, alphabetic writing, formation of city-states, Panhellenism and colonization

500–323

BCE

Classical Period

Democracy in Athens, Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, most influential period of Greek culture, ends with Macedonian dominance of mainland Greece

323–30

BCE

Hellenistic Period

After Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire, Greek and Macedonian elites ruled large areas of the Near East. Starting after 200

BCE

, Rome defeats, dominates, and eventually annexes the Hellenistic Kingdoms

30

BCE

–400

CE

Roman Period

Greece and Hellenistic kingdoms part of Roman Empire

400–1453

CE

Byzantine Empire

Eastern, Greek-speaking Roman Empire survives the fall of the western Empire, finally falls to the Ottomans

The first speakers of Greek probably migrated to the area we now know as Greece around 2000 BCE. By 1600 BCE they had developed the high culture and bureaucratic states that scholars call Mycenaean civilization after the spectacular finds at the site of Mycenae in the Peloponnese. The Mycenaean states kept records on clay tablets in a script known as Linear B. Some tablets contain the Linear B version of the classical Greek word for slave: doulos/doulē (masculine/feminine). The people so described are usually unnamed, humble, and dependent on a more important person, often a religious figure. But they sometimes seem to own land and pay taxes, something we would not expect of slaves. Other tablets list groups of workers supported by state rations, including women and children but no men.1 Some groups are described with ethnic adjectives that indicate that they were foreigners and, according to one reconstruction, slave captives whose husbands had been killed in war. Thus slavery may well have existed in Greece as far back as we have textual evidence. Unfortunately, we do not know much more about Mycenaean slavery.

Figure 1.1 Slaves in the Linear B Tablets? A tablet from Pylos, ca. 1200 BCE, written in Linear B syllabograms: “At (?) Pylos, slaves of (?) the Priestess, on account (?) of sacred gold: 14 [ ]women” – or perhaps “in exchange for sacred gold.” The word in the box, do-e-ra[i], is the antecedent for the classical Greek word for slave (feminine: doulai), but what the term implied in Linear B is not clear. “The Priestess” was an important, religious figure. Source: PY Ae 303 translated in Duhoux 2008, 295–296. Illustration from The Pylos Tablets: Texts of the Inscriptions Found 1939–1954 by Emmett L. Bennett. Copyright © 1955, renewed 1983 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

In the century or so after 1200 BCE, the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, population plummeted, large-scale construction ceased, and literacy was entirely lost – thus this period is known as a Dark Age. Historians did not even know that the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers until Michael Ventris, a professional architect rather than a scholar, deciphered the writing system in 1952. Writing appears again in Greece in the course of the eighth century, 800–700 BCE, after the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet for writing Greek. This was only one of the many ways in which archaic Greece drew upon the older, larger, and more sophisticated civilizations in the Near East: Babylonia, Assyria, Lydia, and Egypt. All of these societies possessed slaves, who are mentioned already in the twenty-third century BCE and in the Code of Hammurabi, but none were slave societies (Turley 2000, 39). It is possible that archaic Greek aristocrats, in a newly prosperous society and enamored of other aspects of Eastern art, clothing, and technology, decided that a bought slave was another luxurious foreign status symbol they would like to acquire. But this is not the only scenario we can imagine. Slavery was common throughout the ancient world: in particular, the enslavement of the women of a defeated enemy was almost ubiquitous. Greeks probably did not need to learn about slavery from anybody.

The return of writing to Greece was far from the whole story. The eighth century also saw growth in population, wealth, and trade, as well as cultural changes. In particular, the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, our best evidence for eighth-century culture and society, were first committed to writing at this time. Slaves play important roles in both epics. For example, upon his return home, the hero Odysseus, an exemplary master, reestablishes his relationship with the loyal slaves in his household and eventually punishes the disloyal ones. Since the suitors of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, have been cruel masters to the slaves in Odysseus’ house in his absence, an anonymous slave woman curses them (Odyssey 20.116–19, trans. Lattimore 1967):

On this day let the suitors take, for the last and latest

time, their desirable feasting in the halls of Odysseus.

For it is they who have broken my knees with heart-sore labour

as I grind the meal for them. Let this be their final feasting.

We can easily imagine slaves in the classical period uttering similar prayers; both loyalty and resentment towards their masters are well attested. But in two interrelated ways, slavery as portrayed in Homer is different from what we find later. First off, although Odysseus captured some of his slaves himself and paid for others, Homer does not present slaves as essentially foreign. In contrast, slaves in the classical period were virtually never native to the city in which they worked; indeed, Greek-born slaves were relatively rare in Greece. Second, in Homer the distinction between slave and free often seems less important than the distinction between the heroic nobles and everybody else. By the classical period, the distinction between slave and free was of paramount importance.

We also see in Homer signs of the early development of the polis, the city-state, the form of political organization that was to dominate Greece until the supremacy of Macedonia in the late fourth century. Greece was not a single nation state, but rather each city – eventually most cities were walled – along with the countryside around it was an independent political entity. The extent of ancient Greece was also different, larger than modern Greece: in addition to the whole coast of the Aegean, there were Greek poleis (the plural of polis) in Sicily, in southern Italy and France, and on the coasts of the Black Sea, as well as a few on the northern coast of Africa. Some of these city-states raided their non-Greek neighbors for slaves or at least traded slaves, both practices we’ll discuss in Chapter 3.

The growth and development of Greek society and culture continued in the seventh and sixth centuries. Our sources of information, however, are not good since no contemporary histories survive and we are left to interpret short poems or the writings of later historians, who had to base their accounts on unreliable oral traditions. Two important events during this period affect our understanding of slavery. First, a later, fourth-century BCE historian, Theopompus, reports that the Chians were the first Greeks to use “bought barbarians [foreigners]” for slaves – we have little idea when.2 According to Theompompus’ model, cities had previously obtained slaves directly, by enslaving the people they captured in war, the most common practice in Homer’s epics. Throughout the classical period, it was always possible to enslave war captives, but it was often financially more advantageous to ransom captured soldiers back to their native city – assuming that it had not been destroyed. As a result, most slaves in the classical period were probably non-Greeks imported and purchased rather than captured directly.

The second crucial development occurred in Athens, the most populous and best-known city-state in Greece. In the early part of the sixth century BCE, an Athenian politician named Solon abolished debt bondage and, perhaps, a certain type of sharecropping – a development we’ll revisit in Chapter 5. He thus reduced the ability of the rich to exploit the poor among the citizens. If similar events and processes occurred in other cities – as did the development of democracy – this may have helped drive the market for foreign slaves, outsiders to whom no rights need be given and who could be exploited to whatever extent was practical. The evidence of Homer shows that slaves were used from the eighth century on; it’s likely that they became more common during the sixth century.

Our sources of information become much better after the start of the classical period in 500 BCE, which roughly coincides with two of the Greeks’ proudest accomplishments.3 First, hostilities with Persia began in 499 BCE; the mainland Greeks repelled invasions by the vast Persian Empire in 490 and 480–79 BCE. In the aftermath of these defensive struggles, Athens led the counter-attack that freed the Greek cities of the Ionian coast from Persian control. Athens eventually turned its anti-Persian alliance of Greek city-states, the Delian League, into an empire, from which many of its “allies” tried to escape in vain. In the process, Athens became a wealthy and powerful state. This wealth supported its outstanding achievements in the arts and literature, many of which belong to this period. It is also likely that this period of wealth and population growth was also the time in which slaves at Athens were most numerous.

Second, Athens became a democracy following the reforms of Kleisthenes in 508 BCE. As opposed to oligarchies, which typically allowed only the wealthy to exercise political rights, Greek democracies gave such rights to the poor. This made it harder for the rich to subject the poor to subordinating economic relationships and contributed to the tendency, already encouraged by Solon’s reforms, for the rich to buy slaves to fill their labor needs. In addition, although the rich did not really consider the poor their equals, an ideology emerged in which the main distinction among men was between the free citizens and the slaves. This was an egalitarian and democratic way of thinking as far as the male citizens were concerned, but it was not a generous worldview when it came to slaves, who lacked basic rights and were often despised as inferior foreigners.

Despite amazing cultural accomplishments in medicine, art, tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy, the fifth century was a period of frequent wars, at first against Persia but later mostly between Greek states. These culminated in the long, extremely bitter, and costly Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) between Athens and its empire on one side and the Peloponnesian League under Sparta on the other. During this struggle, Athens lost more than half of its citizen population in battle – and suffered a terrible plague to boot. In these wars, slaves too could be recruited to fight in the navy – sometimes with the promise of freedom as a reward. Other slaves took advantage of hostilities to flee slavery, since enemy cities could be as close as thirty miles from each other and did not, of course, return fugitive slaves to their masters in a hostile city. For example, the historian Thucydides reports in The History of the Peloponnesian War that more than twenty thousand slaves escaped from Athens when a Spartan fort was established nearby (7.27).

Warfare continued in the fourth century but was never as intense. Several states made bids to dominate the Greek world, but none succeeded until Macedonia finally achieved domination over almost the whole of mainland Greece. Although slavery was known in Macedonia, it played a smaller role in this society – dominated by aristocrats and mainly populated by dependent peasants – than it had in the city-states to the south. When Alexander of Macedon conquered the whole of the vast Persian Empire (335–323 BCE), he mainly left the economies and labor practices of the areas he conquered intact. Alexander died without an heir to the throne and eventually his generals fell to fighting over the huge empire he had created. The result of these wars, which lasted for fifty years, was the formation of a number of stable independent monarchies, called the Hellenistic Kingdoms.

Greeks and Macedonians who had emigrated from their homelands constituted the ruling class in these kingdoms. There they used domestic slaves just as in Greece. The mass of the population in the Hellenistic Kingdoms, however, was composed of natives, mainly peasants engaged in agriculture. Their status and way of life often predated even the expansion of the Persian Empire in the sixth century and did not change with the Macedonian conquest either. Slavery in the Hellenistic Kingdoms was therefore primarily an urban phenomenon practiced by the Greek and Macedonian ruling class. Nevertheless, we know more about some aspects of Hellenistic slavery than that of the classical period: the manumission records at Delphi back in mainland Greece and the papyri from Hellenistic Egypt provide particularly good evidence, which we’ll use in several places.

Map 3 The powers of the Mediterranean in 220 BCE. Source: Courtesy of Stephanie Krause.

Rome came into contact with the Hellenistic world in the third century. Shortly after 200 BCE, Rome decisively defeated Macedonia, and eventually it conquered all the Hellenistic kingdoms. Rome did not annex the last kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, until 30 BCE, but even before then, by the middle of the second century at the latest, Rome was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Even the proud kingdoms of Alexander’s successors needed either to do as Rome wanted or to suffer the consequences. Nevertheless, slavery in Greece continued after its conquest by Rome and even after the fall of Rome. The eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire, known as the Byzantine Empire, outlasted the fall of the western Empire by almost a millennium. Its people referred to themselves as the Romaioi, which is Greek for “the Romans” – yet another striking example of the eventual blending of Greek and Roman culture. These Romaioi owned slaves all the way up to the final fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE.

Rome’s Expansion

The traditional, but legendary, date for the founding of Rome on seven hills overlooking the river Tiber is 753 BCE; archaeology confirms that by the middle of the next century the city center, the forum, had been built between these hills. Already by the end of the sixth century BCE, the city of Rome was one of the largest in Italy. Unfortunately, most of our detailed information about the long early history of Rome (750–350 BCE) comes from sources written down centuries later, whose accuracy inspires little confidence. The oldest genuine document, parts of which survive, is the law code known as the Twelve Tables, which may have been enacted around 450 BCE. Among other topics, the Twelve Tables contain regulations about slaves, including several regarding manumission. As was the case with Greece, Roman slavery went back to the earliest period of its recorded history.

The basic theme of the first eight centuries of Roman history, from about 750 BCE to 50 CE, is the expansion of Roman territory and power through warfare. Rome’s growth began with its control of a league of cities to its south, the Latin League, who spoke Latin just as the Romans did. Rome slowly grew to control more and more neighboring states in central Italy, either directly or as subordinate allies. After its final victory over the Samnites of south-central Italy (290 BCE), Rome controlled almost the whole of the Italian Peninsula. Two long and bloody wars against Carthage, a powerful Phoenician city in North Africa, left Rome at the end of the third century victorious and possessing overseas provinces including Sicily and parts of Spain. Rome’s domination, defeat, and eventual annexation of the great Hellenistic kingdoms was an inevitable, if slow, process – as was the conquest of Spain. Hard inland campaigns brought Gaul – roughly modern France – under Roman rule (58–50 BCE). Rome eventually controlled all the territory west of the Rhine and south of the Danube. Rome’s eastern conquests brought its frontiers to, and occasionally past, Armenia. In the north the Romans managed to conquer about half of the island of Britain. The emperor Claudius conducted this last campaign in the 40s CE, but the Romans acquired the vast majority of their empire during the Republic and during the reign of the first emperor, Augustus, who died in 14 CE. There were still wars and some emperors conducted important and successful campaigns, but not at the same constant and intense level as before. Since conquest provided large numbers of slaves, we’ll consider in Chapter 3 whether the prevalence of slavery peaked and then began to decline as this source of slaves dried up.

As a result of this long process of expansion, Rome became one of the largest and most powerful empires in world history. Nevertheless, Rome suffered setbacks and pauses. For example, its wars against the Samnites and Carthaginians were marked by famous defeats. But for much of its history, starting in the fourth century BCE, Rome had a way of losing battles, sometimes disastrously, but eventually winning the wars. Historians focus on two basic factors in Rome’s resilience and success.

First off, unlike the Greek city-states that jealously guarded their local citizenship, the Romans allowed conquered people to advance through various gradations of partial citizenship and eventually to become Roman citizens. This was not a quick or peaceful process: it often took many generations for a state to go from enmity and defeat – often repeated defeat – through subordinate status to full incorporation in the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Roman power and territory grew in this way, slowly but surely. Rome could eventually draw on a much larger population than any of its rivals. In contrast, the Hellenistic monarchies never succeeded in winning over the populations that Alexander the Great and his army had conquered. The Greek and Macedonian ruling class remained a relatively small foreign elite, centered in the cities, and superimposed upon a much larger and often hostile native population.