Slaveryἡ δουλεία

Greek cities had slaves, and classical Athens, the city that invented democracy, had a great many. They worked in houses, fields, workshops and mines; they were bought at market, taken in war or born to slave mothers; by law their evidence in court had to be taken under torture. Aristotle called a slave "a live article of property", and yet he also recorded that some Greeks thought slavery unjust. A few slaves won their freedom and even citizenship; one runaway on Chios became a hero to whom masters sacrificed. This is what the sources say, told plainly.

"A live article of property"

Aristotle's Politics begins with the household, and so with its slaves. A household needs tools, he argues, some lifeless and some living, and the slave is one of the living ones.

He then imagines a world where slavery would be unnecessary: if tools could work on their own, like the self-moving tripods of the god Hephaestus in Homer, "if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves".

Aristotle knew that his view was not the only one. In the same passage he reports the opposite opinion:

He answered it with his theory of the "natural slave", a person made by nature to be ruled, which he sets out a little later. The argument has troubled readers ever since, not least because Aristotle himself concedes that some who were slaves were not slaves by nature.

Half a man

The oldest Greek poetry already knows what slavery does. In the Odyssey, the swineherd Eumaeus, himself a slave, says it as he watches the old dog Argos lying neglected:

Eumaeus was a king's son, kidnapped as a small child by a slave-woman of his father's and sold by Phoenician traders to Odysseus' father. Capture in war, piracy and sale were how most slaves were made. When Athens took the island of Melos in 416 BC it killed the men and sold the women and children.

Bought for silver

The historian Theopompus, quoted by Athenaeus, drew a line between two kinds of slavery. The Spartans and Thessalians had enslaved the Greeks whose land they had taken (at Sparta these were the helots); the people of Chios, he said, were the first Greeks to buy foreigners.

A slave had a price like any property: Demosthenes' father owned a workshop of sword-makers, most of them valued at five or six minas each.

How many?

Nobody knows how many slaves there were. The only ancient figure for Athens comes from a lost chronicle by Ctesicles, again quoted by Athenaeus, reporting a count of the inhabitants of Attica made under Demetrius of Phalerum, who governed Athens at the end of the 4th century BC:

Debated among scholars Twenty-one thousand citizens and four hundred thousand slaves cannot both be right as a head count. Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat have suggested that the census counted everyone in the households, which later writers misread as slaves; even that, as their reviewer Peter Hunt remarks, would imply 200,000 to 250,000 slaves, "a suspiciously high number even for the peak of Athens' fifth-century empire". Modern estimates differ widely, and every one of them is a reconstruction.

Everywhere at work

Slaves did almost every kind of work. They kept house, as on the gravestone at the top of this page, where a maid carved at half her mistress's size holds out a box; they farmed, made swords and furniture, and dug the silver mines of Laurion. When the Spartans fortified Decelea in Attica in 413 BC, more than twenty thousand Athenian slaves ran away to them. The city itself owned slaves: the man who ground the hemlock for condemned prisoners was a public slave.

Evidence under torture

In an Athenian court a slave could not simply testify. The evidence of a slave was taken under torture, basanos, and litigants loved to claim that this was the surest proof of all.

Debated among scholars How often it actually happened is another question. Speakers constantly challenge their opponents to hand over their slaves for torture, and the challenges are nearly always refused. Michael Gagarin has argued that the challenge was mainly a courtroom tactic, and that torture for evidence was rarely if ever carried out.

Freedom

Slaves could be freed, and a few rose high. Pasion began as the slave of two bankers, Antisthenes and Archestratus, became a rich banker himself, and was made an Athenian citizen. His own slave Phormio was freed in turn, leased the bank and a shield workshop from him, and under the terms of Pasion's will married his widow. When Pasion's son sued Phormio, Phormio's advocate reminded the jury that Pasion too had once belonged to someone.

The kindly hero

The strangest story comes from Chios, told by Nymphodorus of Syracuse and preserved by Athenaeus. Runaway slaves lived in the island's rugged hills, raiding their masters' farms. One of them, Drimakos, took command of the rest like a king. He made a treaty with the Chians: he would take from their storehouses only what he needed, by his own weights and measures, and would send back any runaway who had no good reason to flee. When he grew old, with a price on his head, he persuaded a young friend to cut it off and claim the reward. After his death the raids began again.

Ancient tradition / legend Sara Forsdyke reads the story as a tale told among slaves themselves, about a just leader who could make even masters bargain. Whether Drimakos ever lived, we cannot say; that the slaves of Chios were many, harshly punished and quick to run away when they could, Thucydides also reports.

1. c. 700 BCThe Odyssey: Eumaeus, a king's son sold into slavery. Ancient tradition / legend
2. 416 BCAthens enslaves the women and children of Melos.
3. 413 BCMore than twenty thousand slaves flee Attica to the Spartans at Decelea.
4. 412–411 BCThe slaves of Chios desert to the Athenians in large numbers.
5. 4th c. BCPasion, a former slave, becomes Athens' richest banker and a citizen.
6. later 4th c. BCAristotle's Politics: the slave as 'a live article of property'.
7. late 4th c. BCThe count under Demetrius of Phalerum, with its impossible 400,000 slaves. Debated among scholars