Status in Classical Athens

Deborah E Kamen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400846535
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Ancient Greek literature, Athenian civic ideology, and modern classical scholarship have all worked together to reinforce the idea that there were three neatly defined status groups in classical Athens--citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners. But this book--the first comprehensive account of status in ancient democratic Athens--clearly lays out the evidence for a much broader and more complex spectrum of statuses, one that has important implications for understanding Greek social and cultural history. By revealing a social and legal reality otherwise masked by Athenian ideology, Deborah Kamen illuminates the complexity of Athenian social structure, uncovers tensions between democratic ideology and practice, and contributes to larger questions about the relationship between citizenship and democracy.
Each chapter is devoted to one of ten distinct status groups in classical Athens (451/0-323 BCE): chattel slaves, privileged chattel slaves, conditionally freed slaves, resident foreigners (metics), privileged metics, bastards, disenfranchised citizens, naturalized citizens, female citizens, and male citizens. Examining a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and legal evidence, as well as factors not generally considered together, such as property ownership, corporal inviolability, and religious rights, the book demonstrates the important legal and social distinctions that were drawn between various groups of individuals in Athens. At the same time, it reveals that the boundaries between these groups were less fixed and more permeable than Athenians themselves acknowledged. The book concludes by trying to explain why ancient Greek literature maintains the fiction of three status groups despite a far more complex reality.

CHAPTER 1

CHATTEL SLAVES

ALTHOUGH WAR AMONG THE VARIOUS GREEK POLEIS WAS COMMON, THE Greeks were nonetheless (in principle) averse to the enslavement of their fellow Greeks (see, e.g., Pl. Rep. 469b–c; Xen. Hell. 1.6.14, Ages. 7.6).¹ Most chattel slaves, therefore, were of “barbarian”—that is, non-Greek—origin, acquired mainly through Mediterranean trading networks.² In the archaic period (ca. 630–480 BCE), slaves were primarily Scythians and Thracians, coming from areas northeast of Greece. After the Persian Wars, traders began to acquire more slaves from the east, particularly from those areas (like Caria) near the Greek cities of Asia Minor. And in the fourth century and into the Hellenistic period (323–330 BCE), slaves came from all over Asia Minor, with the number of slaves from Africa also increasing.³ Augmenting these regular supplies of slaves were those captured in war or, less frequently, by pirates or bandits.⁴

For classical Athens, some of our best evidence for the sources of slaves is epigraphic. So, for example, gravestones attest to the various ethnic origins of foreigners living (and dying) in Attica, many of whom were slaves.⁵ The Attic Stelai, records of property confiscated from Athenians convicted in the sacrilegious Defamation of the Mysteries and Mutilation of the Herms incidents of 415 BCE, preserve the names of thirteen Thracian slaves and ten Anatolian slaves; and in the funerary and dedicatory inscriptions from the silver mines at Laureion, many of which date to the fourth century, the names of twenty Anatolian slaves and two Thracian slaves are recorded.⁶ The picture we get from inscriptions is complemented by Aristophanic comedy, which presents slaves of a wide range of ethnicities.⁷

Although the population of chattel slaves was evidently at times quite high in Greece, exact numbers are nearly impossible to ascertain. Even for classical Athens there is no direct evidence for slave numbers; the closest we come is Athenaeus’s (third-century CE) account of the census taken at the end of the fourth century BCE:

Ktesikles, in the third book of the Chronicles, says that in the 117th Olympiad [312–308 BCE], there was a census taken by Demetrius of Phaleron of those residing in Athens, and 21,000 Athenians, 10,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves (oiketōn) were found. (Athen. 272c–d)

This passage is quoted nearly every time scholars hazard a guess as to the number of slaves in classical Athens, but both its meaning and validity are contested.⁸ Also often cited by scholars are two other passages: Thucydides’s report that after the Spartan occupation of Dekeleia in 413 BCE, 20,000 slaves (andrapodōn) deserted from Attica (Thuc. 7.27.5), and a fragment of Hyperides suggesting that more than 150,000 slaves “from the mines and the countryside” be enlisted to fight (fr. 29, Jensen). Drawing cautiously from these ancient accounts of slave numbers, coupled with modern estimates both of the total population of Athens⁹ and of rates of slave ownership, scholars have proposed a range of estimates for classical Athens, varying from a low of 20,000 slaves to a high of more than 150,000; the most likely number falls somewhere in the middle, representing 15–35 percent of the total population. Moreover, these numbers do not remain constant throughout the classical period, but fluctuate: slave numbers were at their highest immediately before the Peloponnesian War, fell dramatically during the war, and began to increase again afterward.¹⁰

Orlando Patterson has famously argued that slaves experience a process of desocialization and depersonalization, which he refers to as “social death.”¹¹ In this chapter, I demonstrate some of the ways in which chattel slaves in Athens were socially dead (their “social status”), in addition to being deprived of nearly all legal and political rights (their “legal status”). There is no question that slaves were desocialized: in most cases torn from their natal communities, they were deprived of all family and community ties.¹² Chattel slaves were also depersonalized, in a process Igor Kopytoff describes as “commoditization.” Once enslaved, an individual “is stripped of his social identity”—that is, desocialized—“and becomes a non-person, indeed an object and an actual or potential commodity.”¹³ In fact, Aristotle calls the chattel slave “animate property” (ktēma ti empsukhon) (Pol. 1253b32), and scholars have defined the chattel slave either exclusively or at least in part by his or her status as a piece of property.¹⁴ In this capacity, a slave could be bought and sold, hired out (Xen. Poroi 4.14–16), or bequeathed in a will (e.g., Dem. 27.9). In addition to being conceived of as a possession, however, the slave was also recognized as a person (of sorts) with limited legal rights, as we shall see.

Finally, chattel slaves in classical Athens, as in many other slave societies, were almost entirely stripped of honor (timē),¹⁵ rendering them the very lowest social and legal status group on the spectrum of statuses.¹⁶ But even within the legal category of “chattel slave,” there existed a large range of sub-statuses,¹⁷ generally dependent on the type of labor the slave performed (and related to this, their economic status).¹⁸ This labor, in turn, was sometimes correlated with the slave’s ethnicity: so, for example, Thracians and Anatolians generally performed manual labor, Scythians served as policemen-archers, and Phoenicians were at least sometimes bankers and traders (see chapter 2).¹⁹ This correlation did not always hold, however: a striking example is the Thracian slave-overseer Sosias, who was wealthy enough to lease 1000 mining slaves from the general Nicias (Xen. Poroi 4.14).

In this chapter, I will focus on the legal and social status of the “basest” chattel slaves—that is, those performing the basest forms of labor, like working in the mines or mills.²⁰ I will reserve for chapter 2 discussion of what have (rightly or wrongly) been called “privileged” slaves, who exercised greater independence despite their legal status as chattel.

Chattel slaves in Greece had no legal claims to property, either moveable or unmoveable. They also, in theory, had no power over their labor or movement: they performed the tasks that were assigned to them and engaged in no movement that was not mandated by their master or mistress. In practice, this ideal behavior was not necessarily realized: although specific tasks were assigned to slaves, the ways in which they conducted these tasks were within their control, and many slaves (particularly in households with few slaves) were “multitaskers” who presumably had some degree of control over which tasks they did when, and how. That said, to the extent that they did not choose their occupations, and did not own the means or fruits of their production, slaves, at least ideologically, had no control over their labor. Slaves’ movement, too, was notionally circumscribed by their masters, and there were certain public places from which they were barred, including citizens’ gymnasia and palaistrai (Aesch. 1.138; Plut. Sol. 1.3).²¹ However, the realities of slave labor necessitated that slaves exercise some autonomy over their own movements. Take, for example, the labor of domestic servants, which encompassed, among other things, “child-minding, caring for the sick, answering and guarding the door, cooking, woolworking, carrying messages, fetching water, [and] shopping.”²² For slaves sent out to the marketplace to buy food, their task was set but their path probably was not.²³ Stephanie Camp’s work on geographies of resistance in the American South has illuminated the ways in which slaves can carve out their own spaces and movements even while appearing to follow the rigid guidelines set out by their masters.²⁴ Moreover, some slaves (as discussed further in the next chapter) were leased out by their masters to work in the mines or to do other dangerous labor; while this often involved extremely unpleasant tasks, it also represents a case where the slaves’ movements were, by necessity, not overseen by their immediate master.

Chattel slaves were defined at least in part by the fact that, unlike free people, they had to answer for their wrongdoings with their bodies (sōmata) (see Dem. 22.55, 24.167).²⁵ One way in which this manifested itself was through corporal punishment by their masters, who were permitted to inflict nearly any form of violence on their slaves. Physical abuse could take a number of different forms: whipping, flogging, hitting with sticks, fettering, rape, tattooing, and branding.²⁶ A vivid description of such violence, apparently written by a young male slave, can be found in a fourth-century lead tablet from the Athenian Agora: “I am perishing from being whipped; I am tied up; I am treated like dirt—more and more!” (Ag. Inv. IL 1702, line 4).²⁷

Slaves had some, albeit few, protections against extreme violence directed aga...