Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery

Peter Hunt

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119421061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1
Introduction 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, formatio...