Slavery

Antiquity and Its Legacy

Page DuBois

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755614264
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Altertum

'Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' is perhaps the most famous phrase of all in the American Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's momentous words are closely related to the French concept of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite'; and both ideas incarnate a notion of freedom as inalienable human right that in the modern world we expect to take for granted. In the ancient world, by contrast, the concepts of freedom and equality had little purchase. Athenians, Spartans and Romans all possessed slaves or helots (unfree bondsmen), and society was unequal at every stratum. Why, then, if modern society abominates slavery, does what antiquity thought about serfdom matter today? Page duBois shows that slavery, far from being extinct, is alive and well in the contemporary era. Slaves are associated not just with the Colosseum of ancient Rome but also with Californian labour factories and south Asian sweatshops, while young women and children appear increasingly vulnerable to sexual trafficking. Applying such modern experiences of bondage (economic or sexual) to slavery in antiquity, the author explores the writings on the subject of Aristotle, Plautus, Terence and Aristophanes.
She also examines the case of Spartacus, famous leader of a Roman slave rebellion, and relates ancient notions of liberation to the all-too-common immigrant experience of enslavement to a globalized world of rampant corporatism and exploitative capitalism.

CHAPTER I

LIVING SLAVES

This is the voice of Christine, a sex slave born in the state of Minnesota in the United States of America, in 1968:

I was born into a prostitution ring, a family of pimps and pornographers and prostitutes. . . . In prostitution rings women and girls are taught to be sexually submissive by men who refer to themselves as masters . . . the men are masters of torture and terror who are highly trained in torture techniques . . . They want us to feel utterly powerless . . . to feel dead, look dead, be dead. Above all else, they want us immobilized. They want to consume our lives, take our freedom with no resistance whatsoever. . . . I wanted to not be sold. I wanted to not be bought.¹

Her account comes from a volume of contemporary slave narratives compiled by Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd, which reveals the terrible extent of the institution of slavery in the present, an institution that most people living in our globalizing, postmodern world assume was abolished for good in the nineteenth century.

This is a passage from an ancient Athenian forensic oration by Lysias, from the fourth century BCE, recorded in the voice of a slave owner who was accused of wounding, with premeditation, another Athenian, over the possession of a slave woman whom they owned jointly. This text derives from a context often idealized in Western political theory and philosophy, the ancient city of Athens, the polis in which were invented democracy, philosophy, the jury trial, much that Western civilization holds dear, claims as its own and often seeks to export to or impose on other civilizations in the present. The centrality of the institution of slavery in the ancient Greek city, and in the Roman empire, is often overlooked. But this legal speech reveals a situation similar to that of Christine, born in 1968 CE. The wounded accuser of the fourth century BCE, bringing the speaker to trial, had apparently argued, in another speech now lost to us, that he alone was the owner of the slave; the speaker defends himself:

[My opponent] denies, in face of the settlement clearly made on every point, that we agreed to share the woman between us. (Lysias 4. 1–2)²

. . . we admit that we went to see boys and flute-girls and were in liquor . . . (4.7)

As to her, sometimes it is I, and sometimes he, for whom she professes affection, wishing to be loved by both. (4. 8)

The two men, according to the speaker, each put down an equal sum of money in order to own this woman jointly:

It would be far more just to have her tortured for the purpose of this charge than to have her sold . . . It is your duty, therefore, [he says to the male, citizen jurors] to reject his claim that the woman should not be tortured, which he made on the pretended ground of her freedom. (4.14)

In having her put to the torture I must be at a disadvantage, and yet I ran this grave risk; for clearly she was much more attached to him than to me, and has joined him in wronging me. (4. 17)

As always with evidence from antiquity concerning slaves, we have only the voice of the master, never a slave narrative spoken by the slave herself. Yet this woman emerges briefly from the shadows in this speech – owned by two men simultaneously, pulled between the two, vulnerable to torture in the Athenian court system, which allowed testimony from slaves only if it was obtained through torture. We cannot hear her voice, yet register her presence through the symptomatic speech of one of her owners, even her attempt, perhaps, to avoid torture and win freedom by manipulating these two men, finding one more sympathetic than the other. In the ancient case, slavery is completely legal; it is the wounding, the throwing of a potsherd by one owner at the other, that is at stake in the court case, and that requires the torture of the slave. In the case of Christine of Minnesota, her enslavement is illegal, and it is those who illegally possessed her as a slave who tortured her. Yet we can see parallels between these two women, far distant as they are in time, one living in the fifth century BCE, the other 2500 years later. One is implicated in the imperial world of ancient Athens, the other in the centre of a new empire, that of a post-national, newly global Empire with a capital E.

There are many slaves living in the present, in highly varied circumstances, doing domestic labour, working in industries, in agriculture and in the sex trade. These slaves fall into the hands of their owners in various ways through birth, as in the case of Christine of Minnesota. Sometimes they are sold by their families, who cannot support them or themselves without the income from sale. Others are kidnapped or captured by slave agents; some, as a last resort, sell themselves. Some are tricked into believing they are leaving some unsatisfactory situation to make a new life, with a new form of employment in a strange country, and find themselves trapped in slavery from which they cannot extricate themselves.

Slavery Defined

What is slavery? Historians and scholars who study slavery in the past and present offer differing definitions of the condition commonly known as slavery. For some, it is simply the state of being owned by another, being the property of another human being. This can be a permanent or a temporary condition, but in either case the freedom of the enslaved individual is curtailed entirely, and, through the threat of force and even death, the slave must obey her or his master. Some scholars argue that, in fact, the term slavery should be reserved for those falling permanently into this condition, and that other forms of indentured labour, of possession that has a limit, should not be called slavery. A dictionary definition: ‘bondage to a master or household.’³ Becky Cornell, and Kevin Bales, one of the most active and prolific abolitionists at work today, present this definition in their book Slavery Today:

Slavery is a social and economic relationship in which a person is controlled through violence or the threat of violence, is paid nothing, and is economically exploited.⁴

One of the most useful and compelling recent definitions of slavery comes from the sociologist Orlando Patterson, whose book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, published in 1982, has had great impact on the historical and contemporary study of slavery.⁵ His definition focuses not on the fact of possession by another but rather on the life circumstances of an enslaved person:

slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons. (13)

In some respects, Patterson’s work on comparative world historical slavery offers an important corrective to economistic or legal definitions of slavery, and is rather an ‘immanent’ definition, one that reads the condition of the slave from inside his or her experience. He calls slavery ‘a relation of domination,’ and argues that slavery is distinctive as a relation of domination. In his view, power relations, relations of domination, have three facets: first, the social, entailing the use or threat of violence in the control of one person by another; second, the psychological facet of influence, the capacity to persuade another person to change the way he perceives his interests and his circumstances and, third, the cultural facet of authority, transforming force into right, obedience into duty. The specificity of slavery in regard to other relationships of domination resides in its particular manifestations: first, that in relation to the social, slavery exhibits an extremity of power and of coercion, in its use of direct violence, where slavery itself is a substitute for violent death. Secondly, slavery is ‘natal alienation.’ The slave is a ‘socially dead’ person, a genealogical isolate. And, third, for the slave, ‘dishonour’ becomes a generalized condition. The slave is thus the victim of extremes of coercion and violence, suffering the equivalent of death, becomes socially dead and dwells in a state of absolute dishonour. Through these categories Patterson engages in a great mapping of the whole that is the history of world slavery, discerning ‘patterns’ in a cross-cultural, transhistorical survey. His vocabulary relies on some of the categories of Marxism, and he touches on questions of power, contradiction, and Hegel’s dialectic of lord and bondsman, or ‘master and slave,’ dominator and dominated. He discusses in some detail such questions as the four basic features of the ‘ritual of enslavement:’ ‘first, the symbolic rejection by the slave of his past and his former kinsmen; second, a change of name; third, the imposition of some visible mark of servitude; and, last, the assumption of a new status in the household or economic organization of the master.’ (52) It is interesting that when Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist ex-slave of nineteenth-century America, escapes to freedom, he is convinced by an abolitionist friend in New Bedford to keep the name Frederick, given him by his mother, saying ‘I must hold on to that, to preserve a sense of my identity.’⁶

In a later work, somewhat controversial, Patterson argues that the category of freedom, so important to traditions of Western philosophy, could emerge only in the conditions of the Greek polis, that with the emphasis on citizen freedom in the Greek city-state the category of unfreedom, of enslavement, helped to generate, by contrast, the characterization of freedom in the citizen class.⁷ In disagreement with Isaiah Berlin’s claim that the notion of personal liberty is ‘comparatively modern,’ Patterson locates it in antiquity: ‘freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. People came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and non-slaves.’⁸ This view is controversial in part because Patterson argues that the idea of freedom does not have such power outside the West, that ‘non-Western peoples have thought so little about freedom that most human languages did not even possess a word for the concept before contact with the West.’ (x) His argument here can be seen to contribute to an idealization of Western civilization, a celebration of its superiority, and of course, a justification for colonialism and imperialism. But these are issues for another book.

I would like, in this book, to hold the several definitions of ‘slavery’ in tension with one another, to see the relationship of bondage as central to the condition of slaves, but also keep in mind the focus on the subjectivity of the slave him or herself, the ways in which slaves, at various moments in history or in differing geographical locations, share the fate of implicit or enacted violence, social death and a life lived in dishonour.⁹ It is crucial to remember these features of slaves’ subjectivity and experience, especially with regard to ancient slaves, whose own testimony about their lives is rarely available, except in such mediated forms as the work of Epiktetos, a freed slave, and the fabulist Aesop, himself allegedly a freed slave, whose work was probably not the product of a single author, but a collection of stories repeated and associated with his name.¹⁰

Numbers and Places

How many slaves live in the world today? Kevin Bales and Becky Cornell estimate that there are at present twenty-seven million, scattered throughout the world, with the majority living in South Asia. There are, however, many slaves in Southeast Asia, in Brazil and elsewhere in South America, in North and Western Africa and in every country in the world. (ST, 8) Christine of Minnesota, cited at the beginning of this chapter, is not an exception; slaves in the United States and in Britain include not only Americans born into slavery, but also others ‘trafficked,’ deceived into slavery through promises of work, and volunteering to immigrate only to be enslaved.

E. Benjamin Skinner tells the story of Rambho Kumar, born in the poor state of Bihar, in India, and sold at nine-years old, by his mother, for 700 rupees ($15) to a carpet-maker.¹¹ The owner made him and his fellow-slaves work nineteen hours a day, and when the boy injured himself at the loom, the slave-holder would cauterize his wound by sticking his finger into boiling oil. When the boys tried to run away, the owner would track them down and beat them. Skinner defines slaves as ‘those who are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.’ (M10) He makes a distinction between prostitution, which in his view may be voluntary, not-coerced, and slavery, although some others argue that there is no such thing as the voluntary choice of prostitution. He argues that the Bush administration erred in focusing on the ending of prostitution world-wide, rather than on the abolition of slavery, since ‘more than 90% of modern-day slaves are not held in commercial sexual slavery.’ The description of sexual slaves, enslaved to perform acts of prostitution, has an inflammatory quality, especially for Americans, that can lead to abolitionist action, but, in fact, most slaves in the world today are not trafficked for sexual purposes, but rather for labour.

The Poetics of Slavery

Another slave narrative, recorded in 1996, comes from Seba, from Mali:

I was raised by my grandmother in Mali, and when I was still a little girl, a woman my family knew came and asked her if she could take me to Paris to care for her children . . . Every day I started work before 7 A.M. and finished about 11 P.M. . . . She often beat me . . . She beat me with the broom, with kitchen tools, or whipped me with an electric cable . . . Once . . . my mistress and her husband . . . beat and then threw me out on the street. I had nowhere to go. (Slavery Today, 98)

Seba wanders the streets, cannot communicate with anyone, finally is taken back to the house, beaten some more and thereafter always locked in the apartment. This form of trafficking occurs frequently; the promises of labour in another country, or another region of the same country, turn into bondage, slavery, as the person transferred from family to a new situation finds that there is no escape, no compensation, no recourse and . . . often, because of an illegal immigration situation, cannot appeal for help to the authorities.

The condition of enslavement enters into the literary record of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The narrative of Seba connects with the novel Le Devoir de Violence, in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s term a ‘post-realist’ text published in Paris in 1968 by Yambo Ouologuem.¹² The Malian author introduces his hero, after reaching back into the history of his people:

The life that Raymond lived . . . was the life of his whole generation – the first generation of native administrators maintained by the notables in a state of gilded prostitution – rare merchandise, dark genius manoeuvered behind the scenes and hurled into the tempests of colonial politics amidst the hot smell of festivities and machinations – ambiguous balancing acts in which the master turned the slave into the first of the slaves and the arrogant equal of the white master, and in which the slave thought himself master of the master, who himself had fallen to the level of the first of the slaves. . . . (136)

The sister of the hero has undergone enslavement; he leaves her behind in Africa, but then, when...