Choice of slavery institutions in Ancient Greece

Slavery in Ancient Greece
In Ancient Greece, various forms of coerced labour are attested from the rise of Mycenae, one of the major centres of the Mycenaean civilisation 1750–1100 BCE, to the Archaic Era 750–500, the Classical Period 500–322, and the Hellenistic Times 322–331 (all dates BCE). Here we focus on the Classical Era when the sources characterise as slaves Athenian chattels and Spartan helots. Information about slaves comes from texts of ancient authors who were themselves slaveholders; there are no slave-written testimonies of the plight of slaves. Enslavement, slave-trading, and commodification of human beings were considered as normal (Braund, Reference Braund, Bradley and Cartledge2011). Greek thinkers had no qualms about slavery considering it as part of everyday life.Footnote2 Aristotle (Politics 1254a) writes:

…one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a person is a human being belonging to another if being a man he is an article of property, and an article of property is an instrument for action separable from its owner.

The island of Chios opposite the shore of Asia Minor is believed to be the first Greek city-state that instituted chattel slavery in the Archaic Era. At times, her slaves may have counted for half of its population most of them used in agriculture (Cartledge, Reference Cartledge1985: 36). In addition to Chios, Athens, Corinth, Aegina, and Corcyra practiced chattel slavery. Garlan (Reference Garlan1988: 144) argued that for the Greek society, slavery was a ‘necessary element to affirm its identity’. It provided free men with the resources and leisure to engage in politics, war, social, and intellectual life.Footnote3 Unlike slaves, free citizens identified themselves as not being subject to restrictions imposed by other individuals. Although slaveholding was vital for the elite to maintain their lifestyle (Cartledge, Reference Cartledge, Cartledge, Cohen and Foxhall2002), Kyrtatas (Reference Kyrtatas, Cartledge, Cohen and Foxhall2002, Reference Kyrtatas, Cartledge and Bradley2011) argues that Ancient Greek authors emphasised domination and ownership of slaves, aspects which relate to political power and legal status of the masters rather than economic considerations.Footnote4 On the other hand, for Osborne (Reference Osborne and Powell1995), employment of slavers was rational in the sense that slaves were occupied in jobs that were not worth rewarding more than subsistence, or jobs that were not profitable enough for a free citizen to earn a livelihood (see below for a critical reassessment of such arguments). Inevitably, slavery affected all aspects of personal and social life, politics, the economy, and culture.

Athenian chattel slaves
Athens, the most celebrated Greek city-state, was the quintessential type of direct democracy (see, e.g., Hansen, Reference Hansen1999 for her institutions and their workings). All Athenian citizens (Athens-born males above the age of 20) had the right to participate in the Assembly of the Demos and the popular courts deliberating and deciding all issues of public interest. The Council of Five Hundred, whose members were selected annually from the citizenry by lot, prepared the agenda of the Assembly and executed its decisions. The popular courts made of 6,000 members also appointed annually by lot held to account all magistrates before taking office checking their eligibility, during their service, and after completing their term, and reviewed the decisions of the Assembly. Regarding the economy, gradually, during the Classical Era, Athens showed signs of ‘modernity’ away from ‘primitiveness’ with construction, mining, manufacturing, international trade, banking, justice, and public administration services, as opposed to agricultural output, contributing increasing shares of activity and employment (Bitros et al., Reference Bitros, Economou and Kyriazis2020: 81–127; Halkos and Kyriazis, Reference Halkos and Kyriazis2010 offer detailed accounts).

Slave origins. Slaves in Athens were chattel slaves. Finley (Reference Finley1959) attributed Athenian slavery to political developments: in 594, following a deep political and social crisis setting rich against poor, the statesman Solon abolished debt-bondage removing the threat that poor peasants would fall into slavery. This, in turn, created a sharp distinction between free citizens and unfree slaves with far-reaching implications. First, the economic inequality between master and slave unified the citizens against ‘the rest’ (the unfree and the non-citizens) enabling the political equality between rich and poor citizens, which was the basis of the democratic constitution. Second, use of slave labour afforded citizens the time to engage in democratic politics. Third, the existence of slaves owned by and working for others meant that dependent labour (working for others) was seen as a threat to equality and thence unacceptable to a free citizen. As a result, demand for labour that until Solon's reforms could have been met by enslaving poor Athenian peasants was thereafter met by importing slaves. They were imported from territories outside Greece, like Lydia and Phrygia of Asia Minor, Syria, and the regions of the Black Sea, especially Scythia. Slaves were acquired as war captives, piracy victims, and by purchase from slave traders, who took slaves from local raids; however, no specific race was targeted.Footnote5 Except for helots, Greeks were rarely enslaved by other Greeks; even as war captives they were usually ransomed by their city-states. The trade-orientated Athenian economy secured a reliable supply of imported slaves, so that a buyer could choose slaves to match jobs, a female servant for his wife, a male slave for the workshop, negating in turn the need to breed slaves (Lewis, Reference Lewis, Harris, Lewis and Woolmer2016). Garlan (Reference Garlan1988) maintained that because of physical dispersion from their homelands, ethnic differences across slaves, language barriers, oppression but also co-optation by their masters, and the almost universal acceptance of slavery, chattel slaves did not develop a ‘class consciousness’, which in turn decreased the risk of uprising.

Legal status. Chattel slave owners had extensive rights over their slaves.Footnote6 They could choose the jobs of their slaves, hire them out, take their incomes if hired out, whip them, or administer other corporal punishment, chain them, and sexually abuse them. However, masters were not permitted to kill their slaves (to stop them from committing hubris from killing, rather than protecting the slaves; Dillon and Garland, Reference Dillon and Garland2013). Slavery was regulated by laws covering among other issues accusations that a person was a slave or a slave descendent (and therefore excluded from citizenship rights), multiple owners claiming the same slave, liabilities of slaveowners for damages caused by their slaves, compensation for injuries caused by slaves, and manumission of slaves. Courts could accept the testimonies of slaves only if extracted by torture (but only if the slaveowner permitted). On the other hand, by limiting a master's liability for a slave's business debts, the legal system opened opportunities for slaves to develop entrepreneurial skills.

Prices. The extant sources do not provide precise figures about slave prices over time. ‘At the end of the fifth century Athens, … depending on age and skill the range of prices [was] from 50 drachmas for a cheap specimen, up to the exceptional price of 1000, with 200 appearing to be an average price’ (Dillon and Garland, Reference Dillon and Garland2013: 194). Two hundred drachmas were ‘equivalent of 200 hundred days work for a skilled workman in the fifth century … the standard ransom for a hoplite enemy captured in war' (Dillon and Garland, Reference Dillon and Garland2013: 183). Scheidel (Reference Scheidel2005: 11) gives an average slave price of 180 drachma (179 drachmas in 414, and 180 in 355 for a slave mine-worker).Footnote7 He calculates that using slaves was manifestly cheaper than free labour. In Classical Athens, a 20-year-old slave bought for the equivalent of 200 drachmas (roughly equivalent to 2 tons of wheat) and maintained for 10 years at a cost of 900 kg per yearFootnote8 would cost 9 tons of wheat. On the other hand, a free worker paid the average wage 1–1.5 drachmas per day during the same period would have costed a staggering 26–44 tons of wheat (Scheidel, Reference Scheidel2005: 14). Although poor Athenians must have found difficult to buy a slave,Footnote9 Lewis (Reference Lewis2018: 180–88) concludes that it was within the means of the ‘average’ Athenian farmer to own one or two slaves. All in all, an abundant supply of slaves and low transport costs from Asia to Greece accounted for this (Rihll, Reference Rihll and Bush1996).

Numbers. The actual numbers of slaves elude us for lack of records in the sources. Thucydides (8.40.2) writes that fifth century Chios had more slaves than any other Greek city, except for Sparta, but gives no figures. Large numbers of male slaves were occupied in the Athenian silver mines, probably between 10,000 and 35,000 (Lewis, Reference Lewis, Harris, Lewis and Woolmer2016; Osborne, Reference Osborne and Powell1995). Inevitably, such numbers of male slaves skewed the sex ratio of the slave population and diminished its reproduction potential. Although slaveholding was widespread, it appears that Athenian slaveholders owned small numbers of slaves. Obviously, wealthy Athenians owned more slaves than poorer citizens, and the latter often worked side-by-side with their slaves. Plato (Republic 478e) alludes that a very wealthy citizen possesses 50 slaves,Footnote10 while Aristotle (Politics 1252b12) says that the ox serves a poor who cannot afford a slave. Many Athenians were small-size farmers or craftsmen able to maintain only a domestic female slave and tended to rely on family members for seasonal agricultural labour. For the fourth century, Hansen (Reference Hansen1999: 93) estimated 100,000 free citizens (with adult men at 30,000), 20,000 metics (resident aliens), and a maximum of 150,000 slaves, with their number fluctuating depending on the fortunes of the polis. Bresson (Reference Bresson2016: 459) suggests that slave population of Athens stood at 40–50% of the total, while for the late fourth century, Ober (Reference Ober2015: 92) maintains a figure of 80,000 slaves, approximately one-third of the Athenian population.

Occupations. Slaves were used in mining, agriculture, milling, pottery, workshops, and domestic services; they could do menial jobs, mechanical and repetitive, employed as housekeepers, managers, and tutors, or hired out. Unskilled and cheaper slaves were destined for hard labour in the mines, or the quarries condemned to gruelling and short lives (Braund, Reference Braund, Bradley and Cartledge2011). Enslaved girls could be trained as entertainers (dancers or flute players) or end up in brothels. The distribution of slaves across occupations and especially the dependence of agriculture on slave labour is a vexed issue. Jameson (Reference Jameson1977) argued that though slave-gangs were absent as there were no large Athenian estates, slaves were used extensively in agriculture, and their labour must have been a critical addition to the work of modest and poor landowners occupying less fertile land that required terracing and trenching. Osborne (Reference Osborne and Powell1995) suggested that middling farmers were able to harvest their crops without a permanent force of agricultural slaves relying on their family members and domestic service slaves. Regarding slave-pay, the extant sources attest that in the construction of the Acropolis, slaves and free men were paid the same wages for the same type of work. Athens also used a few state-owned slaves as record-keepers, policemen to keep public order, and testers of the purity of silver coins. During military campaigns, slaves served to carry bags and prepare food; when the polis faced an existential threat, they could also be enlisted to fight in exchange for citizenship rights.Footnote11

Treatment. Domestic slaves were incorporated in the household (oikos), the basic unit of social and economic organisation. Within the household, the slave had only the right to life; being treated well was not a right, but a choice of the master. Nevertheless, masters appreciated that maltreatment resulting in incapacitation or death would waste the slave as an investment. Slaves resisted their masters by faking illness, wandering in the market, working slowly and carelessly, and even stealing their masters' property (Hunt, Reference Hunt2018: 213–214). Owners tried to secure the loyalty and good behaviour of their slaves by disciplining and motivating them. Punishment of slaves could be severe, like withdrawing food, chaining, and whipping. Incentives for good behaviour included extra food and better clothing and allowing slaves to form families.Footnote12 Skilled slaves could live separately from the house of their owners as choris oikountes (‘living apart’), operate their own business, have their own families, and, in an economically efficient arrangement, pay the master a fixed sum (called apophora) and keep the rest of profits.Footnote13 The ‘Old Oligarch’ an anti-democratic essay of the early fourth century complained that Athenian slaves lived in luxury and could not be distinguished from free citizens by physical appearance, clothing, tattoos, or other marks. Slaves could eventually be freed by the will of their owner or by buying their freedom.

Seeking a systematic explanation of Greek slavery, Scheidel (Reference Scheidel2005, Reference Scheidel, Dal Lago and Katsari2008) highlighted easy access to slaves and high real cost of free labour. In the archaic period, mass emigration around the Mediterranean opened new markets offering opportunities for enrichment and access to foreign slaves. Scarcity of labour, and henceforth high wages, in the Greek city-states originated not from an abundance of land (a prominent factor when new untapped wealth becomes available after the discovery of new lands, as emphasised by Domar, Reference Domar1970), but from the unavailability of free citizens. The latter preferred to engage in military and political pursuits instead of taking up manual, ‘vulgar’ work and dependent employment,Footnote14 limiting the pool of labour willing to be in the employee of others.
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