Hello! χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 10, Owned! People as Possessions in Ancient Greece. I’m Scott Emmons. 

I’m going to kick off this episode on slavery by talking about freedom. Along with excellence, courage, wisdom, and the like, freedom was one of the most cherished ideals in Greek culture. Which leads us into a paradox, because it coexisted with slavery. In fact, it seems that just when freedom was taking a high rank in the Greek value system, chattel slavery was becoming firmly ingrained in the social structure. Some historians have suggested that the growth of chattel slavery sharpened that zeal for freedom by creating a clear dichotomy. Unlike this other person, who’s someone else’s property, I’m a free man. And of course, it’s the free people — free men, for the most part — that we hear from. We hear next to nothing from the perspective of the slaves themselves, because they weren’t the ones doing the writing. But even if their voices are silent, it’s important to recognize that they were very much a part of Greek life and played a crucial role in the economy. So even though I touched on slavery in the last episode, I thought it would be worthwhile to dig a bit deeper. 

Just a note before I go on: slavery came in different forms. In some places, there was a kind of serfdom, where the enslaved person was tied to the land. The best-known example of that is Sparta, where Messenian slaves called helots worked the lands owned by the Spartan citizens, even though they were strictly considered property of the state, not of individual landowners. I’ll get more into that in a future episode on Sparta. In this episode I’m focusing on chattel slavery, the system where an enslaved person is regarded as a commodity, as personal property that can be bought and sold. That was what took hold in most city-states and in many ways shaped the whole culture. 

Now, the very fact of slavery forces a question on those who practice it. How can one human being own another? In the American South before the Civil War, slaveholders were at pains to justify it, not just in their own minds, but because there was a strong abolitionist movement to answer to. So they often tried to make the case that enslaved Africans were not fully human, or were at least an inferior kind of human, unable to live independently and fit only for servitude. In ancient Greece, there was no anti-slavery movement to contend with. And yet, philosophers and other thinkers did wrestle with the same question — How can one person own another? And they didn’t really have the same handy excuse of a quote-unquote subhuman race, because there wasn’t always an obvious physical difference between a free person and a slave. In Greece, slaves came from all over — Thrace, Skythia, Caria, and elsewhere. There was really no way to claim that slaves were anything other than human. So when Aristotle in his Politics defines a slave, he doesn’t shy away from saying such a person is a “human implement.” In the translation by Carnes Lord, quote: “A human being is another’s, who, though a human being, is a possession, and a possession is an instrument of action and separate from its owner.” Unquote.  

So there’s no attempt to claim that slaves of foreign origin are anything less than human. On the other hand, what I just said is a little oversimplified. Because the Greeks did develop a strong sense of themselves as more fit for freedom. As they compared their own political systems with the kingdoms of the Near East, especially after they started butting heads with the Persian Empire, it seemed that people in those regions must be naturally prone to be ruled by monarchs. And the Greeks saw monarchy as a kind of slavery. So the idea of quote-unquote “natural slaves” took hold. But that never meant that enslaved people were in any sense not people. And along with that “natural slave” idea, the Greeks were well aware that enslavement could happen to anyone. There was a general feeling that it was bad form to keep other Greeks as slaves, but it still happened. And it was obvious to anyone that if a hostile force overran your city, you could go from citizenship to slavery in an instant. Just look at a few Greek tragedies, and you’ll see a strong sense that any individual’s happiness and freedom are at the mercy of fortune. Homer often talks about the “day of slavery” — that sudden, traumatic moment when a free person becomes someone else’s property.

When that happens, there’s of course an enormous loss of basic human dignity. And even if slaves were acknowledged to be people, the language used to refer to them included terminology that seems designed to lessen their humanity. There was the standard word “doulos” (and yes, that is where we get the term “doula” for a birth support professional) but there was another term, “andrapodon,” which would literally mean something like “man-footed.” It’s like the qualities that make this person a man have been stripped away, and what’s left is a living body to be used as the owner sees fit. It was also very common to address a slave simply as “pais” — the Greek word for a child, whether a boy or a girl. So on a day-to-day basis, language is used to reinforce a slave’s subservient status. 

So where do slaves come from? One obvious source is war. Victors in a conflict can take captives and sell them into slavery. Piracy was common in the Aegean, and if you were captured by pirates, chances are you’d either be held for ransom, or if your family couldn’t raise enough money, you’d be sold as a slave. In either case, the most common scenario would be for the captives to be sold to a slave trader, who would then sell them at a markup. And even though any relatively well-off person expected to own slaves, being a slave trader was considered a very disreputable profession. There’s a passage in an essay by the Greek author Xenophon where he puts them on a level with thieves and burglars. The so-called New Comedy that flourished in 4thcentury Athens regularly portrayed slave traders as cruel, shifty low-lifes just out to make a buck. Or make a drachma maybe. So they didn’t get much respect, but they were a part of life. Outside of the slave trade, there was always the possibility of breeding. Xenophon again, in a quasi-philosophical dialogue called Oeconomicus, talks about rewarding cooperative slaves by allowing them to have families. 

Xenophon was a wealthy landowner of the 4th century BCE, and this dialogue, the Oeconomicus, was all about managing a large estate. Just to clarify, a large estate in classical Athens didn’t mean a single, big expanse of land. More typically it was a collection of smaller plots scattered over different parts of Attica. In any case, Xenophon makes it clear that slaves would do most of the physical labor on an estate like this. His mouthpiece in the dialogue is a wealthy man called Ischomachus, who talks a lot about the importance of selecting and training a good overseer to manage the slaves who do the actual farm work.  

But people of Xenophon’s class made up only a fraction of the Athenian citizenry. Much more typical were the small landowners who did their own farming. There’s some debate about how many slaves a small farm like this would have, but I think Hesiod’s poem “Works and Days,” which I’ve quoted in earlier episodes, gives us a good indication. In his advice on setting up a farm, he says you first need to get a house, an ox to plow, and a slave woman — not only for housework but to help with the cattle. A few lines later, he says when it’s time for plowing, you and your slaves need to hurry and get that done. So it would have to be a small number of slaves, maybe two or three at the most. And it’s worth noting that Hesiod assumes the landowner will be out there plowing, and the slaves are there as something like hired hands.  

We’re a bit better informed about slaves in industry — and by that I mean crafts like pottery, stone carving, shoemaking, and the like. Those industries relied very heavily on slave labor. 

We know, for example, that an Athenian orator named Lysias in the late 5th century BCE came from a family that owned a large shield-making concern and employed about 120 slaves. Most workshops would be a lot smaller and might just be the first floor of the owner’s house, so only a few slaves would be involved. Here again, we’re not talking about a man of leisure kicking back and letting the slaves do the work, but a craftsman working with probably just as much assistance as he needs. There are quite a few vase paintings that show workshop scenes, and it’s often impossible to tell a shop owner from a slave. 

In these industries, slaves would often be highly skilled, so their work would be essential to putting out a quality product. And this is one area where at least some slaves could enjoy a remarkable degree of independence. Some of the lawcourt speeches of the 5th and 4th centuries refer to “wage-earning slaves” who worked independently, got to keep some of their earnings, and could even save up money to buy their freedom. In those cases, the lines between a slave and a free worker could get somewhat blurry. There’s a fascinating political pamphlet that survives from the 5th century BCE, written by an unknown author, an upper-class conservative who disapproved of the Athenian democracy. Since we don’t know his name, he’s popularly known as the Old Oligarch. And one of his big gripes is that slaves and metics — meaning essentially resident aliens — have so much freedom in Athens. Here’s what the Old Oligarch has to say, in the translation by J.M. Moore. Quote: 

Slaves and metics at Athens lead a singularly undisciplined life; one may not strike them there, nor will a slave step aside for you. Let me explain the reason for this situation: if it were legal for a free man to strike a slave, a metic, or a freedman, an Athenian would often have been struck under the mistaken impression that he was a slave, for the clothing of the common people there is in no way superior to that of the slaves and metics, nor is their appearance… Where there are rich slaves, it is no longer profitable for my slave to be afraid of you; in Sparta my slave would be afraid of you, but there, if your slave is afraid of me, he will probably spend some of his own money to free himself from the danger. Unquote

While we may not be as shocked as the Old Oligarch, it is surprising that a good number of slaves could lead lives comparable to those of free wage earners. And if you were lucky enough to be one of those, there was even the possibility of manumission. There was nothing particularly unusual about manumission in the Greek world. A slaveholder would sometimes reward loyal household slaves by freeing them in his will. As I mentioned earlier, a slave who earned enough money could save up and buy his own manumission. Freed slaves didn’t become citizens, but in a place like Athens they could become successful. One very unusual case is a slave by the name of Pasion who was owned by a couple of bankers and performed so well in his job that they freed him and then actually left him the business when they died. He used his wealth to offer various services to the state and was ultimately rewarded with citizenship. Pasion’s rags to riches story is a huge exception, but it shows at least that such a thing was possible. 

But there was also the opposite extreme. There was a district in Attica called Laurion, which was important for its silver mines. Those mines had been worked for a long time, but in the 480s BCE, an especially rich vein of silver ore was discovered there. Which was very good timing for the Athenians, because that new source of silver helped them finance the building of a greatly expanded navy, which turned out to be crucial in fighting back against the Persian invasion. So mining operations were ramped up, and this is one industry where you really did have large gangs of slaves doing backbreaking work under harsh conditions. Mine shafts were deep, ventilation was poor, and galleries were often so cramped that slaves had to crawl on their hands and knees or lie down while working to extract ore. As you can imagine, safety standards were non-existent, so the accident rate must have been incredibly high. 

So conditions in the mines were brutal, and they involved thousands of slaves. We actually have an account, again from Xenophon, that illustrates just how cold slave owners could be when it came to profiting off slave labor. Nicias was a wealthy aristocratic Athenian and a prominent citizen in the late 5th century BCE. His main claim to fame — or claim to shame, you might say — is that he led the infamous expedition to Sicily that ended in disaster. Well, Xenophon tells us that Nicias leased a thousand of his own slaves to a contractor in the mines and made a profit of about a talent a year. To give you an idea of how much that was, the average wage for a skilled worker was about one drachma a day, and a talent was worth 6000 drachmas. So Nicias made quite a killing by condemning a thousand enslaved people to hard labor under nightmarish conditions.

This brings up an obvious question. Did slaves run away? Or at least try to? Well, of course they did, but it doesn’t seem to have been very common under ordinary circumstances. From what ancient authors tell us, slave owners were very aggressive about recovering runaway slaves. There was also no obvious place that a slave could run to. There was no Underground Railroad; there weren’t any abolitionist strongholds where a slave could expect to be relatively safe. On the other hand, war could provide an opportunity if an enemy city could make it attractive for slaves to desert and come over to their side. The classic example is an episode in the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. The Spartans got ahold of a district in Attica called Decelea, and the historian Thucydides estimates that 20,000 slaves deserted there. But according to another source, the Spartans turned right around and sold those slaves to the Thebans on the cheap. There just weren’t a lot of good options for a runaway slave. 

Well, from this brief overview, you can see that slavery could take a wide variety of forms, from something close to independence all the way to the worst kind of oppression. Before I wrap up, I just want to mention a few specific roles that slaves could play, which I think can provide a little more insight into Greek society. Wealthy families, of course, would have domestic slaves — butlers, cooks, housekeepers, and so on. One important type of domestic slave was a pedagogue. His job was to look after a boy in a wealthy family, to accompany him to lessons, athletic training, and so on, and maybe sometimes to act as a tutor. As galling as it is to think of, slaves could also be used as prostitutes. That could run the gamut from common sex workers all the way to high-end hetairari, so-called “companions,” who were trained in music and dance and were maybe more like geishas than prostitutes. That’s not to say that all women in those roles were slaves, but they could be. Finally, the state could own slaves and employ them for specific purposes. In classical Athens, there was a body of so-called “Scythian archers” who acted as a kind of limited police force. But there was really very little policing in Athens, and those archers seem to have been mainly for keeping order in the assembly. 

When I was first studying Greek civilization in college, I think there was a tendency to whitewash slavery a bit, to say it wasn’t all that bad. We’ve seen that some slaves could enjoy certain privileges, depending on the circumstances. On small farms and in family-run workshops, I imagine that owners often had some affection for slaves and thought of them as something like family. But even in the best circumstances, freedom was a very desirable thing. At the heart of it is the basic right to have control over one’s own body. Looking back at the Old Oligarch, one of the first complaints he makes is that you can’t risk hitting someone, because he might turn out not to be a slave. The body of a free person, and especially a citizen, was considered inviolable. Striking a citizen was a strong social taboo and could easily land you in court. But for a slave, there was no such taboo. In fact, beating a slave was thought of as perfectly normal, even expected. In Athenian comedy, this is played for laughs. Slaves are always getting a beating or at least being threatened with it.  

A passage from a lawcourt speech by the orator Demosthenes puts this in very clear terms. Addressing the jury, he says, quote: 

If you wish to look into what makes the difference between a slave and a free man, you would find this to be the biggest difference: that for slaves, the body is answerable for all their misdeeds, but for free men, even if they suffer the greatest misfortunes, they are still able to keep their body safe. Unquote 

It’s striking how strongly that resonates with recent works by Ta-nehisi Coates, who emphasizes control of one’s own body as central to the whole concept of freedom. 

Slavery is a thorny issue to deal with. Here in the United States, over a century and a half after it was abolished, we’re still paying a price for it — even if we can’t agree on how to repair the damage. In our own time, with the exception of some very vocal extremists, we all accept that slavery is a bad thing and should never be legally allowed. But the harsh truth of history is that those who have wealth and power generally do what’s economically expedient. I have a strong suspicion that if the Industrial Revolution had never happened, we’d still have slavery in one form or another. In ancient Greece, there wasn’t a lot of anti-slavery sentiment. Whatever value judgments we make, it was part of life.  

Now, I wouldn’t be doing this podcast if I didn’t have great respect for Greece’s achievements in literature, art, philosophy, and a dozen other areas. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that slave labor made a lot of that possible. Let’s end with a thought experiment. Imagine if those thousands of slaves hadn’t been available to work in the silver mines at Laurion. The amount of silver extracted might have been much lower — which could have seriously diminished the expenditure for building the Athenian navy. Without that, maybe the Persian invasion would never have been turned back. If that happened, Athens would never have grown to be the powerhouse it was through most of the 5th century BCE. And in that case, western culture would probably look very different today. So when we experience ancient Greece through the works of authors like those I’ve quoted today, let’s not forget about the slaves, whose voices we don’t hear. 

That’s a wrap for Episode 10. I hope you found it interesting, and if you did, I’d very much appreciate a good rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever platform you use. If you’d like to contact me with questions, comments, or corrections, shoot me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. Or leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.