CHAPTER 1

CHATTELS LAVES

Although war among the various Greek poleis was common, theGreeks were nonetheless (in principle) averse to the enslavement of theirfellow Greeks (see, e.g., Pl. Rep. 469b–c; Xen. Hell. 1.6.14, Ages. 7.6).1Most chattel slaves, therefore, were of "barbarian"—that is, non-Greek—origin,acquired mainly through Mediterranean trading networks. Inthe archaic period (ca. 630–480 BCE), slaves were primarily Scythiansand Thracians, coming from areas northeast of Greece. After the PersianWars, traders began to acquire more slaves from the east, particularlyfrom those areas (like Caria) near the Greek cities of Asia Minor. And inthe fourth century and into the Hellenistic period (323–330 BCE), slavescame from all over Asia Minor, with the number of slaves from Africaalso increasing. Augmenting these regular supplies of slaves were thosecaptured in war or, less frequently, by pirates or bandits.

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

Although the population of chattel slaves was evidently at times quitehigh in Greece, exact numbers are nearly impossible to ascertain. Evenfor classical Athens there is no direct evidence for slave numbers; theclosest we come is Athenaeus's (third-century CE) account of the censustaken 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 thoseresiding in Athens, and 21,000 Athenians, 10,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves(oiketon) were found. (Athen. 272c–d)

This passage is quoted nearly every time scholars hazard a guess as tothe number of slaves in classical Athens, but both its meaning and validityare contested. Also often cited by scholars are two other passages:Thucydides's report that after the Spartan occupation of Dekeleia in 413bce, 20,000 slaves (andrapodon) deserted from Attica (Thuc. 7.27.5), and afragment of Hyperides suggesting that more than 150,000 slaves "fromthe mines and the countryside" be enlisted to fight (fr. 29, Jensen). Drawingcautiously from these ancient accounts of slave numbers, coupled withmodern estimates both of the total population of Athens and of rates ofslave ownership, scholars have proposed a range of estimates for classicalAthens, varying from a low of 20,000 slaves to a high of more than150,000; the most likely number falls somewhere in the middle, representing15–35 percent of the total population. Moreover, these numbers donot remain constant throughout the classical period, but fluctuate: slavenumbers were at their highest immediately before the Peloponnesian War,fell dramatically during the war, and began to increase again afterward.

Orlando Patterson has famously argued that slaves experience aprocess of desocialization and depersonalization, which he refers to as"social death." In this chapter, I demonstrate some of the ways in whichchattel slaves in Athens were socially dead (their "social status"), inaddition to being deprived of nearly all legal and political rights (their"legal status"). There is no question that slaves were desocialized: inmost cases torn from their natal communities, they were deprived of allfamily and community ties. Chattel slaves were also depersonalized, ina process Igor Kopytoff describes as "commoditization." Once enslaved,an individual "is stripped of his social identity"—that is, desocialized—"andbecomes a non-person, indeed an object and an actual or potentialcommodity." In fact, Aristotle calls the chattel slave "animate property"(ktema ti empsukhon) (Pol. 1253b32), and scholars have defined the chattelslave either exclusively or at least in part by his or her status as a piece ofproperty. 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 additionto being conceived of as a possession, however, the slave was alsorecognized 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 (time), rendering them the verylowest social and legal status group on the spectrum of statuses. But evenwithin the legal category of "chattel slave," there existed a large range of substatuses,generally dependent on the type of labor the slave performed (andrelated to this, their economic status). This labor, in turn, was sometimescorrelated with the slave's ethnicity: so, for example, Thracians and Anatoliansgenerally performed manual labor, Scythians served as policemen-archers,and Phoenicians were at least sometimes bankers and traders(see chapter 2). This correlation did not always hold, however: a strikingexample is the Thracian slave-overseer Sosias, who was wealthy enough tolease 1000 mining slaves from...