SLAVE SOCIETY IN ANCIENT GREECE- UMA CHAKRAVARTI

I. Geographical background and historical overview of Greek

Society
Geographically, Greece is a land of limestone mountains, narrow
valleys, long gulfs, few rivers and numerous islands. There are a few
plains—not large ones but extremely important in the economy and
history of the country. Greece is also a region of considerable variety.
It is of great importance to the Greek culture that most states had
their strip of fertile plain, pastureland, forested mountain slope and
in many case access to the sea itself. This variety of soil and climate
meant that the normal Greek city state was reasonably self-sufficient
and could enjoy a balanced corporate life. The variety led to
specialized products and this in turns encourage brisk trade.
Another factor of importance is that Greece faces south east. The
mountains run in that direction. Harbours and valleys face that way
and the natural area of movement is in the direction of Asia and
Egypt which were the homes of earlier civilizations. Greece in
prehistoric times lay invitingly open to traders and others from Crete
and Phoenicia.
In the past, Greece was well endowed with natural resources. The
mountain slopes were well forested and provided a rich source of
timber and game. Since the rainfall was greater than it is now it had
more and better-quality pastureland.
Greece according to Homer and Hesiod was practically self-
supporting as far as primary foods are concerned. Apart from
agricultural product there was good clay available for the potters and
stone was in abundance. The olive was an important crop and
provided oil. Vine was also freely cultivated. It was only in minerals
that Greece was poor. Gold, silver and lead were found but not in
large quantities. But above all there was no iron and coal.
The significance of the Mediterranean Sea in Greek history and
culture cannot be overemphasized. For much of its history, the
Greco-Roman world was tied together by the Mediterranean Sea-
“our sea” as it was called in ancient times. The sea was their life line
along which men and goods moved binding all Hellas together.
Nearly all the great centers of the ancient world—Athens, Syracuse,
Cyrene, Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople can be reached
without going a few miles inland. Everything beyond the thin belt
along the sea was peripheral—to be drawn upon for hides, goods,
metals and slaves. The continental interior was a reservoir whose
resources could be used but which was not a region for civilized
living. It was an area inhabited by barbarians and raided for booty,
not to be lived in by the Greeks and Romans. Plato summed up this
characteristic very effectively when he wrote “we inhabit a small
portion of the earth living round the sea like ants and frogs around a
pond”.
The distinctive feature of classical civilization therefore was its
coastal character. Graeco-Roman antiquity was essentially
Mediterranean in its basic structure. The inter-local trade which
linked it together could only proceed by water: marine transport was
the only viable means of commodity exchange over medium or long
distances. The tremendous importance of sea for trade can be
judged by the fact tha even in Roman times it was cheaper to ship
wheat from Syria to Spain which is one end of the Mediterranean to
the other than to cart it 75 miles over land. It is thus on accident that
the Aegean Zone, being a network of islands, harbours and
promontories, should have been the first home of the city states;
that Athens which was the best example of a city state should have
founded its commercial fortunes on shipping; that when Greek
colonization spread to the nearest in the Hellenistic epoch the port
of Alexandria should have become the major city of Egypt and the
first maritime capital in its history; and that Rome in its turn which
was located upstream on the Tiber should have become a coastal
metropolis. Water was the irreplaceable medium of communication
and trade which made possible urban growth. It is significant to point
out that the Mediterranean is the only large inland sea in the world.
It alone offered marine spread of transport which was sheltered
from highlands for a major geographical zone. The unique position of
classical antiquity within universal history cannot be separated from
this physical privilege. In other words, the Mediterranean provided
the necessary geographical setting for the Ancient civilization.
The historical context of the Ancient civilization however lay in the
social foundation of the relationship between the town and country
within it. The early Hellenic polis represented the highwater mark of
urban polity and culture that was not equaled for another thousand
years. However, behind this urban polity and culture there was no
urban economy to match it. On the contrary the material wealth
which supported it was drawn overwhelmingly from the countryside.
In terms of quantitative proportion, the classical world was mainly
rural. Throughout its history agriculture was the dominant area of
production and accounted for the fortune of the cities themselves so
that Strabo stated that “agriculture was the prelude to urbanism”.
The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly communities of
manufacturers, traders or craftsmen having originated as urban
collections of landowners. The municipal organization of all state
whether in democratic Athens or oligarchic Sparta was dominated by
agrarian proprietors. The true city of classical times included both
the chora, the rural hinterland and an urban center. The two were
conceived as a single unit, not as two opposing parties.
The Greek residential pattern was to crowd around in urban centers
or villages rather than to live on isolated farmsteads. Town and
country were bound together not merely by economics but also
psychologically by a feeling among the members of the community
of a unity fostered by common tradition because cultural interaction
was continuous and rapid.
Each of these units of town and country retained their separateness
through most of Greek history and resisted political unity. Geography
partially explains this fragmentation since much of the land surface is
a chequer board of small plains or valleys, tending to isolate each
pocket of habitation from the other. The isolated communities of
archaic Greece developed into the polis, as a self-sufficient
independent political unit. Since Greece never achieved political
unity when the polis declined the Greek classical world also declined.
However, it is remarkable that despite the lack of a political center or
geographical unity, or a single religious authority, the Hellas did not
fall apart. In fact, the Greeks carried their traditions all over the
Mediterranean region through waves of migration.
Many of the city states had their settlements in far flung regions
stretching from Italy in the west to the Black Sea in the east. This
outward move was spearheaded also through geographical
characteristics. Archaeological evidence indicates that neither
mainland Greece nor the Aegean island could support an agrarian
population and that the surplus could not be absorbed in other
pursuits. For a considerable period, a safety value was provided by
the ‘colonization’ movement which took off the surplus and
discontented sections of the population to new regions. It was a
well-planned emigration backed by the community which took the
shape of two major waves of colonization. The first began around
750 BC and went west to the island of the Ionian Sea, to Sicily and
Southern Italy. The second entered the Black Sea soon after 650 BC
and eventually encircled it with Greek communities. Much of the
shortage in corn in Athens for example was made up by import from
the Greek settlements on the Black Sea.
The term colony however is a misnomer for these settlements. They
were actually independent Greek communities. And since the
movement was an answer to demographic and agrarian difficulties
the new communities were themselves agricultural settlements, not
trading posts. The relationship between the colony and the mother
city was neither commercially based not imperialistic in other ways.
It was because the colonies were independent from the start that on
the whole, they maintained close friendly ties with their respective
mother cities for many years—based on tradition and cult—free
from the irrigations and conflicts of ten aroused elsewhere by
commercial disputes and rivalries.
The first “proto-Greek” speaking people in Greece appear to have
migrated to the Greek peninsula before the beginning of the second
millennium BC. They helped to create the technically advanced
Bronze age civilization of the period 1400-1200 BC called the
Mycenean civilization which marked a definite stage in Greek history.
The Mycenean civilization was centered in the southern part of the
mainland. This is the age to which the Greek legends look back. It is
the background of the Iliad and had been partly preserved in the
epics of Homer. The civilization was based on sea-power and its vast
palaces attests to its wealth. But about 1200 BC the Mycenean
civilization came to an abrupt and marked by the destruction of the
palace fortresses in many parts of Greece.

(Greek history is conventionally divided into three major epochs. They are: Archaic—from
750 BC to 500 BC; Classical—the fifth and fourth centuries; and Hellenistic—from the time
of Alexander the Great to the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean)

After the collapse of Mycenean civilization Greece experienced a

prolonged ‘dark age’ in which economic and political life regressed to
a rudimentary household stage which is the world depicted in the
Homeric epics. There was much movement of invaders and refugees
and consequently the small isolated settlement became common in
the archaic period. It was during this period also that the Greeks
varied their small communities to regions like Sicily, Italy and the
east which we have described earlier. By the time Greek dispersion
was complete there were as many as fifteen hundred more or less
independent communities all of them within twenty-five miles off
the coasts. The colonies which were planted on relatively spacious
plains had corn to spare and it became possible to import grain
instead of importing men leading to a slowing down of the
colonization process in later years.
It was during the Archaic age in Greece that the urban pattern of
classical civilization first slowly crystallized. Sometime before the
advent of historical records local kingships were overthrown by tribal
aristocracies and cities were founded or developed under the
domination of these nobilities. This coincided with the creation of a
script derived from Phoenicia, the emergence of coinage and the
reappearance of long-distance trade especially with Syria. The arrival
of coinage and the spread of money economy were accompanied by
a rapid increase in the total volume of trade in Greece. Greece now
witnessed an amazing expansion of sea-borne commerce within the
Mediterranean area. The lines of the main trade routes are revealed
by the distribution of fine pottery which was manufactured in the
main homeland. This pottery contained luxuries such as oils,
perfumes, wines and ointments. Other items that were exported by
the homeland were Corinthian bronze work, especially armour and
Miletus exported woolen goods. From the colonies came raw
material, foodstuffs, precious metals, timber, wool and hides.
There was higher productivity of Hellenic wine and olive cultivation
which was more intensive than cereal agriculture during this period
and this gave Greece a relative advantage in commercial exchanges
within the Mediterranean zone. The economic advantages provided
by this growth created a new strata of recently created agrarian
proprietors drawn from the ranks outside the traditional nobility
who had in some cases also benefited from subsidiary commercial
enterprise. The fresh wealth of this group was not matched by any
other power in the city. At the same time the increase of population
and rhe disruption of the older economy gave rise to social tensions
among the poorer classes on the land who were liable to be pushed
downwards or be subjected to noble estate-owners who therefore
now faced new strains. The combined pressure of rural discontent
from below and the emergence of a new class above forced apart
the ranks of the aristocracy and broke up their rule in the cities. The
class struggle now reached a new stalemate since the hiving off
process to the colonies had not succeeded in eliminating the
difficulties at home: ‘redistribute the land and cancel the debts’ was
the cry heard all over. Out of this tension, there emerged the
specifically Greek institution of the tyrant. During the late 7th and 6th
centuries BC, temporary tyrannies appeared in many parts of Greece.
The tyrants were usually newcomers who were recruited to positions
of honor within the city but their victory was made possible only
because they used the radical grievances of the poor. Their most
lasting achievements were the economic reforms initiated during this
period in the interests of the popular classes which they had to grant
in order to secure power. Consequently, small peasant farms
managed to preserve themselves and become consolidated
throughout Greece at this time. The best example of these
developments are provided by the Athenian situation where Solon
was chosen by the people to wield power and to mediate the bitter
social struggle between the rich and the poor. Solon’s decisive action
was to abolish debt bondage on the land which was the normal
process by which the small holders fell into the grip of the large
landowners and became dependent on them. Solon himself states
that many of the poor had been loaded with shameful bonds and
sold into foreign lands and that he had many of those sold brought
back to Athens. Solons’ reforms, which were widely initiated in the
Greek world, helped to check the growth of noble estates and to
stabilize the pattern of small and medium farms that characterized
the Athenian countryside.
Along with the abolition of enslavement for debt, Solon also
introduced certain legal reforms by which a third party had the right
to seek justice on behalf of the affected party and appeals could be
made to popular tribunals. Solon also deprived the nobility of its
monopoly of office by dividing the population of Athens into four
income groups, giving the top two categories the right to the senior
magistracies; the third category was given access to the lower
administrative positions and the fourth group was given a vote in the
assembly of citizens which from then onwards became a regular
institution in the city. All the Solonic measures had the effect of
protecting the weaker majority from the excessive power of the
nobility. The Solonic settlement however did not last and social
conflicts were later renewed and aggravated when Athens
experienced rapid commercial growth. Finally, the situation ended
with the seizure of power by the tyrant Peisistratus. ‘Peisistratus’
policies have sometimes been regarded as more important for the
economic independence of the peasantry than Solon’s reforms
because he carried Athens a long way along the road Solon had
started out on. He provided direct financial assistance to the
Athenian peasantry which gave them a measure of security and
independence on the land. The survival of the small and medium
farmers was now assured. The economic basis of the Greek citizen
body remained modest agrarian property unlike the situation in
Rome later on in time.
The salvation of the independent peasantry and the cancellation of
debt bondage were followed by the steep increase in the use of slave
labour both in the towns and countryside of classical Greece. Once
the extremes of social polarization were blocked from within, the
need to import slaves was the next step required in order to solve
labour shortages for the dominant class. What resulted was the
introduction and dependence on Chattel slavery on a massive scale.
 II. Slavery: Its emergence and characteristics
Although slavery had existed in the Near East long before the
emergence of the Graeco-Roman world it had only been one of the
forms of servitude along with various kinds of bondage and penal
labour. It was also not the predominant type of labour for the
extraction of surplus and had remained a marginal phenomenon
which existed on the edges of the main rural workforce. The
Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian empires were not slave
economies and they had not had any clear idea of Chattel property.
It was the Greek city states which first made slavery ‘absolute in
form and dominant in extent, transforming it from a secondary
facility into a systematic mode of production’1. The Greeks and
Romans thus succeeded in transforming the existing slavery into
something which was wholly new in world history; namely an
institutionalized system of the large-scale use of slave labour both in
the countryside and in the cities. In the words of Perry Anderson,
“the slave mode of production was the decisive invention of the
Graeco-Roman world”2
However, it must be pointed out that the Greek world was not based
on the exclusive views of slave labour. Free peasants, dependent
tenants, urban artisans and agricultural labourers always coexisted
with slaves in varying proportions in the different city states of
Greece. But the dominant mode of production in classical Greece,
and that which gave its imprint to the whole civilization of the city
state was of slavery. This was equally true of Rome. And even though
the ancient world was never continuously marked by slave labour,
the great classical epochs in Greece (4th century BC) and Rome
(200BC-200AD) were those in which slavery was massively used
along with other labour systems. During the classical period in
Greece, slavery effectively replaced other forms of dependent labour
in contrast to the archaic period when slavery had been

1
Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, London, New Left Books, 1977. Pg 21
2
Ibid
unimportant. To sum up then, we may say that if we put aside the
question of the rise and decline of slavery and concentrate on the
great classical periods in Greece and Rome, then we are faced with
the first genuine slave societies in history, surrounded by societies
which continued to rely on other forms of dependent labour.
According to Finley, slaves were an inherent aspect of the ancient
economy in the classical period being a fundamental part of the
social structure because of the reliance placed on them and their
labour by the upper strata3. Further slavery was the archetypal form
of unfree labour throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity with the result
that much of the terminology of unfree labour was derived from
slave terminology. In fact, slavery was ever present in the psychology
of all classes in the Graeco-Roman society and slavery was seen as a
superior means of extracting surplus in comparison with other
methods of exploitation. This is clear from the sources which
repeatedly indicate that those who did not possess slaves were
working towards a situation when they could also own them.

It is necessary at this point to consider certain basic questions

relating to the emergence of slavery in general and to the Greek
situation in particular. The general need to mobilize labour power for
tasks that are beyond the capacity of the individual or the family
reaches back into prehistory. Such a need came to be felt whenever
a society attained a stage of sufficient accumulation of resources and
power in the hands of either the king, the temple or the aristocracy.
The requisite labour force was obtained by compulsion—by force of
arms or by force of law and custom—and utilized in agriculture,
mining and in public works. Compulsory labour could take the form
of debt bondage, helotage, serfdom and chattel slavery. But
whatever the form, the compulsion in these cases is fundamentally
different from that lying behind hired labour where also the labourer
may give up some of his independence when he accepts
employment but who nevertheless retains considerable freedom
over himself.
3
M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, London, P. 79
In the early societies, free hired labour was only marginally used.
Wage labour as the characteristic form of labour emerged only with
the development of capitalism. In wage labour, it is only the labour
power of the labourer which is the commodity—in contrast the
labourer himself is the commodity in slavery. In this respect, slavery
is unique among types of labour and the slave stands at the extreme
pole of those who labour for others with the wage labourer standing
at the opposite pole. In between would come other categories which
share with the slave varying degrees of compulsion and provide
involuntary labour. Helots, for example, were collective bondsmen
being whole groups of people subjected to bondage. On the other
hand, debt bondsmen or those bonded through debt fell into
bondage individually. However, these categories of compulsory
labour possessed restricted rights of property in different degrees
and wider rights in the sphere of marriage and family law in contrast
to chattel slaves who possessed no rights whatsoever. Since the
slave was considered to be a commodity, he was an object of
possession. He was a form of property but he was property with a
slight difference: Aristotle for eg referred to him as ‘property with a
soul’. The slave owner’s rights over his slave property were total in
more senses than one. The slave not only suffered total loss of
control over his labour but also over his person. His loss of control
extended infinitely to his children and his children’s children. The
master on the other hand had unlimited control over the slave’s
activities. Slavery could be defined as the right to use another man at
pleasure like a piece of property or a domestic animal. Oeconomica,
a Greek text, allots just three things to a slave—work, punishment
and food. The only limit to the master’s use of a slave was that the
slave was human capital and therefore in order to work him a
minimum degree of basic care was required: that is the slave had to
be maintained.

The totality of the slave owner’s rights over the slave was facilitated
by the fact that the slave was always an outsider who was denied the
most elementary of bonds such as kinship. Complete and brutal
withdrawal of kinship privilege took the form of dispersing the
slaves’ kin through sale. These three components of slavery—the
slave’s status as property, the totality of power over him and his
kinlessness provided powerful advantages to the slave owner as
against other forms of involuntary labour. The slave owner had
greater flexibility in the employment of his labour force and far more
freedom in disposing of unwanted labour. It is not surprising
therefore that in his utopian dreams the small and humbly placed
men also looked to a time when he too could live off his slaves—it
was to be preferred to every other form of labour for the purpose of
extracting a surplus.

In the context of labour slavery thus represented the most radical

degradation of labour imaginable—the conversion of men
themselves into inert means of production by their deprivation of
every social right and their legal assimilation of beasts of burden. In
Greece they were called Andropoda or man footed beings on the
model of Tetrapoda or Quadrupeds. They were also branded like
cattle. In Roman theory, the agricultural slave was designated an
instrumentum vocale; the speaking tool, one step above cattle which
constituted instrumentum semi-vocale, and two steps above the
implement which was instrumentum mutum. Slavery was also the
most drastic commercialization of labour possible: the reduction of
the total person of the labourer to a standard object of sale and
purchase in urban markets of commodity exchange. Slaves were a
highly mobile commodity who could be shifted from one region to
another; they could be trained in a number of different skills; further
as alternative labour in moments of abundant supply they acted to
keep down the costs of hired labourers and independent craftsmen.

During the great classical periods in Athens and other Greek cities
(from the 6th to the 4th century BC) and in Rome (from the early 3rd
century BC to the 3rd century AD) slavery effectively came to replace
other forms of dependent labour. One stimulus for Chattel slavery
came from the growth of urban production for which the traditional
forms of dependent labour were unsuitable. On the land, slavery
made significant inroads wherever Helotage and comparable labour
systems failed to survive on a sufficient scale to meet the needs of
landowners.

While slave labour may not have completely substituted free labour
in Greece which continued to exist alongside it, the use of slave
labour specially in the countryside had important consequences for
Greek society. It freed the land-owning classes from their rural
background and made it possible for them to become urban citizens
while continuing to draw their wealth from the land. There was also
a close link between status and the possession of land in which the
law played its part. The Greek fully preserved for its citizens a
monopoly of the right to own land: in the more oligarchic
communities, full political rights were restricted to the land owners
among its members specially in Sparta. In Athens, people were
divided into citizens, metics (foreign residents in Athens) and slaves.
Only the citizens could own land and participate in the assembly.

Although Greek agriculture used slaves to work the farms, the farms
themselves were usually of very modest size unlike the latter Roman
Latifundia. However, there were a few land owners even in Greece
who possessed 3-6 estates in different parts of Attica. The most
valuable known to us were two farms, one in Eleusis and another in
Thria, which were included among the property of a family founded
by Bucelas and can be traced through the 5th and 6th centuries. It
included a considerable number of men in some prominence in the
military and political affairs of Athens who drew their wealth from
the land which was worked for them by the slaves. Whether in the
case of large landholdings or modest sized farms, slaves were an
important component on the land. According to recent research, a
great deal of slave labour was used on the land in many city states
including Athens and this was a most vital sector of the ancient
economy. It was this fairly pervasive existence of slave labour that
lead to Aristotle to express the social ideology of classical Greece
with the statement: “those who cultivate the land should ideally be
slaves, not recruited from one people nor spirited in temperament”.
This was to ensure that they would be industrious and immune to
rebellion.

Trade was an important aspect of the Greek economy and it was

fundamental to some city states such as Athens whose wealth and
prosperity was largely based on trade. In the 5th and 4th BC, Greece
was rapidly developing its commodity production. Production by
individual artisans in their homes or in small shops for a restricted
local market continued but in the main centers much larger and
more specialized workshops are often described in the sources and
were fairly common. They were run mainly with slave labour as
‘capitalist’ enterprises and produced goods that were absorbed only
partially by the local and Greek inter state market, the rest of the
goods were exported to foreign markets with the Greek merchants in
the Greek colonies often serving as intermediaries. Many of the
Greek cities specialized in certain goods and some of them even
succeeded in obtaining a monopoly in the production and sale of
goods by securing a market for them both in Greece and abroad.
Megara specialized in clothing, Laconia, Boeotia and Euboea in the
manufacture of iron armor and weapons: Delos, Aegina and Corinth
were centers of production of bronze and bronzewares; Aegina was
famous for the small goods which were sold all over Greece; Athens
was a well-known center of pottery production; and several places
were known for excellent woodwork, wool and linen. The trade
flowing along the main lines of communication was exploited by
those states which provided centers of exchange. Initially, the
principal beneficiaries were Corinth, Megara and Aegina.
Subsequently, the opening of the Asiatic hinterland resulted in
tremendously increased participation by Athens and other Ionic
regions.

The increasing complexity resulting from the development of

commodity production was accompanied by corresponding
developments in the organization of trade, specially sea borne trade.
Larger amounts of capital were invested in it and bigger and better
ships were used: certain legal principles concerning commercial
transactions were recognized by the courts; and effective measures
were taken against piracy although Greece never succeeded in
completely eliminating it. In the 5th century BC, the Greek city states
began to contract rudimentary agreements called Symbola between
pairs of states providing for lawful procedures in disputes of any
types between individuals. Traders naturally benefitted from these
agreements. In the middle of the 4th century BC, Athens also took a
new step to encourage the activity of foreign traders. A new law was
introduced which was literally a ‘commercial action’ for the speedy
settlements of disputes arising from commercial transactions in
Athens during the sailing season. Athens thus guaranteed outsiders
who brought commodities to Athens full protection of the law and
speedy jurisdiction. Xenophon, a Greek writer in fact went on to
suggest that Athenian public revenue could be increased by
increasing the number of metics in Athens; the metics were outsiders
who dominated industrial and trading enterprises in the city.
Similarly, the Athenians used their imperial power, while it lasted, to
secure their food and timber supplies and to protect their basic
economic interest.

The general development of commerce and industry in Greece had

raised the demand for labour; wars and trade supplied Greece with
many slaves. The change to the use of slave labour in handicraft
production was well underway before 600 BC. Sail to the Greek
colonists by the native population of captives taken in their inter
tribal wars had widened the sources of slave supply open to the
Greeks. The Chians were among the first Greeks to use non-Greek
slaves obtained by purchase and it appears that the slaves were
being used in small handicraft production since Chios was a center of
metallurgy. The great advantage of slave labour was that slaves were
exempt from military service. Also the comparatively large supply of
slaves made their labour on the whole cheaper than that of freemen
and helped to lower the price of labour in general.

In some parts of Greece such as Corinth, Megara and Attica, a large

number of slaves were used in handicraft production. In these city
states, there was a rapid development of a custom of capital
investment in slaves, as instruments of production, earning money
for their owners under the lease system. Their masters would hire
out the slaves to various workshops and the payment due to the
slave for his labour would accrue to the slaveowner. This was a
recognized way of earning a living: more pertinently it was
recognized way of accumulating profits by the owners of the slaves.
Nicias, the Athenian general is reputed to have owned a thousand
slaves whom he hired out to work in the Laureion silver mines of
Attica: in fact the extension of mining to silver in these mines was
entirely undertaken by the use of gang slave labour on a
considerable scale. Other individuals are stated to have possessed
slaves varying from fifty to a thousand and although some of these
figures may be exaggerated there is no doubt about the widespread
prevalence of the system. This is clear from Plato’s remarks that fifty
or more represent the slave possessions of a wealthy man.

The question of numbers brings us to an important problem relating

to slavery in ancient Greece: how extensive was slavery and what
was the proportion of slave labour in the total population of a city
state. It is not possible to make reliable estimations for most of the
city states because of the lack of resources. Since the sources are
more partial in providing information about Athens and the
proportion of slaves within the population. According to a
conservative computation there were approximately 60,000 slaves in
Athens in the 5th century BC constituting approximately 36 percent of
the population. In Xenophon’s time there were 10,000 slaves
working in the mines alone. Another estimate indicates that the total
slave labour force was in the region of 80,000 to 100,000 in the 5th
century BC when its citizens numbered 45,0004. According to this
estimate the ratio of slaves to free citizens in Periclean Athens was
about 3:2. However the number of slaves in Chios, Aegina and
Corinth was at various times even larger and the helot population of
Sparta always outnumbered the citizenry of Sparta. It is significant
that Aristotle who was writing in the 4th century BC remarks as a
matter of course that states were “bound to contain slaves in large
numbers”. The ideal situation as envisaged by one Greek writer was
that the state should possess public slaves ensuring that there were
three to every citizen. This was considered to be one way in which in
the fortunes of Athens could be restored.

Public slaves were an important category of slaves in ancient Greece.

The use of state-owned slaves was most highly developed in the
administration of the Athenian state but it was known in other states
as well. The Athenians bought their slaves from the market. The
duties performed by them included services in police, as guards in
prisons, as executioners, as clerks of financial official and as labour
for public constructions such as temples. The largest group of public
slaves employed in Athens was that of the Scythians who appear in
the 5th century BC as guards of the city district.

One question that requires to be looked into in the context of slavery

is whether or not there were any technological and structural
impediments to the economy through the use of slavery. It has been
suggested that slavery ultimately tended to paralyze productivity
both in agriculture and industry even though there had been some
developments earlier on. All modes of production in their ascendant
phase do show some evidence of advances in economic equipment
and so were there in the slave mode of production. There were
developments in wine and oil processes and there was the
introduction of rotary mills for grain. Glass blowing developed and
botanical knowledge and field drainage also advanced. But it must be
pointed out that there was no major set to inventions to propel the
4
A. Andrews, Greek Society, London, 1967, p. 135
ancient economy forward to any significant changes in the total
system. In contrast to the dynamism of the feudal economy the
ancient economy was a relatively static economy. The overall
technological stagnation of antiquity has been explained by the
negative attitude to manual labour as summed up by Aristotle: “the
best state will not make a manual worker a citizen, for the bulk of
manual labour today is slave or foreign”. Once manual labour
became associated with the loss of liberty there was no rationale for
invention. The structural constraint of slavery on technology lay in
the ideology whereby even independent or hired labour was viewed
with the stigma of debasement. Plato implicitly barred artisans from
the polis and labour remained for him the antithesis of “what was
essential to man”. Since all labour was devalued the attitude
precluded any sustained concern for devices to save it. And since
slaves were cheap labour which was easily available there was no
motivation to conserve it.
 III. Political forms of slave society: Sparta and Athens

Since the Greek sources are somewhat partial to Athens the picture
that emerges of Greek slavery and also of other Greek institutions
such as the city state tends to be a picture of Athens. However, it is
important to take note of another aspect of Greece which was
represented by Sparta. Sparta presents a somewhat complex
problem partly because very little writing on Sparta was the work of
Spartans. Sparta has therefore been presented by others and this
image probably conceals the reality. In the archaic period there is
nothing to suggest that Sparta was very different from the rest of
Greece. But its decisive turning point appears to have come around
600 BC with the second Messenian War which produced persistently
revolutionary potentiates and threats. The army was in disorder and
the community was in a state of stasis to which the Greeks had very
negative reaction. Once the war was won a number of profound
changes were introduced, political, economic and ideological,
resulting in the unique structure which Sparta came to represent in
the ancient Greek world5.

The population of Sparta did not rank with the bigger states. By
conquest Sparta held the districts of Laconia and Messenia which
were quite fertile by Greek standards and which gave her access to
the sea. It also provided her with the rare and invaluable natural
resources of iron as a counterpart to Athenian silver. Apart from the
Spartans this territory supported a subject people of two kinds: the
helots who were in outright servitude functioned as a compulsory
labour force and worked the land for the Spartans; and the others
known as perioeci, who retained their own personal freedom and
their own community organization in return for surrendering all right
of action to Sparta in the military and foreign fields. The perioeci
managed the trade and industrial production for Spartan needs. The
helots had been reduced to helotage by conquest. In contrast to the
common practice in most of antiquity whereby members of a
5
M.I. Finley, “Sparta” in Uses and Abuses of History, New York, The Viking Press, 1975. pp. 161-177; p. 161.
conquered area were enslaved and sold resulting in their dispersal,
the Spartans adopted the alternative of keeping them in subjugation
at home, in their native territory. What kept the helots enslaved
although they were discontented and prone to frequent rebellion
was the emergence of Sparta as an armed camp. After the second
Messenian War the Spartan citizen body became a professional
soldiery, bred from childhood for two qualities, military skill and
absolute obedience, free from all other activities living a barrack life
with their training being provided by the state.

The unique structure of the classical Spartan system can be reduced

to three broad strands: 1) the infrastructure of land allotments, the
helots and the perioeci, and everything that relates to labour,
production and circulation; 2) the governmental system including the
military organization; and 3) the ritual system including the rites of
passage, the agoge which was the conventional label for the system
by which all Spartan boys were brought up by the state and the
sysstia which represented the dining group or mess companies to
which every Spartan male belonged as a necessary condition of full
citizenship. All adult male citizens (or the homoior meaning equals)
had a common, formalized upbringing designed to inculcate
obedience, valor, discipline and professional military skill. He had a
single vocation or profession, that of a hoplite soldier or officer and
he had complete freedom from economic concerns since all service
were provided by the two categories of dependents, the helots and
the perioeci6. Finally the Spartan had a public rather than private life
in an all-male community with maximum conformity and absolutely
no individualism. An important part of the system in Sparta was
negative: the reduction to the barest minimum of the disruptive,
centrifugal effects of property and family. The total withdrawal from
economic activity, the austerity and the sharing were meant to be
cohesive factors and they appear to have actually been so. The
family was minimized and replaced by overlapping male groupings.
Various rites and institutions ensured that the loyalty of individuals
6
M.I. Finley, “Sparta”, p.163
would be transferred away from the family to various male groups.
The function of the family in the Spartan system was merely to
ensure procreation. It is significant to point out in the context of
property that while the Spartan withdraw from economic activity
their youth when initiated were given a police function and policing
the helots was one of their main duties.

The characteristic feature of the Spartan system was the fact that in
Sparta the citizens were not the direct producers: inversely the direct
producers could not be citizens. The body of citizens constituted an
exclusive group ruling over a subject population of the helots who
were the direct producers and other subject communities or the
perioeci. The perioeci were allowed no part in the government of the
state or in the determination of foreign policy. They were obliged to
render military and other services to the Spartan state. The helots on
the other hand were subjects of the state with no political community
of their own. The Spartan peer or the homoiors devoted himself to the
noble profession of arms and in order that he might be able to pursue
this career was granted a certain amount of land by the state. A
number of helots were tied to this land and were obliged to cultivate
it and to provide the Spartan peer to whom they were assigned a
certain fixed amount of the products of the land, sufficient to maintain
him and his family. This land and its proceeds were his by right of
citizenship and was assigned to him from the public land. The citizen
was not the owner of the land assigned to him and he was not free to
dispose of it by sale or by will. He could however mortgage it. The
helots were bound to the land, they had no political rights and no
freedom of movement. Individual Spartans had no rights of possession
in them and so long as they remained quiet and paid their annual dues
they were left alone. The distinctive feature of the system was that
surplus labour was extracted from a section of the people by a class of
non labourers by means of the coercive political apparatus of the
state. In Athens on the other hand we have a situation in which the
body of citizens is first and foremost a body of individual private
landowners.
The helots in Sparta were a numerous group, far more numerous than
the Spartans whose estates they worked in Laconia and Messenia.
Although the Greeks referred to the helots as “slaves” they are easily
and significantly distinguished from the chattel slaves of the other
Greek city states such as Athens. They were not the property of
individual Spartans; they could not be bought or sold; they could not
be freed except by the state and most importantly they were self-
perpetuating in contrast to chattel slaves whose ranks were constantly
being replenished by stocks from outside. The helots probably had
their own limited possessions transmitted from generation to
generation and their own institutions apart from their freedom. One
consequences of these distinctions from chattel slavery was that
unlike most other slaves they often revolted. According to Finley the
helots revolted while chattel slaves in Greece by and large did not
because the helot possessed certain rights and privileges and
demanded more.

Spartan discipline and Spartan military organization elevated Sparta

into a major power far beyond what her size would have warranted
and in the 4th century BC Sparta and Athens were involved in a long
drawn out battle in which Sparta finally had the edge sided by Persian
gold. However, her victory proved to be somewhat hollow and she
rapidly declined. Although ultimately Athens came to triumph through
her image of brilliance it is importance to remember that for many
contemporary Greeks Sparta was the ideal. She was the model of the
closed society admired particularly by those who had rejected an open
society with its factional policies and its frequent ‘lack of discipline’.
The myth of Sparta has remained strong and tenacious.
 IV. Athenian Democracy

The Greek society Sparta was always treated as a contrast to Athens.

They represented two altogether different structures but the
sharpest opposition was noticeable in the context of the political
system. The Athenians prided themselves on their democracy which
was founded on a social structure that reflected some degree of
stratification. At the top of Athenian society were placed some
hundreds of families of considerable wealth: citizens living on the
income from their estates and occasionally on investment in slaves;
also, non-citizens whose economic base was trade, manufacture or
money lending. The rich were essentially landowners who were free
to devote themselves to politics or learning or plain idling. The bulk
of the citizenry were formed by the ‘hoplite’ and ‘thete’ classes;
thetes were the poorest section of the citizenry who were incapable
of equipping themselves for heavy infantry duty unlike the hoplites.
The division between the hoplites and thetes was one of income and
not of occupation. Athens was one of the largest Hellenic states with
approximately a third of its population living in the urban districts.
The urban characteristic was of the greatest importance, a necessary
condition for the power and glory of the state.

The Greek word polis, from which we have derived words like
political, in its classical sense meant ‘a self-governing state’.
However, because polis was small in area and population it is
conventionally translated as ‘city-state’. The world polis also did not
distinguish the structure of government and did not imply anything
about democracy, or oligarchy or even tyranny. Athens was the most
well-known polis in Greece and the Athenian polis was a democracy.

Athenian democracy was the product of considerable evolution,

which was completed in all its essentials by the third quarter of the
5th century BC but it was subject to some modification as long as
Athens remained a democracy. Some of the groundwork was laid by
Solon and Peisistratus by weakening the archaic system especially
the political monopoly of the aristocratic families but neither of them
actually had democracy in mind. The change came in 510 BC
following the overthrow of the tyranny and a two-year civil war. The
architect of the new type of government was Cleisthenes but the
new structure required two full generations before the system could
be perfected. This was a period which included the Persian wars and
the building of the Empire and also much internal conflict for the
forces opposed to democracy were far from crushed in 506 BC.

Athenian democracy had developed a fairly well-designed machine

for expressing and putting into effect the will of the citizens. The
assembly, of which all adult male citizens were members, was in a
very real sense a sovereign body, holding forty regular meeting a
year; in addition extraordinary sessions were held when required,
and they not merely settled general questions of policy but made
detailed decisions in every sphere of government – foreign affairs,
military operations and finance. The administrative lynch pin of the
constitution was the council of 500, annually chosen by lot from all
the demes (wards or parishes) of Athens and Attica (which
constituted the city state of Athens) in proportion to their size and
thus formed a fair sample of the people as a whole. It had two main
functions, to supervise and to co-ordinate the activities of the
magistrates, a majority of whom were annually chosen by lot from all
qualified citizens who put in their names so that every citizen had a
chance to take his turn in the administration and to prepare the
agenda of the assembly. On controversial issues the council normally
refrained from expressing an opinion and merely put the question
before the people leaving it to any citizen to draft the motion during
the actual debate. The president of the council and the assembly
were chosen daily by lot from the council to prevent any undue
influence from the chair. Finally, as ultimate guardians of the
constitution there were the popular law courts. Juries were
empaneled by lot for each case from a body of 6,000 citizens
annually chosen by lot and they decided both private and political
issues. These juries judged cases where charges of corruption were
brought against the magistrates on laying down their office or cases
of treason and so on. They could strike down any motion voted in
the assembly as being contrary to the laws and punish its author.
Political trials were frequent in Athens and the result was that the
popular juries tended to become the supreme court.

All citizens7 who were not expressly disqualified for some offence
such as an unpaid debt to the treasury had equal political rights and
all could speak and vote in the assembly. There was an age
qualification for 30 years for all magistracies, membership in the
council and serving on the juries. For some of the offices there was
an additional qualification of property but by the late 4th century BC
they were being ignored in practice. To make the system work more
effectively it was considered necessary that in order than every
citizen, however poor, should be able to afford the time for
exercising his political rights and pay was provided for this purpose
from the time of Pericles. Magistrates, members of the council and
the juries were all given varying subsistence allowances.
Subsequently this facility was extended to all citizens who
constituted the quorum by arriving first to attend the sessions of the
assembly.

The council took numerous decisions and did a good deal of the
important work itself either through committees or in full sessions. It
was in fact the coordinating body which held the administrative
machine together. But it had a second and more important function,
that of being a steering committee of the assembly. The council
placed on agenda in the assembly motions which had already been
debated and voted by the council. The council consisting of 500
representatives was itself chosen annually by lot and contained 50
members from each tribe. From the elaborately representative
structure of the council it may be inferred that originally the council
7
It is important to note that Athens distinguished between three categories of people within Athens, citizens,
metics and slaves. Only citizens could hold property and participate in the Athenian assembly. For the metics
and slaves there were no political rights whatsoever.
was intended to be the effective governing body of the state, only
referring major and controversial issues to the people. In course of
time however the practice changed. Although in the 5th century
many important decrees were drafted in detail in the council and
passed with minor modifications by the people many of the later
motions were proposed by the people in the assembly and vital
decisions were left entirely to the assembly. The general conclusion
that emerges from the inscriptions is that the council was not a
policy making body. On uncontroversial matters it drafted decrees
sometimes leaving minor difficulties to be settles by the people but
on any major issue it merely put the question on the agenda of the
assembly. In sum the control of the council over the assembly
amounted to very little. It was probably the intention of the
Athenians that the council, consisting of mature men and in theory
at least of some substance, should act as some check on possible
irresponsible conduct by the assembly. It was their duty to refuse to
put to vote illegal proposals and they saw to it that no motion was
proposed without due notice and publicity. But policy was clearly
decided in the assembly and not in the council.

A similar pattern was followed with regard to the formulation of

decrees. Judicial members made an annual review of the laws and
suggested alterations or modifications if they considered it
necessary. A special legislative session of the assembly was then held
and the people voted to delete or confirm the laws. Decrees could be
struck down by the courts if it contradicted a law which was still in
the codes. A vital part was played by the courts in Athenian politics;
they were an expression of the absolute power of the people
functioning directly. Measures and their authors could be indicted
for treason, deceiving the people, bribery and so on and those were
freely used. The juries varied in size according to the importance of
the caste but in political cases they normally numbered some
thousands of members who were chosen by lot from among a panel
of citizens who were themselves chosen by lot.
The key to Athenian democracy was the principle of direct
participation there was neither representation nor a civil service or
bureaucracy in any significant sense. In the sovereign assembly
whose authority was total, every citizen was not only entitled to
attend as often as he pleased but also had the right to enter the
debate, offer amendments and vote on the proposals on war and
peace, taxation, cult regulation, army levies, treaties and diplomatic
regulations and anything else major or minor which required
governmental decisions. There was also no hierarchy among the
offices; regardless of the significance of any post, every holder was
solely and directly responsible to the demos itself; in the council, in
the assembly or the court and not to as superior office holder.

Important officials such as the generals were also elected by the

people. The generals were executive officers in the military and naval
spheres and their duties were to mobilize armies and fleets in pursuit
of objectives laid down in considerable detail by the people. Since
the most important positions in the Athenian political system were
all elected the government had continuity only when one man or a
group of men succeeded in holding the confidence of the people
over a long period of time in which case, he was usually re-elected
general. The most famous case was that of Pericles who owed his
power to his authority and judgement and to his manifest
incorruptibility. Even he had to persuade the people to vote for every
measure that he wished to have passed.

The assembly was the crown of Athenian democracy and the

Athenian political system since it had the right to the power to make
all the policy decisions. It was an open-air mass meeting on the hill
called the Pynx which was technically open to all adult male
citizens—women, foreigners and slaves being excluded. Under
normal conditions the attendance came chiefly from the urban
residents. Few peasants would have often made the journey to
attend a meeting of the assembly. At normal times the activities of
the assembly was largely occupied with technical measures but there
were occasions when great issues were debated and decided—there
were occasions when the composition of the assembly would have
vital consequences for the decisions taken. On such occasions the
assembly represented shifting forces where the debate might swing
from one extreme to another and arouse passions but since each
meeting was complete in itself some decision would have to be
arrived at by nightfall. Sometimes the assembly could even reverse a
decision taken on an earlier date. The psychological aspect of the
assembly and the intense degree of involvement which attending it
entailed was a significant aspect of its functioning. Addressing the
mass meetings of the assembly also required the power of oratory.
Since Athens did not have political parties, or continuous
government it was left to individuals to guide the policymaking.
These individuals would appear on the Pynx and present their
reasons for advocating a particular policy. The needs of the situation
led to the emergence of a class of professional politicians with
rhetorical talent who existed throughout Athenian history. Initially
this category consisted of the gentry but later on went on to include
the new rich and occasionally even the poor. These were the people
who held the elective offices, proposed motions in the council and in
the assembly and prosecuted and defended in political trials. It
became common to refer to these people as demagogues or orators.

Ancient critics have been particularly condemnatory of these orators.

According to them after Pericles the new type of leader was a
demagogue pandering to the demos in the assembly and the courts
at the expense of the higher interests of the state. However, Finley
has argued that the demagogues were a structural element in the
Athenian political system and that the system could not have
functioned at all without them. Anyone who wished to lead Athens
had to first persuade Athens and an essential part of that effort
consisted in public oratory. He further argues that the term
‘demagogues’ is equally applicable to all leaders regardless of their
class and point of view and that they were judged in their own time
by their performance and not by their manners or their methods.
The controversy over the role of the demagogue in Greek literature
suggests that the social dominance of the earlier well-born leaders of
the assembly could not become permanently entrenched. Aristotle
himself noted that the death of Pericles marked a turning point in
the social history of Athenian leadership. Until then the leadership
had been drawn from the old aristocratic landed families. After
Pericles a new class of leaders emerged. They were in fact not poor
men but men of means who differed from their predecessors in their
ancestry and their outlook and who provoked resentment and
hostility for their presumption in breaking the old monopoly of
leadership. This new feature in Athenian society may also partly
explain the unanimous condemnation of the city’s unprecedented
democracy by the thinkers of the time. It is interesting that while
Greek theory had a justification for slavery and the economic system
prevalent in Greece, they did not approve of the political system
built upon it. Athens never produced any democratic political theory.
According to the Greek political writers the greatest malady of the
Greek states was stasis, a word big enough to embrace a wide range
of connotations from political factions to outright civil war, and
democracy was associated with stasis, and with the tussle between
the few and the many. Virtually all the Athic philosophers and
historians of note were bitterly hostile to democracy, others were
ardent admirers of the Spartan regime. Only the 4th century BC
orators, the ‘demagogues’ were democrats. Behind the façade of this
prejudice very fundamental issues were involved and throughout the
5th century a debate existed about the kind of government Athens
was to have: a democracy or an oligarchy. Although the issue was
settles against oligarchy in Athens as far as practical politics was
concerned (having successfully resisted oligarchic revolutions in 411
and 404-3 BC) the philosophers persisted in arguing about it into the
next century.

It is significant that the Greeks expected that an oligarchy should rule

in the interest of the propertied whereas a democracy would rule
mainly in the interests of the poorer citizens. Control of the state was
therefore a crucial significance. If the demos could create and sustain
a democracy that really worked in a Greek polis like the Athenian
one then they could hope to protect themselves to some extent and
escape exploitation. This is an important distinction between the
Greek and Roman situation: in Rome owing to the absence of any
real political democracy the poorer free men were much more at the
mercy of the men of power than were the poorer citizens of a Greek
democracy. The assembly and the courts in particular provided a
degree of protection against oppression by the rich and powerful in
Athens. The struggle to retain democracy against oligarchy was
therefore vital for the ordinary citizens and it was this that led to the
overthrow of the oligarchies in Athens. Further, oligarchic and
democratic leaders had no hesitation in calling in outside powers to
help them overthrow their opponents. In the Greek context this
meant that the respective forces would turn to either Sparta or
Athens. A contemporary Greek source states that when there is a
division within a polis between the rich and the commoners, the rich
would naturally turn to Sparta and the demos to Athens. Sparta
remained the great supporter of oligarchy and the propertied classes
until she lost her pre-eminent position in Greece. The special virtue
of Athens was that she managed to maintain a delicate equilibrium
between the different classes so that they system worked for a long
time.

Summing up Greek democracy and placing it in the wider context of

Greek society it is important to point out that however intense the
struggle between the ‘few’ and the ‘many’ in the Greek states may
have been the essential line of demarcation within the polis was
between the citizens and the non-citizens and the unfree beneath
them. The community of the classical polis no matter how internally
class divided was erected above an enslaved workforce which
underlay its whole structure. Slavery was not merely an economic
necessity; it was vital to the whole social and political life of the
citizenry. This accounts for the more intense development of slavery
in Athens than elsewhere in the Greek world. Since the humbler
citizens could not be fully exploited here because of Athenian
democracy, and It was not wise to put too much pressure on the
metics then it was necessary to rely on slave labour to a greater
degree. This explains the advance hand in hand of freedom and
slavery which has frequently puzzled students of Greek history. The
feature of Greek democracy also brings us to one of the major
criticisms of Athenian democracy where it is argued that Athenian
democracy was parasitic on slavery because the Athenian only had
the leisure to perform their political functions since they were
supported by the slaves. It is significant in this context that Athens
was the largest slaveholding state in classical Greece. Further, in one
of the Greek works demokratia is virtually equated with freedom and
contrasted with slavery. This unique freedom of the Greek citizens
was only possible because of the simultaneous existence of the slave.
The classical polis was based on a new conceptual discovery of
liberty, made possible by the systematic institution of slavery. The
full citizen could now stand out sharply against the background of
slave labourers. The humbler citizens of the Greek polis may have
managed to prevent their own exploitation in their democracies but
they succeeded in preserving their own freedom only at the cost of
the slave.

We may end this discussion of Greek society, economy and polity by

looking at the ideology of slavery: what was the attitude of
contemporary Greeks to the institution of slavery? Although the
average citizen gave no serious thought to the matter, they generally
believed that slaves as a class were inferior beings, inferior by their
very nature. Slavery also had permeated their existence to such an
extent and had been taken for granted so much that even these who
did not possess slaves looked anxiously forward in their utopian
dreams to the day when they too would be able to live off their
slaves. It is not surprising that a society which exploited slave labour
would not also produce a justification for its existence. The Greek
philosophers could not avoid discussing the question more seriously
than the common man but even they came up basically with mere
refinements of the popular attitude. Their poor attempts to come to
terms with it was perhaps their greatest failure.

Both Plato and Aristotle, two of the best-known Greek philosophers,

were derogatory about manual labour which they considered to be
only fit for slaves and barbarians. A theory of ‘natural slavery’ is
implicit throughout Plato’s work and he agreed in all essentials with
Aristotle’s argument. Aristotle provided the moral justification for
slavery when he argued that slavery was a natural institution and
therefore ‘good and just’. Since all men did not have rationality in
equal measure those who had less were intended by nature to be
slaves. Since such people were slaves by nature it was in their own
interest that they be enslaved and be subject to men who could
make the necessary moral judgements for them. Aristotle went on
further to categories all barbarians as slaves by nature. These views
indicate that underneath the writing of Greek philosophers on
slavery lay an openness about exploitation characteristic of any
society in which slavery and other forms of dependent labour are
widespread, an openness that required no justification, no ideology
of conquest or empire. In a passage in the Politics Aristotle included
among the reasons why statesmen must know the art of warfare her
states, “in order to become masters of those who deserve to be
enslaved”. After Aristotle no one else considered it necessary to
provide any further justification for the existence of slavery: no one
appeared to have any serious doubts about its validity as an
institution. But this takes care of the attitude of the slaveowners and
not the slaves. How did they perceive their situation? Unfortunately,
we have nothing that records the views of the slaves which was been
written by themselves. What we do have are the actions of the
slaves, their attempts to escape their slavery individually or
collectively.

The most widespread way of expressing resistance to slavery by the

slave was to run away. That this happened fairly often is clear from
the sources where fugitive slaves are almost an obsession and we
have the material remains of instruments devised to prevent such
light in the form of chains and metal collars. Slave owners were also
known to act collectively in order to track down their runaway slaves
and later on in Roman times they even engaged professional slave
catchers. Socrates states that the slave owners had security against
their slaves only as long as they had the collective backing of other
slave owners. It is clear that without this collective backing the slave
owner would live in the fear of the possibility of an uprising by his
slaves. However, given the odds against the slave of being ethnically
identifiable and the resources that could be deployed against him,
individual flight could end in the slave being tracked down and
severely punished. Collective action on the part of the slaves also
took place usually in the context of a civil war. It was not uncommon
for the respective parties to appeal to the slaves for help. The most
famous example that we have is that of 20,000 Athenian slaves who
felt, at Spartan urging, in the final years of the Peloponnesian war
but they ended up as Theban booty, after Sparta herself was
defeated by Thebes in 371 BC rather than as a freeman8. Slave
revolts were not common in Greek history during the classical period
even though the Greeks were conscious of the possibility of their
occurrence. Partly this way has been because of the heterogenous
origins of the slaves coming as they did from areas as far apart as
Southern Russia, Asia Minor, Egypt, Libya and Sicily. The need for
choosing slaves of different nationalities and language were
recognized and stressed by Greek and Roman writers as an
indispensable means of preventing slave revolts9. The helots of
Sparta on the other hand were largely Messenians and therefore of a
single ethnic stock. Consequently, they presented a perpetual threat
to their masters. It appears however that the terrible conditions
prevailing in the Athenian silver mines at Laurium led to two
attempts by the slaves to revolt in the second half of the 2nd century
BC. It is clear therefore that the institution of slavery continued only
through the use of force used individually, collectively and by the

8
M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery, Modern Ideology, p.112
9
G.E.M Coix, Class Struggles in the Ancient World, p.146
state first to create slaves and then to keep them where they were:
as laboring masses denied of any rights whatsoever.

________________________________________________________