Enslaving Barbaroi and The Athenian Ideology

Franz Steiner Verlag
Enslaving "Barbaroi" and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery

Author(s): Vincent J. Rosivach
Source: Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 48, H. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1999), pp. 129-157
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436537
Accessed: 29-10-2015 10:10 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Franz Steiner Verlag is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte
Geschichte.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Thu, 29 Oct 2015 10:10:26 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
ENSLAVINGBARBAROIAND THE ATHENIAN IDEOLOGY
OF SLAVERY
Slavery defines both the economic and the social relations of slave to
master and, more generally, the place of slaves in society as a whole. The
argument of this essay is that chattel slavery, as it existed in fifth- and fourth-
century Athens, was based on the enslavement of non-Greek barbaroi, and that
certain aspects of the ideology underlying the social relations of Athenian
master and slave can be traced to this fact. In particular,this essay will examine
how fifth- and fourth-century Athenians instinctively viewed barbaroi, and
hence their slaves, categorically not only as fundamentally different, but also in
very specific ways as essentially inferior to themselves.
1. Greeks Enslaving Greeks?
The overwhelming impression which we get from our fifth- and fourth-
century sources is that Athenian chattel slaves were barbaroi, either born
outside of Greece or born in Greece of forbearers born outside of Greece.
Slaves, for example, characteristically had names which marked them as bar-
baroi, either ethnic names denoting place of origin, typical "native" names like
the Anatolian Manes, or names describing typically non-Greek physical charac-
teristics, notably the red-headed Pyrrhias and blond Xanthias.1 Indeed, - what
is most importantfor our purposes here - such ethnic labels were often used to
denote a "typical slave" or even as virtual synonyms for "slave," as when
Euripides' Pheres asks Admetus if he thinks he is some "Lydian or Phrygian
bought for silver" (Alc. 675-676), or when Aristophanes' chorus in the Birds
calls one of its political targets a Phrygian to imply that he is a slave.2 Such
examples could be easily multiplied, for it is clear from our sources that when
Athenians thought about slaves they habitually thought about harbaroi, and
when they thought about barbaroi they habitually thought about slaves. Signif-
icantly, by contrast, there is not one Athenian slave in either the literary or the
epigraphical record who can be securely identified as of Greek origin.3
I Cf. Strab. 7.3.12. On slave names in general see M. Lambertz, Die griechi.schen Sklaven-
namen (Wien 1907).
2 Av. 762; cf. the parallel "slave and Carian" at 764.
3 A "Greek" name does not prove that its bearer was of Greek stock since barbaroi slaves
were sometimes also given such names, e.g. [Fl]elaicrpauo; Kdp ("Attic Stelai" 1.9),
Historia, Band XLVIII/2 (1999)

? Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, Sitz Stuttgart
130 VINCENTJ. RosIVACH
And yet, despite the general impression that Athenian slavery was based on
the wholesale enslavement of non-Greeks, current orthodoxy, it is fair to say,
holds that a significant partof the slave population in Greece, including Athens,
was made up of Greeks enslaved by other Greeks in their frequent wars, and
indeed that it was such regular practice for Greeks to enslave other Greeks
whom they had defeated in battle, that we should assume it happened even on
those occasions when the literary accounts do not mention it.4 The issue is not a
trivial one, for if large numbersof Greeks were enslaved by their fellow Greeks,
this would inevitably affect how society in general thought about slaves and
slavery,5 and it could not be claimed, as this essay does, that the ideology of
Athenian slavery was based on the enslavement of non-Greeks. Nor can the
matter be easily dismissed, for there is in fact a not unsubstantial body of
evidence showing Greeks, including Athenians, enslaving other Greeks whom
they had defeated in war. This evidence, however, is not as straightforwardas is
sometimes assumed.
[IoXvX;[?]vEMaKce66v (ibid. 2.79-80), [Av]Ty?ve; [T]6'yvo; ep&v (ibid. 7.3-4) (W.

K. Pritchett,"The Attic Stelai, PartI", Hesp. 22 [1953] 225-299). Of the eight slaves
listed on the "Stelai"with "Greek"names and no indicationof ethnic origin (Pritchett,
"The Attic Stelai, Part II", Hesp. 25 [1956] 280 n. 35), with the exception of Pistos -
actually a typical slave name -, all come from Adeimantus'household;the absence of
ethnics is probablyan accidentof cataloguingandnot an indicationthatthese slaves were
"Greeksor bornin Greece"(PritchettII, 281); Meocr9vto;avep (10.9) is "a man named
Messenios"(cf., e.g., O'aM 6v9p, 10.7), not "a Messenianman."
4 For the claim thatwarfarewas a principalsourceof slaves, besides the standardworkson
Greek slavery see also e.g. G. Glotz, Le travaildans la Grece ancienne (Paris 1920) 80.
The claim, when made, is never based on a systematicanalysis of the ancientevidence,
butis advancedon a priori grounds,e.g. that"intheoryconquesteliminatedthe distinction
between slaves and free men. Upon falling into the enemy's hands [prisoners-of-warl
were all deprivedof theirpreviousstatus"andleft at the mercyof theircaptorsto dispose
of them as they wished (Y. Garlan, War in the Ancient World: A Social History [New
York 1975170-72, furtherelaboratedin Slavery in AncientGreece, tr. J. Lloyd [Ithaca/
London 1988] 47-48). SimilarlyW. K. Pritchett,The GreekState at WarV (Berkeley/
Los Angeles/Oxford 1991) 224: "... other examples are included where captives
are mentionedas partof the plunder,but we are not given the ultimatedispositionof the
booty. Ransoming,in turn,was almost always a privateaffair and relatively infrequent.
We infer, therefore,that the appropriateclassification is for enslavement."In fact the
evidence for prisonerscapturedin battlebeing freedthroughransomor some othermeans
is far more extensive thanthat for theirbeing enslaved, as Pritchett'sown discussion of
ransoming,etc. (V, 245-312) amply demonstrates.See furtherbelow, notes 32, 34, 35
and 42.
5 Thus, for example, it is often assertedthat the Greekemphasison the alienness of their
slaves was a defense mechanism,as it were,helpingthempsychologicallyto deny the real
possibility thatthey themselvesmight be enslaved;P. Cartledge,The Greeks:A Portrait
of Self and Others (Oxford 1993) 41-42, is typical: "Fear of enslavement ... was an ever-
pressing motive for 'othering' the barbarianfor the majorityof ordinaryfree, citizen
Greeks."
EnslavingBarbaroiand the AthenianIdeology of Slavery 131
To begin, some distinctions would be useful. First, since we are concerned

with Athenian views we may limit ourselves to fifth- and fourth-centuryevents
and leave aside the enslavements carried out later by Hellenistic kings. We may
also by and large ignore events in Sicily, both because they are not really
relevant to Athenian experience, and because the island's geographical isola-
tion and the strong power of Syracuse and Carthagecreated circumstances quite
different from those which prevailed in the Aegean basin. Next - and very
importantly - following Ducrey, we may contrast the treatment of the inhabit-
ants of conquered cities with that of soldiers taken in battle.6 Below is a list, in
roughly chronological order, of all the fifth- and fourth-centuryinstances I have
found of people said to have been enslaved7 when the city they were in was
captured (parentheses indicate threats of enslavement which were not carried
out).
city enemy date earliest source
1. Caria Athenians 470s Vitruv. 1.1.5
2. Eion Athenians mid-470s Thuc. 1.98.1
3. Scyros Athenians mid-470s Thuc. 1.98.2
4. Mycenae Argives 468 Diod. 11.65.5
5. (Oeniadae Messenians 454?8 Paus. 4.25.2)
6. Chaeroneia Athenians 447 Thuc. 1.1 13.1
7. Epidamnus Corcyra 435 Thuc. 1.29.5
8. Amphil. Argos9 Amphilochians 430 Thuc. 2.68.7
9. (Mytilene Athenians 427 Thuc. 3.28.1, 36.2)
10. Plataea Peloponnesians 427 Thuc. 3.68.2-3
11. Corcyra1o Corcyraeans 425 Thuc. 4.48.4
12. Thyreae Athenians 424 Diod. 12.65.9
13. Torone Athenians 422 Thuc. 5.3.4
14. (Amphipolis Athenians 422 Thuc. 5.9.10)
15. Scione Athenians 421 Thuc. 5.32.1
16. Melos Athenians 416/5 Thuc. 5.116.4
6 P. Ducrey, Le traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Gr&ceantique des origines a

la conquete romaine (Paris 1968) 51; the two groups form the subjects of Ducrey's
second (capturedsoldiers) and thirdchapters(inhabitantsof conqueredcities).
7 I.e. actuallyenslaved. I have not includedinstanceswherethe languageof "enslavement"
is used metaphorically(e.g. Thuc. 1.98.4, wherei8oukdti1 describesNaxos forced back
into the Delian confederacy).
8 The date is uncertain,but Pausanias' account suggests that it was not long after the
Atheniansinstalledthese Messeniansin Naupactusin 456-55 (on the latterdate see A. W.
Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides I [Oxford 1945] 304, 404-405).
9 The Amphilochianswho recoveredArgos enslaved the Ambraciotswho had seized the
town from them.
10 The victors in the stasis killed theirenemies andenslavedthe women caughtin theirfort.
17. Hyccara Athenians 415 Thuc. 6.62.3

18. lasos Peloponnesians 412 Thuc. 8.28.4
19. (Methymna Peloponnesians 406 Xen. HG 1.6.14)
20. lasos Peloponnesians 405 Diod. 13.104.7
21. Cedriae Peloponnesians 405 Xen. HG 2.1.15
22. (Athens Peloponnesians 404 Xen. HG 2.2.19-20)
23. Pharsalus Medius of 395 Diod. 14.82.5-6
Larissa
24. Pellana Arcadians 369 Diod. 15.67.2
25. Orchomenus Thebans 363 Diod. 15.79.5-6
26. very many cities Philip - Theop. 115 F 2711
27. Potidaea Philip 358 Diod. 16.8.5
28. Stageira Philip ? Plut. Alex. 7.2
29. (Delphi Phocaeans 357 Paus. 3.10.4)
30. Sestos Chares 353 Diod. 16.34.3
31. Thronion Onomarchus 353 Diod. 16.33.4
32. Olynthus Philip 348 Polyb. 9.28.2-3
33. Orchomenus Thebes 346 Dem. 19.325
34. Coroneia Thebes 346 Dem. 19.325
35. Crobyle/Tiristas Diopethes 342 [Dem.] 12.3
36. Thebes Alexander 335 Hyperides 6 17
37. Gryneium Parmenion 335 Diod. 17.7.9
We can eliminate several of these items either because their evidence is not
credible or because they do not actually involve the reduction of the populations
of the captured cities to chattel slavery. Thus we need not take seriously
Vitruvius' fanciful etiology of caryatids (item 1 above) from Caria, a ciuitas
Peloponnensis which the Athenians punished for medism by capturing the city,
slaying the men and enslaving the women. In the first capture of Iasos in 412
(item 18) it is clear from Thucydides' language that the Peloponnesians handed
over to Tissaphernes only the non-Greek military personnel whom they trapped
in the citadel, and that the rest of the town's inhabitants, other than being
plundered, were left alone.12 Similarly in the case of Epidamnus (item 7), only
11 115 F 27 is Polybius' summary(8.11.1-4) of the contentsof Theopompus'Philippica. In

a similarvein Dem. 9.26 speaksof Philip's destructionof Olynthus,Methone,Apollonia
and thirty-twocities on the Thraciancoast, thoughnot specifically of his enslavementof
theirpopulations.
12 Iasos was the base for Tissaphernes'enemy Amorges(Thuc.8.28.2). The Peloponnesians
incorporatedAmorges' Greek mercenariesinto their own army (8.28.3) before turning
over the 1r6Xkta.aanddv6pdiro&aicivrcaKcai8oia tcaiei5i9epa to Tissaphernesat one
state~rper head: the collocation indicatesthat the dv5p6no6a were in the n6ktcrpa.For
n6klasia here = "citadel"see RE 9. 1, col. 788.
the Leucadian and Ambraciot reinforcements13were put on sale (Oco86m5at),

but the Epidamnians themselves were left alone. In the case of Chaeroneia (item
6) the words xa't dv8pawtoiaavms occur in a minorityof the best manuscriptsof
Thucydides, and even Gomme,'4 who accepts the reading, explains it as refer-
ring only to the oligarchs who had controlled the city, not to the whole popula-
tion. Finally, Diodorus' assertion that the Argives captured Mycenae by siege
and enslaved its inhabitants (item 4) is contradicted by Pausanias (7.25.5-7),
who says that the Argives were unable to take Mycenae because of its strong
fortifications, although the Mycenaeans eventually abandoned the city them-
selves when their food ran out and fled to other communities as refugees.'5
An initial reading of the remaining items suggests that when a city was
captured and its inhabitantsenslaved, it was normal practice'6 to kill the men of
military age caught in the city and to enslave only the women and children.17
This was the fate which the Athenians initially voted to impose upon Mytilene
(item 9), and which they carried out against Scione (item 15), Melos (item 16),
and up to a point Torone (item 13)18during the Peloponnesian War. It was also
the fate of the defenders of Plataea (item 10), of the losers in the Corcyraean
stasis (item 11), of Iasos in 409 (item 20), possibly of Orchomenus in 363 (item
25)19 and of Sestos (item 30), as well as the fate which the citizens of Oeniadae
sought to avoid, according to Pausanias, when they surrenderedtheir city to the
Messenians (item 5), and the threat of the Phocaeans against Delphi, again
according to Pausanias (item 29).20 In this regard it is probably significant that
in Attic tragedy we meet only female prisoners of war2' but never men. Indeed,
13 Cf. Thuc. 1.26. 1. The Corinthians who were captured in the garrison were taken prisoner.
After the simultaneous naval battle the Corinthians were also taken prisoner but the non-
Corinthians were slain.
14 Gomme, Commentary (as in n. 8) I, 338.
15 Pausanias says that some of the refugees went to Cleonae, more than half to Macedonia,
and the rest to Ceryneia. A mass migration to Macedonia seems improbable, but it is quite
believable that more than a few refugees escaped the control of the Argives and fled to
Ceryneia and Cleonae.
16 And sanctioned by Homeric precedent, e.g. II. 4.237-40 (cf. 3.300-301), 9.593-594; Od.
9.40-41. Of course these women were taken into the domestic service of their vanquishcrs,
not sold into chattel slavery as the victims of fifth- and fourth-century warfare would be.
17 Thuc. 5.32.1 is typical: n?K-relvav Toi;bqlCovTac, ntcaxa 5e KcaiyuvadiKaz;flv6pot66toav.
Curiously, we are never told what happened to the men who were too old to fight.
18 The women and children of Torone were enslaved and the men sent back to Athens.
19 Pausanias (9.15.3), however, says rather that the Thebans drove the Orchomenians out as
refugees (rotoiotiv avaatdxovm ?K [Ti;xo@pa).
20 Although it is possible that for these two last items Pausanias or his source (Ephorus?)
relied on the literary stereotype of the captured city rather than on an accurate knowledge
of what really happened.
21 Most notably in Euripides' Troiades, Andromache and Hecuba, but see also Soph. Trach.
134 VINCENTJ. ROSIVACH
the image of enslaved women and children remained a powerful one throughout
our period, witness Demosthenes' and Dinarchus' tales of women enslaved at
the fall of Olynthus22 and Dinarchus' account (1.23) of Theban women and
children (but not men) distributed to the tents of the barbarians(sc. Macedoni-
ans) - shades of the fall of Troy!
In the case of Thebes (item 36), however, our sources specifically tell us
that the men who survived the battle as well as the women and children were
sold into slavery.23Now the enslavement of Thebes is part of a larger group, all
coming late in our period, and all but one clustered in one way or another around
Philip of Macedon, who began the series with Potidaea (item 27), perhaps
Stageira (item 28),24 and Olynthus (item 32). Others in this late group include
Orchomenus (item 33) and Coroneia (item 34) enslaved by Thebans under
Philip's sponsorship,Thebes herself (item 36) enslaved by Philip's son, Gryneium
(item 37) enslaved by one of his generals, and Crobyle and Tiristas (item 35),
two cities allied to Philip enslaved by Diopethes most likely in retaliation for
Philip's enslavement of Potidaea and Olynthus. In this regard we may recall
that Polybius could characterize the whole of Theopompus' Philippica as, inter
alia, an account of how Philip "enslaved ( 4iv8pantotaEvov) very many
cities" (item 26). Although it is only in the case of Thebes that we are specifically
told that the men of military age were enslaved in addition to the women and
children, we may infer that this was also the case in the other items in this group
from the absence of any indication to the contrary.25It is importantto remember,
however, that Philip was Macedonian, and thus this late group of enslavements
for which he set the pattern cannot be considered indicative of earlier common
Hellenic practice. Finally in this late group we may include Onomarchus at
Thronion (item 31), although there is no clear connection here with Philip.
242-243, 298-302, and the extended description of a city's capture at Aesch. Sep-
tem 321-368.
22 Dem. 19.192-198 (cf. Diod. 16.55.3ff.), 305-306, 309; Dinarch.1.23.
23 Arr. 1.9.7; the numbersof killed (6,000) and enslaved (30,000) given by Plut. Alex. 7.2
and Ael. VH 13.7 also indicate that many adult males were enslaved, in additionto the
women and children.
24 Unless they simply became refugees when their city was razed. Plutarch's language
(Alex. 7.2) is confused:on the one handhe says thatPhilipmadeStageiracivdacxazov (i.e.
turnedits citizens into refugees),butthenhe says thatAlexanderrestoredTot; 6tacpiy6v-
Ta;i -oXe3ovra tv v ixtoxv.
25 Since Diodorus in particulardoes distinguishelsewhere between men being killed and
women and children enslaved (13.104.7, 16.34.3) an argumentfrom silence here does
have merit.Plutarch'sroi; bouXAvovra;S r6v roXITt6v(Stageira,item 28) andDiodorus'
masculine TO-V; Evoticoi5vta;(Olynthus, item 32) are also easier to construe if the
menfolkwere also enslaved(Aeschin.2.156 mentionsmen capturedat Olynthusworking
in chains [8&-8eiivoux]in Philip's vineyard,but these were probablyAthenianprisoners
being held for ransom[cf. Aeschin. 2.15-16], and not Olynthians).
Of the remainingitems, when the Lacedaemoniansrefused their allies' call to

enslave first the Methymnians(item 19) and then the Athenians (item 22),26 it is
unclear whether they would have killed the men first or enslaved them with the
women and children had they acceded to their allies' demands.27Similarly there
is no way of knowing how real the threat of enslavement was against which,
according to Thucydides, Brasidas warned the Amphipolitans(item 14). Signifi-
cantly, the enslavements of Eion (item 2), Hyccara(item 17) and Cedriae(item 2 1)
were all carried out against non-Greeks,28and the Thessalian Dolopes of Scyros
(item 3), the Ambraciots who had seized Amphilochian Argos (item 8), and the
Thessaliansof Pharsalus(item 23) were all fromthe fringesof the Hellenic world.29
In sum then, all but two of the items in our list fall into one of four broad
categories:
1. (the typical earlier case) execution of Greek men of military age and enslave-
ment of women and children;
2. (beginning with Philip) enslavement of Greek men, women and children;
3. imprecise threats never carried out;
4. enslavement of non-Greeks or of Greeks from the fringes of the Hellenic
world.30
The overall picture that emerges from our survey of captured and enslaved
cities is thus quite clear: Greeks, including Athenians, were not reluctant to
enslave Greek women and children taken in the towns they captured from each
other, but until late in our period the adult citizen males caught in these cities
were typically killed, not enslaved.31 The capture of Greek cities was thus a
26 More precisely, according to Xenophon, the allies called upon Spartans to ceatpEiiv
Athens (2.2.19), but the Spartans said that they would not av6pacno6teiv the city.
27 Though in the event, in the case of Methymna, they did sell the Athenian garrison along
with the Methymnian slaves on the following day.
28 Eion: Mri6wo ?%X6vtwv (Thuc. 1.98.1); Hyccara: n6kuaota Xuccavuc6v (Thuc. 6.62.3);
Cedriae: it4oapIapos (Xen. HG 2.1.15).
29 On Amphilochian Argos, Thucydides tells us that the Ambraciots enlisted rcovPaplkpcv
noXkoiv; for their initial campaign against Amphilochian Argos (2.68.1); that the inhabit-
ants of Argos were themselves originally barbaroi who adopted the Greek tongue from
the Ambraciots whom they invited to settle with them (2.68.5); and that the rest of the
Amphilochians were still barbaroi (2.68.6; cf. 3.112.7).
30 The two items which do not fit into any of these four categories are Nicias' capture of
Thyreae (item 12) and the Arcadians' capture of Pellana (item 24), two small towns not
likely to have yielded a large number of slaves.
31 Of course captured slaves, male and female, were regularly sold as booty; so e.g. the
Corcyraean slaves sold by the Corinthians in 433 (Thuc. 1.55.1) and the Methymnian
slaves sold by Callicratidas in 406 (Xen. HG 1.6.14-15). When Phormio brought roi6; 'r
t?0EpoVS; x6v aiXiaXcrov to Athens in 429 (Thuc. 2.103.1) we may assume the
slaves whom he captured were sold on the spot; cf. Lysander releasing all free persons
after his capture of Lampsacus in 405 (Xen. HG 2.1.19).
136 J. ROSIVACH
VINCENT
very real source of female and child slaves, though its volume should not be
overestimated.32 We shall return to these captured Greek women and children
later in this essay. For now, however, we would emphasize that, at least before
the time of Philip, the enslavement of captured Greek cities does not appear to
have contributed significantly to the supply of adult male slaves except insofar
as child captives eventually grew into adults. The enslavement of Greek males
from captured cities begun by Philip thus represented a significant departure
from earlier Hellenic practice.33 Synchronic treatments of slavery and warfare
which ignore this important difference between earlier and later practice34will
not accurately reflect fifth- and fourth-century Greek, and specifically Atheni-
an, practice.35
One would also expect that plundering raids on enemy territory would have
netted some captives, including males, who were then sold into slavery, but the
32 The numberof known instancesof andrapodismosis not thatgreat,and thereis no reason

to believe that there were many others which our sources fail to mention. General
statementsthat it is just to enslave an enemy city (Xen. Mem. 4.2.15; cf. 2.2.2, Dissoi
logoi 2.5) or injunctionsthat Greeks should not enslave Greeks (Plato, Rep. 469B, Xen.
Ages. 7.6) tell us only thatsuch enslavementwas a crediblepossibility, but not how often
it happenednor whetheror not the males of militaryage would be slain first. Indeed, not
every capturedcity was enslaved (cf. Methymna[Xen. HG 1.6.14-15], Lampsacus[Xen.
HG 2.1.19], where we are specifically told the free citizens were let go). Further,only
residents actually caught in a captured town were enslaved or slain; the continued
existence of some towns aftertheirandrapodismos(e.g. Iasos [RE9. 1, col. 768], Gryneium
[RE 7.2, col. 1901) shows that a significant number of residents evaded capture and
returnedto the town afterthe victoriousenemy had departed.
33 This "innovation"of Philip is not often noted; an exception (somewhat sensational and
not very detailed) is C. W. Weber, Sklaverei im Altertum(Dusseldorf/Wien 1981) 140-
141.
34 E.g. the "statistics"in Y. Garlan,"War,Piracyand Slavery in the GreekWorld",in M. I.
Finley (ed.), Classical Slavery (London 1987) 9. SignificantlyGarlanhimself admits (p.
13) that he is unable to accountfor "theapparentcontrast"between what he sees as "the
frequent... enslavementof Greeksas a consequenceof war"and "therarityof slaves of
Greekorigin"in our sources.
35 Three passages from Xenophon's Cyropaedeiaare often cited to show that the enslave-
ment of capturedcities was the norm.At 7.5.73, afterthe captureof Babylon, Cyrussays:
voso; yap ?v l&aGtv avv6pcirnot; di&6; Ecartv, 6oav 7coXejgio?5vcov n6kt;6O.C, t6ov
0X6vt6,oveivat Kicai a' ac6aca tiv ?Vf inr6ket icait t xpPaxa, but as the context makes
clear, the Babylonianswill not be sold as chattel slaves but made to labor on the land to
benefit the Persian victors (cf. 7.5.72). Similarly at 4.2.26 (6 yap icparCov &ita 7cdvta
auvrpiaKc icait oi; divppa; Kaitxa; yuvaiKcat Kca't xp7wlata icat racjav TIv Xcopav)
the men andwomen will be used to workthe land (cf. iTaava triv Xopav) for the benefit of
the victors, not sold as slaves. At 3.3.45 when the Assyrian chief says that those who are
defeated 'aia cvaooiv; re icai c& ?a-ociov naivta d7copaikXovntv, it is clear from the
context thatthey will be killed (cf. &uoftviKov. earlier),not enslaved. The argumentof
7.5.73 was used in Aristotle's day (but not by Aristotle)to justify enslaving Greeks (Pol.
1255a6-7), but that was after Philip had takenup the practice.
Enslaving Barbaroi and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery 137
evidence for this is quite limited. Indeed, when our sources speak of &v6panio&a
captured in such raids it is usually impossible to tell whether these were already
slaves or free persons now reduced to slavery.36 The one clear case of a free
male enslaved in this manner is found in Dem. 57.18-20, where the speaker
claims that his father was captured in the Deceleian war and sold into Leucas,
remaining there long enough to pick up a foreign accent, before he was set free
and returned home through the agency of the actor Cleander.7 Andocides
(1.138) also speaks in general terms of "many" being captured by pirates
(ki,aC6nv)during the war and ending their lives as slaves, but it is unclear how
many were "many" or to whom they were enslaved.38 Agesilaus' raid against
Corinthian livestock and refugees in Peiraeum in 390 (Xen. HG 4.5.1-8),
Teleutias' attack on the Peiraeus and on shipping on the coast of Attica in 388
(Xen. HG 5.1.18-24) and Alexander of Pherae's forays in the Cyclades in 361
(Diod. 15.95. 1) may be other instances of this sort of raiding, but to judge from
the relative silence of our sources there were not many more, or at least not
many more with hauls large enough to merit notice.
In contrast to the inhabitants of captured cities or those caught in plunder-
ing raids, it appears to have been the normal practice for soldiers taken after a
battle to be held either for ransom39 to exert political pressure,40 or to be
exchanged for prisoners on the other side.41 Indeed, for the fifth and fourth
centuries I have found only four instances when we are told that Greek soldiers
were enslaved or "sold" by other Greeks after a regular battle42:
36 Thus Xen. HG 3.2.26 (Agis' raid in 399 on the territory of Olympia, which yielded
iirnpnokka pEv Krnvq, -6ntpnokka & 6v6pdro6a); Xen. HG 4.6.6 (Agesilaus' raid in
Arcarnania in 389, which captured dv5padio6a nrokkX);Meiggs-Lewis. GHP 51 (azv-
6pwro6a captured in an Athenian attack on the Megarid in 446).
37 It is unclear, however, whether he was already an adult when captured or a child who
grew up in captivity (note that he received his share of the family estate from his uncles
only when he returned, 57.19). It is also unclear how Cleander secured his release and
return. Perhaps Cleander's role was that of a "middleman" purchasing captives as a
speculative enterprise, then releasing them for a profit on receipt of ransom (see further
below. n. 45).
38 The possibility that there were sold to non-Greeks is not be excluded.
39 On the ransoming of prisoners see Ducrey, Traitenient (as in n. 6) 238-245; on ransoming
and other forms of release of captives see Pritchett, Greek State (as in n. 4) V, 245-3 12.
40 So e.g. the Spartans captured on Sphacteria.
41 E.g. the exchange of Peloponnesians for Athenians in 429 (Thuc. 2.103.2) or the ex-
change of Lacedaemonians and Athenians mentioned in Androt. 324 F 44.
42 Pritchett, Greek State (as in n. 4) V, 226ff., also includes in his list of enslaved captives the
two hundred Athenians taken at Delium in 424/3 (Thuc. 4.100.5); the 5,000+ Peloponne-
sians said to have been captured in the Hellespont and sent to Athens by Alcibiades,
possibly in 408 (Athen. 535C); the 3,000 captured Lacedaemonians sent to Athens by
Chabrias in 376 (Dem. 20.77); and the 100+ Spartans and perioikoi captured by the
Arcadians and their allies in 365 (Xen. HG 7.4.27). In all these cases, however, the texts say
1. The Athenian and allied troops captured on their retreat from Syracuse:
Here Thucydides' narrative distinguishes between the troops under Nicias'
command, who were captured without a formal surrender, and were thus fair
game to be taken as private booty by individual Syracusans, and those who
came under the control of the Syracusan state (viz. those under Demosthenes'
command, who had formally surrendered,and those under Nicias' who had not
been taken by individuals).43 The prisoners in the first group were enslaved by
their individual captors, though many eventually fled their servitude and es-
caped to Catana (Thuc. 7.85.4). The soldiers in the second group (those under
the control of the Syracusan state) were initially imprisoned in the quarries at
Syracuse (Thuc. 7.86.1-2). After some seventy days the Syracusans "sold"
(dn'Sovto) the prisoners in this second group who had come from Athens'
allies in Greece and the Aegean, but the Athenians themselves and the western
Greeks who had joined them were kept in the quarries, where they remained
under harsh conditions for a total of eight months (Thuc. 7.87.2-3), after which
the survivors were apparently ransomed and released.44 Since Thucydides'
narrative clearly implies that the fate of the prisoners whom the Syracusans
"sold" was meant to be milder than that of the Athenians and their western
collaborators, who were kept in the quarries, we may conclude that they were
not sold into permanent slavery. Rather such "sales" (both here and elsewhere)
should be seen as part of the process of ransom, the prisoners who were "sold"
becoming the temporary property of "middlemen" who hoped to turn a profit
from the ransoms they might bring.45
only thatthe men were takenprisoner,andthereis no reasonto believe thatthey were then
enslaved.The Athenianprisonerstakenat Deliumwerealmostcertainlynotsold into slavery
butwereratheramongthe prisonersstill heldby the Boeotiansafterthe peaceof 421 (Thuc.
5.35.5; see furtherA. W. Gomme,A Historical Commentaryon ThucydidesIII [Oxford
1956] 571). As for Alcibiades'andChabrias'captives,if they were to be sold into slavery,
why bothertransportingsuchlargenumbersto Athensratherthanselling themon the spot?
43 On the differentstatusof the two groupssee furtherA. W. Gomme,A. Andrewesand K.
J. Dover, A Historical Commentaryon ThucydidesIV (Oxford 1970) 460.
44 This is the argumentof D. H. Kelley, "WhatHappenedto the AtheniansCapturedin
Sicily?", CQ n.s. 20 (1970) 127-131.
45 Such "middlemen"appearin the accountof the AthenianNicostratusat [Dem.] 53.6-11.
Nicostratuswas captured,apparentlyin 368, by an Aeginitantriremeandtakento Aegina,
wherehe was sold (ixpairT), andeventuallyallowed by his purchasersto go to Athensto
raise money for his ransom(53.6). Nicostratussummarizeshis situationas an exampleof
the general rule: oi voto KCXo1.c0lv
TOuO XtVGag9VOU ?K &v ItoXEgiowv etvat r6v
Xi.iiivTa, eav r
gh dino8t86& XTa pa (53.1 1), where the "middleman" who purchased the
prisoner(toi) Xcaapgvou)is distinguishedfromthe enemy (Xx6~vnoXEgtiov)who captured
him, and where the object of the transactionis not permanentservitudebut ransom(taz
Anothersuch "middleman"wouldbe the Herodeswho sailed fromMytilenewith
XioTpa).
some slaves (av8pdno8a) to set them free (dnoXio6crov)in Aenos, presumably on payment
EnslavingBarbaroiandtheAthenianIdeologyof Slavery 139
2. At Anab. 7.2.6 Xenophon tells how Aristarchus, the Spartan harmost of

Byzantium, sold (a'nFc'oto)some four hundred of the Ten Thousand who did
not vacate the city when ordered to (cf. 7.1.36). Since Aristarchus was acting
here in the interests of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus,who wanted the survi-
vors of the Ten Thousand out of Asia as quickly as possible (cf. 7.1.2), it is at
least possible that the Greeks were sold to him (as the military prisoners taken
in lasos were sold to Tissaphernes in 41246), and not put on the open market.
Recalcitrant mercenaries, one might note, are so unsuitable for the relatively
unsupervised kind of slavery practiced by the Greeks that it is hard to believe
anyone would purchase them for that purpose.47
3. In 365, Xenophon tells us (HG 7.4.26), the Eleans captured a detachment
of Elean rebellious exiles and the Arcadians who were supporting them. The
Eleans slew the exiles and sold (dng8ovto) the foreigners.
4. In 346 the Arcadians and Eleans defeated a force of Elean exiles; the
Arcadians sold their share of the prisoners as booty (kXa(pp6pi1aav),while the
Eleans slew theirs (Diod. 16.35.5).
With these four exceptions, we have no evidence that Greek soldiers who
had been taken prisoner after a battle were enslaved during our period.48This,
however, is just what we should expect if we consider the practical problems
faced by the potential owners of such slaves. In contrast to debt bondsmen of an
earlier age, who, bereft of economic resources, had little choice but to accept
their servitude if they wished to survive, prisoners of war had every reason to
flee their captors if they could, and returnto the farms or shops which they still
had at home. Prisoners of war being held for ransom or exchange were regularly
kept in bonds to prevent their escape;49 bonds50 and close surveillance would
of ransomby theirThracianguarantorswho also sailed with him (Antiph.5.20). See also

above, n. 37. It is sometimesasserted,solely on the basis of [Dem.] 53.11 quotedabove,
that Athenianswho could not repay their ransomersbecame their slaves, but the Greek
does not specificallysay this,andit is difficultto imagineAthenianlaw andAtheniancourts
surrenderingan Atheniancitizen to be enslaved,especially when, as here, the ransomers
to whomhe would be enslavedwere foreigners(tgvot [53.101,possibly metics). I suspect
that Nicostratus'problemwas ratherthat if he failed to repay his ransomerhe might be
subject to summaryarrestand imprisonmentfor default, possibly by the procedureof
apog6ge (cf. dy&ytjio;,53.1 1), thoughthe full sense of [Dem.] 53.11 is still unclear.
46 Thuc. 8.28.4, on which see our earlierdiscussion above.
47 They could well find their bravadodiminished, however, if Pharnabazusfollowed a
common enough Persianpracticeand sent themoff to a distantsatrapyof the empire.
48 One might wonder,however,even aboutthe Arcardianscapturedin 365 (item 3), whether
they were actuallyenslaved or releaseddirectlyor indirectlyfor ransom;cf. the discus-
sion above of the verb denet5ovto at Thuc. 7.87.3.
49 E.g. [Dem.] 53.8, Aeschin. 2.156 (on which see above, n. 25).
50 Cf. Hector imagining the Greeks, whom he expects to capture, in bonds (8o9plot)
workingthe Phrygians'fields ([Eur.]Rhes. 74-75. On the boundLacedaemonianswork-
have been all the more necessary for prisoners who had been enslaved, and thus
had no hope of eventual freedom and so all the more reason to flee if they could,
as the Athenians fled from their captors in Sicily. And yet, significantly,
constant supervision and chains were not a part of the day-to-day reality of
Athenian slavery, at least as we know it from our sources. Given how hard it
would be to prevent enslaved adult Greek males from escaping,51 it should not
surprise us that the few enslaved adult Greek males we meet in our fifth- and
fourth-century sources were all kept overseas at a great distance from home.52
The Greeks, at least as far back as the Homeric poems, regularly enslaved
only the women and children taken in cities which they had captured. Such a
bias in favor of women and children slaves is characteristic of most slave-
holding societies, at least before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade, accord-
ing to Orlando Patterson, who notes that "women and children were easier to
take than men; they were also easier to keep and to absorb in the community."53
In the case of the Greeks, on the simplest level, women and children often did
the same work in poorer households that slaves did in wealthier ones, easing
their absorption. We should also remember more generally how little Greek
males typically thought of women and children in their own right. Greek men
owed their place in civil society to their citizen status, but the place of women
and children depended upon their membership in an oikos headed by a male.
Women and children victims of andrapodismos, however, were "displaced
persons," having lost their oikos, which ceased to exist with the death of the
adult males who had led it. From the Greek point of view these women and
children belonged literally nowhere until they were incorporatedas slaves into
the oikoi of their new masters. This marginalization of captive women and
children, I would suggest, had the effect of diminishing their "Greekness,"as it
were, and making it that much easier psychologically to enslave them.54 It is
ing the fields of the Tegeans (Hdt. 1.66) see A. H. Jackson,"Some Recent Workon the
Treatmentof Prisonersof War",Talanta2 (1970) 40 n. 13.
51 In saying this I do not mean to suggest that barbaroiwere "by nature"more tolerantof
slavery thanGreekswere, only thatthey were moreeasily socialized into acceptingtheir
slavery since distance from home and the alien environmentin which they found them-
selves combinedto make escape practicallyimpossible.
52 Thus the Atheniansand theirallies in Sicily; the mansold into Leucas.Whatis trueabout
Greece is true about slave-holdingsocieties in general.In his wide-rangingcomparative
study, Slaveryand Social Death (Cambridge,MA 1982) 106, OrlandoPattersonprotests
against"the frequentand wholly erroneousassumptionthatthe fate of most prisonersof
warwas enslavement"andattributesthe comparativeraritywith whichadultmale warriors
were enslaved even in pre-modernsocieties to the practical difficulties involved in
controllingthem.
53 Patterson,Slavery(as in n. 52) 120-121.
54 The same will also be a fortiori true of Greek women and children kidnappedand
enslaved by "pirates,"especially since their true identities would have been almost
impossibleto establish.
perhaps not surprising then that while we hear several times throughout our
period of Greek women and children being enslaved after the capture of their
cities, the only identifiably Greek women whom we see actually in slavery were
captured with the fall of Olynthus in 348 and Thebes in 335, when - unusually
- it suited the interests of our anti-Macedonian sources to emphasize that these
particularwomen were Greek.55
Women slaves are thus easy to explain. However, if we are to judge from
our literary sources, adult male slaves were at least as important as female
slaves in the developed slave regime of fifth- and fourth-centuryAthens.56 And
yet, as the preceding discussion has shown, warfare between Greeks was not a
significant potential source of adult male slaves of the classic sort (as opposed
to captives held for ransom or reasons of state) until the mid-fourth century,
well after the classic slave regime was firmly established at Athens; and even
then legislation sponsored by Lycurgus apparently forbade Athenians from
purchasing as slaves free persons captured in war,57suggesting that the practice
still met with disapproval.58In other words, the structures of Athenian chattel
slavery, including a significant role for adult male slaves, were already fully
developed in the fifth century, when our written sources first appear, a century
or so before the widespread enslavement of adult Greek males by other Greeks.
We must conclude then that these structures and their attendant ideology
emerged in an environment where Athenians were enslaving someone other
than their fellow Greeks, namely barbaroi.
55 For sources see above, n. 22.

56 Indeed, when our sources speak in general terms of "slaves," they usually mean male, and
not female, slaves. The practice reflects both the attitude of male dominance typical of
Athenians and the importance of males in their fully developed slave regime.
57 The law may in fact be a reaction to Philip's "innovation" in enslaving the free Greeks of
Olynthus and elsewhere (cf. R. Schlaifer, "Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to
Aristotle", HSCP 47 [1936] 188). The law is described by [Plut.] de vit. X orat. 842A:
4s6&vi e,Eitval 'At57vaiwv pq& r6v oiKo-6vo. vAiOvrjatv ?Vt?uepov Cr6va npiauat
c11i6o0Xvia ?Kr6v dxtaKoivowV aveD & Tfi toiv npoT6pot. 6EOT6too) yvpil;. The sense
is clear even if the text is somewhat corrupt (perhaps the simplest solution would be to
bracket [EXei3t_epov]): no Athenian citizen or metic may purchase a prisoner of war (EK
TC.VaXtOKOCvO.V) unless the previous owner guarantees that the captive was already a
slave. Such a law of general principle is fully consistent with Lycurgus' politics, and we
should reject Garlan's assertion (War [as in n. 341 16) that it refers only to prisoners from
a single (unnamed) city, on the pattern of a provision rendering null the enslavement of
each other's citizens included in a third-century treaty between Cnossos and Miletus.
58 A similar disapproval is also seen in Aristotle's discussion of slaves-according-to-con-
vention (Pol. 1255a4 discussed below).
142 VINCENTJ. RoSIVACH
2. Barbaroi and "Slaves-by-Nature"
A familiar part of the mental apparatus of the typical Greek was his
tendency to categorize all sorts of things into pairs of polar, either/or opposites
which were treated in practice as both incompatible (not A and B) and exhaus-
tive (either A or B). That all living things are either male or female is a rather
obvious example (one cannot be both male and female, but one must be one or
the other); that all men are either rulers or ruled is a perhaps less obvious one. In
this binary Greek way of thinking all humankind was divided into the two
mutually exclusive groups, oi '"EXXivc;(Greeks) and ot Pa'ppapot (non-
Greeks).59 Oi Ia'ppapot were not simply people who were not Greek, but
people who were fundamentally different from Greeks, who they therefore
could never become. To use contemporaryterminology, they were quintessen-
tially The Other.60
Further, when the Greeks spoke of oi Pdplapot they were usually not
thinking of a diverse collection of peoples each with different national charac-
teristics, all of whom happened not to be Greek, but ratherof a single, compre-
hensive group, all of whose members shared a common nature.61Just as all
Hellenes, despite their many differences, were all Greek in the same way, so
too, for the Greeks, all barbaroi were, despite their obvious diversity, all
barbaroi in the same way: what was true of one barbaros qua barbaros was
true of all barbaroi qua barbaroi.
In one sense it is easy to understand why the Athenians were willing to
make chattel slaves of barbaroi. Buying and selling, the fundamental transac-
tions of chattel slavery, treat the slave as property ratherthan person, and it is
clearly much easier psychologically to deny personhood to someone whom one
59 Cf. e.g. Thuc. 1.3.3, where Homericusage is contrastedwith the usage of Thucydides'
day: ov hi1vo08? kpakpoi; flpKE &wa TO6 g6& EXXnvad;ne, 6; goit 6oKit,
dv,rinakovi; ?v 6vo,uad7oKeicpim5at,where dvticakov 5;?v ovoga requiresthat the
two termsbarbaroiand Hellenes be both incompatibleand mutuallyexhaustive.
60 M.-F. Buslez perceptively observes that in the world as they imagined it the Greeks
placed themselves in the center and the barbaroiaboutthe periphery,and she notes that
this was "surtout ... [une] gdographie ... morale" wherein the Greeks fully participated in
the normativerationalityof the centerwhile the barbaroiwere seen as bothgeographical-
ly and behaviorally"excentriques"("Le peril barbare:une inventiondes Grecs?",in C.
Mosse [ed.], La Gre.ceancienne [Paris 1986] 286-288).
61 At Plt. 262d-e Platohas the Strangerprotestagainstthis way of thinking,which he says is
typicalof the Greeks(ca*?kuep oi nokXoitOV ?Vi68ie 8tavegoum); note especially roi;
dXXot y&ecitv (i.e. the non-Greeks) ... iprapov pn4 xXrlaet npoaretu6vr; avro 6 a
Taitylv giiav cXT-latv Kai yevos ?V a6T6o CAtvat nppOoSOK Ioav.
Cf. Cartledge,Greeks (as in n. 5) 45: "for is it not of the essence of 'othering'that the
'other' group is treatedcategoricallyand normativelyas an undifferentiatedhomogene-
ous mass ...?"
EnslavingBarbaroiandtheAthenianIdeologyof Slavery 143
has a priori defined as The Other than to deny it to someone one sees as
essentially like oneself. But this does not explain where the Athenians got the
idea of buying and selling barbaroi as slaves in the first place. There must have
been something in the way the Athenians perceived barbaroi that caused them
to see barbaroi as enslavable, and equally importantly to see chattel slavery
(ratherthan e.g. serfdom or helotage) as the appropriateform of their servitude.
One common approach to the question of chattel slavery in Athens is to
trace its development to the rise of Athenian democracy,62 and in this context
the enslaving of barbaroi is often linked to democratic ideology. Now it is true
that within the developed Athenian democracy the Athenian free citizen (eleu-
theros) defined himself in opposition to the slave on the one hand, and to the
barbaros on the other, and it is easy to see how the two terms blended into each
other, so that the monarchic regimes which the Athenians saw as characteristic
of barbaroi came to be thought of metaphorically as "slavish," and their
subjects as "slaves" of their rulers.This political way of thinking about barbaroi
certainly reenforced the Athenians' readiness to see all barbaroi as potential
slaves in the social and economic sense, but there is a considerable difference
between reenforcing preexisting biases and creating new institutions. After all,
the political "slavishness" of barbaroi was only a metaphor,and it is a good deal
easier to see how the Athenians came to think of all barbaroi metaphorically as
"slaves" of their rulers if they already had chattel slaves who were barbaroi63
62 Thus for example, M. I. Finley, AncientSlaveryand ModernIdeology (New York 1980)

87-90, emphasizesthe value which the free Athenianplaced on personalautonomyand
his consequentunwillingnessto workfor anotherunless compelledto do so. Accordingto
Finley, followed in varyingdegrees by G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the
AncientGreekWorldfromtheArchaicAge to theArabConquests(Ithaca1981) 141-144,
Garlan,Slavery (as in n. 4) 38-39, and E. M. Wood, Peasant-Citizenand Slave: The
Foundationof AthenianDemocracy (London/NewYork 1988) 61, 110-115, once So-
lon's seisakhtheia freed poorer Atheniansfrom the obligation to provide labor for the
elite, the elite were forced to find a new source of compelled labor, which they did in
chattel slavery. Long-standingeconomic regimes do not change quite that suddenly
however, and while the free citizen's unwillingnessto work for anothermay well have
been a factor in the continuationof slavery in fourth-centurydemocraticAthens it is far
from certain that the poorer segments of society already felt so strongly about their
personalautonomyin the pre-democraticsixth century.Indeed,it is equally possible that
the causal link was in the oppositedirection,and thatthe increasingnumberof slaves led
free citizens to look upon labor for others as demeaningbecause such work was being
done more and more by slaves.
63 As H. C. Baldryhas pointedout, the only barbaroimost Athenianswere ever likely to see
in theirlives were the slaves in theirmidst,and this constantassociationwith barbaroiin
the state of slavery "musthave played a large part in determiningthe ordinaryGreek's
idea of the barbarianand in encouraginghis contemptfor him as an inferiorbeing"(in 0.
Reverdin[ed.i, Grecs et barbares[= Entretienssur l'antiquiteclassique VIII] [Vandoeu-
vres/Geneve 1962174).
than it is to imagine them moving from metaphorto reality to establish a slave

regime based on the enslavement of barbaroi. Besides, the view of barbaroi as
"Islaves" of their rulers is a later development unlikely to antedate the Persian
Wars,64 while the Athenians were already enslaving barbaroi in the sixth
century, as we shall see below. More generally, it is an error to project any
metaphor which is the product of fifth-century democratic discourse back into
the mentalite of pre-democratic sixth-century Athens. For all these reasons
then, the Athenian views of the political condition of barbaroi cannot have
been the original reason why they thought them fit to be actually enslaved.
The question thus remains: What did the Athenians see in barbaroi so
different and, more importantly, so inferior to what they saw in themselves that
it made them ready to treat barbaroi as property and not as persons? To answer
this question we may begin with Aristotle's account of slavery in the Politics.
Speaking of this account in the Politics, Paul Cartledge observes that
"slavery was ... part of what Aristotle labeled the phaenomena in a special
sense, namely the received and reputable (endoxon) views of what was or
what ought to be the case as presented in philosophically acceptable form
by the prudent or reasonable Greek male citizen."65
The point deserves emphasizing. Aristotle did not spin a prescriptive ac-
count out of thin air, but ratherdescribed and explained the chattel slavery of
his own day as he and other Greeks understood it. His account is neither a
defense of nor an attack upon the institution of chattel slavery, as some would
have it. It is ratherquite simply, by and large, a more philosophically sophisti-
cated version of the cultural assumptions of his fellow members of the slave-
owning elite, and as such it can help us understandwhat these other Greeks also
thought about slavery and slaves.
In discussing slavery (Pol. 1253bl3-1255b40) Aristotle's principal focus is
on what he calls slaves-by-nature (q6ae& oAoQot),though he recognizes that
there was also "a kind of slave-according-to-convention" (-rt; Kca KLaXtc v6o,ov
8oi?Xo;), namely prisoners of war, whom he considers in an extended parenthe-
sis (1255a4_b4). These prisoners of war may have been the Greek women and
children regularly sold into slavery when their cities were captured and their
menfolk killed, but given Aristotle's relative lack of interest in women and
64 See E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford
1989) 16-17; and the discussionof Aeschylus' Persae in P. Georges,BarbarianAsia and
the Greek Experience (Baltimore/London 1994) 76-114.
65 P. Cartledge,"Likea Wormi' the Bud?A Heterologyof Classical GreekSlavery",G&R
40 (1993) 170-171, with n. 18 for supportingscholarship.The endoxa were, of course,
limited to the views of the elite; on the exclusion of the views of "thevulgarherd"see J.
Barnes,"Aristotleandthe Methodsof Ethics",Rev. int.phil. 34 (1980) 504, commenting
on Arist. EE 1214b34
children in general, it is more likely that they were the adult Greek males who,
as we saw from our historical survey, had only recently begun to be sold into
slavery by Philip and his imitators.66These newer, Greek slaves-according-to-
convention obviously troubled Aristotle since they did not fit into his assump-
tions about slaves-by-nature, and his discussion in the end seems to suggest,
without actually saying so, that slavery-according-to-convention is neither
beneficial nor just.67
Clearly slaves-according-to-convention were an aberration for Aristotle,
and outside of the parenthesis of 1255a4_b4his discussion assumes essentially
that all slaves are slaves-by-nature.68 It is, however, Aristotle's assumptions
about the slave-by-nature which will concern us here not only because we have
reason to believe that they are typical of Greek attitudes on slavery, but more
importantly because they are historically prior, and thus closer to the environ-
ment within which the structuresand ideology of chattel slavery first emerged.
Much the same as in his works on naturalhistory, so too in his discussion of
slaves Aristotle begins with i] qPiku;,which is not some external generative or
ordering principle ("Mother Nature") but rather that within something that
makes it what it is (its "nature").69Aristotle often describes the natureof a thing
teleologically, in terms of capacities (6v6vditet) or functions (?pya). "It is the
natureof X to do Y"is thus, for Aristotle, a legitimate way of defining the nature
of X. In the Politics Aristotle defines a slave as a human being whose nature is
to belong not to himself but to someone else (6 y'ap gi) acn)toi_qpvker8oi6;
EaTtv, akXox 6' ?aftv davipomo; ..., 1254al4-16).70 Further, the person who
belongs to another does so by virtue of his capacity to do so (?CSTt yap qpunEI
66 Much of the scholarly confusion over what Aristotle meant by slaves-by-natureand

slaves-according-to-conventioncan be tracedto a failureto place Aristotle's text in this,
its properhistoricalsetting.
67 Note thatwithinAristotle'stypicallyGreekbinaryframeworkonly Greekscould be taken
as prisonersof war, andhenceonly they could be slaves-by-convention.Slaves-by-nature
[i.e. barbaroi] were "hunted"just like wild animals:1 nO?XEjni
gtX KtTltW1Kfirox
tc,atc (i 'yap tLT1p?Evirtc gtpo; acmi;) . 6?e- Xpriat lnp6; re t&
t?lnpia Kai oiv
dvOp.6nOV 6o(oI itequKOTE; apXeoOasviagh *Xoaixv, Xi; 9pi6a-i SiKalov touToov 6vta
nA6egov(Pol. 1256b22-26), wherethe nE(pu1K6,r; of 6kaotircpqic&me; apXe-aftl takes us
back to p-6wt &oUiot, slaves-by-nature.
68 Thus, for example, a few pages later in the Politics, he ignores completely slaves-
according-to-conventionwhen he says that slaves tout court are among those things
which are by naturewhat they are (6 giv 5ovXo; xxv pi)oei), in contrastto craftsmen,
who are not (1260a4lI-b2).
69 There is an excellent treatmentof this sense of phusis in Aristotle by R. French in his
Ancient Natural History, Histories of Nature (London/New York 1994) 15-22.
70 One is remindedof the standardnomenclaturefor slaves foundin public inscriptions,A of
B (in contrastto A [son of B] of the deme r for citizens, and A living in the deme r for
metics).
146 J. ROSIVACH
VINCENT
5oiXo; O6 zvaEvoq dXkXouetvat - 6o 'Ka'idkXou ?ativ, 125$21-22).

Indeed, since it is a slave's nature to belong to another, he fulfills his nature
only when he actually belongs to another. By saying that a slave belongs to
another Aristotle means that he is a possession (ictiuua),which he defines as an
"instrumentof action separable" (sc. from its owner, opyavov itpaicticov 'cKa
Xoptarr6v, 1254al6-17). The implication is that the owner will use this instru-
ment for his own benefit, just as elsewhere Aristotle says that slaves, like
domesticated animals, provide help with "necessities" (i y'ap ip6o -racvayKOta
.oWeta, 1254b24-26), where the "necessities" are those of the master, not
those of the animals or slaves.
Like domesticated animals, the slave serves his master with his body (ci,
oarti, 1254b25), and the master's use of his body ( toi acoSgaTogXpiicat) is
a slave's ?pyov, his function which teleologically defines his nature as a slave
(1254bl7-18). In their mutual relationship the party who is capable of thought
and foresight (6o ... 6uvadgvov tj &tavoiq Kpoop&v)is by nature (q%a&) the
ruler and master, and the party who is able to toil with his body (6o 6e
&uvdguwvov TX, acoaati iovetv71) is the ruled and by nature ((PqCroe) a slave
(1252a3l-35). Put differently, the master thinks with his mind, the slave works
with his body.72
Aristotle returns several times to this presumed absence of higher-order
(from a Greek perspective) intellectual skills, twice in comparisons which are
especially instructive. At 126Oal2-14 he distinguishes a slave, who is wholly
devoid of the deliberative function (6o Pomuirtruo6v),from a woman, who
possesses it "without authority"(aKupov, whatever that may mean73),and from
a child, who possesses it incompletely (crO?X;). On the scale of humankind,
slaves do not simply stand below (free) men, women and children: they are
fundamentally different - as different, Aristotle says, as soul differs from body
(recall that slaves serve their masters with their body [oa6iarfl) and as human
beings differ from wild beasts (12540l6-19).
The difference between free men and slaves-by-nature is even clearer in a
second comparison. At 125$22-24 Aristotle says that unlike their masters,
slaves do not possess reason (Xoyo;) but share in it only to the extent that they
can perceive it (aiavi5vEcta), presumably in the commands of their masters,
in contrast to animals, which comply with feelings instead of reason. Slaves are
thus something more than domesticated animals but something less than fully
human, and probably closer to animal than to free man, for, Aristotle immedi-
ately continues, the usefulness (Xpeica)of domesticated animal and slave is much
the same in that both help their master by means of their body (1254b24-26).
71 ntoveiv is Ross' emendation for codd. noetv.

72 Cf. 1258b35-36 (the most slave-like craftsare those wherethereis the greatestuse of the
body); 1259b26 (slaves' work defined as OOaIaQtic&; z5nllpeaia;).
73 For some possible explanationssee Cartledge,Greeks(as in n. 5) 70.
Indeed, here the defining function ("pyov) of a slave-by-nature is the use of his
body by another (i toi7 ac ato;xpTi%at;,Pol. 1254bI8). If for poor people an
ox is a substitute for a slave, as Aristotle says elsewhere in the Politics
(1252bl2), conversely slaves are substitutes for oxen for the rich.
To summarize, while Aristotle's slaves-by-nature may be human beings
(&vi5pcwmo),they are human beings who lack certain higher-order intellectual
skills and are thus, by their nature, fundamentally different from, and inferior
to, free men (Ox?i5i?pot, i.e. adult Greek males), who, by their nature, possess
the intellectual skills which slaves-by-nature lack. Slaves-by-nature thus occu-
py a place somewhere between free men and domesticated animals.74 Because
of their deficiencies which make them so essentially inferior, according to
Aristotle it is their nature to be ruled by another, and such servitude is to their
advantage,right, and the way things should be (avgqp&t ... Kat 6icKatov
?cTtv, 1255a1-2; xat 8icati ovK 5e, 6 1255b775).
No one would seriously argue that the mere change in their civil status
through the accidents of war demonstrated that Greeks taken prisoner were
even before their capture, by their nature, intellectually deficient. Rather,
although Aristotle does not emphasize the point - probably, I would argue,
because he and his readers took it for granted76- two passages in particular in
his discussion of slaves show that for Aristotle the inferior human beings who
would benefit from being enslaved are barbaroi, or more precisely, that all
barbaroi are, by their nature, inferior to Greeks, and thus deserve to be enslaved
by them.77In the first passage (1252b5ff.) Aristotle asserts that non-Greeks do
74 For the same hierarchyin a different context cf. Arist. GA 744b16-21, where a good
householderassigns the best available food to free persons, worse food (and leftovers
from the best) to servants,and the worst to the animalsthat are fed with them (aUvtpC-
(og6vot;).
75 ThoughRoss brackets[Kai 5iKatov] here. Cf. also 1278b33-37.
76 Beside the passagesdiscussed here cf. also Pol. 133Oa25-29,where,to preventinsurrec-
tion, Aristotlewouldhave the landin his ideal stateworkedby slaves (8oi.Xou;)"whoare
not all of the same tribe" (gntri 6goq5Xcv rdvtov) or failing that, by kap1dpot;
Epto0iKouv because they are by nature(qv5OE) most like the slaves of which he has just
spoken. Note that the adjective Piap,Bipouc;
is needed with ntEptoiKolU since perioikoi
could also be Greek,in contrastto douloi, who are all assumedto be non-Greek,as gqTi
6goqpXe.ov mdvrcavassumes. The same advice on not having too many slaves with the
same ethnic origin is also found e.g. at Oec. 1344b188-19 and Plato, Lgg. 777c-d.
77 W. Kullmann,"Equalityin Aristotle's Political Thought",in I. Kajanto(ed.), Equality
and Inequality of Man in Ancient Political Thought (Helsinki 1984) 35-37, pointsout that
Aristotle's view of the mentaldeficiencies of slaves-by-natureis somewhatinconsistent
with his broaderethnologicalcontrastof Europeans,Asians and Greeksat Pol. 1327b23-
33, butpace Kullmann,this is not of itself sufficientreasonto rejectthe identificationof
Aristotle's slaves-by-naturewith barbaroi; ratherwe shouldsee these passages (and Pol.
1285a2O22) as evidence of evolution in Aristotle's thinking on barbaroi (E. Badian,
"Alexanderthe Greatand on the Unity of Mankind",Historia 7 [1958] 440-442).
148 VINCENTJ. RosiVACH
not have the naturalcapacity to rule (-orqpkTetapXetv), and hence any conjugal
union between them is one of slave and slave (il icotvwvia avwtCv6o-i5Xr1; Kat
boi5kou, 1252b6-7). From Aristotle's typically Greek binary perspective, those
not suited by natureto rule are ipsofacto suited to be ruled (cf. e.g. 1252a30-34,
1254a21-24). And so Aristotle continues by quoting Eur. IA 1400 to the effect
that it is proper for Greeks to rule barbaroi, adding that "thatwhich is barbaros
and that which is slave are by nature the same" (ta5Yot(plvaeltIap,Bapov 'Kai
8oVXov Ov, 1252a8).
In the second passage (1255a21ff.) Aristotle discusses the view of those
who would argue that enslaving prisoners of war is just. He assumes that the
proponents of this view would never claim that people who did not deserve to
be enslaved could properly be considered slaves, and he concludes that they are
not talking about people like this when they talk about slaves, but ratherabout
barbaroi (Wn6oepav'Toi; ov PovXovrat X,yeiv 8oiLou; XkkXa toi; kap,3c-
pou;, 1255a28-29). "And yet," Aristotle continues, "whenever they say this,
they are looking for nothing other than slavery-by-nature (6o (pi3o?t 5oiXov),
which is exactly what we spoke about from the start. For of necessity one must
say that some men are everywhere slaves and others nowhere" (1255a29-32). In
other words, not only are all barbaroi by their nature slaves under all circum-
stances (tav-raXoi), whether they are actually enslaved or not, but all Greeks
can never really be slaves under any circumstances (oi68agoi5),even if they are
taken prisoner and sold. Again from Aristotle's binary perspective, if all bar-
baroi - and only barbaroi - are by their nature slaves, then all Greeks - and
only Greeks - are by their nature free.
In sum then, for Aristotle (a) slaves are typically barbaroi and barbaroi are
by their nature appropriate to enslave; (b) interchangeably, both slaves and
barbaroi are significantly and substantially different from Greeks; and (c) the
thing that, more than anything else, makes slaves-by-nature different from
Greeks is the incompleteness of their intellectual facilities.
3. The Stereotype of Mentally Inferior Barbaroi/Slaves
To repeat, there is good reason to believe that Aristotle's views on slavery

are representative of views broadly held by the slave-owning elite, and while no
other Greek author treated slavery in as detailed a fashion as Aristotle, the same
basic ideas are repeated, albeit less systematically, by other authors throughout
our period. To limit ourselves to a few examples of our final point, the slaves'
perceived lack of higher-order intellectual skills, Xenophon, for example, tells
us that people are called slave-like (av8pano&d)5et;) who are ignorant of
beauty, goodness and justice (Mem. 4.2.20); and interlocutors unable to answer
Socrates' questioning feel like "slaves" (Mem. 4.2.39; cf. Plat. Theag. 130b).
According to Plato, it is just like a slave to recognize virtue but be unable to
explain it (Lgg. 996d), or to focus on individual instances of beauty but fail to

grasp the overall concept (Symp. 210c-d), since explaining virtue or grasping
the concept of beauty requires logos, which slaves lack.78 Similarly in a com-
parison which Plato makes between slave and free physicians, the slave physi-
cian gives snap diagnoses of his slave patients solely on the basis of his
experience (? j.usLtpia;) whereas the free physician uses logos to inquire
carefully into the circumstances of his free patients' illness (Lgg. 720a-b).
Again, according to Plato,79 slaves may be shrewd (8ptCti;) in what they do,
but they have no real sense of right and wrong; and the comic stage displays
numerous superficially clever slaves who fit the type. Elsewhere Plato quotes a
version of Od. 17.322-323 to the effect that a man loses half his mind (i,uGcsv...
Tc vOou) when he is enslaved.80 According to Xenophon, human beings
(d`vipomot) are amenable to reason (X6yo;), but training appropriate for wild
animals (fj ... pi5i&1 irat6sia) will secure the obedience of one's slaves.81 It
is hardly surprising then to read in Plato that those who are wallowing in
ignorance ought to be enslaved (Plt. 309a, cf. Clt. 408a), that slaves need their
masters as sheep need their shepherds (Lgg. 808d), and that slaves, who lack the
capacity to rule themselves, should be ruled by "the best men" for their own
good (Rep. 590c-d).
This widely held belief in the inferior mental capacities of slaves finds its
corollary in certain common Athenian practices which focus on slaves' bodies to
the exclusion of their minds.82Here we may briefly consider two such practices,
the corporal punishment of slaves and their tortureto obtain legal evidence.
The greatest difference between slaves and free men, the speakers of
Demosthenes 22 and 24 both tell the jurors, is that slaves are liable to corporal
punishment and free men are not (Dem. 22.55, 24.167), a statement which is as
true of the private sphere of the oikos as it is of the public sphere of the polis.83
78 On the slave's lack of logos see G. Vlastos, "Slaveryin Plato's Thought",Phil. Rev. 50
(1941) 289-290, 303.
79 Theat. 173a. Plato actuallymakes this statementaboutspeakersin the dikasteria, whom
he compares to slaves, who must thereforea fortiori share these same characteristics.
These "slavish"speakers,constrainedby time limits andthe need for practicalresults,are
contrastedwith philosophers,who, as free men (eleutheroi) have the leisure to pursue
arguments(logoi) whereverthey may go (Theat. 172c-173b).
80 Lgg. 777a; the Homericvulgate,however,readsijtmou... T' dpeTfi;,which in the context
(servantsmisbehavingin theirmaster'sabsence) is a far more likely reading.
81 Xen. Oec. 13.9;cf. Cyr.8.2.4, whereCyrusgains the good will of his servantscikTleplcai
ToCI; KGicv.
82 Note the numerousinstances in fifth- and fourth-centuryAthenian authors where the
word ogta, "body," is used as a synonym for "slave" (for examples see Stephanus,
Thesauruss.v.).
83 On the accuracy of Demosthenes' statement see V. Hunter, Policing Athens: Social
Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320 B.C. (Princeton 1994) 154-158. Note also the
In particular,numerous passages, especially from comedy,84 imply that corpo-

ral punishment, particularly flogging, was characteristic of a slave's lot.85 In
contrast to free adults, who are verbally "admonished"- the verb VOuft? rEgo<
voig + tit'jit = "put in mind" is regularly used in this context - slaves and
children are both corporally "chastised"- the regular verb is ioXod).86 The use
of corporal punishment for slaves and not for free adults is not simply a
distinction of status, as the use of corporal punishment for free children makes
clear.87Rather,because free adults have a fully developed mind (vov;) they can
understand verbal admonitions and apply them to themselves; children and
slaves are corporally chastised, children because their intellectual abilities are
not yet sufficiently developed to understand verbal admonitions, and slaves
because, by their nature, they will never have the intellectual skills needed for
full understanding.88
Much the same way of thinking underlies the obligatory torturingof slaves
for evidence in legal suits.89Slaves were not allowed to testify directly in court;
variousmethodsof punishingslaves in Pollux' lengthylist (Onom.3.78-79) derivedfrom

his literarysources. The complaintat [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.10 that in Athens one cannot
strikeanother'sslaves implies that it was normalpracticeto strikeone's own.
84 Examplesin V. Ehrenberg,ThePeople of Aristophanes:A Sociologyof OldAtticComedy
(New York 1962) 187 n. 2.
85 To cite one telling example, at Ar. Vesp. 1297-98 the chorussays to the slave Xanthias
"What'sthe matter,boy? For it is right to call anyone 'boy,' even if he's an old man,
whoever receives blows." (Ti 5' ?C;rtv, O cai; Ka v / y9pWv, KakEtv biKatov 6oar av
irXilyy; kXdi3.) A few lines later (1307) Xanthiasmay possibly pun on the word, saying
thathis mastercalled init iwi (suggesting"strike,strike,"fromrtaio) as he beathim. The
same play on wordsmay also be at workat 456 (icaie nai' co_av*ia), wherethe slave is
orderedto strikethe wasps of the chorus.
86 When vo-O*_r&o. is used for corporal punishment (e.g. Ar. Vesp. 254, PI. Lgg. 879d) the
sense is "verberibusuti loco verborumad commonefaciendum" (Stephanus,Thesaurus
s.v.); conversely X6yot;KoXcletv(Soph.Ai. 1160)= "chastisewith wordswhenphysical
force would be appropriate."
87 On the assimilationof slaves andchildrensee M. Golden,"Pais, 'Child' and 'Slave"',AC
54 (1985) 91-104; Golden, however,arguesthatthe marginalstatusof slaves, similarto
thatof children,led to the assumptionthatslaves were intellectuallydeficient,ratherthan
vice versa, as arguedhere.
88 Foradmonishingfree men vs. chastisingslaves see e.g. P1.Lgg. 777e, 845b. Forthe lesser
intellectualcapacitiesof childrenand slaves cf. Arist. Pol. 1260al2-14 discussed above.
Since slaves are not totally devoid of logos, Aristotlelater says that they should not be
orderedabout but admonishedeven more so thanchildren(Pol. 1260b5ff.),from which
we may infer that other slave-holdersfelt admonishingslaves was a waste of time since
slaves totally lackedthe capacityto understand.Aristotle'ssuggestionat Rhet. 1380b16l
20 thatslaves will less resentbeing chastisedcorporallyif they are verballychastisedfirst
assumesthat they always receive corporalpunishment.
89 Althoughnumerousspeakersoffer theirown slaves for tortureor demandthose of their
opponents,all of the challengesin ourextantsourceswere apparentlyeitherrefusedor, if
rather they were tortured elsewhere, and the answers which they gave under
torturewere submitted as evidence to the court.90What is importanthere is that
torture was not optional; unless extracted under torture slaves' testimony was
legally unacceptable. Moreover, this institutionalization of torture reflects not
simply the views of individuals but a consensus of the Athenian community as
a whole on the nature of the slaves who were so tortured. To understand the
thinking that underlay this practice we may consider two passages, one from
Antiphon and the other from Lycurgus, both addressed to jurors, and thus likely
to reflect what their authors assumed were commonly held views. In the first
passage Antiphon (6.25, cf. 6.23) contrasts free men, who are bound by oaths
and pledges, which are the most importantthings for free men (raz g6ytata Jcai
lctpi irksiatou), with slaves, who presumably have no moral capacity, and
hence are compelled to tell the truth under torture. We are reminded of the
statements of Xenophon and Plato mentioned earlier to the effect that slaves,
because of their intellectual deficiencies, are incapable of understanding con-
cepts like beauty and justice the way free men can. In the second passage
accepted,never carriedout; and there is in fact no case where we can say with certainty
thata specific slave was torturedfor evidence in a legal proceeding.Because of this it is
sometimes claimed that the challenges which we find in our texts are nothingmore than
elaborateplay-acting,thatthey were neverexpected to be accepted,and thatthe Atheni-
ans did not actually tortureslaves to obtainevidence (so e.g. S. Todd, "The Purposeof
Evidence in AthenianCourts",in P. Cartledge,P. Millett and S. Todd [eds.], Nomos:
Essays in Athenian Law, Politics and Society [Cambridge 1990] 33-36, following G.
Thur, Beweisfuhrung von den Schwurgerichtshofen Athens: Die Proklesis zur Basanos
[Vienna 1977] 233-261; see also most recently M. Gagarin,"The Tortureof Slaves in
AthenianLaw",CP 91 [1996] 1-18). There is, however, simply too much discussion of
torturingslaves for evidence, both in the forensic speeches and elsewhere (e.g. Arist.
Rhet. 1376b3ll377a7d), and too muchdetail in the discussions, for this all to be nothing
morethanritualisticplay-acting.Indeed,one mustwonderhow the Athenianscould have
developed such an elaborateritual involving the threatof tortureif they did not some-
times really tortureslaves for evidence, or at least had not done so at some time in the
past. As to the silence of our sources, the explanationprobably lies along the lines
suggestedby Mirhady,who views challengesto tortureslaves (and to swear oaths) as an
alternativeto going to trial:in cases which turnedon establishinga matterof fact, if the
challenge was accepted and the slave tortured(or oath sworn), the fact was thus estab-
lished and there was no need to proceed to trial, and hence we would not learn of such
cases from our forensic sources (D. C. Mirhady,"TheOath-Challengein Athens", CQ
n.s. 41 [1991178-83, buildingon an argumentmadeby J. W. Headlam,"Onthe np6KXfl(Fi.
i; Jdacvov in Attic Law", CR 7 [1893] 1-5). One might also note that since evidence
fromslaves could be used only if it was obtainedundertorture,if torturewere neverused,
the Athenianswould have had no way of using evidence which slaves could provide;but
it is hardto imagine why the Athenianswould thus precludethe use of such evidence.
90 On the exclusion of testimonyby the slaves themselves see Todd, Purpose (as in n. 89)
26, with his n. 12 for supportingscholarship.
Lycurgus (Leocr. 32) says that free men can be misled by clever arguments into
lying, but slaves, by their nature (Kaua'(pqatv), will always tell the truth under
torture. In this way of thinking, as DuBois has pointed out, slaves lack the
intellectual capacity both to lie and to tell the truth, and so the truth must be
sought from their bodies - bc oi3 odjiaToo;FXDyXov... ycv1aftt (Dem. 49.56).
We are reminded of Aristotle's several statements about slaves as useful only in
their bodies discussed earlier. To quote DuBois, "the slave, incapable of reason-
ing, can only produce truth under coercion, can produce only truth under
coercion;" and again, "slaves are bodies; citizens possess logos, reason."91
4. Origins of the Stereotype
And so we return again to the Athenians' perception that their slaves were
essentially different from themselves, and that, most importantly, what made
them different was their perceived lack of higher-order intellectual skills. One
is thus led inevitably to ask the question: Where did the Athenians get the idea
that their slaves were intellectually deficient?
To speculate on an answer to this question, we may begin by recalling that
the slaves whose enslavement shaped the institution of chattel slavery, Aristo-
tle's slaves-by-nature, were barbaroi, and, from a typical Athenian point of
view, all barbaroi were, at least potentially, slaves. The first barbaroi whom
the Athenians enslaved were probably Thracians, as I will argue below, a
people whom the Athenians could see as culturally"primitive,"at least compared
with themselves,92 and this impression of "primitiveness" may well have
contributed to the notion that these barbaroi, and barbaroi in general, were
mentally inferior.
But there was probably more to it than this. Discussing Aristotle's account
of slavery in the Politics, Nicholas Smith has argued that, in Aristotle's mind,
the logos which the slave-by-nature lacks was Greek speech, which was, for
Aristotle, the only language capable of using reasoned logic to distinguish right
from wrong.93 I think that Smith is basically correct about Aristotle here and,
moreover, as in much else in the Politics, so too here it is possible to see in
Aristotle's account a philosophically more sophisticated presentation of views
commonly held, albeit in a less sophisticated fashion, by his fellow Greeks,
91 P. DuBois, Tortureand Truth(London 1991) 68, 52.

92 Thus, for example, Thucydides(1.6.6), who had extensive experience with Thracians,
observes in his "Archaeology"thatthe Greeksof early times once hadhad- buthadsince
developed beyond- a way of life similarto thatof the barbaroiof his day.
93 N. D. Smith, "Aristotle'sTheory of NaturalSlavery",in D. Keyt and F. D. Miller, Jr.
(eds.), A Companion to Aristotle's Politics (Oxford 1991) 152.
who were more likely to be concerned with their barbaroi slaves' failure to
understand simple commands than with their inability to philosophize.
Perhaps the difference most obvious to the Greeks between themselves and
barbaroi was that they all spoke Greek and barbaroi did not.94Through trade in
particularthe Greeks as a people had, of course, had extensive earlier contacts
with non-Greek-speaking peoples, but in such contacts Greeks and non-Greeks
met on equal terms, as it were, or perhapseven on terms which favored the non-
Greeks. When, however, large numbers of barbaroi became slaves for Atheni-
an masters the relation between Greek and non-Greek changed, so that it was no
longer a matter of Greek and barbaroi speaking different languages but one of
barbaroi not speaking Greek - or not speaking any real language at all.
Sophocles, for example, has his Heracles divide the world between Greece and
"language-less land" (dyXoxao;, Trach. 1060); Aristophanes contrasts jap-
,apo; with the use of speech ((p/ovi, Av. 199-200); and Aeschylus, Herodotus
and Aristophanes all liken the speech of barbaroi to the sound of twittering
birds.95 What might previously have been simply a difference in language
would now have become a sign reenforcing the sense that barbaroi were
inferior to Greeks.
The link between language and intellect was particularly strong in Greek,
where the same term logos denotes both the word by which an inward thought is
expressed and the inward thought or reason itself.96 Sometimes both meanings
overlap, as for example when Aeschylus' Clytaemnestra says that she will
persuade Cassandrawith logos unless she speaks a barbariantongue (Ag. 1050-
1053), or when Euripides' Perseus says that the nature (phusis) of barbaroi
cannot understand logoi (frag. 139 N2). That Athens' imported barbaroi could
not speak Greek, or could speak it at best only well enough to understand the
basic commands of their masters, was seen by the Athenians, I would suggest,
as an indication that their slaves were intellectually deficient, that by their very
nature they lacked the interior logos, the reason needed to articulate nuanced
ideas, abstractions, values and the like as their Greek masters could. We think,
for example, of the Phrygian slave in Euripides' Orestes (1369ff.) and the
Scythian archer in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae, whose broken Greek is
clearly meant to reflect their inferior intellectual abilities.97 Masters ordered
94 Cf. e.g. Hdt. 1.57-58, Thuc. 1.3.4. Interestingly,the earliestsurvivinguse of the kapfap-
root, KapJv ... ,Bappiapoqovcov (11.2.867), defines barbaroiin termsof their speech.
95 Aesch. Ag. 1050; Hdt. 2.57.1; Ar. Ran. 679-682. Conversely the birds whose cries
Teiresias cannot understand are said to screech KaK6 ... oicarpp K
Kai Bepaptaievco at
Soph. Ant. 1001-1002.
96 The formulationis that of A LexiconAbridgedfrom Liddell and Scott's Greek-English
Lexicon(Oxford 1871) s.v.
97 In Ar. Thes. the Scythian archer is mocked by Echo (1082-1097), misunderstands
Euripidesas he quotesfromhis Andromeda(I1098-1135),andis easily trickedby Euripides
their slaves about, they did not reason with them,98at least in partbecause their
slaves would not understandtheir logos anyway. Indeed, it is easy to see how
Athenian masters could even think of their barbaroi slaves, unable tc speak
Greek or able to speak it but barely, as closer to brute animals than to them-
selves. Of course, once formed, the stereotype of the mentally deficient bar-
baros slave resisted refutation by the counter-evidence of intelligent slaves,
even that of the children of slaves who were thought to be no less barbaroi than
their parents even when they were born in Greece and spoke Greek from birth.99
It stands to reason that these Athenian attitudes toward barbaroi and slaves
go back, at least in germ, to the time when Athenians first began to enslave
barbaroi in sufficient number to alter significantly the character of dependent
labor in Attica.100Edith Hall argues that the Athenian view of the barbaros,
particularlyas it is reflected in tragedy, emerged in the fifth century and that its
construction was profoundly influenced by the Athenians' experience with the
Persian wars and the development of democracy.'01 Hall is certainly right to
emphasize the importance of both these factors in the formation of the stereo-
type of the barbaros which we find in our fifth-century sources. I do not
believe, however, that the Athenians waited until the fifth century to begin
"inventing" the barbaros. Indeed, if the Athenians were already enslaving
barbaroi before the Persian wars and before the advent of democracy, it is
reasonable to assume that they had also begun to construct an ideological
barbaros which depended neither on their experience in the wars nor on the
ideology of democracy, but was rather shaped in its earliest stages, more
simply, by the Athenians' experience with the enslaved barbaroi in their midst.
(1176-1226); on the Scythianarchersee furtherT. Long, Barbariansin GreekComedy

(Carbondale/Edwardsville 1986) 106-107.
98 Aristotledisagreeswith this practice(Pol. 1260b5-6),which was presumablycurrent;cf.
e.g. Plat. Lgg. 778a; frag. com. adespot. 528 K (it&; erit Soi)Xcq
0 8 0oxio; govocrX-
Xaco;).
99 Thatslaves bornin Greeceof slave parentsinheritedtheirparents'servile statusis one of
the clearestsigns thatthe enslavementof barbaroihada racial,andnot merelya political
or culturalbase. On the racismof ancientGreekslavery see furtherFinley, Slaveryand
Ideology (as in n. 62) 118-119.
100 Nor need the numberhave been very large in absolute terms, especially if the rise of
chattel slavery occurredin the sixth century when there was still comparativelylittle
scope for dependentlaborof any sort in Attica, before the intensive exploitationof the
mines at Laureionand beforethe developmentof extensive marketsto absorbagricultur-
al surpluses produced by dependent labor. On the need for markets as a necessary
preconditionfor the developmentof wide-spreadchattelslavery see Finley, Slaveryand
Ideology(as in n. 62) 86. It is also likely thatin the comparativelycash-pooreconomy of
the sixth centuryrelativelyfew people wouldhave been able to accumulateliquidcapital
sufficient to purchaseslaves.
101 Hall, Inventing(as in n. 64) 16-17.
But did the Athenians enslave barbaroi in substantial numbers before the
Persian wars? Virtually no texts survive from sixth-century Athens, and noth-
ing which does survive is of any help in answering this question. We may,
however, be able to approach the question indirectly. As we saw earlier, slaves
often bore names which indicated ethnic origins. These names point to two
principal areas of recruitment,102the Phrygian, Lydian and Carian hinterlands
behind the Greek cities on the western coast of Asia Minor on the one hand, and
the regions to the north of the Aegean, principally Thrace, on the other.'03 The
development of the first of these sources should be linked with the retreatof the
Persians from the eastern Aegean after the wars in the first half of the fifth
century,104 a retreat which left the native peoples in the nearby Anatolian
hinterlandvulnerable to enslavement.105 The development of the second princi-
pal source of Athenian slaves, the regions to the north of the Aegean, may
reasonably be linked with the rise of Athenian interests in Thrace.106These
interests can be traced, initially as private adventures of Athenian aristocrats,
102 We should not assume, however, nor is it importantfor our purposeshere, that every
slave name "Lydus,"for example, necessarilycame from Lydia; some may have been
bornin Attica of a Lydianparentor parents,or even receivedthe namefromtheirmasters
as a typical slave name, withoutreferenceto theirown origin.
103 Note also Hermipp.frag. 63 K-A, a list of goods broughtby ship to Athens includes
slaves from Phrygia(18) and Pagasae(19; for Thessaliansas slave-dealerssee also Ar.
PI. 520-21); Thessaly would be a logical entrep6t for slaves from Thrace. For an
exhaustive listing of Thraciansmentionedin our sources, literaryand epigraphical,see
V. I. Velkov, "ThracianSlaves in Ancient GreekCities" (in Russian), VDI 102 (1967)
75-78. There is no similarlisting of slaves from the Anatolianhinterland.
104 While it is certain that the Persians retreatedfrom the coastal towns and adjacent
countryside it is less certain how far they withdrew. By the terms of the "Peace of
Callias" the Persianswere requiredto keep their forces a day's ride by horse from the
coast (Plut. Cim. 13.4), laterdefined (Cim. 19.4) as 400 stades [= apx. 75 km]); whether
or not the "Peace"is historical,scholarsseem agreedthat the distance probablyreflects
at least the de facto disposition of Persian forces after Eurymedon.In any event, the
Persians'retreatleft ampleroomfor slave raidson nativepopulationseven if the raiders
stayed well shy of Dascyleiumand Sardis.
105 The actualenslavingwas probablydone throughorganizedraidssuch as those described
laterby Xenophon(Anab.7.3.34-48 [Thrace])andin Menander'sAspis (23-37 [Lycia]),
with the capturedbarbaroi being resold throughslave-dealersto Athenians and other
end-ownerselsewhere in Greece. Natives caught in raids ratherthan prisonersof war
were, in the long run, the principal source of slaves from these regions. Diodorus
(11.62.1) tells us that Cimon's various victories up to and including Eurymedonhad
nettedover 20,000 prisonersof war, who it is reasonableto assume were enslaved, but
this was a haul not to be repeatedonce the Persianswithdrewtheirlargerforces fromthe
Aegean.
106 The Athenians,of course, were not the only Greeksinterestedin Thrace.In general see
B. Isaac, The Greek Settlementsin Thrace Until the Macedonian Conquest (Leiden
1986).
156 VINCENT J. ROSIVACH
back to the mid-sixth century, when we hear of Peisistratus raising money in the
Thracian mining district107and of different members of the Philaid clan (vari-
ous Miltiades and others) active in the Thracian Chersonese,108and there were
probably others.109 Details are impossible to reconstruct in the absence of
contemporary sources, but on the whole it seems quite likely that the classic
slave regime and its attendantideology emerged in gradualstages as some or all
of these Athenians compelled Thracians to serve their immediate needs in
Thrace, possibly in the mines, before extending their use back to the homeland.
A confirmation that Athens' first chattel slaves were Thracian may be
found in the fact that (with one minor exception) the masks worn by slave
characters in comedy, as reportedby Pollux, 10 all had red hair (nvppo'iptt vel
sim.), a convention likely to have arisen at a time when Athenian slaves were
typically red-headed and not ethnically mixed. Since Thracians were typically
red-headed,"' the mask convention would seem to point to a time when the
Athenians were enslaving principally Thracians, without (because before) any
significant admixture from other sources.112
Finally the emergence in the second half of the sixth century of a chattel
slavery based on the enslavement of barbaroi probably also lies behind a
significant change which Nikolaus Himmelmann has identified as occurring
about this time in the representation of servants on Attic pottery, who for the
first time became clearly distinguishable iconographically from free men. Him-
melmann contrasts this more distinctive slave iconography with an archaic
idealizing view of hetairoi and free servants iconographically undistinguisha-
107 Arist. Ath. Pol. 15.3; cf. Hdt. 1.64.1. For Peisistratusas a Thracianmining magnatesee
furtherP. N. Ure, The Originof Tyranny(Cambridge1922) 36-37.
108 The evidence is conveniently collected in N. G. L. Hammond,"The Philaids and the
Chersonese",CQ 50 (= n.s. 6, 1956) 113-129.
109 Thus, for example, the name of Thucydides' father,Olorus, is Thracian(Marcel. vit.
Thuc.2), suggestingthatThucydides'family's ties with Thracewent back at least to his
grandfather,and so well into the sixth century.AlthoughThucydideswas relatedto the
Philaids on his mother's side (Marcel. Ioc. cit.) his estates were in the gold-mining
districtto the west (Thuc. 4.105. 1).
110 Onom.4.149-50. Scholarswho have workedon the subjectagree that Pollux' descrip-
tion of comic masksis on the whole reliable;see D. Wiles, TheMasksof Menander:Sign
and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance (Cambridge 1991) 69-70, for a discus-
sion of earlierliterature.
IlI Cf. e.g. Xenophanes frag. 14 D3 [Thracians];Cratinusfrag. 492 K-A; Arist. Prob.
966b32-33 [northernersin general](nvpp6q,however,appearsto describeskin color at
Hippocr.aeraqu.Ioc. 20 [Scythians]).
112 Wiles, Masks (as in n. 110) 165-166, is probablycorrect,however, that the Athenians
retained the convention for semiotic reasons even after they began enslaving other
populations with hair more like their own, since change could blur the distinction
between free and slave.
113 N. Himmelmann,ArchdiologischeszumProblemder griechischenSklaverei(Wiesbaden
1971) 11ff. Himmelmannassociates this change - incorrectly,I believe - with the
emergenceof democracy.See also Garlan,Slavery(as in n. 4) 19.
ble from the heroes they serve. 113 We may see in this change in the iconography
of slaves a graphic reflection of a similar change in the ideology of slavery,
which, we have argued, came at this time to be based on the enslavement of
barbaroi, whom the Athenians saw as fundamentally different from them-
selves.
In sum, we have seen that while Greeks did not hesitate to enslave women
and children whom they captured in war, warfare among Greeks was not a
major source of male slaves until the mid-fourth century, well after slavery was
fully established in Athens. Since male slaves were at least as important as
female slaves in the developed Athenian slave regime, we concluded that the
structuresof Athenian slavery and its underlying ideological assumptions were
based initially on the enslaving of barbaroi. We further saw that fifth- and
fourth-century Athenians habitually thought of barbaroi as essentially inferior
to themselves, and hence by their nature appropriate to enslave, and that an
important part of that inferiority was the barbaros slave's presumed lack of
certain higher-order intellectual skills. Finally we examined evidence that the
barbaros slave's poor command of Greek played an important role in shaping
the Athenian stereotype of his intellectual inferiority, a stereotype which we
have reason to believe first took shape when Athenians began to enslave
Thracians in the second half of the sixth century. It is somewhat ironic - but it
should not surprise us - that the ideology of Athenian slavery, and of the racist
attitudes integral to it, was grounded in the Athenians' pride in their own
command of logos.
Fairfield University of Connecticut Vincent J. Rosivach

Enslaving Barbaroi and The Athenian Ideology

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Enslaving Barbaroi and The Athenian Ideology

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Franz Steiner Verlag

Enslaving "Barbaroi" and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery

1. Greeks Enslaving Greeks?

Historia, Band XLVIII/2 (1999)

[IoXvX;[?]vEMaKce66v (ibid. 2.79-80), [Av]Ty?ve; [T]6'yvo; ep&v (ibid. 7.3-4) (W.

To begin, some distinctions would be useful. First, since we are concerned

6 P. Ducrey, Le traitement des prisonniers de guerre dans la Gr&ceantique des origines a

17. Hyccara Athenians 415 Thuc. 6.62.3

11 115 F 27 is Polybius' summary(8.11.1-4) of the contentsof Theopompus'Philippica. In

the Leucadian and Ambraciot reinforcements13were put on sale (Oco86m5at),

Of the remainingitems, when the Lacedaemoniansrefused their allies' call to

32 The numberof known instancesof andrapodismosis not thatgreat,and thereis no reason

2. At Anab. 7.2.6 Xenophon tells how Aristarchus, the Spartan harmost of

of ransomby theirThracianguarantorswho also sailed with him (Antiph.5.20). See also

55 For sources see above, n. 22.

2. Barbaroi and "Slaves-by-Nature"

62 Thus for example, M. I. Finley, AncientSlaveryand ModernIdeology (New York 1980)

than it is to imagine them moving from metaphorto reality to establish a slave

66 Much of the scholarly confusion over what Aristotle meant by slaves-by-natureand

5oiXo; O6 zvaEvoq dXkXouetvat - 6o 'Ka'idkXou ?ativ, 125$21-22).

71 ntoveiv is Ross' emendation for codd. noetv.

3. The Stereotype of Mentally Inferior Barbaroi/Slaves

To repeat, there is good reason to believe that Aristotle's views on slavery

explain it (Lgg. 996d), or to focus on individual instances of beauty but fail to

In particular,numerous passages, especially from comedy,84 imply that corpo-

variousmethodsof punishingslaves in Pollux' lengthylist (Onom.3.78-79) derivedfrom

4. Origins of the Stereotype

91 P. DuBois, Tortureand Truth(London 1991) 68, 52.

(1176-1226); on the Scythianarchersee furtherT. Long, Barbariansin GreekComedy

Fairfield University of Connecticut Vincent J. Rosivach

Potrebbero piacerti anche