Slavery in ancient Greece

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Slavery in ancient Greece was so ordinary that free citizens rarely questioned it, yet the numbers behind it remain disputed to this day. Between 317 BC and 307 BC, the ruler Demetrius Phalereus ordered a census of Attica that returned 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves. Some researchers reject that figure outright, pointing out that owning a dozen slaves already marked a household as wealthy in ancient Greece. If four hundred thousand people really were enslaved, thirteen for every free man, why does no other evidence from the period support numbers that large?

  The ancient Greeks did not even agree among themselves on a single word for slavery. Their laws also treated a farmhand, a household servant, and a Spartan helot as entirely different kinds of unfree person. How was a person turned into property in the first place? What could that person own, refuse, or eventually buy back? And once freed, were they ever treated as equals?

• 2. Naming the Unfree

  ›

  In the works of Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis of Megara, a slave was called dmos, a term that referred specifically to prisoners taken as war booty. During the classical period, Greeks more often used andrapodon, literally 'one with the feet of a man.' That word stood opposite tetrapodon, meaning a four-footed animal or livestock. The most common term, doulos, was defined by its opposite, eleutheros, meaning a free man. An earlier form of doulos appears in Mycenaean inscriptions written in Linear B, where do-e-ro meant a male slave and do-e-ra meant a female one.

  Therapon meant 'companion' in Homer's day, when Patroclus was called the therapon of Achilles, and Meriones the therapon of Idomeneus, but by the classical age the word simply meant servant. Akolouthos meant 'the one who accompanies,' and its diminutive, akolouthiskos, described page boys. Pais, literally 'child,' could be used as a casual term for a houseboy or, more cruelly, hurled at grown men who were enslaved. Soma, meaning 'body,' turns up specifically in the language of emancipation.

  An oiketes was 'one who lives in the house,' the term for a household servant. An anagnostes was an educated slave whose task was to read books aloud to his or her owner. The demosioi were public slaves bought by the Athenian state itself. They worked as police officers, executioners, treasury clerks, and court record-keepers, and also as minters, miners, and occasional rowers, as at the Battle of Arginusae. A paratiltrios attended bathers by removing unwanted body hair, and female bathers were served in turn by paratiltriai, the feminine plural of the word.

  The verb built from doulos, douleuo, survived into Modern Greek, where it now simply means 'to work.' In antiquity the same verb described far more than chattel bondage. It could describe one city's political subjection to another, or a child's dependence on a parent. That flexibility hints at how blurry the line could be between formal slavery and other kinds of dependence. The Greeks worked out that blur one legal code at a time.

• 3. Before the City-State

  ›

  Numerous tablets unearthed at Pylos document slavery in Mycenaean Greece, centuries before Homer wrote a word. These records split slaves into two legal categories: plain slaves and 'slaves of the god,' likely Poseidon. Slaves of the god were always listed by name and owned their own land. The origin of common slaves can sometimes be traced: some came from Kythera, Chios, Lemnos, or Halicarnassus, probably captured by pirates. Unions between slaves and free people were common enough to appear in the tablets, and slaves could work and even own land themselves. The real dividing line in Mycenaean society, it seems, was not free versus slave but whether a person worked inside the palace or outside it.

  That world vanished without a clear thread connecting it to the era Homer describes, a period that instead reflects the Greek Dark Ages. Even the vocabulary changed: the Mycenaean do-e-ro gave way to dmos. In the Iliad, the enslaved are mainly women taken as spoils of war, since captured men were usually ransomed or killed outright. The Odyssey likewise centers on enslaved women, some of whom served as concubines. It also names a rare male slave, the swineherd Eumaeus. Homer calls Eumaeus 'divine,' the same epithet reserved elsewhere for Greek heroes, and shows him sharing meals and winter lodging with his master Laertes. Yet Eumaeus himself describes the cost of his status plainly: 'Zeus, of the far-borne voice, takes away the half of a man's virtue, when the day of slavery comes upon him.'

  Hesiod wrote Works and Days in the 8th century BC, describing himself as already owning a number of dmoes. Their precise legal standing remains unclear. Poets Archilochus and Theognis of Megara both refer to douloi, confirming the term was current by the archaic period. Around 620 BC, the homicide law credited to Draco, Athens's first lawgiver, mentioned slaves directly and gave wide latitude for private violence against them. A few decades later, in 594-593 BC, Solon reportedly barred slaves from practicing gymnastics and from pederasty, according to Plutarch. The historian Moses Finley pointed to Chios, said by Theopompus to be the first city with an organized slave trade. Chios was also among the earliest to develop democracy. Finley summed up the pattern in a single line: 'one aspect of Greek history, in short, is the advance hand in hand, of freedom and slavery.' Chios's early market in slaves would not stay unique for long, as trading routes for the enslaved eventually reached across the wider Aegean world.

• 4. The Labor Behind the Economy

  ›

  Xenophon's manual Economy, and a similar work attributed to Pseudo-Aristotle, describe large estates worked by dozens of slaves as laborers or foremen. Agriculture anchored the Greek economy, and slave labor mattered most there, though its true scale is still debated by historians. Smaller landowners might keep just one slave, or two, and this modest kind of rural slavery was extremely common in Athens. Politics remained the one occupation ancient Greeks reserved strictly for citizens; nearly every other kind of work could be handed to a slave instead. Greece never developed anything close to the vast slave-run estates, called latifundia, that later defined Roman agriculture.

  The general Nicias leased a thousand slaves to the silver mines at Laurion in Attica. A man named Hipponicos leased 600, and Philomides leased 300. Mines and quarries relied on slave labor at a scale that dwarfed most Greek farms. Xenophon records that mine owners earned one obolus per slave per day, roughly 60 drachmas a year. Leasing slaves to the mines became one of the most sought-after investments in Athens. Historians estimate that around 30,000 slaves worked the Laurion mines and the mills that processed their ore. Xenophon even proposed that the city buy up to three state-owned slaves per citizen, so that leasing income could support the entire citizen body.

  The shield factory owned by Lysias employed 120 slaves, and the father of the orator Demosthenes owned 32 cutlers and 20 bedmakers. Workshops like these could hold large numbers of enslaved craftsmen, doing labor beyond what a family alone could manage. Male domestic slaves typically stood in for their owner in business dealings and traveled with him. In wartime, such a slave served as his attendant, or batman, when the owner fought as a hoplite. Female domestic slaves handled the household's daily work, above all baking bread and making textiles, labor that rarely appears in the historical record but never stopped.

• 5. Counting and Buying the Unfree

  ›

  Athens is believed to have held the largest enslaved population of any Greek city, with as many as 80,000 slaves during the 6th and 5th centuries BC. That works out to an average of three or four slaves per household. During the war of Decelea, in the 5th century BC, the historian Thucydides recorded that 20,890 slaves deserted, most of them skilled tradesmen. A lower estimate, from the time of the orator Demosthenes, puts the figure at just 20,000 slaves, or roughly one per family. The orator Hypereides, in his speech Against Aristogiton, described an attempt to enlist 15,000 male slaves of military age. That effort still ended in defeat at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. Aristophanes, in his play Plutus, shows even poor peasants keeping several slaves, and Aristotle simply defines a household as freemen plus slaves. In his speech For the Invalid, a crippled man pleading for a state pension admits, through the orator Lysias, 'my income is very small and now I'm required to do these things myself and do not even have the means to purchase a slave.' Thucydides separately noted that the island of Chios held, proportionally, the largest slave population anywhere in the Greek world.

  Thucydides describes the people of Hyccara in Sicily, captured by the general Nicias, being sold for 120 talents in nearby Catania. War, piracy, banditry, and organized trade fed the slave population continuously, and under the accepted rules of war, a victor held absolute rights over the defeated. The same fate as Hyccara's befell Olynthus in 348 BC, Thebes in 335 BC under Alexander the Great, and Mantineia under the Achaean League. Thucydides said such raiding was 'the old-fashioned' way of life in Acarnania, Crete, and Aetolia, and also among Illyrian, Phoenician, and Etruscan raiders. The geographer Strabo credited nearby Delos with moving what he called 'myriad slaves daily,' a trade fed largely by Cilician pirates. Rome eventually curbed this piracy in the 1st century BC, to protect its own trade routes. In regions such as Thrace and the eastern Aegean, raids against non-Greek natives, called barbaroi, supplied more captives than war itself did.

  A surviving list of slaves confiscated in 415 BC, after the mutilation of the Hermai statues, traces the origins of 32 individuals. Thirteen came from Thrace, seven from Caria, and the rest from places including Cappadocia, Scythia, Phrygia, Lydia, and Syria. Major slave-trading hubs grew up at Ephesus, Byzantium, and Tanais, near the mouth of the Don river on the Black Sea. Prices tracked a slave's skill: Xenophon valued a miner at Laurion at 180 drachmas, close to 775 grams of silver. A free workman, by comparison, earned just one drachma a day. Demosthenes' father valued his cutlers at 500 to 600 drachmas each. A buyer who discovered a hidden defect after the sale, such as an undisclosed physical impairment, could void the transaction entirely.

• 6. The Law's Uneven Hand

  ›

  Moses Finley proposed eight measures for grading a person's degree of unfreedom, from the right to own property to obligations of military service. Under Athenian law, a slave belonged outright to a master, or to the state, who could sell, lease, or free that slave at will. Slaves could marry and raise children, but the state gave those family ties no legal recognition. A master could scatter a slave's family at any moment. In court, a slave could not testify except under torture. A misdemeanor that cost a free man a fine cost a slave a flogging, reportedly at a rate of one lash per drachma owed. Themistocles's own slave, a Persian named Sicinnus, became a rare example of trusted testimony. He betrayed Xerxes and helped the Athenians win the Battle of Salamis.

  Isocrates claimed that 'not even the most worthless slave can be put to death without trial,' evidence that a master's power was not absolute. Draco's homicide law is said to have punished the murder of a slave with death, treating the killing as religious pollution rather than simple property damage, in a suit called a dike phonike. A master who abused a slave excessively could be sued by any citizen, under a law called graphe hybreos, though the law existed to curb public disorder rather than to protect the slave. Slaves took part in family religious rites and could seek asylum at a temple or altar exactly as a free person could. Before the Battle of Salamis, the order to evacuate formally included 'themselves, their women, children, and slaves.' Solon's laws also barred slaves from pursuing free boys as lovers and from exercising in the wrestling schools, on pain of fifty lashes.

  Peasants known as hektemoroi, unable to pay rent on land they farmed, worked in effective bondage to their creditors before Solon intervened. Debt of this kind could turn a free Athenian into something close to a slave, with no battle or pirate raid required. Solon ended the practice with a reform called the seisachtheia, or 'shaking off of burdens.' It cancelled these debts and outlawed the sale of any Athenian, including self-sale, to cover them. Aristotle preserved Solon's own words describing the reform: 'And those that here in vilest slavery crouched 'neath a master's frown, I set them free.' Two exceptions survived Solon's reform: a guardian could still sell an unmarried woman who had lost her virginity, and a citizen could still abandon an unwanted newborn.

  In Sparta, the enslaved helots belonged not to individual citizens but to the state as a whole. Historians still debate whether Spartans separately owned chattel slaves at all. On Crete, a law code carved in stone at Gortyn around the 3rd century BC set fines for crimes involving slaves at a fraction of those for free citizens. The same code, though, let slaves own houses and livestock, property that could pass down to their children.

• 7. Flight, Freedom, and Manumission

  ›

  According to Aristotle, a slave's daily routine could be summed up in three words: work, discipline, and feeding. Xenophon recommended treating slaves like domestic animals, punishing bad behavior and rewarding good. Aristotle preferred a gentler approach, arguing that slaves, unlike animals, could understand reasoned explanations. In Aristophanes' The Knights, two slaves open the play complaining of being 'bruised and thrashed without respite' by a new supervisor. Elsewhere, Aristophanes describes a slave led out crying after a beating, his skin marked by what a fellow slave mockingly called 'a huge army of lashes.'

  Slaves in the mines at Laurion, and prostitutes working in brothels, called pornai, lived especially brutal lives. Conditions for the enslaved varied enormously by role: public slaves, craftsmen, tradesmen, and bankers enjoyed relative independence, in exchange for a fee, called apophora, paid to their owner. Some slaves saved enough from this arrangement to buy their own freedom. Pseudo-Xenophon complained that Athenian slaves took liberties nowhere else tolerated, writing that 'you cannot just strike them, and they do not step aside to give you free passage.' Despite that relatively lighter reputation, 20,000 Athenian slaves ran away at the end of the Peloponnesian War, encouraged by the Spartan garrison at Decelea, most of them skilled artisans. A 4th-century comedy by Antiphanes, titled The Runaway-catcher, suggests that fleeing slaves were a familiar enough sight to joke about. Large-scale slave revolts, of the kind Spartacus later led in Rome, left no trace in the Greek record, likely because Greek slaves were too scattered to organize at that scale.

  The formal route out of slavery, manumission, is documented on Chios as far back as the 6th century BC. Early manumissions were oral, performed before witnesses at a theatre or public tribunal. Athens banned the practice in the middle of the 6th century BC to prevent public disorder. Stone inscriptions recording manumissions grew common from the 4th century BC onward, recovered from shrines at Delphi and Dodona and dating mostly to the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. One Delphi inscription names a freed slave's former owner as an individual called 'Ioudaios,' or 'Jew,' a name that may itself signal a formerly enslaved person choosing an ethnic identity as his own. To buy their freedom, a slave might take a so-called 'friendly loan,' or eranos, from a master, a friend, or a patron, the same method used by the courtesan Neaira. The most restrictive form, called paramone, kept a nominally freed slave under a master's near-total control for a fixed period. A former slave who won a legal case brought by that master, though, could gain complete freedom outright.

• 8. Debating Bondage, Ancient and Modern

  ›

  The philosopher Heraclitus described war itself as the source of slavery, writing that it 'turns some into slaves and sets others free.' Aristotle largely agreed, accepting that 'whatever is taken in war is supposed to belong to the victors.' He did wonder aloud, though, 'For what if the cause of war be unjust?' Aristotle went further still, arguing some people were naturally suited to be ruled. A person who could labor only with the body, rather than plan with the mind, was, in his words, 'naturally a slave.' The physician Hippocrates had floated an earlier version of this idea, theorizing that the mild climate of Anatolia bred a submissive population. Not every thinker agreed. Alcidamas, a contemporary of Aristotle, insisted that 'nature has made nobody a slave.' The playwright Menander offered a more resigned version of the same idea: 'be free in the mind, although you are slave: and thus you will no longer be a slave.'

  Aristophanes gave slaves a place even in the imaginary 'Cloud cuckoo land' of his play The Birds, suggesting that Greek fantasy could not picture a functioning society without them. Utopian planners like Phaleas of Chalcedon and Hippodamus of Miletus proposed equal distribution of property, yet still kept public slaves as craftsmen and land workers. Only in the mythical Golden Age, where objects were imagined to work by themselves, did writers dispense with slavery entirely. In Telekleides' Amphictyons, loaves of bread supposedly fight each other for the honor of being eaten. Demosthenes, meanwhile, argued in a real courtroom that corporal punishment suited a slave's wrongdoing, since 'the body of a slave is made responsible for all his misdeeds.'

  In 1847, the historian Henri-Alexandre Wallon published a History of Slavery in Antiquity, part of his campaign against slavery in the French colonies. The debate over ancient Greek slavery had by then resumed in distinctly modern terms. Karl Marx treated ancient slavery as central to the economic structure of the period, a dominant mode of production rather than a side detail. The historian Eduard Meyer, in his 1898 work Slavery in Antiquity, countered that slavery was foundational to Greek democracy itself, a legal and social fact more than an economic one. In the 20th century, the historian Joseph Vogt argued that slavery had created the conditions for the rise of elites, while still allowing some individual slaves a path into that elite. As of 2011, historians were still debating whether ancient Greece even qualifies as a 'slave society.'

  Roman rule absorbed Greek slavery from the 2nd century BC onward. It continued under Byzantine rule through the Middle Ages, before large-scale agricultural slavery gradually gave way to serfdom. Ottoman rule followed from 1458 to 1830; under Islamic law, non-Muslims from non-Muslim lands, called kafir of Dar al-Harb, could be lawfully enslaved. In 1479, the Ottoman conquest of the Despotate of Epirus reached Cephalonia. Its castle was burned, and its people were enslaved and sent to Constantinople as a gift to the sultan. In 1537, the admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa raided the Aegean and brought 2,000 captives back to Constantinople, including a woman later known as Nurbanu Sultan. That same year, the Ottoman conquest of Paros left around 6,000 of the island's inhabitants enslaved. Young Christian boys from Balkan and Anatolian families were taken from their homes under the devshirme system. They were converted to Islam and enlisted as janissaries. By 1609, that system had swelled the sultan's Kapikulu forces to roughly 100,000. During the Greek War of Independence, the Chios massacre of 1822 led to the large-scale enslavement of the island's population. It drew enough attention across Europe to produce the Ottoman Empire's first anti-slavery reform. In 1830, the Firman decreed the manumission of Greek war prisoners.