maintain a chronological and geographical balance, from the archaic period to late antiquity and including the whole of the Mediterranean and its adjacent areas, within the limits of the available evidence.
Finally, our selection of sources has been guided by our selection of topics. We have obviously included important topics that have always generated important research, such as the brutality of slavery, the economic exploitation of slaves, and the practices of manumission and the conditions of freedpersons. At the same time, we wish to present new topics, perspectives, and approaches, which have been at the forefront of innovative research in the last fifteen years. Earlier approaches tended to see slavery from a unilateral and top-down perspective, as a relationship defined exclusively by the masters. This meant that slavery was approached as a static institution, while slaves were largely seen as passive objects of domination and exploitation. We have adopted a processual approach, which explores the variety of economic, social, political processes and contexts within which slavery was employed for a variety of purposes; at the same time, while masters played a major role in the historical configuration of slavery, the agency of enslaved persons and other groups and factors (the state, religious groups, voluntary associations) was also significant. The involvement of various processes, contexts, and agents generated important contradictions and conflicts, as well as both widespread diversity and convergent tendencies. We thus devote chapters to the various slaving strategies of masters and the dialectical relationships between masters and slaves, free and slave, and the communities of enslaved persons. In addition, we attempt a systematic comparison of ancient slave systems while also exploring how they changed in the course of the 1500 years of ancient history. Finally, while slavery is usually approached as a socioeconomic phenomenon, recent work has put at the forefront its cultural and political aspects. We have thus devoted substantial space to the geopolitical setting of ancient slave systems and the role of slaves within cultural and religious processes.
All these various factors and topics were, of course, interrelated, and this means that the sources we have selected can be profitably juxtaposed and examined from a variety of viewpoints. We have included extensive cross-references to enable readers to explore sources in different contexts than those we have placed them; the detailed index is also a tool for using the sourcebook in multiple and alternative ways. We hope that this volume adequately reflects the diversity and richness both of the ancient evidence for slavery, as well as its modern scholarly study.
Notes
1 1 Wiedemann 1981.
2 2 Eck and Heinrichs 1993.
3 3 For other important collections of sources on ancient slavery, see Scholl 1990; CRRS.
4 4 For the voluminous scholarship on ancient slavery, see the search engine at http://sklaven.adwmainz.de/index.php?id=1584.
5 5 Lewis 2018; Vlassopoulos 2021a.
1 What Is Slavery?
What is slavery? Modern scholarship has largely focused on two definitions: slaves were human property,6 and slavery is a form of social death: the violent domination of dishonored outsiders without acknowledged kinship links (natal alienation).7 There is no shortage of ancient sources that support these two definitions (1.1, 1.11–2, 1.14). On this basis, scholars have constructed a stereotype of slaves as outsiders acquired through trade or war (1.2) who lived and worked under the direct control of their masters.
We aim to assess the advantages and limits of these approaches by examining servile groups like the Spartan helots and the Cretan woikeis, who were native inhabitants with their own families, working the land and surrendering a part of the harvest to their masters. Were such groups really slaves, or should they be interpreted as persons in an intermediate state “between slavery and freedom,” as serfs or dependent peasants (1.3)? Or should we rather see them as slaves with peculiar characteristics, as a result of the peculiar histories of the societies in which they lived (1.4–9)? If so, slavery was not a uniform institution across ancient societies but a complex and contradictory phenomenon affected by a variety of economic, political, social, and cultural processes.8 Social death was undoubtedly a constant threat that slaves faced and a harsh reality for many of them, but how should we account for cases in which masters (1.18) or states (1.15) honored their slaves? How should we interpret sources in which slaves present themselves as honorable persons (1.17) or honor their fellow-slaves (1.16)? Natal alienation was undoubtedly part of the slave condition, but how should we account for the evident significance of slave families for how slaves acted (1.13)?
If property and social death emphasize the power of masters over slaves, we also need to take into account the role of slave agency. Should we see slavery as a relationship unilaterally defined by the masters or rather as an asymmetrical negotiation of power involving, masters, slaves, and other groups and agents?9 In this respect, we explore a variety of issues: the negotiations that were inherent in the master–slave relationship (1.19, 1.21–2), the slaves’ quest for emotional fulfillment and support and its impact on how slavery operated as an institution (1.20, 1.25), the significance of the intervention of the state and other third parties in relations between masters and slaves (1.23–4), and the conjunctures that slaves could take advantage of to enhance their conditions (1.26).
Finally, we move beyond property and social death to examine other ways (modalities) of conceptualizing slavery that existed in ancient societies, even in the text of the same author: as domination, an instrumental relationship, an asymmetrical relation of benefaction and reward, and so on (1.27). Although some sources can describe enslaved persons as natural slaves (1.28), it was also possible to conceive of slavery as an extreme form of bad luck, from which it was legitimate to seek to escape (1.30). These diverse modalities were partly complementary and partly contradictory;10 we shall explore their consequences for how slavery operated in the various ancient societies.
PROPERTY AND DOMINATION: “CHATTEL SLAVES” AND OTHERS
1.1 Aristotle, Politics, 1253b23–1254a17:11 Greek Philosophical Treatise (Fourth Century BCE)
Literature: Garnsey 1996: 107–27; Millett 2007; Vlassopoulos 2011a.
Because property is part of the household, so the art of acquiring property is part of household management – for both living and living well are impossible without the necessaries. Now, as a specific art would have to have its own proper tools, if its work is to be accomplished, so is the case with the person practicing household management. Tools can be inanimate or animate. For example, for the helmsman, the helm is an inanimate tool, while the look-out man an animate one (for when an art is concerned, an assistant is a kind of tool). Accordingly, a possession is a tool for maintaining life; property is a multitude of tools; a slave is a kind of animate possession; and every assistant is like a tool before tools. For if every tool could accomplish its own task when ordered or by sensing in advance what it should do […], then master-builders would not need assistants, nor would masters need slaves.
“Possessions” are spoken of in the same way as “parts.” A part is not merely a part of another entity but also is wholly of that other entity. The same is true of a possession. This is why a master is just the master of his slave, not “his
