LITMIR.BIZ

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.