Greek and Roman Slaveries

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) ...