Slavery in ancient Greece

In ancient Greece, a slave, a δοῦλος, was a person who belonged to another person. A slave was not paid, could not choose where to live, and could be bought, sold, rented out or given away, like an animal or a tool. The owner was called the δεσπότης, the master.

Slaves were everywhere. In houses they cooked, cleaned and looked after children. They worked in the fields, in workshops and on building sites, and a few belonged to the city itself and helped to keep order. The hardest work was in the silver mines of Laurion, south of Athens, where many slaves died.

Most Greeks thought that slavery was normal. Any free person, a citizen or a foreigner, could own slaves. This is one of the hardest facts about ancient Greece: Athenian democracy, which gave power to the people, grew up in a society where people could be owned.

Some slaves were born to slave mothers. Many more were captured. When a city was taken in war, the winners often sold its people. In 416 BC, after the island of Melos surrendered, the Athenians put the grown men to death and sold the women and children as slaves (Thucydides 5.116). A war captive sold in this way was called an ἀνδράποδον. Pirates also kidnapped people, and unwanted babies left outside to die could be picked up and raised as slaves.

In Athens, a law of Solon in the early 6th century BC banned loans secured on a person, so an Athenian could no longer be enslaved for debt (Constitution of the Athenians 6.1). Slaves therefore generally came from elsewhere. They were sold at monthly markets in the Agora and in the mining district near Sounion. An inscription from Attica of the late 5th century BC gives prices of 70 drachmas for a child and 200 for an adult man.

The worst fate was the mines. The rich Athenian Nicias once owned a thousand men in the mines and hired them out to a contractor for one obol a day each (Xenophon, Ways and Means 4.14).

Sparta had a different system. Its land was farmed by the helots, the εἵλωτες. According to Thucydides, most of them were descendants of the old Messenians, a Greek people whom the Spartans had conquered and enslaved in an earlier war (1.101). So the helots were not individuals bought one by one at a market, but a whole conquered people, far more numerous than their masters. At the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, Herodotus says, 5,000 Spartans were accompanied by 35,000 light-armed helots, seven for each man (9.28).

The Spartans lived in fear of a helot revolt. After a great earthquake, many helots did rise up and held out on Mount Ithome (Thucydides 1.101). Thucydides also tells a chilling story, which he recalls in his account of 424 BC; its exact date is not known. The Spartans invited the helots who had fought best for Sparta to come forward and receive their freedom. About two thousand were chosen and went round the temples wearing garlands, but soon afterwards they disappeared, and no one knew how each of them died (4.80). Spartan policy, Thucydides says, was always shaped by the need to guard against the helots.

How many slaves lived in Athens? Nobody knows exactly. The writer Athenaeus reports a count made under Demetrius of Phalerum in the late 4th century BC: 21,000 Athenians, 10,000 metics and 400,000 slaves. Historians doubt the slave figure and argue about what the count really measured. What is certain is that there were many: after the Spartans occupied Decelea in Attica in 413 BC, more than twenty thousand slaves ran away, a great part of them craftsmen (Thucydides 7.27).

Slaves had almost no rights. A master was not allowed to kill his slave, but the law did not stop him from beating him, and in Athenian courts a slave’s evidence counted only if it was given under torture, although historians debate how often this really happened. A master could free a slave, who then became an ἀπελεύθερος, a freedman. But a freedman did not become a citizen: like resident foreigners, he paid the metic tax.

Few Greeks questioned slavery. Aristotle called the slave «κτῆμά τι ἔμψυχον», “a live article of property” (Politics 1253b), and argued that some people were slaves by nature. Yet he also reports that others said slavery was against nature, based only on force, and therefore unjust. Among the rare critics were the playwright Euripides, the speaker Alcidamas and the comic poet Philemon.