Archaic Slavery

Hello. My name is David Lewis.

I'm a lecturer in Greek history and culture at the University of Edinburgh.

And in this lecture,

I'm going to be talking about slavery in the ancient Greek world.

And I want to start right at the beginning. Um,

move forward in time and then branch out words in space from there.

And so the earliest evidence for slavery in the Greek

world comes from the late Bronze Age and from the

linear B documents clay tablets that were burnt in the

in the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC.

And this gives us evidence of slaves, uh, active in the palace economy there.

And these slaves seemed to have come from parts of the coast of Asia minor

and various other places probably captured in raids.

Um, after 1200 b c. When the Bronze Age came to an end.

What follows is the early Iron Age,

which many people used to call the dark age and

dark because the are written evidence basically dries up.

But slavery re emerges in around 700 BC with

the Homeric poems The Iliad and the Odyssey,

and also with Haitians, works and days will talk a little bit more about, he says,

works and days

shortly

as the first with the Homeric poems. And

you might ask why historians would be interested in

the Homeric poems because these are obviously fiction.

But the the basic

blueprint of Greek society as, um, set out in the In the Iliad and The Odyssey,

and especially in terms of slavery in the in The Odyssey,

approximates to what would have been the case in Greek society around 700 B. C.

So we're really talking about the social institutions, the structure of the poems.

So things like the way property is managed

and inherited the way marriages are brokered.

Um,

institutions like guest friendship practises like sacrifice supplication

and these kind of social institutions structure the narrative,

and they reflect the assumptions about how society works

off the audience original audience of the Homeric poems.

So the slavery is one of these social institutions discussed in in Homer.

It can tell us some very in a very basic, low resolution sense about, uh,

slavery in early Greece around 700 BC.

So there are slaves in the Iliad, uh,

more of them in the Odyssey and that the

Greek terms used in the Homeric Greek our demos.

Uh, so the male slaves are called GMOs, and the female slaves are called de Moy

and the slaves in the strict sense.

So the definition of slavery is, um, it's a relationship based on legal ownership.

So the slave is the property of the master,

and we can see in the In the Iliad and the Odyssey this is working out. So,

um, slaves are captured in war.

They might be born into slavery,

But whichever way they got into slavery in the first place,

they're treated as the property of their owners.

So they have to obey the commands of the

the owner there retained for the their entire lifetime.

And they can be bought and sold and even killed,

as is the case with some slaves at the very end of the Odyssey.

Um,

my slaves also play a very important economic role in the Homeric poems,

which probably reflects a very important economic role in real life.

And if we look at the Odyssey,

we can see how the labour of slaves is structured on the

estate of a member of the elite in this case Odysseus.

So the CIA zones lands in the island of Ithaca,

and he also owns lands on the mainland opposite Ithaca.

And these are worked predominantly by his slaves.

And after he returns at the end of book 13 of The Odyssey to Ithaca,

first person he encounters is a chap called, um s who's one of his slaves.

And Odysseus is in disguise.

So you Miss doesn't know that he's talking to his master.

He describes how slavery works on Odysseus lands.

So Odysseus owns all these different flocks and herds

distributed across ethnic and then on the mainland.

And these are managed by slaves like you may.

So you may, as himself,

is that the foreman of a group of four or five

slaves who are managing a large herd of swine pigs.

But the swine herds of cattle on of goats and sheep and so on

and distributed elsewhere and mostly looked after by slaves

and a small number of hired men called seats

and slaves are also used in cereal production. We find in books 17 of the odyssey.

When Odysseus goes into town, he

sees his old dog Argus dying, dying on top of a heap of manure.

We're told in the poem that this is going to be distributed by

Odysseus slaves over his fields for growing some cereals.

Female slaves are mainly located in the household itself.

In time, Uh, Odysseus, we're told, has 50 50 female slaves,

and they also provide a key sector of the economy,

domestic economy and that they produced textiles,

which is very labour intensive in pre industrial societies.

They also perform various domestic duties and also

processed cereals into into flour and cooking,

and so on and so forth.

So in the Odyssey you find described in a state of an

elite Greek that's basically almost entirely run by by slave labour,

with a little bit of hired seasonal labour to top up the workforce

now how historical is this?

Well, actually,

it matches very well with what we find in another part of the Greek world,

which is by OSHA in central Greece

and where we have a poem called the Works and Days by his Side,

which is also from around 700 BC,

And he said it's not, um, not at the same level of wealth as a character like Odysseus.

He's a run down the wealth spectrum.

Really, Uh, he's a middling farmer, but in his his works and days,

the expectation is to that someone in that position would have four

or five slaves to help him out and running the farm.

So slavery's really underpinning the wealth of the rich

and the middling sorts in Greece around 700 BC

after that point and moving towards the classical period.

We don't have many sources to go on, so we need to fall back on to conjecture.

But we can look at several processes that would have

reconfigured the shape of slavery during those two centuries.

One is colonisation,

so Greek settlements spread right across the Mediterranean and Black

Sea during the 8th and 7th centuries B C,

especially

this, but the Greeks, in contact with new sources of slaves, basically barbarians,

non Greeks.

The population grew as well over time,

which provided more potential slave owners and therefore more demand for slaves.

And the economy grew more complex.

And this means that the range of tasks that

slaves could be put to began to expand greatly.

Um, so when we come to look at classical Athens,

you'll say that the range of tasks that slaves

are are are set is really very large indeed,