Greek slavery and social mobility, 800 - 300 BC

Abstract

The phenomenon of social mobility in the archaic and classical Greek world has been studied primarily in relation to the free and with a disproportionate emphasis placed on elites. Where the conversation has been extended to include slaves, social mobility has often been taken to be synonymous with manumission and a few ‘exceptional’ cases and by now well-known (primarily Athenian) sources have been privileged, namely about bankers, prostitutes, and miners.

This study goes beyond the usual familiar evidence and investigates slaves’ chances for status betterment both within and beyond slavery in archaic Greece, classical Sparta, classical Crete, and classical Athens. I argue that in order to investigate slaves’ lives and chances for social movement and social mobility one needs to go from the general to the granular, for it is there that motives and dynamics lay. Each chapter, then, investigates the ways in which slaves could improve their condition in the context of their own unique, local circumstances, not least through capitalising on slaveholders’ inherent reliance on them for surplus.

Slaves weaponizing their autonomy and agency can be traced all the way back to Homer, perhaps best encapsulated in the example of the loyal swineherd by the name of Eumaios, and can also be found in real-life examples contemporary to Homer. In classical Sparta, though the ban on private manumission was unique, economic and geopolitical realities meant that helots, who existed under a sharecropping arrangement, could achieve economic differentiation between themselves but could also find their freedom through service in war. In the case of Crete, by building on recent work that has challenged the general picture of economic austerity, I argue that slaves there, too, could achieve status differentiation, including through their labour and amassing a peculium, a fact that is confirmed through an investigation of Gortynian laws. In Attica, where the evidence is most extensive, a thorough investigation of the occupational lexicon takes us beyond the well-known examples of slave bankers and prostitutes and contributes new insight into slaves’ centrality to the economy, specialisation and competencies; it was these that in each case allowed slaves to improve and sometimes exit their condition of slavery.