Talk:Slavery in ancient Greece/Archive 2

Statistics on Slaves
At least once this comment is made -- "Only the poorest citizens did not possess a domestic slave". I find this hard to believe. For one thing, we lack any kind of census for ancient Greece: we don't have a reliable number for how many people lived in Athens or any Greek city at the time, let alone how many were slaves/citizens/metics. For another, scholars of ancient Greece & Rome traditionally had the habit of inferring typical behavior from the surviving literature -- plays, speeches, dialogues, poems, etc. -- which did not necessarily reflect the society accurately. (Consider how television programs of any country portrays the average person/family. Should we expect the writers of ancient Greece to do a better job?) In addition, there have been attempts to create some kind of population profile from surviving inscriptions; although most of these inscriptions are tombstones, it has been pointed out that the population these inscriptions attest to are disproportionately wealthy, male, & older than average. Lastly, while this statement at one point is based on something Moses Finley wrote; while he is an expert on the subject, unless he presented how he came to this conclusion it is still just an opinion of one person. Experts can be wrong. This statement might be salvageable by rephrasing it as "Moses Finley believes that only the poorest citizens did not possess a domestic slave." IMHO, it should be replaced by a more plausible statement, such as "Ownership of domestic slaves was common." Lacking reliable statistics -- which don't now & perhaps never existed -- we can't be more exact. -- llywrch (talk) 21:18, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree, and I've boldly edited the paragraph to non-controversially state, "Ownership of domestic slaves was common, the domestic male slave's main role being to stand in for his master at his trade and to accompany him on trips. In time of war he was batman to the hoplite. The female slave carried out domestic tasks, in particular bread baking and textile making." Carlstak (talk) 16:59, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree that flatly stating "only the poorest" in Wikipedia's voice, was best removed. However, I'm not so sure that we should require reliable sources to show their working. Nor that we should second-guess their accuracy by deciding on our own initiative (WP:OR) that their methods of research (literature, tombstones, et cetera) were inadequate. It would be good to still include a mention of Finley's conclusion, alongside the more widely supportable generalisation that's now in there. MPS1992 (talk) 17:53, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't oppose mentioning Finley's thesis, with qualifications. It seems incorrect to speak of "Greek" slave ownership as a monolithic entity, though. For example, regarding the statistics, one would think the lower classes in Sparta held fewer slaves than those in Athens. Carlstak (talk) 00:19, 28 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, definitely worth looking for the context here. MPS1992 (talk) 00:28, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

The conclusion being discussed here is one that I have seen in other places. If I remember correctly, for instance, Robert Garland says something similar in the section on slavery in his book Ancient Greece: Everyday Life in the Birthplace of Western Civilization. (I do not currently have access to my copy of the book to verify this, however.) In any case, the statement that only the poorest citizens could not afford to own slaves seems to be very much a standard one found in most discussions of how common slavery was in ancient Greece; that does not necessarily mean it is correct, but it does mean it is an idea that a lot of scholars tend to take for granted.

I know one piece of evidence that is often cited in support of the view that only the poorest Athenian citizens did not own slaves is a statement found in Lysias's speech On the Refusal of a Pension to an Invalid 24.6, in which the speaker uses the fact that he cannot even afford to buy a slave as proof of how utterly destitute he is. I have always personally been a bit unconvinced by this evidence, since the speaker in Lysias's speech is obviously not trying to give a neutral account of how common slavery was in classical Athens, but rather trying to convince the jury that he is extremely poor, which means he is willing to construe any evidence to support that argument. In any case, we should probably include something along the lines of the statement we are discussing. it may be a good idea to include some distancing language, however, to convey that this statement only reflects one possible view on the matter. —Katolophyromai (talk) 04:20, 28 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Let me begin by turning to Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy (Berkley, 1973) for a statement whence I drew my observation above:

"We do not know the numbers of slaves in Greece or Italy at any given time, not even the number in any particular community or in any particular individual's possession, save for exceptions. Estimates by modern scholars for classical Athens range wildly, all the way from 20,000 to 400,000, both impossible figures but indicative of the sad state of our information. (p. 71)"


 * Finlay then turns to the better documented antebellum American South, using it as a comparison to the ancient world, stating that in 1860 "the slave population was slightly less than one third of the total, and perhaps three-fourths of the whites owned no slaves at all, according to official census figures." (p. 71) In short, while we can make educated guesses in the end they remain impressionistic guesses.Then there is the thesis that "everyone but the very poor had at least one slave" -- what is meant by the "very poor"? Remember, our informants about life in ancient Greece (i.e., the people who wrote the books, letters, inscriptions we base our knowledge about that time) came from the most affluent ranks or classes of society, which was a society with a great wealth inequality -- as is the case with all pre-Modern societies. Many of the members of these upper classes had little information & less empathy for how the less fortunate lived. Lysias may have considered anyone who lacked a slave to be "extremely poor", regardless of other means to define that term such as food security. Notwithstanding class snobbery, if we define being simply "poor" as anyone who lack food security -- don't know where tomorrow's meals are coming from -- based on what little we know & comparisons with pre-Modern societies, that would include as any as half of the total population. And most of those who owned other people had one slave, or maybe a man-woman pair.But after all of these qualifications, I have found a couple of sources that provide estimates in the form of numbers, which appear to be based on some kind of calculation. One is offered by Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations: 50 BC to AD 284 (New Haven, 1974): "In Italy it [the unfree population] was enormous, possibly a quarter of the whole. In the provinces the proportion may have been closer to a tenth." (p. 92; a footnote points to further sources) The other is Demography of the Roman Empire, where a 2006 work is cited that 27% of the population in Greece & Asia Minor were slaves.I hope some of my comments here have helped the conversation. -- llywrch (talk) 07:49, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Women slaves
This article seems very male-orientated. There is almost nothing in it about the position of female slaves. IT seems extraordinary that there's nothing about rape, sex slavery, forced marriage, or the position of women in general. Please could someone put this right? Urmilla Stoughton (talk) 12:19, 19 January 2020 (UTC)
 * do you have reliable sources that indicate that rape, sex slavery, forced marriage occurred regarding female slaves in ancient Greece? MPS1992 (talk) 15:12, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

While we're at it, the article explains nothing about the related question of what happened to the children of women slaves. Were people born into slavery in Greece? The articles doesn't mention "birth" status as one of the sources of slaves. It's fairly obvious in the helot system of Sparta that they were indeed born into slavery. But what about Athens and elsewhere? Did owners intentionally compel slaves to rape one another or rape the slaves themselves in order to profit from coming into possession of more property, as later happened in the Americas? Even if we don't know whether this happened under Athenian or other Greek slavery practices, our lack of knowledge on this important issue should be explored. Ftjrwrites (talk) 04:32, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Any objection to archiving old discussions?
This talk page is getting really long and some of the discussions haven't been active in over a decade. Does anybody object to me using User:ClueBot III to archive old threads on this page? The archives would be available by a link at the top of this page (for example, see Talk:Slavery_in_ancient_Rome, where I recently set up the same bot with the same parameters). I would set it up with the following parameters: If there is no objection within a few days, I will assume this is fine. Thank you for any input. Ikjbagl (talk) 14:49, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
 * age=4320 (only sections with no replies in the last 180 days will be archived)
 * maxarchsize=50000 (will create a new archive at about 50000 bytes)
 * minarchthreads=4 (requires at least 4 old threads to make a new archive page)
 * minkeepthreads=4 (will not archive if there are 4 or fewer threads on the page)
 * format= %%i (default archive format)
 * That's fine with me. Sweet6970 (talk) 09:11, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

ClueBot has been set up; archiving will begin soon. Ikjbagl (talk) 11:52, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Slavery Conditions, Xenophon
Under Slavery Conditions, we find: "Xenophon's advice is to treat slaves as domestic animals, that is to say punish disobedience and reward good behaviour." (Economics 13:6). Economics is a dramatic Socratic dialog in which Socrates talks with a wealthy, esteemed landowner about the day-to-day operations of a rich household. That landowner, Ischomachus, does advise treating slaves in the above-quoted manner. That is fairly obviously not the same as Xenophon himself advising it. One could more accurately say something like 'Xenophon notes the accepted practice of treating slaves as domestic animals...' 146.115.132.3 (talk) 20:26, 15 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comment. Your suggested change sounds good to me. Sweet6970 (talk) 10:34, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Change now made. Sweet6970 (talk) 09:48, 20 September 2020 (UTC)