Reconstructing the Slave: The Image of the Slave in Ancient Greece

201 Pages·2012·1.37 MB·English

by  Kelly L. Wrenhaven

Reconstructing the Slave
Frontispiece. Attic red-figure kylix by the Dokimasia Painter, c. 490 BC.
Reconstructing
the Slave
The Image of the Slave in
Ancient Greece
Kelly L. Wrenhaven
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published in 2012
Reprinted 2013
© Kelly L. Wrenhaven 2012
Kelly L. Wrenhaven has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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ISBN: HB: 978-0-7156-3802-6
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Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank Tom Harrison and Jon Hesk, who provided
me with support, advice and encouragement when this project was at
its earliest stages. I would also like to thank Paul Cartledge and Mark
Golden, both of whom kindly took the time to read and comment upon
drafts of Chapters 1 and 2, gently correcting errors and offering advice
for further reading (any remaining errors are, of course, my responsi-
bility). I am further grateful to Nick Fisher, who has kept me up to date
on his own work related to slavery and provided me with some useful
information regarding a particular Attic tombstone; Timothy McNiven,
who provided me with some useful images of comic slaves; François
Lissarrague, who many years ago directed me towards the only known
figure identified as a ‘slave’ on a Greek pot; and Christopher Smith and
Sian Lewis, who encouraged me to think more about the provenance
and audiences of Greek pottery. I would also like to express my appre-
ciation to my colleagues at Cleveland State University for allowing me
the funds, time, space and encouragement I needed to complete this
book, and to the National Archaeological Museum at Athens for their
quick responses to my requests for the rights to images of Attic tomb-
stones, which were sent to me free of charge (an unfortunate rarity
today). I would also like to acknowledge a personal debt to my parents,
who have given me limitless and unquestioning support throughout
many years of studies and research.
Finally, I would like to thank the one person to whom I am most
indebted: my husband, who has been a constant source of friendship
and support over many years, and without whose firm and uncondi-
tional encouragement I would never have considered going this far.
Thank you for never letting me take the ‘easy way out’. I dedicate this
book to you, with all my love.
To Steven Wrenhaven
ix

Introduction
In 422 BC, during the Gamelion (January/February), an audience of
primarily Athenian residents (citizens and non-citizens) gathered to
celebrate the Lenaia.1 As part of the festival, they were entertained by
some of Attica’s leading dramatists, among them Aristophanes, who
produced a comedy that year entitled Wasps, which cast a satirical eye
upon Athens’ jurors and political demagogues. Characteristic of Aristo-
phanes’ plays (and quite likely of those of other comic writers; see
below), the audience was first presented with two slave characters,
Sosias and Xanthias, whose task it was to guard the door of their owner
Bdelycleon’s house in order to prevent his father, Philocleon, from
escaping. The play opens with Sosias scolding Xanthias for sleeping on
the job and warning him that he ‘will owe a great penalty to (his) ribs’,
meaning that he will be roundly flogged if his master catches him (3).
Sosias himself then promptly falls asleep. Both slaves blame their
drowsiness upon the Thraco-Phrygian god Sabazios, whose function, in
this context at least, was to bring sleep, perhaps in the form of a
drunken stupor.2 Once fully awake, the slaves share with each other
their dreams, which are peppered with an amusing mixture of omens
and commentary about contemporaneous Athenian political figures.
Finally, Xanthias focuses the audience’s attention upon the issue at
hand, namely Philocleon’s seemingly insurmountable addiction to jury
service (hence his ‘imprisonment’ in the house). After explaining the
premise of the play, the slaves are reprimanded by Bdelycleon for
sleeping and ordered to run to the house to keep an eye on his father,
who is threatening to slip out through the drain in the kitchen sink.
This is just one example of Aristophanes’ use of slave characters for
initial, attention-grabbing comic relief and plot introduction – Peace
and Knights begin in much the same way, with two bungling slaves
narrating the action and explaining the plots to the audience. The way
in which Aristophanes represents these slaves, however, is not unique
to his plays. Not only does he reflect and manipulate representations of
comic slaves from the plays of other dramatists (as Xanthias suggests
when he warns the audience that he will not resort to the lowbrow
tactics of other comedies, such as throwing basketfuls of nuts into the
audience), within just over one hundred lines, he manages to draw upon
1
Reconstructing the Slave
what was by this time a well-established series of ideas about slaves
found in sources as varied as historiography, philosophy, tragedy and
the visual arts. One of the most readily apparent stereotypes is his
representation of barbarian slaves, which reflects the tendency in
Greek sources to associate barbarianism with slavery.3 Aristophanes
does this, in part, through the slaves’ names. Although neither name is
exclusive to slaves, ‘Sosias’ is likely a Hellenized version of a Thracian
name (cf. Xen. Ways 4.14), and always marks a slave in Attic comedy.
Similarly, the name Xanthias means ‘golden’ or ‘reddish’ hair, which
was likewise associated with foreigners. Xanthias’ name might also
have been reflected by his costume, which perhaps included the red-
haired slave mask. The slaves’ reference to Sabazios further connects
them with barbarianism. Although there was a contemporaneous Athe-
nian cult to Sabazios, the god was adopted from the East, most probably
from Phrygia or Thrace, and was associated with a lack of moderation
in the form of corybantic revelry.4 These characteristics, or weaknesses,
were likewise connected with slaves and barbarians in a variety of
sources. Moreover, since it appears to have been primarily women who
worshipped Sabazios in the Athenian version of the cult, the god was
linked to effeminacy, which by Aristophanes’ time was considered
characteristic of slaves and barbarians.5 The slaves are also charac-
terized by a general shirking of their duty, since both spend more time
sleeping than guarding, and when they are awake (and unwatched by
their master), they chat and gossip about the citizens of Athens and
divulge a great deal about the goings-on in their master’s household.
When their master gives them orders, however, they quickly jump to
attention, no doubt from fear of being flogged.
Aristophanes’ depiction of these slaves would have come as no sur-
prise to the members of the audience, who were already accustomed to
seeing slaves stereotyped as lazy, untrustworthy and prone to excessive
behaviour and gossip. As this book will show, these ideas were essential
to the slave-owning society of the ancient Greeks. Indeed, judging by
the frequent inclusion of slave characters in comic scenes on Greek
pots, and the relatively numerous terracotta figurines of slave charac-
ters produced between the late fifth and the second centuries BC, these
types of characters appear to have been amongst the most popular and
collectible, perhaps in the same way that people later collected (and
continue to collect) black Americana items such as rag dolls of black
slave Mammies, rotund Aunt Jemima cookie jars, tea pots and salt and
pepper shakers in the form of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Moses (Fig. 19).
Although in both the ancient and modern contexts such items were
considered amusing and entertaining, at least by their intended audi-
ences, both also draw upon an ideology of slavery which aimed to justify
2
Introduction
the enslavement of certain people by ‘Othering’ them, typically through
the attribution of characteristics which were considered non-ideal, such
as laziness, barbarianism, servility, and mental and moral inferiority.
Indeed, these types of amusing, likeable, even childish slaves are
constructions which had the effect of making slavery, an intrinsically
cruel and contradictory institution, seem as agreeable, acceptable and
justifiable as the slave characters themselves. By emphasizing the
slave’s perceived barbarity and lack of intelligence, or ‘Otherness’, a
hierarchy of power was established between the master and the slave,
making the former appear superior and deserving of dominion and the
latter inferior and deserving of domination. In this way, representing
slaves both aided in the construction of identities and, through repeti-
tion, in perpetuating ideas which were important to maintaining these
identities.
It is clear that these kinds of representations are caricatures of
slaves, in the same way that Philocleon is a caricature of an elderly
Greek male citizen and Bdelycleon is a caricature of a Greek youth. Yet,
while studies of Greek comedy generally recognize the generic distor-
tion of non-slave characters (we can hardly assume that Aristophanes
provides a mirror image of the real Cleon), in an effort to determine the
historical reality of slavery in the Greek world, studies of Greek slavery
tend to underestimate the power of generic distortion as it applies to
slaves. To use the same example, because slaves are so often repre-
sented as barbarians in Greek comedy (and in other sources) it is often
assumed that the majority of slaves in Greek city-states were, in fact,
barbarian. While this might represent the real situation, it can hardly
be proved definitively; in fact, there is at least as much evidence of
Greek as barbarian slaves in epigraphic and historiographic sources.6
On the other hand, the value of the idea of the barbarian slave, whether
for comic effect or for some other purpose (such as connecting slaves
with the innate moral and intellectual deficiency associated with bar-
barians), is underestimated or even overlooked altogether.
The issue of the selectivity of our source material is further com-
pounded by the fact that the majority of the evidence, not only for Greek
slavery but for Greek culture in general, is provided by a small segment
of society, namely the literate, polis-dwelling elite. As has often been
noted, particularly in studies of Greek women, this poses challenges for
any socio-historical examination of ancient Greece; however, it is a
particular challenge for the topic of slavery. For instance, it is often
assumed, based upon the impression given by our sources, that slaves
were to be seen virtually everywhere and that virtually everyone owned
at least one slave. This has, in turn, led to the general assumption that
slave ownership was common amongst all but the most impoverished
3
Reconstructing the Slave
levels of Greek society. Moses Finley, for instance, argued that ‘the fact
(of slave-ownership) is taken for granted so completely and so often in
the literature that I strongly believe many owned slaves even when
they could not afford them’.7 While the ‘fact’ of slave-ownership might
have been true from the point of view of members of the upper class who
owned slaves and were therefore surrounded by them, it has the
potential to distort our view of Greek society, and quite possibly the real
situation of slavery in the Greek world. Lysias’ speech On the Refusal
of a Pension is sometimes cited as an example that even average men
of middling means (i.e. tradesmen) were expected to have at least one
slave. In this speech, the speaker is trying to demonstrate that he
suffers such abject poverty that he is unable to afford even one slave to
help him in his trade (24.6). This might indicate that it was considered
unusual not to have at least one slave, however, it should be stressed
that the speaker is responding to the argument that he has an affluent
trade and so should be able to afford to support himself and, presum-
ably, purchase slave help. More importantly, perhaps, he clearly
expected the jury to believe that there were, indeed, some men who
were so poor that they could not afford slaves. The idea that not all
Greeks owned slaves is further suggested in Aristophanes’ The Assem-
bly Women, when Praxagora aims to correct the inequality of a society
in which some men have many slaves and some none at all (593).
Although such poverty might have seemed virtually unimaginable to
the wealthy, surely most Greeks did not fall into the category of being
able to afford the luxury of slaves, who, if epigraphic documents such
as the Attic Stelai are accurate measures of their cost, did not come
cheap.8 A comparison might be made here between the possible situ-
ation in Greece and that of the slave-holding American South, where
modern historians generally assume that slave-holders made up ‘a
relatively small part of the southern population’.9 This assumption is
based, in part, upon census data from 1860, which indicates that only
about 25 per cent of the population of the fifteen states owned slaves.10
Therefore, even though southerners seem generally to have identified
with the institution of slavery insofar as it helped to define their own
rights and freedoms, most did not directly partake in it as slave-owners.
Although the extent to which average Greek citizens identified with
slavery is not so easy to determine, there is a strong possibility that the
presence of slaves in Greek society similarly helped the Greeks to
define themselves appositionally, as free Greeks with political, civic
and legal rights, especially over their own bodies.
Another area where our sources often conflate slaves and the lower
levels of Greek society is in the context of labour. Because poor free
persons often performed the same type of work as slaves, members of
4