Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

112 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
hood of mankind, were muted in their opposition. In The Politics,
Aristotle goes so far as to justify slavery as part of the order of existence,
though he makes a distinction between what he calls slaves
by nature (i.e., those born in captivity) and slaves by law (i.e., those
captured in war). Aristotle proposed this distinction in response to
those who regarded the very existence of slavery as “contrary to
nature” (1253b–1255b).
Our understanding of slavery in the Greek world is bedeviled
by both Christianity and Marxism. Each imposes value judgments
upon the institution, and these value judgments tend to distort our
investigation of its place in ancient society. Christianity deplores
slavery as barbaric and inhumane. Marxist historians identify
slaves with the subjected European proletariat of the nineteenth
century. Friedrich Engels went so far as to allege that the moral
and political collapse of the ancient world was chiefly caused by
slavery. Neither the Christian nor the Marxist viewpoint does full
justice to the realities of life in the ancient world, however. Abhorrent
and vicious though the institution of slavery was in so many
respects, it nonetheless provided some measure of economic security
in an otherwise dangerous and unpredictable world. It would,
however, be quite wrong to give the impression that slavery was a
benign institution. The fact that “more than 20,000 slaves deserted,
most of them skilled laborers” (Thukydides 7.27.5) when the Peloponnesians
established a permanent base at Dekeleia in Attica in
413 b.c.e. is testimony to widespread discontent, even if many of
the refugees were mine workers. Nor does it seem to have occurred
to anyone that the existence of such a large servile labor force
depressed the wages of the poor—or, if it did, no one did anything
about it.
With the exception of Spartan agriculture and Athenian silver
mining, there is little evidence to suggest that the Greeks depended
on slavery for what Marxists call their means of production. Overall,
therefore, it remains questionable whether the achievements of
Greek civilization were made possible by slavery.
FOREIGNERS AND BARBARIANS
The status of being a foreigner, as the Greeks understood the
term, does not permit any easy definition. Primarily it signified
such peoples as the Persians and Egyptians, whose languages were
unintelligible to the Greeks, but it could also be used to describe
Greeks who spoke in a different dialect and with a different accent.