Women at Work in the Deuteronomistic History - International Voices ...

76 | WOMEN AT WORK IN THE DTRH
The Greco-Roman World. Views of conditions of slavery in the Greek and
Roman empires are as divergent as those among Assyriologists on the ANE. The
following are some of the most representative writers. 58 William Westermann
believes there was a great fluidity of statuses among Greeks between free and
slave, the number of slaves was low, and there were no revolts, because of
possibilities to acquire one’s freedom by borrowing money. He considers that,
since slaves in Greece could live far from their masters, and choice of location
was characteristic of a free person, some slaves were “one-quarter free, or three
quarters free.” 59 Studying the same period, Moses Finley arrives at opposite
conclusions, for instance with regard to numbers of slaves and slave revolts.
Finley believes there were revolts, but they did not progress because of external
reasons. He sees slavery (“roughly the status in which a man [sic] is, in the eyes
of the law and of public opinion and with respect to all other parties, a
possession, a chattel, of another man”) as one extreme in a continuum.
If we think of ancient society as made up of a spectrum of statuses, with the
free citizen at one end and the slave at the other, and with a considerable
number of shades of dependence in between, then we have already discovered
two lines of the spectrum, the slave and the serf-like oikeus of Crete. At least
four more can easily be added: the helot (with such parallels as the penestes of
Thessaly); the debt-bondsman [sic], who was not a slave although under some
conditions he [sic] could eventually be sold into slavery abroad; the
conditionally manumitted slave; and, finally, the freedman [sic]. All six
categories rarely, if ever, appear concurrently within the same community, nor
were they equally significant in all periods of Greek history. By and large, the
58 See also Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1975), 211–217, and K. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 183–185, who have bibliographical suggestions. These two scholars stand at
opposite extremes in their view of slavery conditions, with Vogt stressing the more humane aspects
of it, while Bradley sees it more as a form of social control. Worth noticing also is G. deSte.Croix,
“Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour,” in Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour (ed. L.
Archer. London: Routledge, 1988), 22–23. He adopts definitions of slavery, debt-slavery, and
serfdom from the Slavery Convention held by the League of Nations in 1926, and the Supplementary
Convention on Slavery organized by the United Nations in 1956.
59 William Westermann, “Slavery and the Elements of Freedom in Ancient Greece,” in Slavery in
Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (ed. M. Finley. Cambridge: Heffer, 1960), 31.“Greek
society was, of course, a slave society. Its slavery was of a type unfamiliar to Europeans and
Americans in the last two centuries. It had no color line. (Therefore, pace Aristotles, it had no single
and clearly defined slave race or slave caste.) The person enslaved might well be one-quarter free, or
three quarters free. ... There was an astonishing fluidity of status in both directions, from slavery to
freedom as from freedom to slavery. This it is which, in large measure, explains the absence of slave
revolts in the Greek classical period.”