Slavery is one of the most consequential aspects of ancient Greek history. It is thus highly significant that its study has experienced a major transformation over the last fifteen years, alongside equally important changes taking place in the study of Roman slavery. Given the significance of the topic, and the thousands of books and articles devoted to it, a short volume that offers an overview of the field and the current state of play to students, interested non-specialists, specialists and the wider audience is highly desirable. This is the task that Deborah Kamen has set for herself, and she has greatly succeeded in that aim. This is a difficult book to write and review, as the author primarily presents the views of other people, rather than conducting new research or presenting her own views. Kamen has to be congratulated for offering a judicious and balanced presentation of scholarly debates and the different views of scholars; in fact, I admired highly her ability to present critically her own research. Equally important is the fact that Kamen does not focus exclusively on scholarly work in English, but has made a serious effort to incorporate in her overview research published in German, French, Italian and Spanish.
The introduction does a great job of setting the stage. It presents the most important monographs and edited volumes on Greek slavery that have appeared in the last two decades. Kamen then moves to discuss two major debates concerning the study of Greek slavery. The first concerns definitions and approaches to slavery: should slavery be seen as a relation of property or as a form of a social death? And was it a relationship unilaterally defined by the masters, or a historical phenomenon shaped by the agency of various actors? The second major bone of contention concerns the twin concepts of slave societies and societies with slaves. Moses Finley coined these terms to distinguish between the ubiquitous societies with slaves, where slavery existed but was a marginal phenomenon, and the rare slave societies, where slavery played a fundamental role. Recent research has challenged the utility of this distinction and has suggested alternative conceptual frameworks; Kamen offers the reader excellent guidance in navigating these debates.
Chapter 2 discussed the concept of epichoric slave systems, which has truly revolutionised the study of Greek slavery. Earlier approaches tended to assume that Greek slavery was tantamount to slavery in classical Athens. Servile systems that seemed to differ significantly from that of Athens, like those of the helots at Sparta, the woikeis in Crete and the penestai in Thessaly, were explained away by arguing that they were not ‘proper’ slaveries, but something else (e.g. serfdom, collective subjugation etc.). At the same time, ‘chattel’ slaveries in the rest of the Greek world, like e.g. in Chios or Rhodes, for which little evidence survives from the classical period, were considered as effectively identical with that of classical Athens. The concept of the epichoric slave system posits that Greek slavery was never a unified phenomenon, but an agglomeration of local systems which developed in their own particular ways as a result of local social, economic and political developments. This allows us to incorporate Spartan, Cretan and Thessalian slave systems into the study of Greek slavery proper, by explaining both what all these epichoric systems shared, as well as the ways in which they differed and diverged from each other. Athens should no longer stand as the archetype of Greek slavery, but simply as one slave system among many others. Kamen examines a series of Greek epichoric systems: Mycenaean and Homeric slavery, slavery in archaic and in classical Athens, Spartan and Cretan slavery. In each case, she shows how recent scholarship has challenged earlier assumptions: e.g. that Homeric slavery was somehow milder than later forms of slavery, or that helots were not the private property of their individual masters.
But Kamen’s discussion also illustrates two big gaps in our current knowledge. Apart from Mycenaean and Homeric slavery, the chapter focuses exclusively on epichoric systems from archaic and classical Greece. Readers would assume that there were no epichoric systems in Hellenistic or early imperial Greece; they might be surprised to discover that chapter 7 discusses Greek manumission using primarily epigraphic evidence from the Hellenistic and early imperial periods. This is characteristic of how the study of Greek slavery has developed: studying manumission using evidence from later periods, while constructing models solely on the basis of archaic and classical evidence. Furthermore, while the discussion of epichoric systems illustrates well the processes of divergence that made classical Greek systems look so different, the opposite processes of convergence, through which epichoric systems like those of Sparta, Crete and Thessaly became extinct or converged towards the Athenian model during the Hellenistic period, remain invisible.
Chapter 3 focuses on the economics of Greek slavery, a field which is quite neglected in comparison with the treatment of the same topic in the field of Roman slavery. Kamen reviews current debates on the various sources of supply of Greek slaves, in particular over the role of trade, captivity, and natural reproduction, and she re-examines the traditional debate on the number of slaves in classical Greece. More extensive is the discussion of the various economic roles of slaves, in particular the traditional debate on the significance of slaves in Athenian agriculture. Rather surprisingly, to me at least, Kamen has opted to defer to the next chapter the presentation of the concept of ‘slaving strategies’, i.e. the various ways in which masters employed their slaves. This concept aims to move the discussion beyond the usual focus on agriculture and the production of goods, in order to stress the significance of many other strategies that were highly significant in ancient societies, like labour for the everyday maintenance of households, which in a preindustrial society without electricity, running water and washing machines, involved a huge amount of labour. The best part of the discussion concerns the explanations for the prevalence of slavery in classical Athens and the models devised by Scheidel and Lewis to explain the peculiarity of the comparatively low prices for slaves in classical Athens.
Chapter 4 turns to the treatment of enslaved people in the ancient Greek world. This chapter is more descriptive, aiming to present the evidence for various forms of violence inflicted on ancient slaves, both by their individual masters, as well as by the institutional apparatuses of Greek states. In the process of presenting the evidence, Kamen also introduces the scholarly debates that concern the evidence, as e.g. over the Spartan krypteia and its nature and frequency. The most interesting part of this chapter concerns the debate on the Athenian law of hybris, and whether this can be seen as an institutional recognition and protection of slave honour that had a real effect on the lives of ancient slaves.
Chapter 5 focuses on sex and gender, one of the liveliest topics in the recent study of Greek slavery. Kamen starts by rightly emphasising that, like everything else, slavery was a highly gendered experience. Past scholarship (mine included) has generally taken the experience of male slaves as representative for all slaves; recent work has started to bring to light the various ways in which the experience of female slaves diverged substantially from that of male slaves. The rest of the chapter focuses on the connection between sex and slavery. Prostitution was a major industry in the ancient Greek world as a result of urbanisation and the strong link between sex and marriage for respectable free women; slave prostitutes filled in a crucial niche. At the same time, Kamen also examines the other sexual relationships between slave and free, in particular concubinage and paederastic relations with slave boys. Finally, Kamen rightly stresses that slave sexuality is not tantamount to coercion: sex offers a fascinating opportunity for exploring the agency of enslaved persons, and the various ways in which they sought to satisfy their sexual desires, create meaningful relations, and form families and kinship networks of solidarity and support.
The short chapter 7 concerns agency, resistance, and revolt. Past scholarship has effectively understood slave agency as tantamount to disobedience, resistance, and revolt. More recent work has tried to create conceptual space for understanding slave agency in broader terms; while resistance was always an important part of slave agency, the latter also comprised actions that were essential for slave systems (e.g. slave overseers), actions that simultaneously both supported and conflicted with slavery (e.g. slave families), and actions that were relatively neutral (e.g. healing rituals). Kamen introduces the recent debates on the nature of slave agency in the ancient world, but her discussion of specific examples of slave agency is restricted to examples of resistance and revolt. In many ways, the previous chapter 6 on slave sexuality is an excellent illustration of why we need a broader approach to slave agency in the study of Greek slavery.
Chapter 8 examines manumission, perhaps the aspect of Greek slavery for which we have the most detailed information, because of the thousands of manumission inscriptions from all over the Greek world that document the practice. Unsurprisingly, given her previous work, Kamen offers a tour de force that has much to offer. A major peculiarity of Greek slavery is the evidence for very different forms of manumission, like the unilateral informal declaration of the master or the fictive sale of a slave to a deity. Particularly interesting is the recent discussion whether consecrated slaves should be considered as free, or whether they retained a peculiar status as a result of the fact that they no longer had a specific human master. These manumission forms have raised various problems of interpretation, which are presented thoroughly and incisively. Equally debatable is the status of post-manumission status of paramone, and whether manumitted people in paramone can be considered as free or were still slaves. The chapter concludes with a discussion of current approaches to the status of freedpersons in ancient Greek societies.
The final chapter switches to the representations, metaphors and legacies of Greek slavery. Kamen presents recent scholarship on the representation of slaves and slavery in Greek literature, focusing in particular on Homer, Old Comedy, and Aristotle. She also examines representations of slavery in Greek art, a topic that is little studied in comparison with the fascinating recent work on the material and visual culture of Roman slavery. Slavery was also employed as a metaphor to discuss various issues, from relations among citizens or between states to the link between soul and body in ancient philosophy. Particularly interesting in this chapter is the discussion of the reception of Greek slavery in modern history and culture, a topic that has started to attract some fascinating research.
Kamen’s overview allows us to see how the study of Greek slavery is currently being transformed as a result of the continuous dialogue between traditional concepts, like those of slave societies and societies with slaves, and new approaches and frameworks, like those of epichoric slave systems and slaving strategies. It also illuminates the areas and topics that have been at the forefront of research, from traditional topics, like manumission and punishment, to new issues, like sex and gender. But the overview is also useful from a negative point of view: it illustrates by omission the areas and topics on which we need to conduct more research in the future. I have noted above various such omissions in the study of Greek slavery: Greek slave systems in the Hellenistic and imperial periods; slave agency in broader terms; slavery in Greek visual and material culture, etc. There is obviously a huge lot to do; but anyone who is willing to contribute, or is interested to find out about what is going on, will benefit immensely from this book.