[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This volume is the fifth book to appear in the series Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Slavery edited by Ulrike Roth, and it is a product of the research project ‘Honour in Classical Greece’ funded by the European Research Council. As the title suggests, the essays explore the relationship between slavery and systems of honor. In particular, the authors take aim at Orlando Patterson’s claim, in his influential book Slavery and Social Death (1982), that a key part of the condition of slavery was the denial of honor. While none would dispute that slaves were generally dishonored in the societies in which they were enslaved, many scholars have pointed out that Patterson’s argument was too sweeping and underestimated the ways that slaves could in fact obtain honor, not only among themselves but also sometimes from their enslavers and even from the wider community.[1] The essays in this volume contribute to this research direction by exploring ways that slaves in ancient Greece were participants in systems of honor within and beyond the household.
The volume’s introduction sets out a definition of honor that draws on the philosopher Stephen Darwall’s distinction between ‘recognition respect’ and ‘appraisal respect.’ According to this scheme, recognition respect is the respect accorded to a person because of their position in society, including their legal status but also their occupational role or their social roles as parent, spouse etc. By contrast, appraisal respect is the respect generated by a person’s excellent performance of their role. Many of the essays in the volume demonstrate that slaves in ancient Greece could be accorded both types of respect and therefore participated in systems of honor.
In the opening essay, Douglas Cairns shows how Herodotus’ depiction of Xerxes’ relationship with his subjects illustrates Darwell’s two types of respect and suggests that actual slaves similarly had opportunities for gaining both recognition and appraisal respect through “services rendered, benefits conferred, and the expectations generated by iterated reciprocity.” (p36). In chapter two, David Lewis argues that scholars confuse the legal criteria of slavery—namely, ownership of one individual by another—with the broader array of characteristics—such as lack of honor—that derive from the existence of a prototype of the slave in the Greek imagination.[2] While Lewis’ point about honor is well taken, his insistence on the stability of the legal criteria of slavery, runs afoul of some cases. In particular, how are we to understand the status of those individuals who are granted freedom in the inscriptions on the temple of Delphi but must remain with their enslavers and continue “to do whatever she/he is ordered to do” for a specified period (often years)? Technically, these individuals are free (i.e., no longer owned by their manumitter), but their condition is—at least temporarily—indistinguishable in practice from their enslaved state. Such examples do not show that the Greeks were confused about status but rather reflect the messy realities that often result when a society attempts to put the ‘unruly animal that is a human being’ (as Plato puts it in Laws 777b4-8) into a system of control that is slavery. Human societies are not ideal legal templates, and the attempt to fit human beings into the template inevitably succumbs to the variety of human situations.
Ulrike Roth examines Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery in order to determine whether it is compatible with the notion of honorable slaves. She argues in the affirmative, drawing on recent interpretations of Aristotle’s theory that view his categories of ‘natural slave’ and ‘natural master’ not as fixed but rather as -at least partly- the result of habitual actions that befit a slavish or free person. As such, Roth argues, there is a conceptual space in Aristotle’s theory between natural slavery and natural mastery that allows for individuals to move from one category to another through their actions. This is why, according to Roth, the theory of natural slavery does not conflict with the idea that someone can perform honorable deeds while enslaved or even become free after being enslaved. In practice, enslaved persons who perform honorable deeds and masters (such as Xenophon’s Ischomachus) who honor slaves illustrate two sides of the process by which an enslaved individual may perform acts that befit a free person. This is an ingenious argument, yet one wonders whether Roth is too eager to save Aristotle from the contradictions in his theories that in fact lie at the heart of slavery as a system that imposes artificial distinctions on human beings.
Gabriel Cabral Bernardo examines the role that ritual dishonoring of helots played in constructing Spartan identity. For example, he suggests that the public whipping of helots or their forced inebriation reinforced the superiority of the Spartans. Bernardo observes that reports of imposed dishonor mostly date from 4th and 3rd century authors when Spartan dependence on helots had increased due to dwindling numbers of Spartans. As such, these practices of ritual humiliation can be viewed as attempts to counter symbolically the honor that these groups were acquiring for example through their service in the Spartan army.
David Tandy describes the hierarchy of slaves in the Homeric poems and argues that they are distinguished by the level of honor each is accorded. Within the domestic sphere, female slaves enjoy honor according to the nature of the labor they provide. Household managers such as Eurykleia stand at the top of the hierarchy and are followed by bedroom attendants who care for important female members of a noble family. At the bottom of the hierarchy, countless other female slaves perform menial tasks such as grinding grain, fetching water, spinning and weaving and serving meals. Most of these are unnamed, although one of the disloyal female slaves is highlighted by name, Melantho, sister of one of the bad male slaves, the equally disloyal goatherd Melanthios. As goatherd, Tandy argues, Melanthios enjoys little recognition respect, compared to higher rank male livestock slaves such as cattle-herders and swineherds, the latter prominently represented by the loyal Eumaeus. Due to his disloyalty, moreover, Melanthius also merits little appraisal respect.
Mirko Canevaro argues for the existence of honor dynamics not just in slaves’ relationships with one another but also in master-slave relations. Canevaro demonstrates that the masters’ own invocation of norms of honor to incentivize slave productivity provided grounds for enslaved persons themselves to assert that they were rights-bearing individuals who could claim recognition (honor) for services rendered. One piece of evidence for this view is found in Plato’s warning, in the Laws, that masters should not honor their slaves excessively since this gives them the idea that they are the equals of their masters (777e-778a). While Plato’s fear may be exaggerated, as Canevaro acknowledges, other evidence confirms that the normative system of reward and punishment invoked by slave-owners gave space for the enslaved to hold their masters to account in a system of reciprocity that recognized the enslaved as potentially worthy of honor.
Bianca Mazzinghi Gori examines the representation of slaves in Menandrian comedy and argues that these comic slaves reflect the ways that historical slaves in 4th century Athens were participants in the honor dynamics of the household. Parallels with epigraphical and forensic sources support the evidence from comedy. Despite the denial of honor to slaves in the political and legal spheres, in the informal and interpersonal contexts depicted in comedy they were “fully fledged members of communities of honour.” (158)
Jason Porter examines the ways that trusted slaves (e.g., overseers, managers of workshops and banks, business agents) were incentivized through honor and not simply material rewards. Porter observes that both pseudo-Aristotle and Xenophon in their treatises on household management advise the granting of honor as a means of securing the loyalty of these slaves and increasing productivity. That is to say that such grants of honor were of instrumental value to the slave-owner and not done for moral reasons. Porter draws a parallel with the royal slaves of the Sokoto Caliphate, who also wielded authority in the wider society because of their privileged position. By contrast, overseers in the American South—although they too could earn the respect of plantation owners—were not typically enslaved, but in fact hired from the lower-class free population.
Kostas Vlassopoulos shows how slaves could gain honor in three spheres of relationships: master-slave; free (non-master)-slave; and slave-slave. The first category is discussed by previous essays in the collection (especially Canevaro and Porter), although Vlassopoulos adds some additional epigraphical evidence for slaves gaining honor through their association with high-status owners. Next Vlassopoulos examines relationships between free persons and slaves, and observes that marriages between slaves and free persons, such as are attested for Gortyn, granted honor to slaves. Vlassopoulos also points to the case of public slaves at Athens, who were sometimes granted public honors for services to the state. In this regard, Vlassopoulos observes the paradox that “Greek cities punished public slaves as slaves and honored them as if they were free.” (188) Finally, Vlassopoulos turns to relationships between slaves and surveys various examples of slaves being honored by other slaves in funeral monuments and in cultic dedications.
Nick Fisher defends his view that hubris entailed a judgment about the effect of an act upon the victim against Canevaro’s critique that it involved primarily a judgment about the disposition of the perpetrator.[3] This distinction is significant particularly in the case of the slave victims of hubris because of the implication that slaves could suffer dishonor. Fisher draws on several examples of slave victim of hubris feeling insulted and dishonored, including the anonymous Olynthian woman of Dem.19, the enslaved sex worker Neaira, and the public slave Pittalakos. Fisher concludes that while the disposition of the perpetrator was important for the classification of an act as hubris, the effect of the action on the victim was also significant.
Deborah Kamen examines the honor granted to so-called ‘privileged’ slaves, that is slaves who lived and worked independently of their enslavers as bankers, merchants, and managers of workshops among other occupations.[4] Using the cases of the banking slaves Pasion and Phormion as a case study, Kamen argues that privileged slaves attained both recognition respect and appraisal respect. For example, in Phormion’s account of Pasion’s success in his defense against a lawsuit by Pasion’s son Apollodorus, Phormion observes that Pasion was valued by his owner as not only a skilled banking slave (recognition respect) but also as industrious and trustworthy (appraisal respect). Kamen’s larger goal in this chapter is to defend her view that privileged slaves such as Pasion and Phormion did in fact occupy a distinct status from other slaves.[5] Given the flexibility of the term ‘status,’ Kamen makes a plausible case that these individuals were in fact distinct from other slaves in the honor and benefits they received.
Finally, Ambra Ghiringhelli turns to slaves’ participation in religion and argues against Patterson’s claim that religious rituals worked to “incorporate the slave to his marginal status.” Ghiringhelli provides several examples of slaves who gained authority and influence through religious cult. For example, she points out that, according to Diodorus’ account of the first and second slave revolts in Sicily in the second century BCE, the leaders Eunus, Salvius and Athenion all presented themselves as having special access to the will of the gods and were granted both recognition and appraisal respect on these grounds. Ghiringhelli also discusses a fascinating set of inscriptions from Sounion from the second century CE which record the foundation of a cult of Men by an enslaved Lycian man named Xanthos. Ghiringhelli suggests that it is likely that the enslaved Xanthos had religious authority not just among fellow slaves, but also among free persons who probably participated in this cult.
This is a rich volume with many insightful, and sometimes provocative, ideas. While there is some redundancy across essays (multiple chapters present Darwall’s conceptual scheme and the same passages in Xenophon and pseudo-Aristotle’s treatises on household management are discussed in several essays) these repetitions will not bother most readers who will likely read select chapters rather than the whole book.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Douglas Cairns, Mirko Canevaro and David M. Lewis)
Part I: Slavery and Honour in the Conceptual Sphere
- Honour and the Rhetoric of Slavery in Herodotus (Douglas Cairns)
- Greek Slavery and Honour: Institutional and Prototypical Approaches (David M. Lewis)
- The Space in Between: Honourable Slaves and the Theory of Natural Slavery (Ulrike Roth)
- Helot Dishonour and Spartan Identity (Gabriel Cabral Bernardo)
Part II: Slavery and Honour in the Household
- Slavery, Honour and Ideology in Homer’s World (David Tandy)
- Recognition and Imbalances of Power: Honour Relations and Slaves’ Claims vis-à-vis Their Masters (Mirko Canevaro)
- Negotiating Respect and Oikeiotês: The Honour of Menander’s Slaves (Bianca Mazzinghi Gori)
- Honour as a Privilege: Slave Hierarchies and Master-Slave Relationships in the Household-Management Texts of Classical Athens (Jason Porter)
Part III: Slavery and Honour Beyond the Household
- The Multiple Honours of Enslaved People in Ancient Greek Societies (Kostas Vlassopoulos)
- Whose Honour? Hubris, Slavery and the Athenian Law Once More (Nick Fisher)
- ‘Privileged’ Slaves and Honour in Classical Athens (Deborah Kamen)
- Chosen by the Gods: Enslaved Leaders and Religious Honour (Ambra Ghiringhelli)
Notes
[1] J. Bodel and W. Scheidel eds. On Human Bondage. After Slavery and Social Death. Malden MA, 2017, with references to earlier scholarship.
[2] Here Lewis is drawing on arguments he has made in other publications, including an essay in Bodel and Scheidel above, and his book, Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BCE. Oxford, 2018.
[3] Fisher, N. Hybris: A Study of the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece. Warminster, 1992; Canevaro, M. 2018 “The public charge for hubris against slaves: the honour of the victim and the honour of the hubristes” Journal of Hellenic Studies 138: 100-126.
[4] She focuses on privately-owned slaves and therefore does not include in her analysis the various publicly-owned slaves who might be classified among the privileged slaves of classical Athens.
[5] D.Kamen Status in Classical Athens. Princeton, 2013; J. Trevett ‘Review of D.Kamen Status in Classical Athens” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014.02.35.