This weekend, our excursions across Greece continued, this time in the region of Central Greece. Friday, we visited Thebes and Glas, as well as the church of Panagia Skripou. Saturday, we finally got to visit one of the most important sites of the ancient world: Delphi. (However, much to my chagrin, we only spent a mere three and a half hours there, whereas I think we could have spent a couple of days there and still not have covered all of it.) On Saturday afternoon, we went to Osios Loukas, a stunning Middle Byzantine monastery in Boeotia. Finally, on Sunday, we visited Eretria and Amarynthos, which housed the excavations of a Sanctuary of Artemis (although very little of it was still visible to us, so I naturally—and unfortunately— found it a bit harder to resonate with). As one might easily be able to tell from this itinerary, our weekend was absolutely jampacked, so I’d like to elaborate upon my favorite and most resonant site: Delphi. More specifically, I’ll be focusing on the contents of a single wall, one replete with inscriptions of the manumissions of slaves. Since we have discussed so little about slavery in antiquity, despite ancient Greece being indubitably a slave society—which I find to be altogether quite distressing—I will be taking a closer look into the lives and manumissions of slaves in classical Greece.
First, I will give an overview of the wall of manumission inscriptions we were given by Professor Edward Harris at the site of Delphi. As a whole, Delphi is an incredible source of Greek epigraphy. The bulk of these inscriptions are manumission inscriptions, with an impressive 1,341 documents of the freeing of slaves at this site alone. Ranging in date from 200 B.C. and ending in 100 C.E., the manumission inscriptions reside on the retaining wall of the temple of Apollo and walls of the theater. Generally, from the two translations Edward provided us with, the manumission inscriptions follow a general formula: first, the conditions upon which the individual was enslaved are stated, including the month, archonship, and prospective owner, as well as the price by which the slave was purchased. Then, the conditions under which the slave is freed are recounted, which includes the slave—or a freedperson on their behalf— paying a necessary ransom for their freedom. Finally, witnesses of the manumission are listed, corroborating the newfound freedom of the individual. In some cases, though, the slave remains in a sort of liminal state between freedom and captivity: under a practice called paramone, slaves could be forced to stay with their ex-masters for a specified period, or until the owner passes away. To further complicate the precarious freedom (or lack thereof) that slaves were granted, manumissions often took place as a sale to a god: in the case of Delphi, that god is almost always Pythian Apollo, or the Delphian diviner attribute of Apollo. The ten or so minutes we spent discussing slavery, while an appreciable effort at discussing such a convoluted and under-discussed topic, left me unsatisfied and looking for more information on the lives of slaves that might have been manumitted at Delphi.
To give a brief overview of slavery in classical Greece (especially classical Athens) would be helpful here. Classical Greece was a chattel-slavery society. Slaves had little to no legal or social capabilities: they could not claim property, offer testimony, have legally recognized families, or exercise the public rights and privileges of citizens. Furthermore, they were excluded from community events, such as religious festivals (Kamen 283). Also, on a more informal note, I remember from reading a few plays by Aristophanes (a classical Greek comedian) in my Greek drama class in the fall that slaves were brutally treated: they could be whipped, fettered, tattooed, and corporally violated. I remember feeling doubly disturbed by the fact that this inhumane treatment of slaves was viewed as entertaining and comedic.
One of the questions I was left with was concerning the “selling” of slaves to gods in the manumission inscriptions at Delphi. How, I wondered, could a transaction concerning such a serious matter be made between a mortal and a metaphysical deity? How could a god be a slave-holder? One possibility is that the prospect of a slave being sold to a god is a fiction that intends to prevent the possibility of a slave owning property; since the slave provided the purchase price to the owner for their freedom, and the Greeks did not conceptualize their gods as slave-holders, the slave was free upon being sold to Apollo (Samuel 268). As a result of this “sacral fictive sale,” the ownership of slaves was transferred to themselves, because gods were not conceptualized as making use of their right to ownership (Kamen 286).
It interested me that both of the translations of the manumission inscriptions that we were given were concerning female individuals. How exactly, I wondered, did gender dynamics manifest in the comparative numbers and experience of male and female slaves? According to Keith Hopkins, of the 1,213 slaves whose sex is known, 737 (61%) were female (140). The cost for freedom for female slaves was about 20% less than that for males (Hopkins 159). Upon reading this, my guess is that women’s freedom is cheaper than men’s because men might have been perceived as capable of greater physical labor, and therefore economic output, so owners were less inclined to grant them their freedom, but this is just a guess. The price of freedom for these female slaves ranged from “a free gift” to thirteen mnae (or 1,300 drachmas) (Tucker 226). Naturally, upon reading this, I wondered how female slaves might have earned a sufficient amount of money for their manumission. Some female slaves were craftswomen and entertainers, and in many cases owners contributed to their slaves’ manumission price in return for good services; it is also the case that the freedom of female slaves was purchased by a third party with the intention of marrying the individual (Tucker 227).
One thing that struck me was how the incredibly rich and complex inner lives of the slaves have been, over thousands of years, reduced to mere etchings on a wall that groups of students such as ourselves come to discuss for ten minutes, only to move on with their lives unchanged. I could not help but wonder if we will ever be able to truly know what the daily experiences and relationships of the slaves were like. In terms of familial relationships, some of the manumission inscriptions at Delphi indicate that they were recognized among slaves. The relationship that is most often acknowledged is that between mother and kin; there are very few acknowledgments of two slaves being husband and wives (Tucker 228). I found this fact to be both disturbing and yet heartwarming: that this is often the only familial relationship recognized for manumitted slaves shows the notion that slaves were primarily thought of as property. However, to me at least, it exhibits the possibility of the mother-child connection being indestructible, even under circumstances such as enslavement. Furthermore, I wondered to what extent slaves lived under the threat of violence—physical, psychological, and sexual—and how the intersectionality between the slave’s sex and their enslavement manifested. In one inscription from the late first century B.C., a female slave who was also a concubine was granted freedom with the caveat of paramone: however, if she did not remain a sufficient amount of time or work and act appropriately, her owner would have the power to beat and sell her (Tucker 230). Although this is one of thousands inscriptions—which themselves are only a fraction of the actual number of slaves—I feel that I am able to glean a bit of insight into the life of a female slave. First, the inscription implies that escape from paramone or living with the master after (quasi) freedom is granted, showing that the individual’s life among their former master even after legal freedom is granted is dire enough to push them toward escape. Second, I wonder if the fact that the inscription had to include that the former owner was legally allowed to beat her implies that physical violence is already a part of enslavement. This may show that the kind of slavery I have learned about the most is chattel slavery in the American South, a horrifically violent and dehumanizing institution, but nevertheless, I cannot imagine that the physical and psychological environments of enslaved people in antiquity were safe and harmless. Further, my knowledge of ancient Greek and some vocabulary that I encountered corroborates this violence and dehumanization: (μαστιγιας, “whipping post”; ανδραποδον, “man-footed creature”; δουλος/δουλη, “male/female slave”; οικετης, “household slave”). (The former two of these four forms were some of the first words we learned in Greek 101, which goes to show you just how ubiquitous and pervasive slavery was in Classical Greece.) Ultimately, the very fact that violence against a slave was enshrined in a legal inscription indicates, to me, that the status of an enslaved person was that of a subaltern, someone oppressed and disenfranchised in the extreme.
Overall, Delphi was a beautiful and inspiring site, and it was pretty awesome to visit a site that I had been at least somewhat aware of since I read about Percy Jackson consulting the oracle when I was in elementary school. Nevertheless, I could not help but be a bit disappointed that slavery has gone virtually unmentioned in our class until this point. Especially with this weekend’s trip, some of my friends and I have been even more concerned with archaeology’s ties to the practice of colonialism and the near-erasure of non-elite identities. With so much focus on wealth and affluence in the ancient world so far, one might think that we might have discussed more about those enslaved people who laid the foundation for such opulence, in terms of both labor and sheer ubiquity. All that being said, I am glad that we finally spoke about it, and I intend to use this as a springboard for future research into slavery in antiquity.
On a lighter note, I am thankful for getting to eat great food, see beautiful vistas, and spend time with great people this weekend. More next week!
Sources:
Alan E. Samuel, “The Role of Paramone Clauses in Ancient Documents,” (1965)
Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge 1978)
Wayne Tucker, Women in the Manumission Inscriptions at Delphi (1982)
Deborah Kamen, Sale for the Purpose of Freedom: Slave-Prostitutes and Manumission in Ancient Greece (2014)
Sir Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980)