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Like a worm I' the bud? A heterology of classical Greek slavery*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Paul Cartledge
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Extract

‘Classical’ Greece? The very term exudes stability, permanence, confidence, authority, excellence, perfection (in a teleological sense), even possibly glory – as in ‘The Glory that was Greece’. Consider, for instance, the following paean of eulogy pronounced in 1914: ‘The Greeks were explorers in every field of knowledge and art, where they showed in the highest degree the desire for truth and the love of the beautiful’. All of them, always? In any case, to quote that well-known philosopher Pontius Pilate (John 18. 37–8), what is Truth, and is not Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , October 1993 , pp. 163 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1993

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References

1. Easterling, P. E., The Survival of Greek (Inaugural Lecture, University College London, 15 12 1988, published, 1989), p. 4Google Scholar; the 1914 paean, quoted by Easterling, p. 3, is from H. J. W. Tillyard's Greek Literature.

2. On the Victorians and ancient Greece see briefly Turner, F. M. ‘Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain’ in Clarke, G. W. (ed.) Rediscovering Hellenism. The Hellenic Inheritance and the European Imagination (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 61–81Google Scholar; and at length Turner, , The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven & London, 1981)Google Scholar; for the post-Victorian hangover, a locus classicus is Murray's, Gilbert ‘The value of Greece to the future of the world’ in Livingstone, R. (ed.), The Legacy of Greece (Oxford, 1921), pp. 1–23Google Scholar.

3. From a large literature one might just select (since they are valuable in all sorts of other ways) Finley, M. I., ‘Was Greek civilization based on slave labour?’, Historia 8 (1959), 145–64Google Scholar, reprinted both in Finley (ed.), Slavery in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1960, repr. with bibliographical supp. 1968), and in Finley, , Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, ed. Shaw, B. D. and Sailer, R. P. (London, 1981, Harmondsworth, 1983)Google Scholar; and de Ste. Croix, G. E. M., The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. From the Archaic age to the Arab conquests(London, 1981, corr. impr. 1983), esp. pp. 133–74Google Scholar.

4. It is instructive to compare and contrast the Livingstone Legacy (above, n. 2) with Finley, M. I. (ed.), The Legacy of Greece. A new appraisal (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.

5. Compare the opening remarks of my ‘Rebels and Sambos in Classical Greece: a comparative view’ in Cartledge, and Harvey, F. D. (eds.), CRUX. Essays in Greek history presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th birthday (Exeter & London, 1985), pp. 17–46Google Scholar.

6. For a recent overview see Walvin, James, Black Ivory. A history of British slavery (London, 1992)Google Scholar. See also below, n. 13.

7. See esp. Taplin, O., ‘Derek Walcott's Omeros and Derek Walcott's Homer’, Arion (Spring, 1991). 213–26Google Scholar.

8. Sawyer, R., Slavery in the Twentieth Century (London & N. Y. 1986)Google Scholar, who rightly divides his chapters between the principal categories of unfreedom, including that with which I am here concerned, chattel slavery.

9. Perhaps the most vigorous exponent of this essentially nineteenth-century understanding of the historian's craft is my Clare colleague, Sir Geoffrey Elton: see most recently his characteristically titled Return to Essentials. Some reflections on the present slate of historical study (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

10. One of the best-known exponents of this view is Hayden White: see e. g. his 'The historical text as literary artifact’ in Canary, R. H. and Kozicki, H. (eds.), The Writing of History. Literary form and historical understanding (Madison & London, 1978), pp. 41–52Google Scholar. Compare Fineman, J. ‘The history of the anecdote: fiction and fiction’ in Veeser, H. Aram (ed.), The New Historicism (New York & London, 1989), pp. 49–76Google Scholar (with interesting remarks on Thucydides at pp. 52–5).

11. Jones, G. Stedman, ‘History: the poverty of empiricism in Blackburn, R. (ed.), Ideology in Social Science. Readings in critical social theory (London, 1972), pp. 96–115, at p. 112Google Scholar.

12. Perhaps the best short introduction in English to recent Euro-American historiographical debates is Tosh, J., The Pursuit of History. Aims, methods & new directions in the study of modern history (2nd edn, London, 1991)Google Scholar.

13. For a novelist's perspective, from the other side of the open boundary, there could be no more apt source than Barry Unsworth's historical novel of the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade, Sacred Hunger (London, 1992)Google Scholar. In an interview (Harrods/Waterstone's Book Catalogue, Spring–Summer 1992, p. 14)Google Scholar Unsworth is quoted as saying, somewhat provocatively: ‘The novelist is only grubbing around for facts that will support the illusion he is trying to create. In crude terms he is telling lies and wants to be believed. The historian might be just as much a liar, but he depends on reference to ascertainable facts. There is an essential truth in fiction which is outside the range of a historian – an order of truth in novels which even transcends the truth of history’.

14. See esp. G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy. Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought (Cambridge, 1966, repr. Bristol, 1987), Part I (pp. 1–171).

15. Apollodoros is discussed under his father's name, Pasion (I) Akharneus, in Davies, J. K., Athenian Propertied Families 600–300 B. C. (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, serial number 11672; cf. Glover's, T. R. still useful ‘The House of Pasion’ in his From Pericles to Philip(London, 1917), pp. 302–36Google Scholar; and, for an unusual sidelight on his historical reading, Trevett, J. ‘History in [Demosthenes] 59’ CQ 40 (1990), 407–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Schofield, M. ‘Ideology and philosophy in Aristotle's theory of slavery’ in Patzig, G. (ed.), Aristoteles “Polilik”. Akten des XL Symposium Aristotelicum (Friedrichshafen/Bodensee 25. 8–3. 9. 1987) (Göttingen, 1990), pp. 1–27Google Scholar.

17. Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery was partly argued in attempted refutation of some unnamed thinkers who believed that slavery was both contrary to nature and unjust (Pol. 1253b20); but even they fell short of being abolitionists, as is noted e. g. by Finley, M. I., Ancient Slavery and Modem Ideology (London, 1980), pp. 120–2Google Scholar (‘everyone was agreed that the institution must be preserved’, pp. 121–2).

18. G. E. L. Owen, ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’ (1961), repr. in his Logic, Science and Dialectics. Collected papers in Greek philosophy, ed. Nussbaum, M. (London, 1986), pp. 239–51Google Scholar; on Aristotle's use of endoxon, cf. Burnyeat, M., London Review of Books, 6 11 1986, p. 11Google Scholar: ‘In 1980 [Jonathan] Barnes published an important article in the Revue Internationale de Philosophic which demonstrated that endoxonis best translated “reputable”: what Aristotle starts from are propositions of good repute, propositions which enjoy good standing with the majority or with the experts’.

19. The many contradictions are especially well exposed in Smith, N. D., ‘Aristotle's theory of natural slavery’ Phoenix 37 (1983), 109–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a revised repr. in D. Keyt and F. D. Miller (eds.), A Companion to Aristotle's Politics(Oxford, 1991), pp. 145–55. See also R. Schlaifer, ‘Greek theories of slavery from Homer to Aristotle’ HSCPh 47 (1936), 165–204, repr. in Finley (ed.), Slavery in Classical Antiquity, pp. 93–132, at 192–9, 130–2; Ste. Croix, , Class Struggle, ch. VII, esp. pp. 416–18Google Scholar.

20. Clark, S. R. L., Aristotle's Man. Speculations upon Aristotelian anthropology(Oxford, 1975), pp. 206–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; id., ‘Aristotle's Woman’, History of Political Thought3 (1982), 71–91.

21. Equation of barbarians and (natural) slaves: Hall, Edith, Inventing the Barbarian. Greek selfdefinition through tragedy (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, index s. v. ‘slavery, slaves’; Ste. Croix, , Class Struggle, pp. 416–17Google Scholar.

22. Pagden, A., The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), ch. 3 (‘The theory of natural slavery’), esp. pp. 38–9Google Scholar.

23. The passages are cited by Croix, Ste., Class Struggle, p. 558 n. 5Google Scholar; for discussion of Rhetorica 1367a 28–32, see ibid., pp. 116–17. On manual labour, Aymard, A. ‘Hiérarchie du travail dans la Grèce archaïque’ (1943)Google Scholar, repr. in Etudes d'Histoire ancienne (Paris, 1967), pp. 316–33; id., ‘L'idée de travail dans la Grece archaïque’ Journal de Psychologie normale etpathobgique 41 (1948), 29–50.

24. On ‘banausic’ crafts and wage-earning labour generally, see Croix, Ste., Class Struggle, pp. 182–5Google Scholar (with special reference to Aristotle).

25. Cartledge, , Millett, P., and Todd, S. (eds.) NOMOS. Essays in Athenian law, society and politics (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

26. For a basic introduction, see MacDowell, D. M., The Law in Classical Athens (London & N. Y., 1978)Google Scholar, index s.v. ‘slave’.

27. Hansen, M. H., The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991), ch. 8 (pp. 178–224)Google Scholar gives due weight to ‘The People's Court’.

28. See his two fundamental articles published in this journal: ‘Hybris and dishonour I’, G&R 23 (1976), 177–93Google Scholar; ‘Hybris and dishonour II’, G&R 26 (1979), 32–47Google Scholar.

29. Fisher, , ‘The law of hybris in Athens’ in Cartledge, Millett, and Todd, NOMOS pp. 123–38, at 127Google Scholar; cf. Cohen, D., Law, Sexuality and Society. The enforcement of morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Fisher, , ‘The law of hybris in Athens’, p. 134Google Scholar.

31. Todd, S., ‘The purpose of witnesses in Athenian courts’ in Cartledge, , Millet, , and Todd, , NOMOS, pp. 19–39, at 26Google Scholar (the proklēsis eis basanon procedure), 33–6 (alleged rationale of procedure).

32. duBois, P., Torture and Truth (London & N. Y., 1991), p. 51Google Scholar.

33. See esp. Finley, , Ancient Slavery and Modem Ideology, p. 93Google Scholar (citing the ‘rhetorical flourish’ of Dem. 22. 55), pp. 118–19 (the ‘paradigmatic’ tale in Hdt. 4. 1–4).

34. The letter is no. 759 in the standard collection by J. E. Norton (1956), cited by Cartledge, , ‘The enlightened historiography of Edward Gibbon, Esq.’ Maynooth Review 3 (1977), 67–93, at p. 78 a 49Google Scholar.

35. Vidal-Naquet, P., Torture: Cancer of democracy (Harmondsworth, 1963)Google Scholar; note esp. p. 167: ‘The Greek City State had the logical answer when it refused to admit that slaves were human beings and therefore considered torture inflicted upon a slave to be a perfectly normal occurrence’. By implication, all modern torture is strictly illogical as well as inhumane.

36. Fine, J. V. A., The Ancient Greeks – a Critical history (Cambridge, MA, 1983), p. 437Google Scholar.

37. ibid., p. 440.

38. Huggins, N. I., ‘The deforming mirror of truth: slavery and the master narrative of American history’, Radical History Review 49 (Winter 1991), 25–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 38. Huggins, , who died in 1990, is the author of Black Odyssey (1977)Google Scholar, an account of ‘the Afro-American ordeal in slavery'.

39. ‘No leisure for slaves’, quoted by Aristotle, Pol. 1334a 21–2Google Scholar; cf. Stocks, J. L., ‘Skholē’ CQ 30 (1936), 177–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Barbara Clark Smith, in a response to Huggins's paper (above, n. 38), Radical History Review 49, p. 56Google Scholar.

41. While revising and annotating my lectures for publication here, I was fortunate to come upon Keith Bradley's ‘“The regular, daily traffic in slaves”: Roman history and contemporary history’, CJ 87 (1992), 125–38Google Scholar, to which I would like this article to be considered a companion piece on the Greek side. There are – as David Brion Davis among others has observed, ‘Slavery and the Post-World War II historians’, Daedalus 103 (1974), 1–16Google Scholar, repr. in his From Homicide to Slavery. Studies in American Culture (New York & Oxford, 1986), pp. 187–206, at 197–204 – perils as well as rewards in ‘presentism’; but I can only endorse Bradley's suggestion (p. 134) that ‘if presentist concerns actually lead to a more comprehensive view of the past, then engagement between the present and the past is not to be resisted but positively encouraged. Distorted vision may be imperfect vision, but it is preferable to no vision at all’.