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concept of “foreigners” in order to define a contrario political public collectives. We
see such a process in the Greek cities, in the creation of a new Israelite entity in Judea
under Achaemenid rule, and in Republican Rome. During the second half of the first
millennium bce, political definitions established a separation between the enslavement
of local inhabitants, whose political status should ensure their juridical status, and
enslaved foreigners. The definition of slavery is therefore related to the process of
social politicization of Mediterranean societies. Moses Finley (1998) proposed eco-
nomic reasons behind Greek enslavement and trafficking of foreigners. But imported
slaves merely formed a segment of the foreign population in ancient Greece.
Democratic or republican, Greek and Roman societies were not “free societies” in
modern terms, and slaves were part of the majority who did not hold political rights.
Moreover, being the “perfect outsiders” did not actually put slaves outside of
Greek and Roman societies. On the contrary, it made them an extremely elastic social
element. Thanks to their being deracinated foreigners, they were integrated into the
household and used in order to enlarge the social and economic importance of
the family. Historians who deal with slavery in antiquity have attempted to estimate the
percentage of slaves in their societies. These estimates vary between 5% and 40%, and
are based mainly on speculation. It is impossible to give properly-based estimates in view
of the absence of historical records, while censuses, if we do possess them, rarely included
slaves. However, the question of percentage is an important one, since it is the basis of
the definition of Greek and Roman societies as “slave-owning societies.”
In the third century bce, the Mediterranean became a Hellenistic–Punic–Roman
habitat. The lack of Phoenician sources leaves us with the Hellenistic and Roman
evidence. Slavery also became a common phenomenon, mainly thanks to common
political, social and cultural structures. The right to subdue, own and use foreigners
was institutionalized in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman societies, and differentiated
slaves from other figures of social dependency by defining them as res, “a thing” to
own, being themselves unable to own (in the ancient Near East, in contrast, being a
slave did not necessarily exclude the capacity of ownership), a status which Roman law
defined as inherited from the mother’s side.
The special human character of this type of res was nevertheless acknowledged.
And an elaborate system of thought supported by literature, religion and art pro-
duced moral and philosophical justification for the enslavement of human beings. The
capacity of ownership thus became a demarcation between slaves and free persons in
Greek and Roman societies. Roman law excluded the former in defining the latter as
having a juridical personality, but did not make two classes out of them. First, slaves
were not dependent on the free persons in society, but were solely subordinated to
their owners. Second, although used more than free persons as a disposable labor
force in mines and public construction enterprises, slaves did not share a single socio-
economic status. This was dependent on their owner’s status and the position they
held in his household. Moreover, a clear-cut division between slave labor and free
labor, while desirable, is impossible to establish. In fact, it is precisely the absence of a
single economic definition which reveals the function of slavery in Mediterranean
societies throughout the history of the region. This becomes clear when the
Mediterranean became Roman.
The Roman imperial period presents a unique phase in the history of the
Mediterranean. It is the only period when the entire region was under a single