CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

SLAVERY AND MANUMISSION

Enrico Benelli

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

T

he existence of the institution of slavery in Etruria has never been doubted. Ancient
historians and, more frequently, antiquarian sources refer repeatedly to Etruscan
slaves; their somehow abnormal behavior (as seen from Greek standards) is a major
component in the build-up of the image of Etruscan tryphè.^1 It is precisely these sources
that inspired a reconstruction of Etruscan slavery as something completely different
from similar Greek and Roman institutions; historians, at least before the last decades of
the twentieth century, attempted to demonstrate that the Etruscan civilization, usually
conceived as genuinely anti-classical before the diffusion of the historical approach fi rst
introduced by Pallottino’s methods in the new discipline of Etruscology, never knew the
inhumane custom of chattel slavery before its incorporation in the Roman world (and
forced adoption of Roman laws and behaviors). This is the outcome of a long debate about
the existence in Antiquity of more “humane” and morally acceptable forms of slavery,
based on long-established family bonds, in which the relationship between master and
slave assumed the paternalistic overtones that usually served to justify the various forms of
serfdom widely diffused in modern Europe until at least the beginnings of the nineteenth
century (but in some places even later); examples were found mostly in the Greek world,
fi rst of all in the Spartan institution of helotage. The widespread repugnance for chattel
slavery favored an equally diffused appreciation of these forms of dependence, thought of
as milder, morally justifi able, and somehow “humane” and “natural” (an idea about which
the Helots themselves would have presumably dissented).^2
It is probably no accident that the fi rst assemblage of sources aimed at reconstructing
some kind of helotry in the Etruscan world appears in Karl Ottfried Müller’s handbook:^3
the same author was best known for his monumental work die Dorier (“that perniciously
infl uential 1000-page fantasia...in which the helots and the dependent labour in
other so-called Dorian states were together squeezed into twenty pages of blatant
apologetics,” in M. I. Finley’s words).^4 Müller’s ideas received widespread support and
were later (supposedly) backed by linguistic arguments especially developed by Karl
Pauli and Wilhelm Deecke (the latter arranged for a second edition of the handbook,