were used to maintain public order and place citizens under arrest. But most Athenian slaves were the
personal property of individual citizens. The modern term that is used to refer to the type of slavery found
in ancient Athens (and in most other Greek poleis) is “chattel slavery.” The origin of the English word
“chattel” gives a good idea of the humiliating status to which Athenian slaves were subjected: It derives
from a Latin word that is also the origin of the English words “cattle” and “capital.” That is, Athenian
slaves were the living property of their owners; they could be sold at will or they could be beaten and
branded and forced to work for their owners like an ox. The difference, however, between a slave and an
ox (apart from the fact that the former could generally fetch a higher price on the open market) was that,
while any shortcomings in the latter might be attributed to physical defects, failure on the part of the
former could be blamed on moral inferiority. For a slave was considered to be inherently inferior in
character to his or her citizen owner. This belief in the “natural” superiority of the citizen to his slaves
could, paradoxically, help promote “democratic” values by setting up a clear differentiation between
slave and free citizen: Just as slaves are more or less interchangeable, so citizens can imagine their very
citizen-status as conferring on them a kind of equality with other citizens.
“A piece of property, then, is an instrument that enhances the quality of life, and we refer to the
totality of these instruments as one’s ‘property’ in general. A slave is a sort of animate piece of
property and, as such, has precedence over other instruments. For if it were possible for each
instrument to perform its own work on command or by its own prior understanding of its duties,
managers would have no need of workers nor would masters have need of slaves; that is, if a loom
could do weaving on its own or a plectrum could play the lyre unaided, like the legendary statues of
Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, which Homer says ‘moved under their own power into the
assembly of the gods.’” (Aristotle, Politics 1253b30–54a1)It is, in fact, in democratic Athens among the poleis of ancient Greece that chattel slavery was most
extensively employed, not only for purely economic reasons but also as a means of marking the owner’s
status as a free citizen. Estimates vary considerably for the number of slaves in classical Athens, but it is
safe to say that slaves outnumbered adult male citizens, and perhaps even outnumbered them by a wide
margin. Slaves could be acquired as a result of warfare – that is, through the enslavement of the
population of a defeated state – or they could be purchased from a dealer. Once a citizen owned slaves in
sufficient numbers and of the right ages, he could more economically obtain additional slaves by breeding
those already in his possession. Slaves were used for a great variety of tasks: as agricultural workers, in
manufacture (with the profits accruing to the owner), to perform household duties, as workers in the silver
mines, or for purposes of “entertainment,” often involving sexual submissiveness. All of this sounds
thoroughly incompatible with a sophisticated, democratic society capable of the highest achievements in
intellectual and artistic pursuits. We are, however, familiar with the similar dependence on chattel slavery
among some very cultured citizens of the United States in the years before 1865. Indeed, the precedent set
by the ancient Greeks and Romans was frequently offered as partial justification for the institution of
slavery in the Southern states. A further justification was that those enslaved were “naturally” suited to
servitude by virtue of belonging to a supposedly “inferior” race. Likewise, in ancient Athens, very many
slaves were non-Greeks, drawn from those barbarian nations that had been subjects of the Persian Empire
and, hence, the “slaves” of the Persian king. It was, in fact, typical of most Greek poleis that their slaves
were of barbarian origin. (In this regard, as in so many others, Sparta was unusual, with its large
population of helots consisting of the enslaved populations of Sparta’s Greek neighbors.)
In the context of this slave-owning society, with its clear distinction between slave and free citizen and
between Greek and barbarian, Solon’s reforms succeeded in alleviating the hostility between rich and