instruction to the palace guards to take the sisters away indoors and where they
cannot wander about (ll. 578–579). Drawing conclusions about social attitudes from
dramatic representations is fraught with difficulty, but it may be worth remarking in
conclusion that the various male dramatists have a variety of strong female characters
often sympathetically represented in their plays and often honoured with central roles.
This would not have happened if the dramatic representations had not to some extent
mediated aspects of a social and human reality in the audience’s eyes.
Slaves
It is even more difficult to glean much information about slavery in the Greek world
than it is about women. Evidence is sporadic, difficult to interpret and much debated.
Most of it represents a view from the elite. In particular, there is no agreement about
estimates of numbers, a vital topic in assessing the degree to which a society was
dependent upon slavery.
Slaves are present but not prominent in the Homeric poems. In the Iliad, the
Trojan women are aware that slavery awaits them after the fall of Troy. In the Odyssey,
the faithful steward Eumaeus, though of noble blood, after a misadventure had been
bought by Odysseus’s father Laertes. He had also bought Eurycleia, the nurse of
Odysseus and Telemachus, for twenty oxen (Odyssey 1, 429–430).
Later, two categories within slavery may be distinguished in the Greek world.
One exemplified by the Spartan helots and dating from the archaic period comprises
those conquered in war and forced by their conquerors to work for them in what had
previously been their own country. The Spartan helots were controlled by the
Spartiate citizenry but seem to have been owned by the state. In dire emergencies
the Spartans conscripted helots to fight, particularly in the later period of the city’s
decline, and gave them their freedom if they survived. But for the most part they were
tied to the land as serfs, where they could maintain a family and communal life. They
were probably not, therefore, at the arbitrary whim of a single owner. However, given
that they were subject to the extraordinary methods of control employed by the
Spartiates from time to time (see above p. 54), they suffered general oppression.
There were other serf systems in Crete and Thessaly.
In the course of time there was a reluctance to enslave fellow Greeks, though
the practice did not entirely die out. After killing the male inhabitants of the island of
Melos in 416 the Athenians sold the women and children into slavery, and according
to Xenophon feared the same fate for themselves after their defeat at Aegispotami in
405 (Hellenika,2, 2, 3–4). Nevertheless, by the Classical period most slaves seem to
have been non-Greek. An inscription recording the property of those implicated in
the mutilation of the hermaerecord that one Kephisodoros had sixteen slaves, all
RELIGION AND SOCIAL LIFE 135