fudir was not allowed to testify in response. Punishments for
slaves who committed crimes were harsher than those meted
out to freemen.
Th e Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56–ca. 120 c.e.) ob-
served that the Germans kept and used slaves. According to
Tacitus, when Germans defeated enemies in battle the losers
would go into voluntary slavery, allowing the victors to bind
them and sell them. Th e victors always sold or traded away
such slaves because they would have been ashamed to keep
them around. German slaves lived in their own households,
and their masters treated them as tenants; each slave was re-
quired to pay his master a yearly tribute of grain, cattle, or
cloth, but otherwise the slaves were free to live as they liked.
Slaves did not perform the master’s household duties, as Ro-
man slaves did. Tacitus remarked that Germans did not chain
or beat their slaves or work them to death. Masters occasion-
ally did kill their slaves in anger; this was apparently accept-
able behavior and not considered worthy of punishment.
During the Roman Empire, German society adopted
many Roman laws concerning slavery. German slave owners
of this time treated their slaves much as Romans did, some-
times paying them and off ering them opportunities for so-
cial advancement. Slaves were allowed to marry free people,
though this meant that the free partner would become a
slave. A woman slave owner was not allowed to marry her
own slave, and sexual contact with slaves was discouraged.
German men, however, had ample sexual contact with their
female slaves.
Many ancient Europeans experienced slavery under the
more powerful and better organized Greeks and Romans.
Some 40,000 Gauls, for example, became slaves of the Ro-
mans aft er Julius Caesar’s army won the battle of Alesia in
52 b.c.e. Historians estimate that Caesar may have enslaved
half a million Gauls throughout his career. During the early
Roman Empire huge numbers of European slaves passed into
Roman territory. Romans and Greeks appreciated the exotic
appearance of slaves from northern Europe and admired the
strength of large German men, who made excellent soldiers
and gladiators.GREECE
BY JEFFREY S. CARNES
For the Greeks, as for most human societies until quite re-
cent times, slavery was an accepted fact of life and, with rare
exceptions, it was not subject to analysis or moral criticism.
Greece, however, stands out for the degree to which slavery
was central to the economy, and every Greek polis had a sig-
nifi cant number of slaves, both agricultural and urban.
Th ere existed in Greece both chattel slavery, in which the
slave was the legal property of another person, and a num-
ber of intermediate forms of servitude, in which a person was
forced to labor for another while still remaining technically
free; in other words, an individual was not subject to sale.
One such form was debt bondage, in which a free person whowas unable to pay off a debt came under the power of another
until such time as the debt was paid. In practice, interest on
a debt could turn this into a form of long-term or permanent
servitude, and the creation of a “sharecropper” class in many
Greek cities was a key factor in the rise of tyrants and other
political reformers. For example, in Athens the lawmaker So-
lon (ca. 630–ca. 560 b.c.e.) canceled debts to eliminate debt
bondage. In Sparta nonchattel slavery took a political form:
A permanent noncitizen class—the Helots, literally “the cap-
tured ones”—was created as a result of Sparta’s conquest of
Messene in the 10th through seventh centuries b.c.e. Helots
were forced to perform agricultural labor for their Spartan
masters (who were themselves forbidden from engaging in
such labor), and they were subject to terror at the hands of
the Spartans. Helots were not, however, subject to sale or
removal; on the contrary, they were bound to the land, and
their status was akin to that of serfs.
Chattel slavery dates back to the earliest historical re-
cords. Indeed, the initial written records of most societies
reveal slavery as an already existing institution. Documents
from Mycenae, dating to before 1200 b.c.e., refer to slaves,
and Homer’s Iliad, the earliest work in the Greek literary tra-
dition, begins with a dispute over a slave. Th e Homeric world
shows the Greek attitude toward slavery both explicitly and
through its silences: no one questions the morality of slavery,
and the lot of slaves is pitied. One of the distinguishing fac-
tors of Greek slavery (as opposed to the more familiar model
from the pre–Civil War United States) was that anyone could
become a slave.
Wars were frequent, and those captured in war were typ-
ically ransomed (if their families could aff ord to pay), kept
as slaves by their captors, or sold on the open market. Piracy
and brigandage were also common throughout antiquity,
and anyone whose fortune was suffi ciently bad could wind
up a slave. Th ere was some sentiment (particularly from the
fourth century b.c.e. onward) that Greeks should not enslave
their fellow Greeks, but this was by no means a hard-and-fast
rule. By the fourth century b.c.e. it seems that most slaves
in Athens were non-Greek, coming instead from a variety of
areas, particularly those to the north and east of mainland
Greece, including Th race, Scythia, and Asia Minor. Slaves
were not normally permitted to have families, so most of the
slave population was purchased rather than homebred, and
the slave trade was a thriving one throughout antiquity.
Slaves worked in every sector of the economy, and only
a few occupations (such as mining, which was harsh and
dangerous work) were viewed as exclusively servile. In Ath-
ens state-owned slaves formed the police force and served as
clerks in certain courts, but there was no large slave-domi-
nated civil service bureaucracy as there was in Rome. Since
Greece was an agricultural society, most slaves worked on
farms, but in cities they formed part of the industrial labor
force. Th e largest factory we know of produced shields and
employed a labor force of 120 slaves, but many enterprises
employed a mix of slave and free labor. Inscriptions for publicslaves and slavery: Greece 9910895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i991 991 10/10/07 2:30:41 PM