[1] Instituenti mihi, Quinte frater, eum sermonem referre et mandare huic tertio libro quem post Antoni disputationem Crassus habuisset, acerba sane recordatio ueterem animi curam molestiamque renouauit. nam illud immortalitate dignum ingenium, illa humanitas, illa uirtus L. Crassi morte exstincta subita est uix diebus decem post eum diem qui hoc et superiore libro continetur. nam ut Romam rediit extremo ludorum scaenicorum die, uehementer commotus oratione ea quae ferebatur habita esse in contione a Philippo, quem dixisse constabat uidendum sibi esse aliud consilium; illo senatu se rem publicam gerere non posse, mane Idibus Septembribus et ille et senatus frequens uocatu Drusi in curiam uenit. ibi cum Drusus multa de Philippo questus esset, rettulit ad senatum de illo ipso, quod in eum ordinem consul tam grauiter in contione esset inuectus. hic, ut saepe inter homines sapientissimos constare uidi, quamquam hoc Crasso, cum aliquid accuratius dixisset, semper fere contigisset, ut numquam dixisse melius putaretur, tamen omnium consensu sic esse tum iudicatum ceteros a Crasso semper omnes, illo autem die etiam ipsum a se superatum. deplorauit enim casum atque orbitatem senatus, cuius ordinis a consule, qui quasi parens bonus aut tutor fidelis esse deberet, tamquam ab aliquo nefario praedone diriperetur patrimonium dignitatis; neque uero esse mirandum, si, cum suis consiliis rem publicam profligasset, consilium senatus a re publica repudiaret. hic cum homini et uehementi et diserto et in primis forti ad resistendum Philippo quasi quasdam uerborum faces admouisset, non tulit ille et grauiter exarsit pignoribusque ablatis Crassum instituit coercere.

CRASSUS' EDICT CONCERNING THE ‘LATIN RHETORS’ (93N.)

Suet. DGR 25.2 (text of Kaster) Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus et L. Licinius

Crassus censores ita edixerunt:

CICERO AND DE ORATORE

Circumstances of composition

Between 63, the year of his consulate and his widely supported and acclaimed suppression of Catiline's conspiracy, and 55, when he wrote De or., Cicero experienced, among other reversals, estrangement from the most powerful men in Rome, Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, whom he declined to abet in their ‘triumvirate’ aimed at dominating the state, and increasing resentment in other quarters, fomented by his arch enemy P. Clodius, for what had come to be regarded as the unlawful execution of some of Catiline's followers. The estrangement and the resentment culminated in his exile from Italy for over a year (58–57) and, despite a triumphant return (Sept. 57) suggesting better times ahead, his hopes of renewed prominence were cut off by warnings from the ‘triumvirs’, who reaffirmed their alliance in the infamous conference at Luca (May 56), and by his disgust and disillusionment with the senate in general, which he came to regard as no less harmful to the state than the ‘triumvirate’ itself.

In these circumstances Cic. turned to the solacia (cf. 14) furnished by literary composition, first (57–55) with poems about Marius (= frr. 15–19 FLP; cf. 8n.) and about his own exile and return (= fr. 14 FLP), later with the philosophical treatises Rep. (54–51) and Leg. (begun in 52). In between – figuratively, perhaps (cf. 27, 56nn.), as well as actually – the poetry and the philosophy came De or., which he completed after considerable care and effort in Nov. of 55.

1–16 Cicero's proem: the fates of the characters in the dialogue.

17–18 Cotta's story: gathering to hear Crassus.

19–24 Crassus' discourse: the impossibility of separating style from subject matter.

25–36 Preliminaries to ornatus: the variety of eloquence.

37–51 The ‘necessary’ virtues of style: Latinity (purity) and clarity.

52–5 The other virtues of style: ornatus and appropriateness.

56–9 Oratory and philosophy: unity and ‘schism’.

60–8 The ‘schism’ and the history of philosophy.

69–73 Oratory without philosophy.

74–81 Philosophy and the ‘ideal orator’.

82–90 Philosophy and the actual orator.

91–5 Rhetorical teaching without philosophy: Latin rhetores.

96–103 A theory of ornatus.

104–8ornatus, amplification, and philosophy.

109–19 A method of philosophical inquiry: hypothesis and thesis.

120–5 Philosophy and ornatus.

126–31 Catulus on the Sophists.

132–43 The ‘schism’ and the earlier unity: Crassus' conclusion.

144–7 The reaction to Crassus' discourse.

148–54 The technicalities of ornatus: individual words.

155–65 Metaphor.

166–70 Devices related to metaphor.

171–2 Words in combination: juxtaposition.

173–81 Words in combination: rhythm and period.

182–6 Rhythm and period: theoretical considerations.

187–9 Catulus and Antonius react.

190–8 Prose rhythm: practical considerations.

199–209 Other aspects of ornatus: levels of style, ‘figures’ of speech and thought.

PROBLEMS AND METHODS

Any reconstruction of the Roman slave supply depends on two variables: the total number of slaves, and the relative contribution of particular sources of slaves to overall supply. Owing to the nature of the record, these issues are at best only dimly perceptible. A simple comparison with the history of US slavery highlights the severity of this predicament: decadal census counts not only record the number and distribution of slaves but also permit us to calculate rates of natural reproduction and even to assess the patterns of the domestic slave trade. This body of data gives us a good idea of the scale and development of the underlying slave system. In the study of the world history of slavery, by contrast, an evidentiary basis of this kind is the exception, while uncertainty and guesswork are the norm. Roman slavery firmly belongs in the latter category: hardly any genuine statistics are available, and historians face two similarly unpalatable options. Thus, we may decide to eschew speculative quantification altogether and focus on what our sources readily provide – that is, qualitative impressions of the prevalence of slave-ownership and the provenance of slaves. This humanistic approach allows us to draw a rich canvas of slaveholdings large and small, and of a variety of sources of supply from capture in war all the way to voluntary self-enslavement. What it cannot do is to give us even a remotely reliable notion of the representative value of scattered references.

INTRODUCTION

Classical Athens (500–300 bc) produced many of the modern icons of ancient Greece: the Parthenon, democracy and tragedy. But classical Athens by itself is not ancient Greece. Ancient Greece was a much larger and more diverse entity than ancient Athens, for the Greeks were not united politically: Athens, Sparta, Argos, Corinth, Thebes and thousands of other poleis or microstates were independently governed. Yet there was cultural unity, dependent on language, religion and a common, if variable, set of distinctive norms. Within that general Greek culture, Athens developed a unique portfolio of institutions and traditions, just as Sparta and every other Greek microstate did.

A huge array of extant sources demonstrates clearly that slaves were an integral part of ancient Athens, and scholars regularly refer to classical Athens (rather than ancient Greece) as one of the only five ‘genuine slave societies’ in world history. What does that term mean? Why does classical Athens qualify for inclusion under that label? This chapter is an extended answer to those questions.

To begin with the basics, there are two principal factors for qualification as a ‘slave society’ (rather than simply a society with slaves): the sheer number of slaves, relative to the population as a whole, and the significance of the role slaves played in the society at issue, especially economically. For most scholars, economics is fundamental to the classification: a society is a slave society if slaves played a vital quantitative and qualitative role in production, and the material basis of that society absolutely depended upon slave labour.

DEFINING SLAVERY IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The study of the ancient Near East, the modern Middle East from Iran to Turkey to Egypt, has been pursued in the last two centuries in societies of Europe and the Americas that have themselves been mired in industrial slavery. Scholars of the ancient region have consequently been quick to point out that nowhere do we see the kind of mass exploitation that we find since the sixteenth century of our era. Some have tried to deny that there even were slaves in the ancient Near East and have suggested that we should not call some of the dependent people slaves.

It is true that there were other kinds of dependency in the ancient Near East besides slavery, and ancient law-givers and others who reflected their societies were not concerned clearly to define lowly statuses that they took for granted. But there is no question that persons could be and were bought and sold from a very early period, such transactions fitting with a traditional definition of what slavery is. Patterson (1982), however, questions whether this is sufficient. He argues that in societies with a wide range of documentation, a more general component of the lives of enslaved peoples was systematic dishonour from the enslaving group. He speaks also of natal alienation, meaning that the enslaving group went to lengths to deny the actual family relationships of the enslaved and to create a new subservient identity for them, engineering their social death to their former lives in freedom.

INTRODUCTION

Slaves are everywhere in Roman literature. They serve masters faithfully or plot their undoing in Roman comedy. They are topics of concern in agricultural manuals. They act as go-betweens in love poetry and as figures of ridicule and disdain in satire. They make revolts in histories and sacrifice themselves to masters in collections of paradigmatic stories (exempla). They figure in the letters of famous Romans like Cicero and Pliny the Younger. Roman authors dismiss them, love them, hate them and sometimes ignore them. In their writings, slaves receive whippings or rewards, serve or betray masters, stand as moral paradigms and blend into scenery of house, city and fields.

Since Rome was a slave society from the late third century bc to the third century ad, the presence of slaves in its literature will not surprise its readers two thousand years later. Yet, how we understand the ubiquitous literary presence of slaves is no easy matter. The literary scholar observes the tropes and figures that deploy the slave; the social historian finds evidence of the realities of the institution and even of the experience of slaves; and the cultural historian looks for the attitudes, notions and ideology associated with these realities. Although this chapter partakes of all these approaches, it focuses on the work of cultural history. I examine a selected group of Latin authors as representative of both Roman literature from the late third century bc to the early second century ad and the appearances of slaves in it.

INTRODUCTION

The Republican period of Rome's history occupied half a millennium, from the late sixth century to the late first century bc. It was characterised by a form of government that distributed public rights and responsibilities among a group of interdependent entities – magistrates, senate, citizens – in a cohesive system intended to prevent the monopolisation of political power by a single individual. At the beginning of the period Rome was a small city-state, comparable to and no more distinctive than many other communities in peninsular, especially central, Italy. By the end of the period it was by far the largest city in the ancient Mediterranean world – larger than any other European city until the modern era – with a population conventionally estimated at close to one million. It controlled a vast empire embracing much of continental Europe, parts of North Africa, and regions in the Near East, and indirectly its influence extended further still. The preservation of political freedom within the civic community was a hallmark of Republican government, but it did not deter or prevent Romans from subjecting others to their will.

There are no contemporary sources to show with any certainty how the Republican form of government was instituted. Later Romans believed that it came into existence as a reaction against tyrannical rule exercised in the sixth century by a sequence of overlords of foreign, especially Etruscan, origin (which modern scholarship denies). At no point, however, was the constitution given written form.

INTRODUCTION

Although mass (chattel) slavery was a specifically Roman phenomenon in antiquity, Jews do not seem to have been less affected by this common and all-pervasive institution than Romans, Greeks and other provincials in whose immediate environment they lived. Ancient Jewish literary sources suggest that Jews were both slaves and slaveholders in antiquity, and that slavery had a major impact on almost all areas of Jewish daily life, whether in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine or in the Mediterranean Diaspora. The phenomenon of slavery shows how and to what extent Jews were part of Greco-Roman society while at the same time maintaining their biblical roots. It is therefore of particular interest to examine similarities as well as differences between the Jewish and Greco-Roman discourse on slavery to determine whether there was a particularly Jewish perspective and approach.

This chapter will focus on the Jewish experience and rhetoric of slavery from post-exilic to Roman imperial times and late antiquity (fifth century bc to fifth century ad). Previous scholars have usually assumed that slavery was insignificant in ancient Judaism of the post-biblical period. Since the Hebrew Bible refers to Jewish slaves as temporary bondsmen who are to be released in the seventh or Sabbatical Year (cf. Exod. 21:2–3; Lev. 25:40–41; Deut. 15:12), it was commonly assumed that Jews could not be proper slaves of Jews and that Jewish slaveholders treated their gentile slaves as slaves only.

INTRODUCTION

When Alexander of Macedon conquered the former Persian empire in the last third of the fourth century bc, the different forms of dependence that he found there seem likely to have exceeded those familiar to the Greek world from which he came. Following this conquest much was left in place, but the spread of Greek-style chattel slavery represented a real change in the Hellenistic world. While attempting, therefore, to place chattel slavery within a wider context of dependence, this chapter will in part be concerned with one particular aspect of the impact of Greek rule on new areas of the East – the introduction of chattel slavery to areas where previously it had not formed part of the culture. The geographical scope of this inquiry is of necessity wide, since the new Greek-speaking world stretched from Sicily in the west to Afghanistan and the bounds of India in the east. The old world of mainland Greece, the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor and the Black Sea remain relevant, but changes there were of lesser note than those in the new Macedonian kingdoms of the East – in Seleucid Asia, Attalid Pergamum and Ptolemaic Egypt. From Egypt, papyri preserved in the dry desert sands provide an ever-expanding source of information on the role played by slavery in at least this one of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

INTRODUCTION

At its best, Roman material culture brings a dimension to historical inquiry that written sources cannot by recapturing the texture of daily life and by providing a unique angle from which to interpret cultural attitudes and behaviour. This is especially important for Roman slavery since there are no slave narratives or plantation account books as there are from the antebellum American South, nor the vivid descriptions by contemporary commentators of slave systems'in Brazil or the Caribbean. In Roman archaeology, where the framework provided by historical texts has always prevailed over theory, the absence of written documentation makes the task of seeing slaves in the archaeological record particularly challenging. Furthermore, the value of material culture is defined by both the quality of its preservation and the nature of the analysis that is brought to bear by scholars. Both factors have had critical consequences for the contribution material culture has made to the study of Roman slavery. At first glance, when compared to other aspects of Roman society and to the ubiquity and economic importance of slaves, Roman material culture offers relatively scant direct evidence. Much of this is due to the poor quality of housing, clothing and other goods used by slaves that reduces their chances of survival in the archaeological record and makes it impossible to reconstruct, for example, slave religion, diet, or other aspects of a slave subculture.

APPROACHING THE GREEK SLAVE SUPPLY

How did Greeks obtain their slaves, and how did men, women and children come to be slaves in classical Greece? While statistics are elusive, no one would seriously challenge the fact that there were large numbers of slaves in the Greek world of various kinds and origins. This chapter seeks to explore the processes that brought people into slavery in Greece, and also to give some sense of the individual slave's experience of these processes. The sheer scale of enslavement meant that the supply of slaves was a central feature of the ancient economy, quite apart from its fundamental social significance within and beyond Greek culture. The slave trade was everywhere. At the periphery of Greek culture, slaves were traded all around the Black Sea, in the Adriatic and in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. So too at its traditional centres – in Athens, Aegina, Corinth, Chios and elsewhere. The scattered instances about which our sources tell us are no more than drops in the great ocean of the ancient Greek slave trade, with its ripples reaching far and wide into ‘barbarian’ hinterlands.

The slave trade was also everywhere in ideological terms, explored by philosophers or expressed in art, from Homer through Athenian tragedy and historical and geographical writing of all kinds. Moreover, the slave trade was treated as a fit topic even for comedy, whether in satirical poetry or on the stage.

The purpose of this volume, the first in a series of multi-authored works examining the institution of slavery throughout human history, is to survey the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. It begins with an overview of slavery in the ancient Near East, then quickly moves to its principal concern, the history of slavery in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. In these societies slaves were regularly used as primary producers in the key economic activities of agriculture, mining and manufacturing. As domestic servants and administrators, they also provided their owners with a multitude of services. In competitive social and political contexts, they were sometimes simultaneously items of conspicuous display.

The scale of ancient slave-owning varied from period to period and from place to place. In certain instances, especially in classical Athens and in Roman Italy of the Late Republic and Principate, it became particularly prominent. But despite fluctuations of scale, slavery as a concept was never altogether absent from ancient Mediterranean life. Ideologically, members of society were divided into two broad categories: those who were free and those who were not. As the Roman jurist Gaius stated, attributing the coercive authority that slave-owners exercised in the second century ad to universal standards: ‘The principal distinction in the law of persons is this, that all human beings are either free men or slaves’ (Institutes 1.9). For Greeks and Romans throughout their history, slavery was a defining and distinctive element of culture.

INTRODUCTION

What can archaeologists contribute to the study of Greek slavery? First, we need to know just what it is we are studying. According to Peter Garnsey (1996: 1), ‘A slave was property. The slave-owner's rights over his slave-property were total, covering the person as well as the labour of the slave. The slave was kinless, stripped of his or her old social identity in the process of capture, sale and deracination, and denied the capacity to forge new bonds of kinship through marriage alliance. These are the three basic components of slavery.’ Some ancient historians dispute particular elements of this definition or merge chattel slavery into a broader category of unfree labour, but few ancient historians dissent strongly from Garnsey's phrasing. This immediately raises the issue that dominates this chapter: archaeologists face severe problems operationalising any plausible definition of ancient Greek slavery. Slavery was a legal category, driven by notions of property; and despite considerable ingenuity, archaeologists cannot dig up property rights. Moses Finley (1985: 25) emphasised this in his influential discussion of the complicated arrangements involving leases, labour and capital in Roman pottery kilns, insisting that ‘archaeological evidence or archaeological analysis by itself cannot possibly uncover the legal or economic structure revealed by the Oxyrhynchus papyri or the alternative structures in Arezzo, Puteoli, Lezoux or North Africa’.