The slave estates of Odysseus and Ischomachus

At various points throughout its narrative and above all in its final books, which describe Odysseus’ homecoming, Homer's Odyssey provides some informative details about the household of its main character.Footnote ⁶ Particularly germane to the present topic are details about the slave labour force that worked and managed Odysseus’ large estate. Another informative account of an ancient Greek household is described in the second and main part of the fourth-century bc Oeconomicus (The Estate Manager) by Xenophon, which recounts a conversation on household management between Socrates and an elite Athenian citizen by the name of Ischomachus.Footnote ⁷ Socrates asks questions on the subject and Ischomachus’ responses describe the running of his agriculturally based household and its domestic sphere managed by his wife. At its heart the text is a moral discourse, but it is framed in terms of practical advice offered to Socrates on the management of an estate.Footnote ⁸ The training of slaves, furthermore, constitutes a significant part of this dialogue.

Before we examine some of the similarities in the presentation of slave management in both texts, some broader similarities between the households of Odysseus and Ischomachus should be highlighted, in order to help explain how the system of forced labour described in the Odyssey and the Oeconomicus resulted in similar practical and cultural responses. However, it should be noted at this early point that there is disagreement about the extent to which the statements of Ischomachus reflect those of Xenophon. There is a minority, but prominent, trend in Xenophontic scholarship to read his works as ironic presentations which subtly undercut the overt messages they convey.Footnote ⁹ My own thoughts on these readings are that, while Xenophon clearly shows himself capable of representing a complex opinion on the issues he discusses, his works should be read on the whole as largely straightforward in their intentions.Footnote ¹⁰ In light of this scholarship, however, it seems advisable to distinguish between Xenophon the author and the remarks of his character Ischomachus accordingly.

Despite notable differences between the society described in the Homeric poems and that of classical Athens, both depended on the labour of chattel slaves.Footnote ¹¹ As the life story of Eumaius demonstrates, the dmōes of Homer are often stated to be purchased by their masters, who exercised over all their dmōiai the rights which these transactions imply: that of property.Footnote ¹² More specifically, this meant that the community in which the dmōes lived sanctioned complete domination over their lives by those who had paid for them – such as (to choose examples we will return to later) control over their reproductive rights and the ability to punish them in whatever way they deemed appropriate.Footnote ¹³ The same is true of Athenian slaves, as we can observe not only in the Oeconomicus but in several hundred literary sources which have been the subject of intensive study over the past century.Footnote ¹⁴

Furthermore, Lewis has recently shown that there is good evidence for some broad structural continuity in practices of elite agriculture from the archaic Greek to the classical Athenian world.Footnote ¹⁵ As well as a similar system of farming, large archaic and classical estates were equally dependent on slave labour – the slaves in the Odyssey are put to work in an agriculturally based household, which is comparable to that described in the Oeconomicus.Footnote ¹⁶ In the domestic settings painted by both texts, enslaved women are found spinning wool and preparing food.Footnote ¹⁷ It is also apparent from the Odyssey that the use of male slave labour for agriculture, which is the entire point of Xenophon's discussion of slave management, was very much a feature of Odysseus’ household too.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition, we can infer from both texts a reliance on certain slaves for the management of this labour. The male slaves Eumaius, Melanthius, and Philoitius are not only the primary slave characters in the Odyssey but are also important slaves tasked with overseeing Odysseus’ herdsmen.Footnote ¹⁹ All three are also closely attached to his household. We are told that Eumaius and Philoitius were raised from boyhood in Odysseus’ household; and from a description of his sister, Melantho, as being raised by Penelope, we can infer that Melanthius had a similar upbringing.Footnote ²⁰ This fact serves to underscore the treachery of the siblings’ betrayal of Odysseus, as does Melanthius’ economic mismanagement.Footnote ²¹ Eumaius and Philoitius, for their part, are the only slaves to whom Odysseus turns for support in his final showdown with the suitors.Footnote ²² In this way, the interrelated economic importance of these slaves and their relationship to the household are significant facets of their role in the poem. The same is true of the slave woman Eurykleia, who has been in the household since she was a young girl.Footnote ²³ She also occupies an authoritative position in the household, as a tamiē (housekeeper).Footnote ²⁴ Odysseus’ household, in short, utilizes trusted slaves, closely attached to their owners, in important positions of authority over other workers.

The same holds true for the household of Ischomachus. In fact, the entirety of the section on the management of slaves is framed as a discussion on how to train good supervisors (epitropoi) who can manage Ischomachus’ property in his absence. These supervisors, as we learn early in the discussion, are slaves – and it is notable that Xenophon, through Ischomachus, recommends that such slaves be trained for this position in the household rather than bought already experienced.Footnote ²⁵ What follows is effectively a description of how to implement an incentive scheme for encouraging the good behaviour of slaves. Although much of this scheme should be taken as applying to all the slaves of the household, crucially, the emphasis of the discussion repeatedly returns to the necessary qualities to be instilled in an epitropos.Footnote ²⁶ It is from his ‘good’ slaves who respond well to his incentive scheme, that Ischomachus picks his supervisors.Footnote ²⁷ Ischomachus also employs a tamia (the classical Athenian equivalent to the Homeric tamiē), who occupies an important place in the organization of his household and who receives rewards comparable to those received by his ‘good’ male slaves.Footnote ²⁸ The use of trusted slaves in important positions is therefore another similarity between the households described in the Odyssey and the Oeconomicus.

The functioning of these two estates was heavily reliant on a very similar status of enslaved persons for the manual, supervisory, and organizational labour on which they depended. Both used violently coerced labourers who were isolated, by their origin, from the wider community in which they lived. Both masters also elevated certain slaves to positions of trust in order to provide the management which their estates needed.Footnote ²⁹ In these respects, the world of the Odyssey would not have been all that foreign to Xenophon, who was raised in an elite Athenian household. As far as the management of a household's slaves was concerned, Xenophon and his elite archaic counterparts, who comprised Homer's audience, would therefore have faced similar challenges. Some deliberate and unintentional responses to these challenges, reflected in literary discourse, will now be the subject of our discussion.

The Oeconomicus and the Odyssey on the rewarding of slaves

As Thalmann notes, slaves in the Odyssey fit into one of two polarized archetypes; they are characterized as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and these qualities are ‘measured respectively by loyalty to and betrayal of the master’.Footnote ³⁰ After reclaiming his household, Odysseus metes out rewards and punishment to both groups of slaves accordingly. The same theme is a recurring feature of Xenophon's discussion of slaves in the Oeconomicus, which consistently and directly refers to a binary division between slaves in a household based on their willingness to serve the interests of their master.Footnote ³¹ In its first appearance in the dialogue he has Ischomachus contrast ‘the good’ (hoi chrēstoi) with ‘the bad’ (hoi ponēroi) slaves.Footnote ³² A similar categorization reappears throughout the section on slave management.Footnote ³³ The following sentence is indicative of this juxtaposition:

As in the Odyssey, the treatment of slaves in the Oeconomicus (usually the apportioning of certain privileges) is governed by this divide between slaves.Footnote ³⁵ In the Oeconomicus the divide constitutes the framework on which a strategy for a long-term coercive system is based.Footnote ³⁶

The system of rewards offered to ‘good’ slaves also shares many of its specifics with the treatment of loyal slaves in the Odyssey. For their help in defeating the suitors, Odysseus makes the following promise to his two loyal slaves Eumaeus and Philoitius:

As Hunnings notes, this short summary of slave rewards bears several similarities to those outlined in the Oeconomicus, including sexual privileges and material comforts.Footnote ³⁸ It is worth pointing out that, as well as identifying wealth as a privilege given to slaves who prove themselves valuable to their owner, several passages recommend that such slaves receive honour too:

Several of these statements are reminiscent of Odysseus’ claim, cited above, that his slaves will be treated as if they were free members of his household. Particularly striking in this regard is Xenophon's statement that he will treat his slaves ‘as if they were free men…and honour them as if they were gentlemen (kalous te kagathous)’.Footnote ³⁹ The Pseudo-Aristotelian author of another classical Athenian handbook on household management (Oeconomica), which identified slave management as one of the most pressing concerns of its science, also recommends that slaves in important positions be given a measure of honour.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nor was this shared sentiment unusual for its period. In a study examining Greek literary evidence for honour accorded to slaves, Fisher shows that the Odyssey's portrayal of certain slaves as worthy of honour was a theme in discourse on the correct management of slaves, not only in Xenophon and Pseudo-Aristotle, but also in the writing of Plato.Footnote ⁴¹

Similarities between Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the Odyssey can also be seen in the former's recommendations for the management of sexual relationships between slaves in the household. As Schmitz has pointed out, slave families in the Odyssey are the exception, not the rule, and only happen by the direct authorization of a master: a privilege awarded only to the most loyal of slaves.Footnote ⁴² We are told directly of only one slave family in the Odyssey (three, counting Odysseus’ promise quoted above), and Eumaius at one point complains that, since his master is gone, he cannot take a wife (14.449).Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, the restriction of slave relationships (though not explicitly families) as a privilege awarded only to loyal slaves is a strategy that Ischomachus employs.Footnote ⁴⁴ On the topic of slave reproduction, however, we find some disagreement between Xenophon and Pseudo-Aristotle, who did not recommend restricting the sexual rights of his slaves.Footnote ⁴⁵ This appears to contradict Xenophon directly, as was noted in the first century bc by the philosopher Philodemus, who expressed his preference for Xenophon's advice.Footnote ⁴⁶ Another notable difference between the texts is the absence of any mention of manumission in the Oeconomicus, whereas this measure is recommended as an incentive by Pseudo-Aristotle.Footnote ⁴⁷ These differences are all the more noteworthy because of the clear intertextuality between the two works; it seems more or less beyond doubt that the Oeconomica was influenced either directly by the Oeconomicus or by a common ancestor of both – possibly a lost work of Antisthenes, another student of Socrates – or (most likely) by some combination of these two possibilities.Footnote ⁴⁸

It is worth highlighting that which the intertextuality of the Oeconomicus and the Oeconomica suggests: that these texts were part of a broader conversation on household management in classical Athens, in which arguments between authors were presumably written down, distributed, and read by many elite Athenians, including those who wrote their own works on the subject. We might also think of these texts as part of a longer-term tradition, to which Philodemus added his thoughts over two centuries later, at around the same time as the Roman agrarian writers Cato, Varro, and Columella, who had read the earlier Greek texts and provided their own recommendations for the productive treatment of slaves.

By the time of Columella in the first century ad, and certainly in the manuals of the plantation owners in the US South some 1,800 years later, slave reproduction appears to have been facilitated as much as possible, and restriction of sexual privileges is never recommended. In my opinion, this change can be explained by the impact of changing economic conditions on the practices of slave management, reflected in turn by literature on the subject.Footnote ⁴⁹ A full outline of this argument lies beyond the scope of the present article, although the disagreement between Xenophon and Pseudo-Aristotle suggests that, even within a similar economic context (barring significant changes in the fifty or so years between these texts which we cannot trace in the evidence), the restriction of sex among household slaves would vary from master to master. This discourse on slave management was not just a restatement of the same ideas in different contexts, but a dynamic discussion which altered over time.

We have already seen how the households of both Odysseus and Ischomachus relied on trusted slaves to manage their estates. Both texts also suggest, however, that this on its own was not enough to ensure adequate management. As Thalmann points out, an emphasis on the necessity of direct supervision over slaves by their masters is a theme present in the Odyssey as well as in later household management manuals.Footnote ⁵⁰ With its implicit distrust of unsupervised slaves, moreover, this shared sentiment is an excellent example of Thalmann's ‘suspicious model’ of attitudes towards slaves, discussed in the introduction above. Compare his translation of a comment by Eumaius – ‘Slaves (dmōes), whenever their masters no longer control them, no longer wish to do the work that befits them’– with the following remark by Ischomachus:

One key difference between Odysseus and Ischomachus is the former's absence from the management of his estate during most of the action of the poem, in contrast to the latter's diligence in overseeing his. The author of the Odyssey therefore emphasized the need for due diligence by a master by highlighting the dilapidated estate of Odysseus – exemplified in the undisciplined Melanthius’ damage to his owner's property.Footnote ⁵² Xenophon, on the other hand, appealed to the same reasoning by using Ischomachus and his prosperous estate as a positive example.Footnote ⁵³

So far, we have seen how Xenophon represented slaves of a household as belonging to one of two archetypes which deserved contrasting treatment (a characterization which is very much a feature of the Homeric poems) and used this as the basis of a system to incentivize them. I have left analysis of the punishment of ‘bad’ slaves to the following section, but we have noted how Xenophon laid out a system of rewards very similar to those offered by Odysseus to his loyal slaves. Another way in which the practical considerations of Xenophon resemble the content of the Homeric poems is the fact that both texts explicitly stress the importance of direct supervision by a master in enforcing the rewards and punishments meted out to slaves.

The issue of leadership and management is a leitmotif that runs through much of Xenophon's writing and is best exemplified in his ahistorical construction of the character of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire; indeed, the figure of the Persian king is drawn on in the Oeconomicus in relation to the management of slaves and subordinates.Footnote ⁵⁴ Slaves are said to be directly equivalent to free subjects, and the role of householder is stated to be directly equivalent to that of a king more generally.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cyrus is held up as the consummate example of such a king in an extended passage before the introduction of Ischomachus to the dialogue, a discussion which serves as a parallel to Ischomachus’ management style.Footnote ⁵⁶ Cyrus’ direct role in overseeing the competency of his governors is highlighted, a theme which reappears in Xenophon's largely fictional biography of the Persian king, the Cyropaedia.Footnote ⁵⁷

As Xenophon's authorship of the Cyropaedia implies, Cyrus should be considered a prominent figure in the philosopher's thoughts on leadership. My introduction of Cyrus here may seem something of a digression, but it has a twofold purpose: first, to introduce the importance of the figure of Cyrus to Xenophon's thinking, a subject which will be returned to shortly; and secondly, to show that Xenophon's writing was the product of multiple influences on his thought. In many ways, his fictionalized portrayal of Cyrus is itself a reflection of his own conceptualization of ideal leadership, developed not only from literary influences (including Homer) but also from his own experiences as a commander and estate owner. Rather than just reflecting his own preconceived views, Xenophon's depiction of Cyrus was likely to have also been informed by his experience of Persia and its government, recorded in his Anabasis. Moreover, the use of the Persian Empire as an instructive paradigm appears to have been debated in Socratic circles.Footnote ⁵⁸ Ancient authors, naturally, did not write in a vacuum. Xenophon's creation of Ischomachus was subject not only to his personal experiences but also to his involvement in philosophical discourses of the time, and this can be seen in his use of Cyrus as a paradigm for the ideal estate owner.

There is a very real possibility that the Odyssey itself was among the influences on Xenophon's attitudes towards the treatment of slaves, a fact which, if true, could account for the similarities between these texts which we have noted so far. Indeed, if we accept Hunnings’ view, the Odyssey was read in part as a practical guide to slave management in its presentation of an ideal structure of dependency, in which certain obligations are owed by masters to slaves and vice versa. The Odyssey, she writes, ‘offered paradigms useful to the household manager in his handling of slaves, paradigms which constituted ideological justifications for attempts to keep a slave in the ideal condition of social death’.Footnote ⁵⁹ As such, ‘the Odyssey can be read as perhaps our earliest version of an archaic work imaginatively anticipating – and therefore informing – the “slave handbook” genre’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Familiarity with the poets (of whom Homer was the most prominent example) was certainly a vital part of an elite Athenian's education.Footnote ⁶¹ All wealthy Athenians, including the writers and readers of literature that dealt, inter alia, with the management of slaves, would have been extremely familiar with them, and several studies have argued for their influence on wider Athenian thought and literary discourse.Footnote ⁶²

Hunnings also makes clear that, if the Odyssey did not have an instructive purpose in its conception, it was certainly perceived to have one in mid-fourth-century bc Athens. She notes a remark by Plato acknowledging this phenomenon in his Republic, but does not comment on a very similar one in Xenophon's Symposium, placed in the mouth of the Athenian Nikeratos.Footnote ⁶³ However, Nikeratos’ claim in this passage – that all subjects (including household management and, by extension, slave management) can be learned from Homer – receives mocking rebukes from the other symposiasts.Footnote ⁶⁴ What is more, in Plato's Ion, Socrates similarly challenges the idea that significant practical knowledge could be learned from Homer, as opposed to an expert in a particular field.Footnote ⁶⁵

If the Odyssey had a direct effect on the household management recommended by Xenophon, it was an unacknowledged one; Xenophon was perfectly capable of citing Odysseus as an exemplar of household management, but chose not to, preferring instead to name Cyrus as the model par excellence of commanding subordinates. It seems clear from the discussion of this section that the treatment of slaves in the Oeconomicus was developed at least partially by factors separate to the Odyssey. These probably included Xenophon's independent thought and experiences, as well as discourse contemporary to fourth-century Athens.

I would not go so far as to argue that intertextuality played no role in the similarities between the Odyssey and the Oeconomicus that we have discussed. However, I find myself in agreement with Thalmann, who, commenting on the construction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ slaves in both Plautus’ Captivi and the Odyssey, believes the significance of these similarities to lie primarily in the fact that ‘the problems and anxieties surrounding slavery and strategies for managing them are remarkably consistent from one slave-owning society to the other’.Footnote ⁶⁶ As we shall see, there are also considerable differences in the ways that these texts deal with the punishment of ‘bad’ slaves.

Paternalism and the punishment of slaves

The King of Persia makes another appearance in the Oeconomicus during a discussion of the punishment of slaves for theft, which Xenophon begins by having Ischomachus state that he applies the civic laws of Athens – ascribed to the lawgivers Draco and Solon – to the subordinates in his own house.Footnote ⁶⁷ Directly afterwards, he describes this strategy in the following terms:

In other words, Ischomachus not only establishes punitive measures for misdemeanours by his slaves, but – modelling his household on Persian customs – he also establishes rewards for good behaviour. What rewards Xenophon had in mind here is clear from the discussion elsewhere in the text. Importantly, however, the same cannot be said about the punishment he refers to in this passage. Though references to punishment are very much a feature of the Oeconomicus as a whole, they are consistently mentioned ‘in studiously vague and unspecific terms’.Footnote ⁶⁹ True, Ischomachus mentions imprisonment and even death as punishments in the Athenian laws he applies to his slaves, but it seems more likely that Xenophon's meaning here is more general than specific – that, rather than applying actual laws to his slaves, it is more aspects of those laws’ overall character which he claims to have been applying to his system of control.Footnote ⁷⁰ Imprisonment is certainly an option for Athenian masters wishing to discipline slaves – one that is mentioned by Socrates earlier in the Oeconomicus – but it is difficult to believe that capital punishment of slaves for stealing is really being recommended here.

This marks a sizeable difference between how ‘bad’ slaves are treated in this text and in the Odyssey, in which the executions of the disloyal slave women and of Melanthius are described in the most graphic detail in back-to-back scenes.Footnote ⁷¹ Nothing approaching the level of violence painted there appears in the Oeconomicus. Indeed, in its graphic description of slave execution, the Odyssey is nothing like later Western slave manuals. It is telling that in her lengthy discussion of violence in the Odyssey, the comparative example which Hunnings employs is derived from the narrative of an American slave, not from the slave-owner literature that makes up the majority of her comparative material.Footnote ⁷²

Naturally, this difference between the Odyssey and the Oeconomicus can be partially accounted for by differences in narrative and genre between the two texts. Ischomachos was not anticipating slave treachery of the kind that Odysseus dealt with, nor did Xenophon need to create a climax in which past wrongs are righted in the most dramatic of ways.Footnote ⁷³ Nevertheless, his work is scant on details of what must have been one of the most important aspects of being a slave owner in the ancient world. Consider the fact that the Oeconomicus contains no mention of corporal punishment whatsoever, even though we know how important this was to Athenian slavery.Footnote ⁷⁴ Punishment, as noted above, is only ever referred to ambiguously; there are references to confinement (3.4; 14.5), though Ischomachus never explicitly states that he restrains slaves.Footnote ⁷⁵ Furthermore, slave discipline is never to be excessive and is always to be commensurate with the gravity of the slave's misdemeanour.Footnote ⁷⁶ Dal Lago and Katsari note a very similar trend in their comparative study of slave management advice in ancient Rome and the US South, writing that these texts consistently put ‘emphasis…on the certainty and fairness of punishment rather than its severity as instrument of prevention of, and response to, slave resistance to the master's discipline’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The authors argue that this particular observation can be accounted for by reference to paternalistic ideology.Footnote ⁷⁸

Such an ideology obviously conflicts both with slave resistance to their condition and with the slave owner's violent reaction to this resistance, which has been one of the hallmarks of slavery throughout its history. Rather than marginalize the importance of this issue, the Odyssey confronts it head on – revelling in the violence meted out to slaves whom the poem works hard to characterize as deserving of the treatment which they receive. However, there are aspects of the Odyssey that appear decidedly paternalistic, particularly in its presentation of its ‘good’ slaves, who love their masters and are grateful to them for the little which they have. Eumaius, for example, notes the benefits which his kind master has bestowed on him, and Philoitius similarly bemoans the loss of his master.Footnote ⁷⁹ The use of family metaphors in describing the relationship of slaves to their masters, a prominent aspect of later paternalistic attitudes, is evident throughout the Odyssey too. Thalmann, in fact, sees the Odyssey as using its caricatures of two categories of slaves to deal with the reality of slave resistance, while simultaneously maintaining an essentially paternalistic attitude towards slavery as a whole.Footnote ⁸⁰

Dal Lago and Katsari also discuss an alternative motivation for masters to advocate the good treatment of slaves, based on the work of Fogel and Engerman, which views a slave owner's interest in the well-being of his or her slaves as grounded in self-interested concerns in a purely economic sense, rather than an ideological justification of slavery.Footnote ⁸¹ According to this argument, not only did masters take care of their slaves out of a desire to preserve valuable property, but they also provided a set of incentives beyond the threat of violence as a necessary measure to increase slave productivity.

Even a cursory glance at the advice in the Oeconomicus on slave management makes it clear that this is how the work represents a master's interest in his slaves. As we have seen, the entire section on rewards is based around explaining how a master could acquire epitropoi. I can find no passage suggesting that Xenophon was interested in portraying the well-being of slaves as an end in itself or that ‘good’ slaves deserved good treatment for moral reasons. At one point, Ischomachus tells his wife that she will have to care for sick slaves, one of many statements in which Pomeroy sees a somewhat ‘progressive’ attitude to slave management.Footnote ⁸² And yet, this too is best understood in terms of its utility as a means of control. It is phrased as a tiresome task by Ischomachus, one which his wife nevertheless expresses her eagerness to perform, only because it will earn her gratitude from household slaves. The Oeconomicus is also completely void of familial metaphors in describing the relation of slaves to their households. The closest comes in a passage describing the incorporation of a tamia into the household:

Again, the focus is on the practical expediency for the slave owner.

All the same, the reasons for Xenophon's emphasis on positive over negative rewards deserve some further explanation. This focus, in fact, is indicative of a preference that leaders should inspire their subordinates to follow them through willing rather than forced obedience, which is a prominent theme throughout Xenophon's work, notably in his presentation of Cyrus the Great.Footnote ⁸³ As well as in its reference to the king's law codes, the Oeconomicus mentions this as a positive aspect of Cyrus’ reign.Footnote ⁸⁴ An emphasis on positive rather than negative incentives is also a feature of Cyrus’ imperial organization as described in the Cyropaedia, and a trait which Xenophon admired in the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, under whom he served with the 10,000.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is particularly worth emphasizing that in the Cyropaedia the Persian king never resorts to retributive or disciplinary violence in the administration of his empire, but always seeks to resolve issues peacefully.Footnote ⁸⁶ For the most part, such responses are not necessary, as ‘Xenophon much prefers to invent characters who are happy to be ruled by Cyrus, rather than oppose him.’Footnote ⁸⁷ The same can be said of Ischomachus’ slaves in the Oeconomicus.

It might be argued from this evidence that the attitude towards household slaves in the Oeconomicus has little to do with Xenophon's attitudes towards slavery per se. But it is still noteworthy that he saw no difficulty in comparing the management of slaves and freemen. Furthermore, just as Xenophon's account of Cyrus’ reign drastically underestimates the violence surely required to maintain control of a despotic empire, Ischomachus’ presentation of his household marks a distinct ‘downplaying [of] slave resistance’, as McKeown aptly puts it, and, as such, ‘Xenophon's methods are relatively paternalistic.’Footnote ⁸⁸ His preference for this approach, repeated to different degrees in slave management literature throughout history, seem indicative of a paternalistic bent, as Katsari and Dal Lago have argued it is in Roman and American examples of slave management literature.

Though it represents the violence inherent in slavery in the most extreme way, the Odyssey also, through the mouths of its slave characters, professes a belief in the benefits of slavery to slaves who accept their position happily. Xenophon, in contrast, does not feel the need to justify explicitly the exploitation of slaves, but only to explain how a slave owner might do this with the utmost efficiency. With its gruesome depiction of the execution of disloyal slaves, the Odyssey seems at first glance to be very different from the Oeconomicus in its treatment of slave dissent. Even accounting for differences in genre, the examples of practical action which Xenophon uses to reinforce his moral discourse on leadership – namely, an overemphasis on rewards and ambiguous reference to punishment – separate it from the Odyssey. Nevertheless, both texts show evidence of a paternalistic ideology which justified the exploitation of other humans as property, albeit in different ways. Following an ironic interpretation of the Oeconomicus, one could argue that Ischomachus’ profit-driven motive to his treatment of slaves is another characteristic which exposes his moral failings to the astute reader.Footnote ⁸⁹ It seems more likely to me, however, that Ischomachus does speak for Xenophon (at least for the most part), and that an ideological outlook can be seen, not in a hidden agenda intentionally placed within the text, but in its unintentional emphases.

Cross-cultural similarities beyond Greece

The Odyssey, the Oeconomicus, and indeed the writings of the Roman agronomists and the classically trained American planters stand in an intertextually connected literary tradition, in which the earlier works no doubt had some influence on those that followed. However, I have argued that, in the case of Xenophon's Oeconomicus, we can see that the attitudes towards slavery were as much formulated from their contemporary context as they were drawn from archaic literature. To support this, we might point to a tradition of slave management advice outside this Western literary tradition. Daniel Snell has collected 55 proverbs from Sumer concerned with slaves. These proverbs cover a range of topics, but two are of particular relevance: ‘After (the lady) had left the house and (the slave girl) had entered from the street, (away from) her lady the slave girl sat down at a banquet’;Footnote ⁹⁰ and ‘The male [slave] because the lord is gone, the female [slave], because the lord is gone…’.Footnote ⁹¹ These proverbs stress the importance of the master's direct oversight of slaves to the ruling class who conceived these proverbs and passed them down. This is a theme we have already seen in both the Odyssey and the Oeconomicus, and which Dal Lago and Katsari note in the material they studied.Footnote ⁹²

Furthermore, in a section on food, Snell notes three proverbs which portray slaves as ungrateful for their rations. The following is indicative: ‘Although the pea-flour of the home-born slaves is mixed with honey and fine oil, there is no end to their lamentations.’Footnote ⁹³ Not only does this proverb characterize a slave's resistance to their status as ingratitude, it simultaneously portrays their master as their benefactor. We can here see a Near Eastern brand of paternalistic thinking. Together with the material examined in the previous section, these passages provide further evidence for Patterson's contention, referenced in my introduction, that paternalistic ideology frequently arises as a consequence of slavery.

It is true that the Greeks borrowed from Near Eastern literature, though the extent of this borrowing and its exact nature are still debated.Footnote ⁹⁴ A full examination of potential links between Sumerian proverbs on slave management and Greek texts is beyond the scope of this article. However, even if these specific proverbs were transmitted to later Greek literature (which seems unlikely to me), their survival in various forms is still worthy of remark. The similarities of this written advice across different societies point to continuities in cultural responses to slave management concerns that extend not only from archaic Greece to classical times, but also across large stretches of human history, regardless of intertextual links.