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Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean cultures comprised a mixture of debt-slavery, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war.

The institution of slavery condemned a majority of slaves to agricultural or industrial labour and they lived hard lives. In some of the city-states of Greece and in the Roman Empire, slaves were a very large part of the economy, and the Roman Empire built a large part of its wealth on slaves acquired through conquest.

Masters could free slaves, and in many cases such freedmen went on to rise to positions of power.

Slavery in ancient Egypt

Historians can trace slavery in Egypt from an early date. Private ownership of slaves, captured in war and given by the king to their captor or otherwise, certainly occurred at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550 - 1295 BCE). Sales of slaves occurred in the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (732 - 656 BCE), and contracts of servitude survive from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (ca 672 - 525 BCE) and from the reign of Darius: apparently such a contract then required the consent of the slave.

The Old Testament also recounts tales of slavery in Egypt: slave-dealers sold Joseph into bondage there, and the Hebrews suffered collective enslavement (Exodus, chapter 1) prior to the Exodus.

Slavery in the Bible

See Sabbatical year, Onesimus, Bible-based advocacy of slavery, in addition to the details of the Book of Exodus.

Old Testament or Tanakh

Leviticus draws a distinction between Hebrew debt slavery:

25:39 If your brother becomes impoverished with regard to you so that he sells himself to you, you must not subject him to slave service.

25:40 He must be with you as a hired worker, as a resident foreigner; he must serve with you until the year of jubilee,

25:41 but then he may go free, he and his children with him, and may return to his family and to the property of his ancestors.

25:42 Since they are my servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt, they must not be sold in a slave sale.

25:43 You must not rule over him harshly, but you must fear your God.

and "bondslaves", foreigners:

25:44 As for your male and female slaves who may belong to you, you may buy male and female slaves from the nations all around you.

25:45 Also you may buy slaves from the children of the foreigners who reside with you, and from their families that are with you, whom they have fathered in your land, they may become your property.

25:46 You may give them as inheritance to your children after you to possess as property. You may enslave them perpetually. However, as for your brothers the Israelites, no man may rule over his brother harshly.

Slavery in Greece

Most philosophers of antiquity defended slavery — douleia (the idea that not everyone should have voting rights and that some people should be forced to obey masters) as a natural and necessary institution; Aristotle believed that the practice of any manual or banausic job should be disqualifying for citizenship. Quoting Euripedes, Aristotle declared all non Greeks to be slaves by birth fit for nothing but obedience.

Some other philosophers, especially in Athens, opposed slavery and believed that every person who lives in a city-state has the right to be free and to be subject to no one, except only to laws that are decided using majoritarianism. Alcidamas, for example, said "God has set everyone free. No one is created doulos by nature." A fragment of a poem of Philemon also shows that he opposed slavery-douleia.

Greece consisted of many independent city-states, each with its own laws. All of them permitted slavery, but the rules differed greatly from region to region.

Greek slaves had some chance of escape, as they could become suppliants in temples and change their masters in case of maltreatment. In Athens, in case a maltreated slave become suppliant in a temple, his master was forced by law to sell him to another master. This law protected slaves, though a slave's master had the right to beat him at will. And a slave's testimony would be taken under torture - fear of the fact that a trusty slave may protect his masters secrets or fear of his master might otherwise make him lie, which reveals the kind of relation slaves had with their masters.

The system in Athens encouraged slaves to save for their freedom, and there are records of slaves operating businesses by themselves, with only a fixed tax payment to their masters. There was also a law in Athens, forbidding the striking of slaves— if a person struck someone who seemed to be a slave at Athens, the person might be hitting a fellow citizen, because many citizens dressed no better. Other Greeks were startled by the fact that Athenians tolerated back-chat from slaves (Old Oligarch, Constitution of the Athenians). We are told, from nearly seven centuries afterward, that Athenian slaves fought together with Athenian freemen in the Battle of Marathon, and there is a separate battle-monument for the slaves and allies, , or possibly they fought in another battle a little before. Also Plutarch mentions that, during the Battle of Salamis, Athenians were doing their best to save their "women, children and slaves."

On the other hand, much of the wealth of Athens came from its silver-mines at Laurion, and slaves, working in extremely poor conditions, produced the greatest part of the silver (although recent excavations seem to suggest the presence of free workers at Laureion). During the war between Athens and Sparta, twenty thousand Athenian slaves, including both mine-workers and artisans, escaped to the Spartans when their army camped at Decelea in 413 BC.

Other than flight, resistance on the part of slaves occurred only rarely (e.x. in Sparta). GEM de Ste. Croix gives two reasons. First they came from various regions and spoke various languages (similar to the contemporary multicultural states or cities). Second that a slave holder could rely on the support of fellow slaverholders if his slaves offered resistance. Finnaly another possible reason, not mentioned by Croix, is that each slave belonged to a different master so their treatment varied according to their master will. Slaves had no common goals in order to revolt and some slaves were treated well but their master. So the majority of slaves, except for the fact that they could not decide about the laws of their city state, they had no other reason to revolt.

Athens had many classes of slave in Athens:

• House slaves, living in their master's home and working at home, on the land or in a shop.
• Freelance slaves, who didn't live with their master but worked in their master's shop or fields and paid him taxes from money they got from their own properties (as long as property was allowed to be owned by slaves).
• Public slaves, who worked as police-officers, ushers, secretaries, street-sweepers, etc.
• War-captives (andrapoda) who were primarily used in unskilled labor at which they could be chained: for example, rowers in commercial ships or miners. (Excavations may suggest that free persons also worked in the mines of Laurion.) The miners' work was very hard and their living conditions very bad.

The comedies of Menander show how the Athenians preferred to view a house slave: as an enterprising and unscrupulous rascal, who must use his wits to profit from his master, rescue him from his troubles, or gain him the girl of his dreams. We have most of these plays in translations by Plautus and Terence, suggesting that the Romans liked the same genre. And the same sort of genre has not yet decome extinct, as the popularity of Jeeves and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum attest.

Helots and penestae

In some areas of Greece, like Thessaly and Sparta, there existed a class of unfree laborers tied to the land and called penestae or helots respectively. (The Spartan perioikoi were free non-citizens, as in the example below.) These were not chattel slaves; they could not be bought and sold freely. Geoffrey de Sainte Croix has argued that helots and similar groups had a major advantage over other slaves because they could not be sold at will by their masters. This stability left them free to form family life without the fear that they might be divided one from another by being sold separately. That helots and similar groups were in a kind of half way position between chattel slave and free is fairly uncontroversial. M I Finley takes issue with those who choose to give this intermediate status the label serf. Partly, this is because he gives greater emphasis on the many graduations amongst unfree laborers in the Ancient world. His prime objection, however, is that for him serf is a precise term, and serfs can only exist under feudal obligations. M I Finley had in his sights certain Marxist historians, especially Soviet,who, committed to economic determinism, attempted to show that ancient society passed through the same economic, and consequently social, forms as medieval and modern Europe. Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, though also a Marxist, is in agreement with Finley that to regard Sparta as having been a feudal society is absurd. For him serfdom was a form of unfree labor where that laborer is bound to the land and has to render fixed services, irrespective of to whom those services are owed.

Michael Grant takes a middle position saying that such groups between slave and free could be loosely “if somewhat anachronistically” called serfs. (Michael Grant,The Classical Greeks p284) Helots were assigned to individual Spartans but were not owned by them. The helots were obliged to surrender a proportion of the harvest to their master as tribute but were then free to keep the remainder themselves. Similar groups existed in Argos, Crete, Syracuse, Thessaly and other places. (Michael Grant p284)

Sparta, in particular, treated her slaves very harshly. Stories survive of how the Spartans blooded their young men by having them go out and kill some helots. Helots were compelled to get drunk, to demonstrate the ill consequences of drunkenness; and any Spartan might beat any helot at whim. The Spartans did take perioikoi (and in some cases helots) with them to war, where they usually had light arms; and freed the helots afterwards - especially during the difficult parts of the Peloponnesian Wars. After the peace, however, some thousands of these neodamodeis disappeared one night, and were never heard from again.

Some commentators account for Spartan severity by emphasizing their constant fear of an organized rebellion of the Helots, and at least one such rebellion actually occurred in 464 BC. Ste. Croix explained this fear from the helots largely having a common culture and language and hence being more able to take joint action than chattel slaves. Both the explanation and the underlying conjecture are controversial. M I Finley explains the greater rebelliousness of helots to rebel compared with chattel slaves by the fact that the helots being half free wanted more.

Slavery in Rome

According to the Roman law, "slaves had no head in the State, no name, no title, no register"; they had no rights of matrimony, and no protection against adultery; they could be bought and sold, or given away, as personal property; they might be tortured for evidence, or even put to death, at the discretion of their master." Cato the Elder expelled his old and sick slaves out of house and home. Hadrian, one of the most humane of the Roman Emperors, wilfully destroyed the eye of one of his slaves with a stylus. Roman ladies punished their maids with sharp iron instruments for the most trifling offences. A proverb prevailed in the Roman empire: "As many enemies as slaves." Hence the constant danger of servile insurrections, which more than once brought the republic to the brink of ruin, and seemed to justify the severest measures in self-defence — including the law of collective responsibility: if a slave killed his master, the authorities put all of the slaves in the household to death.

Estimates for the prevelance of slavery in the Roman Empire vary. Some estimate that the slave population in the 1st century consisted of approximately one-third of the total. The Roman economy was certainly heavily dependent on slavery, but was not (as is sometimes mistakenly stated) the most slave-dependent culture in the history of the world. That distiction probably belongs to the Spartans, with helots (the Spartan term for slave) outnumbering the Spartans around seven to one (Herodotus; book IX, 10). While we have from Herodotus an ancient source to place Spartan slavery at 7:1, few cite a similar source for the Roman 1:2 so it should be viewed as less reliable. A high proportion of the populations in Italy, what is today Tunisia, southern Spain and western Anatolia was slave. The actual proportion may have been less than 20% for the whole Empire, 12 million people, but we cannot be sure. Since there was a labor shortage in the Roman Empire, there was a constant need to find slaves to tie down the labor supply in various regions of the Empire. In the Later Empire emperors tried to tie people into hereditary occupations to secure vital services as the supply of slaves dried up.

In Republican Rome, the law recognised slaves as a social class, and some authors found in their condition the earliest concept of proletariat, given that the only property they were allowed to own was the gift of reproduction. Slaves lived then within this class with very little hope of a better life, and they were owned and exchanged, just like goods, by free men. They had a price as "human instruments"; their life had not, and their patron could freely even kill them.

Most of the gladiators came from the ranks of the slaves. One of them, Spartacus, formed an army of slaves that battled the Roman armies in the Servile War for several years.

Augustus punished a wealthy Roman, one Vedius Pollio, for feeding clumsy slaves to his eels; and under the Empire laws restricting the power of masters over their slaves and children came into force and were steadily extended; however, we cannot know how well-enforced these were. Claudius ruled that if a master abandoned an old or sick slave, the slave became free. Under Nero, slaves were given the right to complain against their masters in court. Under Antoninus Pius, a slave could claim his freedom if treated cruelly, and a master who killed his slave without just cause could be tried for homicide. At the same time, it became more difficult for a person to fall into slavery under Roman law. By the time of Diocletian, free men could not sell their children or even themselves into slavery and creditors could not claim insolvent debtors as slaves.

Freedmen and freedwomen, called liberti, formed a separate class in Roman society at all periods. They had the Phrygian cap as their symbol. These people were not numerous, but Rome needed to demonstrate at times the great frank spirit of this "civitas," so the freed slaves were made famous, as hopeful examples. Freed people suffered some minor legal disabilities that show in fact how otherwise open the society was to them—they could not hold certain high offices and they could not marry into the senatorial classes. They might grow rich and influential, but were still looked down on by free-born Romans as vulgar nouveaux riches, like Trimalchio. Their children had no prohibitions.

The Latin poet Horace, the son of a freedman, served as a military officer in the army of Marcus Junius Brutus and seemed headed for a political career before the defeat of Brutus by Octavian and Mark Antony. Though Horace may have been an exceptional case, freedmen were an important part of Roman administrative functions. Freedmen of the Imperial families often were the main functionaries in the Imperial administration. Some rose to positions of great power and influence, for example Narcissus, a freedman of the Emperor Claudius.

Many historians credit this improvement to the influence of Stoicism and of Christianity. The Stoics taught that all men were manifestations of the same universal spirit, and thus by nature equal. At the same time, however, Stoicism held that external circumstances (such as being enslaved) did not truly impede a person from practicing the Stoic ideal of inner self-mastery: one of the more important Roman stoics, Epictetus, spent his youth as a slave.

Both the Stoics and the early Christians opposed the ill-treatment of slaves, rather than slavery itself. Keith R. Bradley argues, indeed, that the influence of such texts as "obey your masters...with fear and trembling" may have made beatings more common in late Antiquity. Many Christian leaders (such as Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom) often called for good treatment for slaves and condemned slavery. In fact, tradition describes Pope Clement I (term c. 92 - 99), Pope Pius I (term c. 158 - 167) and Pope Callixtus I (term c. 217 - 222) as former slaves.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

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