Was Athenian Democracy Dependent on Slavery?
Back in November 2021 I published a piece in Areo magazine called ‘Was Athenian Democracy Dependent on Imperialism?’ When I sent the editor this second installment on slavery, she asked me to re-work the piece to incorporate some introductory material on Athenian democracy for the sake of the general reader. That wasn’t a bad suggestion at all (and people who do want a very, very short introduction to Athenian democratic institutions can start with this video), but in view of the time that has now passed since the first piece, I’ve decided simply to post the second installment here more or less unchanged.
In a previous piece, I challenged University of Brunswick classicist Matthew Sears’ assertion that there was a “nearly perfect” correlation “between the degree of political freedom and equality” for citizens of ancient Athens “and the rise of chattel slavery and imperial depredation.” As sharp-eyed readers may have noticed, though I was able to counter Sears’ claim that Athenian democracy was dependent on imperialism, I didn’t really deal with the issue of slavery.
As I pointed out in that piece, the idea that Athenian democracy couldn’t have happened without the Athenian empire is easy to disprove, because we can point towards several periods of Athenian history when the city had democracy but no empire. In the case of slavery, proving that Athenian democracy wasn’t dependent on it in this strong sense (as a necessary condition) isn’t just more difficult — it’s impossible. We can’t look directly at what happened to Athens’ democracy in the periods when the ancient city didn’t have slavery, because there were no such periods.
We could make a weaker sort of claim about Athenian democracy being dependent on slavery: that the democracy might still have been possible without slavery, but that a slave-free democratic Athens would have looked very different. The problem with this is that it’s so obviously true that it seems hardly seem worth stating. If we are interested in the more meaningful question of whether Athenian democracy could have happened at all without slavery, we’ll need to do some educated guesswork.
It might be helpful to begin by going back to David Pritchard’s research on Athenian public spending, which reveals that the city spent relatively little on its democratic system — only some 90 to 100 talents of silver a year, an amount it was easily able to cover, whether it was getting money from its fifth-century empire (to the tune of some 1000 talents a year) or simply from taxes, fees, and duties (which together helped give Athens annual revenues of some 1200 talents by the last few decades of the democracy).
Now, slavery was certainly an integral part of the Athenian economy, not least in silver mines of Laurion, which provided the raw material for many of the city’s distinctive owl coins, and leases for which were bringing the state some 160 talents of silver a year by late classical times. The leases may have been snapped up by wealthy citizens, but the actual work was done by huge teams of slaves, working in the kinds of conditions that you would have had to pay free labourers a lot of money to endure (and free labour already cost almost 5 times as much as slave labour in the democratic city).
As a quick glance back at the figures show, though, Athenian democracy wasn’t dependent, on a yearly basis, on Laurion silver — even if an especially rich vein of silver was instrumental in helping the city build the warships that saw off the Persian threat in 480 BC. With revenues of up of 1000 talents or more in good times, 90 or 100 talents a year was a sum Athens could generally afford. It was, after all, around 15 times less than the amount the city spent on the military during the early years of the Peloponnesian War.
If Athenian democracy wasn’t financially dependent on slavery, though, didn’t citizens rely on their slaves to take care of their farms and shops as they went to participate in the city’s political institutions? Undoubtedly. Athenian democracy was highly participatory, with almost a third of citizens serving on the central Council at some point in their lives, and thousands of Athenians each year serving as magistrates, jurors, or simply attending meetings of the open-air Assembly. And the fact that most citizens had slaves (with only extremely impoverished men having no slaves at all) surely helped make the system viable.
Again, though, a lot hangs on what, exactly, we mean by ‘dependent’: it seems clear that fewer citizens would have been able to attend the Assembly, say, or serve as jurors, without slavery. Whether any democratic system worthy of the name would have been impossible is another question. It’s worth bearing in mind that even in an Athens with slavery, the citizen body wasn’t perfectly represented in every democratic institution: as anyone familiar with Aristophanes’ Wasps will know, the courts in particular had a reputation for being dominated by grumpy old men.
What about the demosioi, the public slaves that were owned by the democracy itself? In a recent book, Paulin Ismard has claimed that these slaves — many of whom worked as scribes or secretaries — formed a kind of permanent civil service without which the rule of the masses would not have been possible. As Ismard points out, public slaves remained in public service year after year, while most citizen magistracies could be held for only a single, non-repeatable term. Demosioi thus built up a kind of familiarity with Athens’ public institutions that few citizens ever accrued. And that was a good thing, since if individual citizens had accrued that kind of administrative expertise, it would have undermined the egalitarianism that underpinned Athens’ democratic society.
Again, though, it’s not quite clear that a democratic Athens without public slaves would have been impossible, rather than simply different. First of all, the total number of demosioi was only around a couple of thousand. Some of these performed literate tasks, it’s true, and not all Athenian citizens were literate; but many of them were, and a good number of citizens served in secretarial roles that weren’t that dissimilar to the ones that public slaves performed. If public slaves could sometimes build up impressive records of public service, so could citizens like Pericles (a general 14 times in a row) without too many cracks appearing in the democracy as a result.
An argument that’s somewhat similar to Ismard’s has been eloquently made over the past few decades by the current Cambridge Professor of Ancient History, Robin Osborne. For Osborne, slavery was important not so much because it made Athenian democracy feasible economically, but because it helped buttress citizens’ sense of themselves as equals. Athenian citizens, in this theory, were equal in this respect, if in none other: that they were free men and not slaves. As Osborne himself admits, though, it wasn’t ‘democracy as such which slavery enabled in Athens, but a particular conception of the citizen body.’ Would popular rule of any sort have been unthinkable in the absence of that particular conception of the citizen body, or even with a watered-down version of it? It’s hard to say.
In fact, what exactly an Athens innocent of slavery would have looked like is hard to say in any number of different ways. This is precisely why I’ve spent most of this piece simply drawing attention to a few of the points we need to wrestle with before we can make statements as confident as Sears’ declaration (made with slavery as well as imperialism in mind) that ‘the freedom and rights of citizens depended on the subjugation and exploitation of others.’
Alongside his more confident declarations about Athenian democracy ‘depending’ on subjugation and exploitation, though, Sears also makes a more modest claim — the claim quoted at the start of this piece — that democracy and slavery were simply correlated. Here he is echoing the influential Marxist historian Moses Finley (also mentioned in my previous piece) who, in an article first published in 1959, talked about the ‘advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery’ in ancient Greece. Does this more modest claim have more to recommend it?
Sears focusses mainly on the apparent boom in the number of slaves, mostly of foreign extraction, in Athens during the city’s fifth- and fourth-century heyday — which was also, of course, a period in which Athens’ democracy flourished. But just because there were more slaves in Athens during the city’s democratic heyday doesn’t mean the two phenomena were causally related. We have to consider other factors that could help explain why Athens acquired so many slaves in the classical period — the city’s development into the economic powerhouse of the Aegean, for example.
Finley’s more general idea that freedom and slavery advanced ‘hand in hand’ in ancient Greece is similarly questionable. In the Greek world itself, all of the city-states owned slaves, and most of them weren’t democracies; indeed, some of the poleis that depended most heavily on slaves were oligarchies (Sparta, with its large population of ‘helots,’ is only the most notorious example). Slavery was also the norm in the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Finley argued that these weren’t true ‘slave societies’ in a technical, Marxist sense; but as David Lewis has reminded us, the evidence for considerable numbers of slaves in civilizations like Assyria, Babylon, and Phoenician Carthage is overwhelming.
It may be, in the end, that historians should always have been more suspicious of Finley’s ideas about slavery and freedom being associated. After all, the vast majority of civilizations that we know of have had slavery, and only a tiny proportion of these have been democratic, let alone liberal in any modern sense. At the same time, most of the societies which have evolved into liberal democracies over the past couple of centuries have been among the very few to pro-actively attempt to root out slavery.
Where does this leave Athens? Ancient Athens, like most ancient states that we know of, seems to have acquired slaves to the extent that it could. It also, again like most ancient states that we know of, sought to expand its influence and power as far as it was able to — and in the second half of the fifth century, at least, this took the form of full-blown imperialism. It makes a certain amount of sense for historians to keep reminding us of these facts, not least to stop us falling back into the habit of viewing Athens in an unrealistically adulatory way.
But the attempt to explain the emergence and flourishing of Athens’ radical democracy with reference to the city’s slave-holding and imperialism was probably always doomed to failure. Slavery and imperialism (or would-be imperialism) were the norm among ancient states; democracy was something that arose in only a very few. It will always be healthy to remind ourselves that democratic Athens was a slave-holding, intermittently imperialistic society; but we are now at risk of forgetting something far more remarkable — that it was a democracy too. And how this democracy came into being and sustained itself is far too complex and interesting a story to be reduced to the default conditions and tendencies of all ancient states.
