Defying the Greek ideal

Peter Hunt, an associate professor and chair of classics at CU, has highlighted another way in which slaves contributed more to the dominant culture than most think. Hunt specializes in ancient Greece and argues that slaves played a much more significant role in Greek warfare than many acknowledge.

In ancient Greece, slaves were not supposed to be good soldiers, who are generally idealized as good, brave citizens. Ancient Greeks “didn’t want to concede that slaves, whom they despise, could be good soldiers.”

In his famous funeral oration, Pericles portrays dead soldiers as citizens who “would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her.” Pericles concludes that “where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state.”

But Hunt finds ample evidence that many Greek soldiers were not honored citizens, but hated slaves.

This is a theme Hunt explores at length in “Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians,” a book that is seen as epochal. Paul Cartledge, chairman of the faculty of classics and a fellow of Clare College in the University of Cambridge, writes that Hunt’s book is one of the most important works on Greek historiography in the 1990s.

The involvement of slaves as Greek soldiers has been “systematically under-reported,” Hunt argues. Of course, facts that are under-reported are relatively hard to confirm. But Hunt has techniques of exhuming these data.

One such technique is making a close reading of historical texts. Chance remarks can reveal patterns. For instance, Hunt cites an illuminating section in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens.

Thucydides reports that Thurian and Syracusan contingents in 411 B.C. vigorously demanded their pay, “since they were for the most part free men.” Hunt argues that Thucydides’ text implies that the rest of the Peloponnesian navy—with 112 ships and 20,000 rowers—was for the most part slaves.

Another clue to the prevalence of slaves in Greek military forces comes from inscriptions—such as lists of crew members on naval ships. Evidence such as this sheds light on the number of slaves present, and such evidence is not, Hunt notes, “susceptible to suppression.”

Hunt also cites “anti-ideological” texts, which may outline “underhanded, nasty things you can do to get an edge in warfare.” Some of these tracts tout war tactics that are “shunned and awkward,” he says.

One tract, for instance, suggests that an army besieging a city should instruct its heralds to announce that any slaves who desert will win their freedom. That discourages the besieged city from arming slaves, and it encourages a city to feed its slaves better, Hunt notes. It also indicates that slaves were sometimes acting as soldiers in Greek cities.

Hunt notes that the systematic under-reporting of ancient slavery can stem from “right-wing” or “left-wing” analyses by modern scholars. The right-wing view, he contends, reflects the discomfort that Greeks felt having slaves fight Persians. The left-wing view, on the other hand, is that slaves are terribly oppressed and could not be trusted with weapons.

Hunt acknowledges that slaves are oppressed, but he says they can still be pressed into military service. Hunt says a “very modern view of armies” holds that soldiers must be citizens fighting for the state. But, he observes, “The British Navy in its heyday was manned with unhappy people pressed into service.”

Like Cameron, Hunt probes the transmission of culture from captives to captors.

Most slaves in Athens were imported. Nonetheless, they preserved a sense of themselves as members of their original culture, Hunt says.

Not everyone agrees. A prominent archaeologist has looked at archaeological remains in Greece and found no evidence of cultures from which Athens got its slaves.

“I believe he made a mistake,” Hunt says. A dearth of archaeological evidence just shows that slaves toiling in mines didn’t build houses or make pottery. “I maintain that slaves did maintain a sense of themselves as Thracian or Assyrian.”

Slaves seem to have preserved their native religions, too, Hunt says, noting that Plato’s “Republic” begins with a discussion of a torch race in honor of a Thracian god. Much of the Thracian population of Athens was enslaved.

“It seems that slaves did try to celebrate their Thracian cults.”

While some scholars claim that slaves’ own views were overwhelmed by hegemonic Athenian ideology, Hunt counters, “That’s much too simplistic.”

He notes that Greeks were advised not to get too many slaves from one ethnic source. “If they lost ethnic identity, there’d be no reason to warn against this.”

High-level history—examining history from the vantage point of the elite—is falling out of favor, Hunt says. “Slaves are history from the bottom up.”

Recovering pieces of the slaves’ experiences is difficult because we lack text written by slaves, Hunt adds. "If I can make a persuasive case for this aspect of their world view, I feel that I will have contributed to our knowledge of slavery."

And knowledge facilitates freedom.

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