Carrie Gibson’s Offcuts: Ancient slavery and modern Greece
Hello and welcome to my newsletter, Offcuts! As the name indicates, this is the place for writing that didn’t make it into any of my books, but it’s also a place for musings and experiments.
This week I’m revisiting the Chios, Greece where I went to research The Great Resistance (ordering info here). What follows is a section that didn’t make it into the book, but I think it’s worth sharing here …
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When I arrived on the Greek island of Chios (pictured above) in the autumn of 2021, it seemed like anywhere else in Europe. People sitting at cafes, anchored boats gently swaying in the port. Its very normality was fashioned after 200 years of wrestling the Ottoman empire before joining Greece in 1914. There is a memory of slavery that hovers near the surface here, but it relates to the Turkish kidnapping and capture of Chios during the Greek revolution in 1822 — not entirely surprising, as Turkey’s port of Çesme sits visibly across the Aegean.
Chios, a city-state with the second largest slave population in antiquity, lingers in another past, one buried as far into the earth as pottery fragments from thousands of years ago. Nowhere would it even seem evident that this was a place where humans were first purchased as chattel. Or where Christopher Columbus and other Genoese (who controlled the island from c. 1300 until 1566 when it went under Ottoman rule) found the profits that helped push them into new lands, ones where enslavement would become part of life as well.
This island is not the stuff of whitewashed Greek island holiday fantasy. It is windblown, with buildings of brown stone, orange groves, and patches of mastic trees, identifiable by their sinuous trunks. It is an unprepossessing place for what would be a significant development in the longer history of slavery.
Chios is believed to be the earliest place that people were bought and sold, slaves turned into commodities. They were becoming property, commodity, and wealth rolled into one. The slave was now a possession or a saleable asset, an andrapodon. In English, this would be “chattel,” coming from the medieval Latin capitale, which informs the words cattle and capital, but with its roots planted in the rocky soil of Chios.
Unlike what would happen centuries later halfway across the world, the people who were purchased at this time were often physically indistinguishable from the buyers — slavery had not yet been racialised in the way it would between Africa and the Americas. However, slaves had other markers of difference, such as foreign accents. To be a slave at this time, a person had to first be a ‘barbarian’, that is to say, an outsider. A person with no legal status. Alienation was key, so the person could be put to work on the land or in a household, or be sent to battle, used in ritual sacrifice, exploited sexually, or be commercially exchangeable.
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‘We don’t talk about such things,’ the docent answered with a nervous laugh. I had asked whether there were any objects relating to slavery to be found in the elegant high-ceilinged galleries of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, in Athens. Given that an estimated one-third of the Greek population in the classical period (c.400BCE) was believed to have been enslaved, I had come to the capital looking for their cultural footprints. The docent scurried off to consult with her colleagues, before returning to direct me to a handful of objects in a few of the galleries. As I thanked her, she added ‘you’re the first person to ask that’. I was a bit surprised — surely some other visitor had made a similar query? But this surprise evaporated, and a far more unpleasant sensation took hold, when it became clear that some of the objects I had been directed to depicted African people.
I stood in gallery 14, staring at a pair of candle votives that were unmistakably of Africans. Both heads had ebony skin with terra-cotta-coloured hair arranged into small bumps, with what appeared to be a candle-holder at their crown. Was the connection of blackness to enslavement so enmeshed that the docent had assumed I was looking for depictions of enslaved Africans, even though very few slaves in ancient Greece would have been of sub-Saharan origin?
The object’s museum tag offered little explanation, saying that these figurines were often used as part of votive or graveside offerings and that ones involving black heads — along with women, satyrs, and Dionysus — were popular around the start of the 6th century BCE. It didn’t specify the status of the black faces, and there is no indication that they were meant to symbolise a slave. Rather, such objects were apparently thought to bring good fortune.
In another gallery I was directed to a much larger work, involving two slabs of marble showing, according to the museum tag, a young Ethiopian groom trying to keep his master’s horse under control. His round face, snub nose, and tight curls presumably were meant to indicate that he was not Greek. Less clear was this young man’s status; nowhere did it say he was a slave. In fact, throughout much of the museum the descriptions mentioned servants, not slaves. The enslaved 30 percent of ancient Greece continued to elude me.
I had one more stop: the docent told me to look closely in the many galleries of funeral stelai, which are similar to gravestones. I spotted only one clearly bearing an enslaved person — this time, not an African — and that was the stele of Euempolos, whose name, according to the tag, ‘designates a cheap slave.’ He had been granted freedom for his participation in a battle against Sparta around 390 BCE. On the surviving fragment, a bearded Euempolos sits in a chair, holding a bird in each hand, giving them to his children. He lives on in death, but the contents of his life remain unknown, save for his slave origins and military service.
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My book, The Great Resistance, is about the abolition of Atlantic slavery, not classical slavery and, initially, Greece wasn’t on my agenda. And yet, I found myself in 400 BCE, puzzling over the triangulation of slavery, freedom, and the democratic system that connected both. Wandering around that museum in Greece, it seemed like the story of Athenian democracy had little space for the slavery which supported it. This suspicion was reinforced by the docent’s apparent confusion. The cultural sites of Athens seemed to exhibit much pride in their connection to an innovative political system, but are far more circumspect about the exploitation that underpinned it.
In both Chios and Athens, the traces to this slavery past are scant. The River of Lethe, the mythical stream from which forgetfulness flows, runs through so much of the global landscape of slavery. Who wouldn’t want to drink from its waters to purge these memories? But to forget about slavery, is to ignore the social role enslaved people had in ancient Greece. They were a crucial link in the development of democracy, allowing citizens time to pursue the affairs of state. The very machinery of democracy was oiled by them; in this period, slaves could also be owned by the state, working as clerks, police, public works labourers, and even overseeing treasury coinage. The freedom of the demos was paid for by the labour of the enslaved.
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Suggested further reading:
Finley, Moses I. 1998. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. Edited by Brent D Shaw. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers,
Forsdyke, Sara. 2021. Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greece. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press
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What I am currently … watching
I recently had the uncomfortable pleasure of watching the 2024 documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. It is a terrific documentary of a terrible story, recounting the events that led to the assassination of the newly independent Democratic Republic of Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba in 1961. The soundtrack is heavy on jazz, not least because US musicians were enlisted in Cold War cultural campaigns, something I did not know much about. The music matches the mood of these times, an emotional period marked by the euphoria of ending colonial rule by Belgium and the deep, aching abyss with which Congolese people were pushed into as they realised their country had become a pawn in a much larger global game. No one in this story comes out of it well, especially not the UN or the US. I can’t recommend this film enough, and it makes particularly instructive viewing during our own worrying times.
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If you liked this essay, leave a comment. Or buy me a drink! Or treat yourself to one of my books!
Leah says:
This is fascinating, Carrie. Did the docent not know much (anything?) about the slavery that underpinned classical Greek society? Any of her colleagues? I that why they pointed you toward objects that depicted Africans? How much of that reflects their own assumptions of what it means to be enslaved? I will read this one again. Thank you for sharing!