used. Neither serfs, bond-men, nor chattels, were held in Elis, Locris,
or by the Arcadians, Phocians, or Achæans, until the downfall of Greek
dignity, liberty, and independence, under the Macedonian and Roman
rule. The Phocians prohibited slavery by express legislation.
The Ionians in Attica boasted that they sprang from their native soil.
They were therefore the primitive tillers and cultivators of their not
over-fertile and rather rocky land, of about one hundred and ninety
square miles. This land was divided more or less equally into small
homesteads worked by yeomen, to whom chattels would have been a burden.
Centuries after the heroic or legendary epoch, when Attica possessed
wealthier landowners, Hesiod advises the agriculturists to work their
lands by the free labor of the Thetes in preference to slave labor.
Athens became very early a commercial city, and perhaps piratical
expeditions for the kidnapping of slaves were fitted out from the
Piræus. At any rate, slavery, chattelhood, was especially, if not
exclusively, fostered when commerce became more extensive. Athens was
the seat and focus of domestic slavery. In the course of time almost
all trades were carried on by slaves, as also mining, and finally,
farming. But all this was the growth of the long process of centuries.
Debtors were enslaved; but Solon abolished this right of the creditor.
He likewise abolished the custom of going about armed in the community.
Generally it is a sign of a dangerous and very degraded state of
society when men carry arms as a necessity. By a strange coincidence,
since slavery has been proclaimed a moral and religious duty, the use
of bowie-knives, revolvers, and rifles becomes more and more the order
of the day in the South. Not against the slave, not against any foreign
enemy, not even against the abolitionist, do the men of the South arm
themselves, but it is against each other that they have recourse to
armed assaults in their private and public intercourse. From the South
the savage custom invades the North, and it has in some cases been
forced on peaceful Northern members of Congress in self-defence against
the assaults of their Southern colleagues.
The Ionic race had no serfs or Helots, either in Attica or elsewhere.
But in Attica, as in other Greek communities, and indeed throughout the
whole world, from among the primitive yeomen or peasants, emerged those
who, more thrifty, more successful, or more brave, accumulated wealth
in various ways. Such was one mode in which aristocracy originated.
These yeomen growing richer, acquired more land, bought out smaller
farmers, and could hire more field hands. Even before Solon the aim of
the rich was to transform freeholders into tenants, but Solon stemmed
this current for a long period of time.
Parents could sell their children into slavery; Solon reduced this
right to such daughters as willingly submitted to seduction. A poor man
could sell himself into slavery, and children exposed by their parents
were enslaved by the public authorities.
War and traffic furnished the great supplies of slaves or chattels for
the Athenians. Such chattels were from all nations and races, and the
black slaves constituted an accidental and imperceptible minority.
Witness Æsop telling the story of a rustic who bought a black slave
and unsuccessfully tried to bleach or to whitewash it. If blacks had
been common merchandise, the rustic would have been familiar with
its nature. Slavery was transmitted from parents to children, if the
prisoner of war was not ransomed or the slave not manumitted. But
at any time a slave could receive or buy his freedom, and a chattel
once liberated could not, under penalty of capital punishment, again
be violently enslaved. In the South they begin to legislate for the
re-enslavement of the liberated: the odium no longer falls on the
individual but on the whole body politic. All over the ancient world
the state watched over and protected the once enfranchised slave:
the modern slave-holding polity expels him or legislates for his
disfranchisement. In Athens, as all over Greece, the offspring of
freemen and slave-women were free.
At first slaves performed domestic service, and afterward, when their
number increased, they were employed in various trades. The state used
them in public works, sometimes to row the ships. But the greatest
number were employed to work the mills and mines of Attica. However,
the state itself did not work the mines, but rented them generally
without the slave labor; though private individuals rented them for
a term of years, together with the slaves who worked them. Slowly
chattelhood spread over the rural economy of Attica.
About the time of the Persian wars, rural property was still nearly
equally divided among the citizens. Wealth was accumulated and
represented in commerce, in various industries, and in the precious
metals. But at that time slaves nowhere outnumbered the freemen. At
the battle of Marathon the Athenians had ten thousand _hoplites_ or
heavily armed able-bodied citizens; at Platea eight thousand; and in
both battles nearly as many _peltasts_ or lightly-armed troops--poorer
citizens, but not serfs, or retainers, or slaves. Before the invasion
of Xerxes, the free population of Attica probably amounted to more than
one hundred and twenty thousand of both sexes and all ages. The slave
population is estimated at the utmost as sixty thousand.
Athens, like all the other Greek republics, colonized other countries
with the surplus of their free--mostly poor--population. Herodotus
died in such an expedition. The Dorians very likely colonized Sicily,
the Ionians Italy or Magna Grecia. Such colonizations relieved the
over-populated mother-country, extended the Hellenic culture, but
likewise, in more than one way, fostered and nursed slavery. The
Greek colonists in Sicily and in Italy, conquering or pushing into
the interior the aborigines of these lands, enslaved, kidnapped and
sold them. Then the Greek cities warred with and enslaved each other.
Such was the case between Sybaris and Crotona, or in Sicily between
Syracuse, Girgentum, etc. The rich men of Athens bought more and
more slaves, purchased the lands of the poor, substituted in various
handicrafts their gangs of slave laborers for freemen, and exported the
impoverished freemen.[13] The increase of large estates and chattels
went hand in hand with the decrease of freemen and public spirit in
Athens; and the same was the case in other large commercial cities of
Greece.
After the Persian war Athens became the wealthiest of commercial
cities, and the Athenians a conquering nation. Both circumstances
increased the number of slaves. But still the landed property was not
yet absorbed. Alcibiades owned only about three hundred _plethra_, or
about seventy-five acres of land in Attica. The wealthy slave-owners
and oligarchs were not in power, but they owned mines in Attica and
landed estates in various Greek dependencies and colonies. Slavery
prevailed in the city, and it became more and more common on the
farms. However, on the eve of the Peloponnesian war, democracy still
prevailed. The oligarchs, proud of their slaves, mines, plantations and
estates, scorned the democracy of Athens, composed of artists, yeomen,
operatives, artisans--who really formed the soul of the great Periclean
epoch.
Oligarchies are alike all over the world; in most of them,
slave-holders, however called, live upon the labor of others; all
of them scorn the laboring classes. The Southern militant planters
and their Northern servile retainers scorn the enlightened masses of
working-men, the farmers and operatives of the free states. But it is
those masses which exclusively give original signification to America
in the history of human development. Athens and the various monuments
of the Periclean epoch coruscate over doomed Hellas: so the villages
of the free states, with their schools and laborious, intelligent,
self-reliant populations, shed their rays now over the Christian
world. And the sight of such a village is a far different subject of
contemplation from that of the slave-crowded plantation.
Slavery increased rapidly in Athens, as in all the great commercial
centres, and in the adjacent isles of Greece. At the beginning of the
Peloponnesian war, Attica had a population of about twenty thousand
male adults, or a little over one hundred thousand free persons of
all ages and sexes. The whole free population of Greece is estimated
to have been at that time about eight hundred thousand souls; and the
slaves--the Spartan serfs or Helots included--perhaps outnumbered the
freemen. Thucydides says that the island of Chios had about two hundred
and ten thousand slaves, the largest number next to Sparta; then came
Athens, with nearly two hundred thousand human chattels; while other
great commercial cities of Greece, as Sycyon and Corinth, likewise
contained very large numbers.
The Peloponnesian war was waged with all the violence of a family feud.
It spread desolation, impoverishment, carnage and slavery over Greece.
Captives made by the one or the other contending party, were sold by
tens of thousands into slavery; these captives were principally the
small freeholders, the _thetes_ and _geomori_--operatives, artisans,
and, indeed, free workmen of every kind. Their number consequently
diminished, and their small estates were either bought or taken
violently by the rich, who thus simultaneously increased the number
of their chattels and their acres of land. Thus did slavery permeate
more and more the Greek social polity, until, at the epoch between
Pericles and the beginning of the Macedonian wars, the number of slaves
in Athens and Attica was nearly doubled: but the free population did
not thus increase. Large landed estates became more and more common,
till, in the time of Demosthenes, the soil of Attica, was concentrated
in comparatively few hands. At Cheronea, the Athenians fought against
Philip with mercenary troops, and even armed their slaves. But the
spirit of Marathon and of Platæa was gone, and Athens succumbed. The
gold of Philip was acceptable to the rich slave-holders, and went
principally into the hands of the oligarchs; but alas! no second
Miltiades ever emerged from their ranks.
It is supposed that at the epoch of the Macedonian conquest, the
proportion of slaves and freemen was as seven to three. Near the
beginning of the reign of Alexander, the free population of Greece
amounted to one million, and the slaves to one million four hundred
and thirty-five thousand. The census taken in Attica about that time,
under the archon Demetrius of Phaleris, gives for Athens and Attica
twenty-one thousand adult male citizens, or a little over one hundred
thousand persons of all ages and sexes, and four hundred thousand
slaves. The slave population pre-ponderated, however, only in the
wealthy part of Greece; the poorer agricultural communities, as already
mentioned, having been free from its curse. Thus Corinth had four
hundred and fifty thousand, and Ægina four hundred and seventy thousand
slaves; and this is the reason that Philip, Alexander, Antipater, and
other conquerors had such comparatively easy work in destroying Greek
liberty.
The Macedonian wars also spread desolation, slavery and ruin; and of
Thebans alone, Alexander sold over thirty thousand into slavery.
Thus ended the independent political existence of Greece and Athens.
Rich slave-holders, indeed, they still had; but they ceased to have a
history of their own, or a distinct political existence; and Greece
became a satellite successively of Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Rome.
To conclude: in Athens, as indeed throughout Greece, the commercial
cities inaugurated domestic slavery. Slavery first penetrated into
domestic life; then entered into the various trades and industries, and
finally, almost wholly absorbed the lands and the agricultural economy.
It also penetrated into the functions of state, and various minor
offices were held by slaves--which anomaly was afterward reproduced in
Rome, especially under the emperors.
In the slave section of our own country the system has already got
possession of domestic and family life, of agriculture, and of some
of the handicrafts; and slaves are employed on some of the railroads
as brake-men and assistant-engineers. This may be a cheering proof
of the intellectual capacity of the colored race, but it proves also
the analogy which exists everywhere between the workings of slavery,
whatever may be the distance of ages or the color of the enslaved.
It was only during the period of the moral, social and political
decomposition of Greece that slavery flourished. A certain Diophantus
at one period proposed a law to enslave all the laborers, artisans and
operatives in Athens--so that those who now so loudly demand the same
thing here, had prototypes more than twenty-four centuries ago; for,
though history has transmitted to infamous memory only the name of
Diophantus, yet undoubtedly he stood not alone.
In Athens and in Greece we see the cancer growing steadily over the
whole social and political organism, until all Attica and almost the
whole of the ancient world were divided only between slave-holders and
chattels.
In the slave marts of Athens and of Corinth, and afterward in that of
Delos, the sale of chattels was conducted in precisely the same way as
it now is in Richmond, in New Orleans and in Memphis. The proceedings
of the auctioneers and the traders, of the buyers and the sellers, were
as cruel then as they are now. The same eulogies of the capacities
of able-bodied men, the same piquant descriptions of the various
attractions of the women, the same tricks to conceal bodily defects,
and similar guaranties between vender and buyer, then as now.
When, finally, laborers of almost every kind, handicraftsmen and
agriculturists, had thus become enslaved, all the freemen, both rich
and poor, were speedily swallowed up in an equal degradation. The
family became disorganized; the republics perished. This was completely
accomplished when Greece passed from Macedonian to Roman rule: then
domestic slavery flourished as never before. In that final struggle
the password of the Greek slave-holders was, "_Unless we are quickly
lost, we cannot be saved._" The non-slaveholding mountaineers of Achaia
fought against the Romans until they were almost exterminated. But
Rome conquered, and large numbers of Greeks were sold into slavery by
the Roman consuls. Paulus Emilius alone sold one hundred and fifty
thousand Macedonians and other Greeks, while the whole population of
Corinth was sold by Mummius; and Sylla depopulated Athens, the Piræus
and Thebes. The Roman rule in Greece and over the Greek world was a
fierce stimulant to the growth of domestic slavery. The Roman senate
and the Roman proconsuls especially favored the large slaveholders,
since they were the fittest persons to tolerate the yoke. The Romans
helped them to degrade and to enslave as much as possible. Rome wanted
not freemen in Greece, but slaves and obedient slave-drivers; and Roman
tax-gatherers and the farmers of public revenues sold freemen into
slavery for debt. Finally, the celebrated Cilician pirates desolated
Greece, carrying away and selling, in Delos, almost the last remnants
of the free laboring population.
A small body of free citizens now ruled immense masses of slaves. The
normal economy of nature was thus destroyed, and the depopulation
of Greece went on rapidly. At the time of Cicero, almost the whole
of Attica formed the estate of a single slaveholder, who also owned
other estates in other parts of Greece. Many militant slave oligarchs
doubtless envy that Athenian slaveholder; at any rate they are doing
their utmost to bring the Southern States to a condition similar to
that just depicted in Athens and Greece.
During the Peloponnesian wars, insurrections of slaves often took place
in Attica, especially in the mines. But the greatest slave rebellion,
as far as history has recorded, was under the Roman administration. The
revolted slaves then seized upon the fortress of Sunium, and for a long
time fought bravely for their freedom.
The Greeks, as in some degree all the peoples of antiquity, considered
domestic slavery a social misfortune to the enslavers, and an accursed
fatality inherent in human society. They never presented it under the
false colors of a normal and integral social element. The striking
analogies between the workings of slavery in the ancient world
and in the American republic, show that the disease is everywhere
and eternally the same, and that it does not _ennoble_ either the
community or the individual slaveholder, as the pro-slavery combatants
apodictically assert.
If in the despotic oriental empires, domestic and political slavery
at times played into each other's hands until they jointly destroyed
national life, _it was domestic slavery, single-handed, which did
the work in Greece_, and particularly in Sparta and Athens. Domestic
slavery enervated the nation and made it an easy prey to foreign
conquest. It converted into a putrescent mass the once great and
brilliant Grecian world.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: Edward A. Pollard, letter to the _Tribune_.]
[Footnote 13: So the poor whites of the South emigrate and settle in
the Western territories, and the planters magnify their plantations and
their chattels.]
XII.
ROMANS--THE REPUBLICANS.
AUTHORITIES:
_Corpus Juris, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Niebuhr, Arnold,
Savigny, Puchta, Mommsen, Jhring, Clinton, Carl Hegel, Zumpt, etc._
The primitive occupants of the Mediterranean peninsula--anciently, and
at the present time, called Italy--issued from the same Aryan stock
as peopled Greece. These immigrants, almost from the first moment of
their arrival, seem to have devoted themselves to agriculture, as all
the relics still dimly visible in prehistoric twilight certify to
this fact. Thus, the domestic legend of the Samnites makes an ox the
leader of the primitive colonies, which is only a different version of
another tradition, according to which Vitulus or Italus--a legendary
king, from whom the name of "Italy" is derived--brought about among his
subjects the transition from shepherds to farmers. The name _Italia_,
in ancient Latin, signified a _country full of cattle_. The oldest
of the Latin tribes has the name of _Siculi_, _Sicani_, reapers, and
another, _Opsci_, or field-laborers. Among the Italians (or _Italos_,
_Italiots_), the legends, creeds, laws, and manners all originate in
agriculture; while every one knows the use of the plough in the distant
background of the legendary foundation of Rome. The oldest Roman
matrimonial rite, the _confarreatio_, also has its name from _rye_.
With agriculture is primarily connected a fixed abode, and thus springs
up the love of home and family. From agricultural life arises the tribe
or clan, which is simply a community of individuals descending from
the same ancestor. In this primitive condition the field-labors and
domestic occupations were performed by various members, first of the
family, and then of the clan. The _servus_ or servant of that epoch was
no more a chattel in the Latin agricultural family and community than
was the primitive servant in the tent of the patriarchs (see "Hebrews"
and "Aryas"), or than were the servants of the first colonists in New
England, Virginia, or the Carolinas. In these primitive households
there were no duties for a chattel, for from the earliest time
agricultural and household occupations were as sacred to the yeomen and
peasants of Latium and Rome as were the domestic hearth, the father,
and the family.
From the left bank of the Tiber to the Volscian mountains, and over the
plains of the Campagna, lived the Latins--the _prisci Latini_. They
were divided into numerous distinct families or clans, which afterward
were the generators of the Roman people. The region where they first
appear, in the most ancient times, was therefore settled by separate
families, and divided into separate townships and villages. These clans
it was which afterward in "the city" constituted the primitive _tribus
rusticæ_ or rural tribes.
The _Ramnes_, _Ramneis_, _Romaneis_, _Romani_ or Romans, the founders
of Rome, were, in all probability, bold rovers and adventurers from
the various tribes and villages of Latium. They lived among the bushes
and groves of the Palatine Mount, and what they acquired by depredation
was common property. These primitive legendary Romans had no use for
slaves; they had no mart in which to sell them, and it is probable that
they neither kidnapped nor enslaved any of the neighboring villagers.
Neither legend nor history fixes positively how long these _Ramnenses_
or Romans persevered in their wild mode of life. The legend very soon
unites them with other settled families, such as the Sabine farmers and
peasantry. Then began the specific organized existence of the Romans.
The whole soil of the Roman community constituted an _ager Romanus_
or _publicus_. Every citizen, as a part of the _populus_ or state,
received therefrom a share of the public land for his private use.
When the Romans extended their dominions by subduing the neighboring
villages and districts, the lands of such districts, their pasturages,
etc., were incorporated into the _ager Romanus_, and the inhabitants
were sometimes obliged to settle in Rome or in lands in its vicinity.
From these originated the plebeians, who, under certain conditions,
received shares or lots in the _ager publicus_ or _Romanus_. The aim
of these primitive wars was neither to kidnap nor enslave the subdued
tribes, nor even to transform them into serfs or Helots, at the utmost
to make them tributaries.
To the legendary Romulus were attributed the regulations or laws which
forbade the massacre or enslavement of the male youth of conquered
villages or districts, and prohibited also the transformation of the
conquered lands into pasturages, and provided that they should be
parcelled into small homesteads for Roman citizens. At first two acres,
and afterward seven, constituted such a civic patrimony or homestead.
It was the abandonment of this law in after ages which generated
slavery and the ruin of the populace.
Only the prisoners made on the battle-field and counted among the
spoils, were sold by the state at public auction: _sub hasta_, "under
the spear," and _sub corona_, "the citizen wearing a crown"--to the
citizens or members of the community. Such prisoner, like all other
vended booty, became a _mancipium_, _res mancipia_, (from _manu
capere_, "taken, caught by the hand.") Such slaves, in all probability,
were not numerous. A more prolific source of slavery was the right to
enslave a debtor for life. The debtor became a _mancipium_; and even
when the right to enslave him was abolished, the legal formality of
catching him or touching by the hand, was maintained.
The power of the father or chief of the household--_patria
potestas_--was limitless, in the precincts of the house, over both the
family and the servants. The father, be he patrician or plebeian, could
sell his son into slavery, but the right was very seldom used. So also,
the father had the right of life and death over all his family and
household. Manumission of slaves was common; it existed from the most
ancient times. The slave could also buy his liberty. Subsequently,
in the last centuries of the republic and under the emperors, a slave
could be emancipated by various positive enactments, and the status of
the manumitted slave often passed through various gradations before
reaching absolute independence. The fortieth book of the Pandects
contains several chapters relating to manumission.