Slavery in ancient Greece and Rome

In How to run a farm, written in the second century BCE, the Roman landowner Cato tells a master to sell his old oxen, his worn-out tools, and his old and sick slaves along with spare wine and wool. Plutarch, writing two centuries later, called this mean.

In Greece and Rome, an enslaved person was the property of an owner. Under Roman law, slaves could not marry, own property, or bring a case to court in their own name. In strict law a master could sell, punish, or kill them, though custom and later laws limited this. People became slaves through capture in war, birth to an enslaved mother, or kidnapping. The geographer Strabo says pirates sold great numbers of captives on the island of Delos, though Westermann thought this much exaggerated.

No count of slaves survives. Modern estimates for Athens and its countryside run from about 20,000 to over 100,000. The historian William Westermann thought 60,000 to 80,000 reasonable for the years around the start of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE). In his view slaves made up no more than a third of the people there, and possibly no more than a quarter. An ancient figure of 400,000 is rejected. For Roman Italy under Augustus, Walter Scheidel reports, P. A. Brunt suggested about three million slaves. Scheidel himself argues for no more than one to one and a half million, and estimates that two to four million people were brought to Italy as slaves in the last two centuries BCE.

Slaves did almost every kind of work. In Athens they mined silver at Laurium and worked as craftsmen. At one Athenian temple, enslaved craftsmen earned the same pay as free ones. In Rome they served in households, worked large estates in gangs, and acted as business agents, doctors, and craftsmen. Owners could free their slaves, and the freed slaves of Roman citizens became citizens themselves when freed in the formal way. Enslaved people rose in revolt in Sicily from about 135 to 132 BCE and again from 104 to 101 BCE, and under Spartacus in Italy from 73 to 71 BCE.

Both library texts were written by slave owners. In A young wife learns to run the house, Xenophon's landowner Ischomachus teaches his wife to oversee the household slaves, who have no voice in the text. Cato's farm is run by an overseer who was usually enslaved himself.