Part 8
In the course of about four centuries, both during and after the Peloponnesian war, the Spartan oligarchy was enriched more and more by the spoils of victorious wars, and by the importation of slaves as war prisoners from other Greek and from barbarous nations. Then the difference between the rich and poor was more striking, and the eternal process of oppressing the poor, seizing upon their property, or buying them out, was busily and cheerfully pursued. Then Laconia was held by comparatively few Spartan slaveholders--but there were no more heroes of Thermopylæ. Citizens and freemen were a scarcity during the Augustan period; but slaves, the property of a few wealthy owners, actually covered Lacedemonia and Sparta. Domestic slavery undermined and destroyed the Spartan nation in precisely the same manner as it did others before and since. The enslaved Helots and Greeks, and many of the descendants of the enslavers, became, in their turn, slaves of the Romans, then of the Slavic invaders, afterward of the Crusaders, till finally all of them, masters and slaves, groaned under the yoke of the Osmanlis. The traveller can now scarcely find the few mouldering ruins of the once proud and enslaving city. Spartan history covers nearly a thousand years: and for centuries the destructive disease was at work. Some of its symptoms, in the course of half a century, are already highly developed in the South.
Piracy and kidnapping, which in Greece originated at a time when every man saw an enemy almost in his immediate neighbor, did not wholly cease when national relations became more normal and regular. When slavery began to permeate the domestic economy, piracy and the slave-traffic were of course more active. The Southern enslavers assert that their region is not yet supplied with the necessary number of chattels. They draw on piracy, kidnapping, and bloodshed in Africa. The almost incessant wars between the Greek neighboring tribes and nations encouraged slavery; and innocent citizens, going from one Greek state to another, were often enslaved through enmity and greed. However, this savage custom became softened and finally abandoned when the mutual relations became more civilized and regulated; whereas free-men from free states of the Union are arrested and imprisoned in the so-called civilized slave-holding states, and in some cases they can be legally sold as slaves.
In Boeotia slaves were not numerous--being only occasionally made and 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.