Thornton Chapter 3: The Roots of Emancipation



"Mankind is one tribe; one day in the life of father and
mother brought to birth all of us; none was born superior to
any other. But some are nurtured by a fate of misfortune,
others of us by prosperity, and others are held down by the
yoke of compulsion that enslaves us."
from Sophocles' lost play Tereus, translated by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Sophocles vol. 3. Fragments

Thornton starts his chapter with some observations: every pre-modern society practiced slavery. It was a ubiquitous evil. He claims that slavery has been eradicated in the West. He is of course right that legal ownership of another human being has been made illegal. But slavery still occurs here and there: migrant workers are sometimes virtually slaves. And even if you do not have the slaves in your "society," if your "society" buys goods produced by slaves, then you are setting up a somewhat questionable definition of what your "society" is. For surely "the West" is not a matter of nations: it transcends nations. Just so, an "economy" transcends nations to form a sort of society. Thus when we westerners buy certain goods, we are participating/benefiting/supporting slavery, child labor, etc.

So, hurray for the West for the important step of outlawing slavery in the West, but let's not stop the struggle: moral "progress" might best be defined as protecting and if possible empowering the powerless and innocent to a greater degree. There are those in our own society and elsewhere who continue slavery, and they need to be opposed.

Thornton quickly moves to claim that "it was Greek humanistic ideals of rational inquiry and freedom of dissent that started humanity down the long road of emancipation." (62) How can he claim that when Greek owned slaves? Well, the idea is that the Greek intellectuals produced various theories about humans, among which a popular and powerful one was that some things are natural and others are cultural. Explicitly recognizing and exploring the tension between nature and nurture was an important step in Greek intellectual thought: it is called the "nomos-physis" debate (nomos means "law, custom" and physis means "nature"). The Sophists were major figures in that debate, one of whom was a figure about whom we know very little named Alcidamas, who said "the deity gave liberty to all men, and nature created no man a slave." Those theories, the ones which pointed out that slavery was an accident and had nothing to do with the nature of any particular human, were widely discussed and probably found acceptance in many Greek minds. If you own slaves, and yet admit that no one is naturally a slave as well as that being a slave lessens one's humanity, then you have a moral problem: you are harming fellow humans who by nature are every bit as human as you are. You might not stop owning slaves, but the contradiction is there. It will sleep and seem to be taken care of, but eventually, it will come out and force the issue. Contradictions love resolution, and the resolution of the contradiction of slave-owning and those ideals lead many masters to let some of their slaves buy freedom, or to manumit their slaves at death, or even eventually to oppose slavery.

Those ideals are found in the Greek legacy, and they exert their force against slave-owning still.

A problem with abolishing American chattel slavery was that it rejected those ideals: it held that blacks are naturally servile and inferior. Speaking about an area about which I am not an expert, I would say that abolishing slavery in America was rendered more difficult by the fact that slavery was predicated on inferiority. To fight American slavery, you had not just to point out that slaves and masters are equally human, because the slave-owners would dispute that, and many non-slaveowners would as well.

In Greece, anyone and everyone faced a risk that he or she might become a slave: anyone could suffer defeat in war and be enslaved as a result.

In Greece, slaves were often educated to perform tasks: the Greeks knew that slaves were every bit as smart as masters, and so could read, write, etc. They also knew that a slave who could read, write, etc., was worth more at auction and did more highly-valued work. So they had an incentive to train their slaves. An example: the pedagogue, who herded noble children around, was expected to educate them. Themistocles' children's pedagogue, Siccinus, was the one who helped defeat the Persians. Still, most slaves in antiquity probably did mostly menial labor, because there was so much of it to be done.

Greek slaves had paths to freedom. If a slave fought in a war and his side won, he might be freed (Athens did this at Arginousae and Marathon). Sometimes masters freed their slaves when the masters died.

Greek slaves could save money and buy their freedom. They might even be relatively rich.

But freedom was not freedom as we might think of it: a Greek slave could still be bound to his or her master, and still have to perform the same tasks and even give up a child to his or her former master after being freed. So being "freedman" was in some ways not quite what we might expect "freedom" to be. On the other hand, former masters were required to protect the freed person from being re-enslaved.

And the status of freed people did not include citizenship. They could not own land. And yet they had to pay taxes and serve in the military. (65)

Sex frequently occurred between slave and master as well as slave and other people. Slaves could be the playthings of their masters and mistresses.

The legal status of slaves was as follows. Slaves had some legal protections: they could not be killed or subject to unjustified injuries. The Old Oligarch complains about all the rights slaves have in Athens. But the standards for "justification" were lax, because the evidence from comedy and other sources points to whipping, beating, etc. as a frequent phenomenon. What is more, legal testimony from a slave had to be accompanied by torture (slaves would not tell the truth otherwise, it was believed).

A huge number of slaves worked in agriculture and mining. The worst conditions were those of the miners. See quotation on P. 69.

The Greeks seem to have widely believed the following three premises:
  1. Whether you are a slave or not is a matter of luck, not something essential about your character. Another way to put this is that slaves are equally human.
  2. Being a slave harms the slave.
  3. Generally, one should not do harm to other humans.
Those three premises seem to create a contradiction for a slave owner. There are and were ways to finesse it. Aristotle, for instance, claimed that some people are slaves by nature, and so rejected 1. One might think "I am not harming my slaves: I educate them and give them good conditions, honest labor, and the possibility of freedom." Of course, the slaves might still say, "But we're not free: what if you die and your evil brother inherits us? We are still subject to you in an objectionable way." But the slaveowner might not be as bothered by that, because he will feel that he has taken the fangs out of 2 above: he is not harming his slaves. He will even argue that he is benefiting them. One might also claim that if it is just the fact of being a slave that does the harm, then it is OK to own slaves that one bought as slaves: they were already enslaved, and one is not doing them any further harm by buying them. The harm is already done. That is a bad argument, but you get the picture: it is possible for slaveowners to finesse the problem.

But finessing it won't make it go away, for it can reappear at any time. The underlying problem is still there. That is the sense in which Greek thought was a powerful force for fighting slavery: some Greek intellectuals wrote down their thoughts in a form that was read again and again by westerners. Those thoughts included thoughts about what it meant to be human.

Greeks apparently thought that slavery was introduced at some stage of their history. That being the case, it cannot have been a "natural" state, because society existed before it existed. Furthermore, in that long ago time, it was generally believed that conditions were better. (70-71) Greeks also had festivals (which were all religious in nature) at which the roles of master and slave were somewhat reversed.

Thornton does a good job of citing widespread evidence from tragedy and comedy to the effect that slavery was seen as degrading and harmful, and that slaves were typically thought to be less good than free people. But he also cites a lot of literary evidence that shows that slaves were often seen as every bit as good as their masters, if not better. In "New Comedy," which came after Aristophanes, there was even a stock character slave who was smarter and morally better than his masters. Euripides' slaves are virtuous, more virtuous than the free people in Euripides (75). Euripides depicts slaves as rational and good. In Euripides' lost play Alexander, there is a debate about nobility versus slavery (Alexander was raised a slave in the play, then went to Troy and bested his brothers in contest).

Although many Greek writers wrote down things that depicted slavery as evil and argued against their being such a thing as a "natural-born" slave, the most influential Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, appear to have defended slavery. And they did, in a way. But we should be careful to distinguish between "philosophical slavery" and slavery as it was practiced in Greece just as we need to differentiate between slavery as practiced in Greece and slavery as practived in N. America.

First, Plato defended slavery. He thought he had a precedent in Hesiod, who said that if one knows how to be good, one should do so, but if one does not know, one should simply obey one who does know. That is "philosophical slavery." It is an extreme version of patriarchy. Someone who knows better should be the master of those who do not know better. You all know someone or other who is so out of control and dangerous to him or her self and others that it would be better for all concerned if he or she would simply be put in a position of having to obey a good person. He or she would make no more decisions for him or her self. The good person would make all the decisions. Think of it as similar to the parent-child relationship. What is wrong with that? Well, the superior still owns the inferior and uses the inferior as a tool. Patriarchy does not include ownership, and is still objectionable in many forms, so combining ownership with patriarchy to make "philosophical slavery" does not make it better.

As objectionable as it is that adults should be in such a relation to other adults, "philosophical slavery" is not slavery that is actually practiced anywhere. It is an ideal. But it can be used to defend slavery as it actually happens (Southern slave owners basically made a patriarchal argument that they could run their slaves lives better than the slaves could). If there were some reliable way to determine who knows best and who simply cannot be trusted with the direction of their own lives, there would perhaps be little to object to about this sort of slavery, but the ownership issue would still be problematic. In any case, philosophical slavery is clearly different from slavery as it actually occurred in Greece and elsewhere.

Aristotle thought that Barbarians were such inferiors that they were "by nature" slaves, because they were all inferior in intellect to Greeks. He connected that with a theory about climates and human physiology which explained why Greeks had better intellects (too cold up north, too hot down south, Greece just right).

It is interesting that Aristotle, in the Politics 1253b, talks of "others" who argue that the control a master holds over a slave is contrary to nature. Slavery is a matter of convention, according to them. Aristotle himself held that most war-gotten slaves are not natural slaves, and so by implication he must be taken to be saying that it is wrong to hold them as slaves. His criterion is that barbarians are natural slaves while Greeks are not. But that is not how slavery was practiced in Greece, and so he seems to be pointing towards a need to reform Greek slavery.

Those "others" Aristotle refers to are interesting shadowy characters. They might be the Sophists. They show us that in the fifth century in Athens, there were ideas opposing slavery. But those ideas are not part of the Greek legacy in that those who came later did not concentrate on them or seem to react to them directly. Rather, Plato and Aristotle themselves were the influential ones.

After Aristotle, in the third century BCE, the school of the Stoics held beliefs that did not lead them to advocate actively the abolition of slavery, but nonetheless that were opposed to slavery in that they completely rejected the idea of natural slavery. The stoics believed that slavery is a condition of the soul, not one of the body. Thus it was not important whether one's body was owned by another, because no one could own your mind unless you let him or her do so. True freedom for a stoic was the choice of a wise person to do that person's moral duty (80). The stoics thought all humans are rational insofar as they are human and that virtue is entirely a matter of rationality. Thus being human means being capable of being rational which means being capable of virtue.

The stoics also held that all humans are akin to each other. That idea had predecessors: Antiphon the Sophist, writing in the late fifth century, said that there was no natural distinction between barbarians and Greeks. Isocrates, a later orator, said that being Greek was not a matter of sharing blood ties, but rather one of sharing ideas. Zeno, the founder of stoicism in the fourth century, said that ther is a brotherhood of humans and that we all should live together as one large flock. The Stoic Epictetus, himself a freed slave, said that we should be citizens of the world, not one small nation. These ideas are all part and parcel to the claim that all humans are equal qua humans. (80-82)

Thornton ends his chapter with a strong claim that no culture contemporary with the Greeks discussed slavery so critically. He points to a dialogue by Dio Chrysostom, Slavery and Freedom, which portrays a slave questioning the institution of slavery. Thornton says that that was unheard of outside of Greece. Hence if we want to look for the origins of the debate about slavery that led to its abolition in the West, we should look to the Greeks. He ends with a quotation from M.I. Finley to the effect that the Greek attitude towards slavery was ambiguous and full of tension, and that no society can abide such a tension within itself. The eventual resolution of that tension, abolition, was a long time coming, but the careful and critical discussion which pointed out and heightened that tension goes back to the Greeks.


In a book calleed "Who Killed Homer", Victor Hansen and John Heath suggest on pages 111-116 that we have not really abolished slavery, for we have a society that treats millions as little more than slaves.

On a less tendentious note, they point out that other languages of the time had no word for "freedom." That is a telling fact, if it is true.