17/02/2024
MINI LECTURE: Monday 19th feb
7:30pm in the memorial room
“A slave by any other name? The terminology of Ancient Greek slavery”
Abstract:
Even the most cursory glance at surviving ancient Greek texts reveals that slavery must have been central in all parts of life. Be it comedy or tragedy, inscriptions or papyri: slaves turn up everywhere—or do they?
What we translate and hence imagine as one phenomenon, namely that of slavery, looks diverse in Greek. This fact is entirely obvious to anyone looking at the original evidence. But what are we to take from such linguistic diversity? Its implications for how we are to think of slavery in the ancient Greek world have not been given the attention they deserve. In this paper, I will look at three terms: δοῦλος, οἰκέτης, and ἀνδράποδον. I will analyse their various connotations in different contexts in ways that scholarship is yet to capture. In doing so, I hope to show the overarching connections that can be found within that diversity that speak to the different ways the Greeks conceptualised the exploitation of the enslaved. Where these words overlap and where they do not hints at exactly those conceptualisations. The difference in usages of δοῦλος and ἀνδράποδον capture complimentary models of what it means to be a slave in the abstract and often metaphorical. The discrepancies between occurrences of ἀνδράποδον and οἰκέτης, on the other hand, reveal differences on the concrete and literal level, specifically in the perception of different kinds of slave labour. Together, these differences in usage of δοῦλος, οἰκέτης, and ἀνδράποδον capture complimentary models of what it means to be an enslaved person. What seems to us like one phenomenon was conceptualised in entirely different and mutually exclusive ways.
