Slave Revolts in Antiquity

by Urbainczyk, Theresa;

  Shortly after this incident, in 370 BCE, after the battle of Leuctra, the Theban army was urged by Sparta’s enemies to invade Laconia. At first, according to Xenophon, the Thebans were reluctant since they considered Laconia to be difficult to invade and they had seen that the easiest routes were guarded.88 It is interesting to note that Xenophon reports that Oeum in Sciritis was guarded by a band of freed helots. What changed the minds of the Thebans, however, was the promise made by some of the perioikoi to rebel if the Thebans entered the territory; they added that they were already refusing to come to Sparta’s aid when asked.89 When they saw the invading army the Spartans made a proclamation to the helots promising them freedom if they took up arms on the Spartans’ behalf.90

  That some helots or, rather, many helots – 6,000 in all – responded to the offer might indicate loyalty towards their masters, but one could also see it as evidence of the attraction of freedom. In any event, the Messenian helots took advantage of the success of the Theban army under Epaminondas in entering the Peloponnese in 370/369 BCE to rise up against their masters and establish the city of Messene, although Xenophon himself makes no mention of this.91 One might say that as well as staging many revolts that ultimately did not result in their freedom, the helots provided at least two examples of slave revolts that were successful in the long term: the first after the Mount Ithome incident, and the second after Leuctra. In both cases, helots became free.

  The helots, being so ready to rebel, forced the Spartans into permanent and open war with them. The main magistrates, the ephors, declared war on the helots every year so that killing them would be lawful.92 Many of the other conditions seen in the revolts discussed earlier were present: there were vast numbers of helots in comparison to their masters; they spoke the same language and had a shared culture; although they were not born free they had an ideology of a free past; they had leaders; and the geography was suitable for groups of slaves to maintain their independent existence.

  Slaves in antiquity rebelled when they could, taking advantage of wars or other slave revolts to take up arms.93 What does not seem to have deterred them are previous revolts that resulted in death for the participants. If anything, rebellions do indeed seem to have sparked off others, as Orosius commented. We have evidence that such outbreaks were relatively frequent occurrences. What was more difficult was for the slaves to maintain their initial freedom.

  3

  Maintaining resistance

  As seen in the previous chapter, slaves might revolt at any time but the circumstances might not favour continued resistance for one reason or another. There was a good chance of a longer period of success when the slaves’ masters were divided or at war. We do not know the circumstances of the breakout of the slaves on Chios, nor the exact date, although it seems probable that it was during the third century BCE. We are told, however, that there were many slaves on Chios because Thucydides comments: “There were many slaves in Chios – more, in fact, than in any other city except Sparta”.1 Here, again, is one of the normal conditions for a successful breakout of slaves, that is, the presence of large numbers of them. It is more the maintenance of the revolt that concerns us here because, for once, we have some information about how the slaves maintained their rebellion. The slaves in Chios, unusually it would seem according to our evidence, entered into an agreement with their former masters to ensure their continued survival as a free group.

  Athenaeus preserves this episode. In the voice of his interlocutor Democritus, in Deipnosophistae Book 6, he quotes the fourth to third century BCE Greek historian Timaeus of Tauromenium, who had commented that in ancient times (ancient to him, that is) Greeks did not have slaves at all, but used younger members of their families to work for them.2 He then goes on to quote Plato, who said there were problems with enslaving whole groups of people as the Spartans had, as seen from the frequent revolts of the Messenians. Athenaeus proceeds to quote Theopompus who wrote that the first Greeks to buy slaves were the Chians.3 Athenaeus’ speaker, Democritus, breaks off from quotation and appears to comment in his own voice that the Chians were punished for this practice because they later had a war against their own slaves.4

  Following this is an extended extract from a work by Nymphodorus of Syracuse called Voyage in Asia, which told the story of the rebel slaves of Chios, headed by a man called Drimakos. Nymphodorus, who is thought to have written in the late third century BCE, says that this story was told by the Chians as having happened a little while before his own day.5 Drimakos, however, had died some time before the narration of the story since at the end of the episode it is commented that after his death runaways continued to bring offerings to his shrine even at the time of writing.6 So it is thought that the events happened in the first half of the third century BCE.7

  The extract from Nymphodorus by way of introduction gives the detail that, since Chios was mountainous and wooded, runaway slaves were easily able to find places to hide, and they did. From their hiding places the runaways raided the estates, did much damage and could not be conquered by the slave-owners, who sent out many expeditions against them. A truce was made and an accommodation was reached that the slaves would not steal more than an agreed amount of produce and, having done so, they would seal up the storehouses and leave the property-holders in peace.

  The slaves, while limiting their takings, also promised not to accept any runaways into their group other than those who had been badly treated, and who could prove they had been. Nymphodorus records that this condition was observed very strictly and that slaves ran away less often after this because they dreaded being cross-examined by Drimakos. This sounds a little far-fetched but it belongs with the generally paradoxical nature of the story, which presents the slave leader Drimakos as authoritarian. Nymphodorus records that his men were more frightened of him than of their old masters, but presumably they could easily have killed him.

  Although this arrangement was kept by both sides, it was nevertheless a victory for the slaves and unsatisfactory for the former owners, who placed a reward for anyone who would capture Drimakos or bring his head. However, Drimakos chose when to give up his command. He was not betrayed by any of his men and, after his death, the masters did not regain control of their ex-slaves; rather, the situation grew worse. Drimakos had, in fact, ameliorated the situation for the slave-owners, and the slaves were in a strong enough position to survive without him and without the agreement. The owners then regretted the loss of Drimakos and set up a shrine to him. The runaways also brought offerings to this shrine so that there emerged a situation where both sides honoured his memory for the benefits he had conferred on them. At the time Nymphodorus was writing, there were still slaves living in freedom; he wrote that they still brought offerings to the shrine.8

  It seems possible that Nymphodorus enjoyed paradoxical stories and thus included the story of Drimakos in his Voyage in Asia for its curiosity value; another piece he wrote was called On the Wonders of Sicily.9 The story of Drimakos might fall into the category of a wonder or a paradox because the final outcome is that slave-owners regretted the passing of a rebel slave leader and both owners and slaves honoured his memory. Drimakos had provided the island with some stability; under his leadership the Chians had come to an agreement with him. However, as the price on Drimakos’ head shows, the existence of such groups was humiliating and damaging for the owners, since the slaves had won freedom for themselves and the owners were powerless to prevent this.

  The features of this community correspond with similar groups known from more recent times as “maroons”, which I shall briefly discuss because from them Bradley has developed a more general argument about ancient revolts.10 The term “maroon” was used of escaped slaves in the New World.11 These escaped slaves lived in remote places that they could defend easily and where they could grow food and hunt. They are a well-known feature of slavery from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Caribbean and Americas. In an important article on these runaways, Rich
ard Price describes the situation:

  For more than four centuries, the communities formed by such runaways dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil to the southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest. Known variously as palenques, quilombos, mocambos, cumbes, ladeiras, or mambises, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members and surviving for generations or even centuries.12

  Such communities were an embarrassment as well as a danger to the slave-owners and there were drastic punishments not only for running away but also for aiding members of such communities.13 As Price remarks a little further on:

  In a remarkable number of cases throughout the Americas, the whites were forced to bring themselves to sue their former slaves for peace. In their typical form, such treaties – which we know of from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Mexico, and Surinam – offered maroon communities their freedom, recognised their territorial integrity and made some provision for meeting their economic needs, demanding in return an agreement to end all hostilities towards the plantations, to return all future runaways and often, to aid the whites in hunting them down.14

  Bradley discusses some of the modern episodes in his first chapter of Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World 140 BC–70 BC, before considering whether the ancient slave armies were to some extent maroon communities.15 When explaining why a comparison with modern maroon communities is fruitful, he writes:

  The object, it must be stressed, is not to try to prove a direct equation between the Roman rebellions and later episodes of servile behaviour; it is only to suggest that the ancient events, once set out in detail, can be seen to carry something of a maroon character. In turn, these correspondences … may be taken to point up the nonrevolutionary nature of the Roman slave movements. It is in this that the chief pertinence of the modern material lies.16

  What would “revolutionary” mean in this case? From this discussion it would seem to entail large personal aims on the parts of the leaders, rather than the more commonplace definition of a situation that is the reversal of the normal state of affairs, which clearly does obtain whenever the slaves take up arms.

  Throughout his book Bradley argues that the slaves of the great wars of the Roman Republic were engaged not in revolution but rebellion, by which he means they wanted to be free but nothing more. They had no plan for a different society and did not want to abolish slavery. He writes, for instance:

  The discrete groups of rebellious slaves led by Varius, Salvius, and Athenion rose up in revolt on the lines of a well-established pattern of small-scale resistance and did not deliberately aim to engage the whole slave population of Sicily in a more general insurrection.17

  There are, however, statements in the primary sources that seem to contradict this. In his description of the second Sicilian slave war, Diodorus writes that the slaves rebelled, and collected other recruits in an active way, not that others were attracted to them.18

  About Spartacus’ revolt, Bradley observes: “The growth of the rebel movement was not a deliberately contrived or carefully orchestrated phenomenon, therefore, but an example on the grand scale of traditional patterns of flight and revolt”.19 The argument, then, is that there is a strong connection between the maroon characteristics and the lack of any large aim. However, it does not seem so necessary that there should be such a connection. Those establishing maroon communities may well have had more ambitious plans. Vogt makes a point that relates to Bradley’s argument:

  If we ask what were the reasons for this large number of slave revolts, one factor can be excluded immediately. There was no doctrine current at that time among free citizens which aimed at the abolition of slavery; the idea that under certain circumstances men could be claimed as chattels by others basically remained unchallenged.20

  This argument may strike some as surprising. We are being asked to accept that the slaves did not have ambitions because the free people had not developed an abolitionist movement, such as occurred in later times and that preceded the abolition of the slave trade. It might be argued, however, that Wilberforce’s abolitionist movement became popular because of the success of the slave revolts at the time, rather than that the slaves took up arms because they heard about the activities of a Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull. One might challenge Vogt’s thesis and say that the free citizens did not develop a doctrine for the abolition of slavery because the slave revolts were not successful enough.

  Bradley also makes the point that we have no evidence of any aims on the part of the slaves apart from their own personal freedom and that we can thus distinguish between their efforts and revolts in the modern world, for instance, on the Engeno Santana of Ilhéus, a large sugar plantation in Brazil in 1789, where slaves sought to improve their conditions. After rebelling for two years they offered terms, saying that they would return as slaves if these were accepted. Unsurprisingly the terms were not conceded but, Bradley adds: “they [the Brazilian slaves] represented all the same a revolutionary threat to the institution of slavery of a kind that is without parallel in the Roman world”.21 In other words, the slaves in Brazil were a completely different threat from the slaves in ancient Sicily because they asked for certain conditions, not because they achieved them.

  The aims of the slaves in Brazil were indeed revolutionary but one can see how they arose from their particular situation since we have a transcript of their demands. The slaves did not demand freedom and an end to their slavery in those words, couched in the vocabulary of the French Revolution, for instance, but what they demanded was in reality an end to their slavery.22 They wanted Fridays and Saturdays to work for themselves, and for their masters to provide them with canoes and nets, proper boats for working and clothes. They did not want to do certain tasks and asked to fix the amount of work for themselves; they asked for proper working conditions; and they wanted to choose their overseers. They wanted to be able to grow their rice wherever they wanted and cut whatever wood they needed and, as Schwartz points out, very importantly they wanted the equipment for their work to remain in their control, “reducing the concept of slavery to a farce”.23 The last clause is perhaps the most striking for the modern reader: “We shall be able to play, relax and sing any time we wish without your hindrance nor will permission be needed”.24

  What the slaves asked for was peculiar to their own situation and yet, what they described, all in all, would have resulted in an end to their slavery, even though they did not couch their demands in these broad, ambitious words. It seems entirely possible that similar events happened in the ancient world about which we no longer have any information. Spartacus, for instance, according to Appian, offered to make terms with Crassus, and we do not know what he offered, except that Crassus refused.25 If this document from Brazil had not survived, most would never have ascribed revolutionary aims to the eighteenth-century slaves. They did not have their terms accepted; they were defeated and recaptured.

  The intentions of the slaves in antiquity are almost certainly lost forever, but it is indisputable that whatever certain individuals may have envisaged at the start of an action, especially war, events can take on their own momentum and make those intentions irrelevant. What starts out as a protest may end in a revolution.

  There is, for instance, no evidence that any of the slaves in St Domingue had written or read any revolutionary tracts when they rose up against their masters in 1791. The eventual leader of the first independent black republic outside Africa, Toussaint Louverture, did not join the revolt immediately, so one can hardly assume he had planned the whole course of the rebellion.26 As Dubois has shown in his history of the St Domingue uprising, the story is immensely complicated. Ideas and aims developed as events unfolded. We know this period is so complicated because we have many more sources to reconstruct the actions and ideas of the different actors. In the ancient world, it is unlikely to have been much simpler, although o
ur insufficient source material might lead us to this impression.

  The slaves in St Domingue rebelled because they had the chance, not because they had perfected some strategic plan for an alternative society that they wanted to try out. Their aims in the first instance were for their situation to change, for them to be free, to avenge themselves for their suffering and also to remove the causes of their suffering so they would not have to endure it again. If the slaves in St Domingue had failed, some might call it a rebellion, an attempt for freedom, but probably not a revolution. Once the ex-slaves achieved some freedom they started to think about how they wanted to live, and unsurprisingly concluded that they did not want slavery. This is not such an intellectual feat that the ancient slaves would have been incapable of it.