Slave Revolts in Antiquity

by Urbainczyk, Theresa;

  This definition of “natural” is a little puzzling since the term “natural leaders” is used by most to mean people who naturally are leaders, not ones who have learnt the skills of leadership. One must also remember that Hesychius of Alexandria has a word in his lexicon, μνωιονόμοι, that means leaders of helots. It is a lexicon of rare words, but that does not necessarily mean leaders of helots were rare, just that people did not use the term very often.106 Talbert completely redraws our picture of helots, observing: “Like the lower orders in many societies throughout human history, helots knew their place within severely limited horizons, clung to it and seldom thought coherently about how to alter it, regardless of how humiliating or undesirable it might seem to others”.107

  This, however, is an unusual view and one not generally accepted by most scholars, who perhaps find it more difficult to ignore what sources such as Thucydides and Aristotle have written.108 One of the reasons our ancient sources are so critical of the way that the Spartans treated their helots may be not simply that it was brutal but that it did not work, given that the helots were constantly rebelling.

  While it is true that we do not learn the names of prominent helots, this may be due to our sources, as well as the famous secrecy surrounding everything Spartan. Usually, however, there is a name on which to attach all sorts of legends and stories. The effect of the nameless leadership of the helots is to accord all the helots with an energy and resourcefulness not often attributed to followers in the other revolts. Because we cannot attribute all the success to one particular person, we must acknowledge the role played by all. Similarly, when we have names it is tempting to credit all the success to them, rather than to the group. Certainly in the case of the slaves on Chios, at least, we have evidence that their determination was not due only to the leadership of Drimakos. Similarly, slaves from the Spartacan revolt continued to survive independently for ten years after what is normally termed the final battle.

  It has been suggested that often there were religious aspects to the leadership of the slave revolts, and certainly this is true of those who led the Sicilian slave wars, but it is not universal. One can see, however, the importance of religion in binding slaves together although we do not always have enough information to say this was usually the case.109

  It is difficult to say anything definitive about the individuals who led the revolts, but we can say that the sources attributed to them all the powers, abilities, wisdom and cunning that challenges to the status quo had to have had in order to succeed. This meant that once that individual had gone, the regular slaves need not be feared, or at least not feared more than necessary.

  5

  The ideology of the slaves

  What did the slaves of antiquity think they were doing when they took up arms against their masters? What could they hope to achieve? It is conventional to argue that these revolts were doomed to failure because of the forces marshalled against them.1 In any case, the slaves could not conceive of a society without slaves. If they fought it would be merely to be masters rather than slaves themselves. Eunus and Salvius set themselves up as kings, indicating that they had no egalitarian aims. What presents a problem is that the slaves seem to have been either suicidal or stupid. How could they hope to defeat the Roman army? How, for that matter, could the lowly helots think they had a chance against the Spartan army?

  There are, however, examples even today of people without resources violently resisting others who are much better equipped and armed, and generally more powerful. It is perhaps a mistake to assume that the participants had any long-term plan. Sometimes people have much smaller ambitions and are satisfied merely to inflict damage. It might be that they saw an opportunity and took it, without thinking through all the next moves. The ancients had long recognized how unpredictable events were in wartime. Thucydides put the following expression into the mouths of the Melian speakers as an accepted truth about war:

  Yet we know that in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected from the difference in numbers of the two sides. And if we surrender, then all our hope is lost at once, whereas, so long as we remain in action, there is still a hope that we may yet stand upright.2

  Rather than look for specific aims that a particular group of slaves may have had, it might be more useful to look at the ideas of slavery and freedom that we do come across in our sources. Our sources were all written by men of the slave-owning class, but they can give us an idea of what might be called the “dominant ideology” of the times. Throughout the classical period, the idea that freedom was desirable and slavery absolutely to be avoided was always current: “Men desire above all things to be free and say that freedom is the greatest of blessings, while slavery is the most shameful and wretched of states”, as noted by the Stoic orator, Dio Chrysostom, as he starts his first treatise On Slavery and Freedom.3 He goes on to argue that unfortunately most people do not understand what freedom really is.4 However, the assumption that the word “freedom” represents something good and desirable was as valid in the ancient world as it is today.5 This premise, which may appear a truism to many, has important consequences for how we view the ancient world. If freedom is what people want above all else, then one might assume that they would grasp every opportunity to obtain it. From the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, it is clear from our source material, which is much more copious than that for ancient times, that this was true of the Africans exported to the Americas for their enslavement.6

  There is also evidence from the ancient world that not only did slaves share this longing for freedom, but also many owners lived under the constant fear generated by this desire. An implication of this premise is that there is a natural enmity between masters and slaves, since the former have deprived the latter of the precious object of freedom, or at least have it in their power to bestow on them this greatest good, but choose not to do so.7 The assumption of the underlying hostility between masters and slaves is also well documented from ancient times.

  In a passage of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates discusses tyranny with Glaucon, he suggests a parallel between rich men and tyrants.8 The rich own many slaves but do not fear them, and Glaucon says that this is because the whole city protects the single individual. Socrates agrees, and asks Glaucon to consider the case of a man who owns fifty slaves or more being carried away to some desert island where there is no free man to assist him. What is likely to happen to him? Glaucon answers that the man would be terrified of an uprising of his slaves in which he and his family would be massacred. He would therefore be obliged to be obsequious to his own slaves and to free them even though he did not want to, as the only way of escaping death. Here, the main discussion is not about slavery, since Plato is merely using the example of a rich man and his slaves as a parallel to a tyrant, to show that the slave-owner’s security depends on the rest of society; if there were no other citizens to hand, then of course slaves would kill their masters.9

  In Hiero, Plato’s contemporary Xenophon describes how the poet Simonides, on visiting the tyrant of Sicily, asked him how life differed from being a private individual. He describes how trust is important for happiness but observes that tyrants do not share the luxury of such trust, wryly commenting that communities put up statues to tyrannicides.10 Part of the way Xenophon develops the argument is to say one can see trust manifested among ordinary citizens by the way they protect each other from their own slaves.11 Again, like Plato in the passage mentioned above, Xenophon’s main concern is not to discuss the threat posed by slaves to their masters but, taking this for granted, to use it to point out the role of the masters within the community in protecting each other.

  When the orator Lysias talked about using slaves as witnesses, he worked from the assumption that the basic attitude the slaves had to their masters was one of hostility:

  To my mind it is surprising that when put to the torture on their own account, they accuse
themselves, in the certain knowledge that they will be executed, but when it is on account of their masters, to whom they naturally have most animosity, they can choose rather to endure the torture than to get release from their present ills by an incrimination.12

  The Roman saying “quot servi, tot hostes” is often translated as “all slaves are enemies”, the truth of which was disputed by Seneca in the first century CE, followed by Macrobius about 300 years later. These writers urged good behaviour on the part of the masters and commented “non habemus illos hostes, sed facimus” [slaves are not our enemies but we make them so].13 Yet their very discussion takes place in order to argue against a consensus, and one might add that we learn of this proverb here only because it is being challenged. In the first or second century CE, Quintus Curtius Rufus put the following words in the mouths of Scythians who were asking Alexander not to attack them: “Do not believe that those whom you have conquered are your friends. There is no friendship between master and slave”.14 Even when discussing apparent good will between master and slave, Vogt admits that this was the exception to the rule.15 In Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, he included a chapter on the faithful slave.16 Many of the examples of servile docility Vogt gives in this context were, however, as he admits, recorded as remarkable events. In the course of describing civil war, in which many of these passages are set, the loyalty of slaves is frequently used to highlight the disloyalty of citizens.17 In addition, when reading descriptions of great devotion of slaves to their masters, it is necessary to remember that all our sources were from the slave-owning class.18

  These accounts are all we have left to us. There are no texts extant written by authors who were interested in slave unrest for its own sake. Not only do the ancient authors normally record the activities of the slaves incidentally, but many of the most crucial sources, in the sense of being the fullest, are not in a very good condition, so that we must rely on summaries, excerpts or quotations, often from the works of much later writers. One reason is that those who wrote histories and kept records of events did not wish to confer immortality on the names of rebellious slaves and so either did not mention them, and this would seem to be the largest category, or mentioned them briefly, with great condemnation and, in any case, in the course of some other topic. For example, Cicero often mentions the name Spartacus, but usually only in order to cast a slur on his opponents, to whom he compared him: they were to be considered as great a threat to the res publica as Spartacus himself.19 Cicero was not writing a history but denouncing his opponents and making the most forceful arguments he could. The greatest threat to the state was from Spartacus. This would not have worked as an attack if it did not correspond to his contemporaries’ views of the slave war.

  The argument that no one in the ancient world, let alone slaves, had been able to form a conception of a society without slaves is not true. Aristotle, for example, writes that some people in antiquity objected to slavery. If one objects to slavery or thinks it wrong, it follows that one is able to imagine a society without it. In Politics Aristotle wrote: “There are others who hold that controlling another human being is contrary to nature, since it is only by convention that one man can be a slave and another free; there is no natural difference, and therefore it cannot be just, since it is based on the use of force”.20

  Not only could, and did, people challenge the justice of slavery, but it was a commonplace that once, in a golden age, there had been no slavery. In his comparison of Lycurgus and Numa, Plutarch wrote that Numa was a more humane legislator, allowing slaves to taste from freedom at the feast of Saturn, and commenting that in the age of Saturn there was no slavery, when men lived as equals.21 Herodotus also comments that in the days of the quarrel between the Athenians and Pelasgians there was no slavery.22 Justin reports that Pompeius Trogus had described the early days of Rome as being without slavery and without private property.23

  The lack of an extant text that urges the abolition of slavery does not mean such ideas never existed. There is the utopia described by Diodorus, where he apparently reproduces the report Iambulus wrote about the island where men lived in a state of extreme equality.24 This expression of the inherent injustice of slavery was still there in Roman times; the legal text called the Digest has the following statement: “slavery is an institution of the common law of peoples by which a person is put into the ownership of somebody else, contrary to the natural order”.25 This is not to suggest that opposition to slavery was widespread, or that it was a dominant view; however, one cannot argue that this opposition did not exist at all. In his book on attitudes to slavery in antiquity, Peter Garnsey describes how we first see opposition to slavery as an institution articulated by the theologian Gregory of Nyssa, and he ends with the words: “It will surprise no one that the hero of my narrative is Gregory of Nyssa who, perhaps uniquely, saw that slavery itself is a sin”.26 In an earlier chapter he discusses one of Gregory’s homilies, where the bishop had put forward arguments for the abolition of slavery, which Garnsey describes as “unique in the surviving evidence”.27 One cannot assert, and Garnsey is very careful not to, that others had not expressed such views elsewhere; one can only state that such expressions have not survived. It is quite plausible that Gregory was not uttering views that were completely original and disconnected from contemporary thought. It seems more probable that we simply no longer possess evidence of similar views of his contemporaries and predecessors.

  The dominant ideology of the time was that freedom was to be preserved and slavery to be avoided. There is no reason to think that the slaves did not share this view and that it did not inform their actions and their intentions. This may seem self-evident but much store is placed on the lack of ideology on the part of the slaves: that they only wanted to be free. There seems no reason to think that slaves were incapable of taking the same step in their thinking as those anonymous people mentioned by Aristotle, who argued that slavery was unjust because it was based on force. They, more than anyone, would have had reason to reflect on the nature of slavery. Had any of the revolts lasted longer, they may well have thought of how they wished their future society to be organized. I do not wish to argue that the slaves did have intentions of this kind, only that we are not entitled to declare definitely that they did not.

  6

  Sympathy for the slaves: Diodorus Siculus

  We know about the slave revolts in Sicily because the first century BCE writer Diodorus, a writer from Sicily (hence his name), wrote about them. Until Kenneth Sacks’ reappraisal there was a tendency to dismiss him as a copier, valuable for the most part as a preserver of texts because many of his sources are now lost.1 The nature of his undertaking was so large, starting with myths earlier than the Trojan War and continuing until the start of Julius Caesar’s activities in Gaul in 60/59 BCE, that it has usually been assumed he moved from copying out one text to another.

  He himself gives us a great deal of information in his preface to the whole undertaking. He tells us, at some length, why we should read his massive work; that history is useful because we can learn from the mistakes of others; that good deeds are preserved by historians and inspire the readers to emulate them; that history is good but universal history is even better, although it is more difficult to write; that he has worked on his history for thirty years and now finished it; that he did much travelling in order to write his history; that he came from Agyrium in Sicily and that he had much exposure to Latin from his contact with Romans on the island, lived in Rome for a long time and studied the records that were kept there carefully; and that his history covers 1138 years and is divided into forty books (only fifteen of which remain intact today).2

  His aim, he said, was to help others by writing, since his readers could learn from the lessons of history with no risk to themselves. Diodorus’ purpose is perhaps not an original one but a very moral one. By reading history we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and the young can possess the wisdom of the old, direct their lives b
etter and be inspired to emulate the great deeds recorded there. Moreover, historians, he says, are like servants of divine providence (ὥσπερ τινὲς ὑπουργοὶ τη̑ς θείας προνοίας),3 since they bring the affairs of the world into an orderly whole. As P. J. Stylianou observes, this moral purpose recurs throughout Diodorus’ history, and we often see divine justice bringing down the arrogant.4 This aspect is quite apparent in the sections dealing with the Sicilian slave wars and the narrative of the Sicilian war is a faithful reflection of the aims expressed in the prologue.5

  For example, in the opening chapter Diodorus writes about learning from mistakes, and it is clear, as will be shown, that he considered that both the landowners in Sicily and the Roman authorities had made mistakes in their handling of the situation. In the following chapter he discusses the good deeds to emulate, and in the slave war narrative there is the example of the daughter of Damophilus and Megallis who, by her virtuous behaviour towards those weaker than herself, shows the right way to treat them. In describing the difficulties faced by those who would write universal histories, he says that some omitted the deeds of the barbarians.6 Perhaps one can see the wish for completeness in his description of what happened in Sicily, and clearly he had a personal interest in this, as well as easy access to material about it. A little later he mentions the supremacy of Rome, and the Roman occupation of Sicily and he reveals views on this quite candidly in his later books.7

  What is noteworthy here is the overall moral purpose for his work and the sympathy that Diodorus has for the slaves. His analysis of the situation absolved them from any notion of vice being innate to slaves and laid the blame firmly at the feet of the slave-owners. They treated their slaves badly and therefore provoked hatred and rebellion from them, in the same way as states that treat their subjects badly will suffer the consequences. Sacks has argued convincingly that Diodorus is critical of the Roman Empire throughout his history and that his description of the slave wars is an example of his antipathy to the Romans and Italians.8 An illustration of this is when he tells us that the number of slaves on Sicily was so huge that many did not believe such numbers could be true, adding that the Sicilians, who had become so rich, rivalled the Italians in arrogance, greed and villainy.9