Você está na página 1de 17

Believing the ancients: quantitative

and qualitative dimensions of slavery


and the slave trade in later
prehistoric Eurasia

Timothy Taylor

Abstract

This paper briey examines two types of slavery in the Žrst millennium Aegean, Carpatho-Balkan
and Pontic regions – branded silver-mine slaves and blinded milk-processing slaves. The Žrst is
examined primarily in quantitative terms, to attach economically sensible order-of-magnitude
Žgures to the trade in people. The second is examined qualitatively, to show how indigenous forms
of dependence and subordination were caught up in the emergence of Graeco-Roman chattel
slavery. In both cases I have taken the rather unusual step of trusting what the classical authors tell
us they knew. Finally, a symbolic connection is made between shackles and torcs.

Keywords

Ancient economy; Celts; freedom; Scythians; silver mining; slavery; torcs.

Introduction

That the classical world used people whom we call slaves is beyond dispute, as is the under-
standing that the Iron Age in non-classical Europe is a period characterized by a complex
of developments which are ultimately, and often intimately, linked to the city state
developments of the south and east (Wiedemann 1980; Nash 1985; Alföldy 1988; Cunliffe
1988a; Kristiansen 1998). However, the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ underestimate the
signiŽcance of the Achaemenid Persian model of empire as a political aspiration for all
those – Ateus, Alexander, or Ariovistus, Burebista or Caesar – who sought great power in
the second half of the Žrst millennium BC. The Scythians, Celts, Germans and Dacians each
strove for dominion as hard as Greece, Macedonia and Rome. Only hindsight projects
Rome as inevitably core, and Germania and Dacia as naturally peripheral. That the latter
ultimately lacked Rome’s integrative mechanisms, notably disembedded institutions for
World Archaeology Vol. 33(1): 27–43 The Archaeology of Slavery
© 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/0043824012004761 8
28 Timothy Taylor

property transfer and credit, is of course signiŽcant in relation to their failure to be


adjudged central by history. But on every side there was both wealth and poverty, freedom
and slavery, and the bargains by which these things were created were Faustian, with
profound implications for the psychological texture of the societies involved.
Slavery is materially elusive in prehistory. Diodorus’s famous statement that Italian
merchants could purchase a slave from the Gauls in exchange for wine has provided fuel
for inferences concerning the source areas of Gaulish slaves traded through Massalia on
the basis of the archaeological distribution of amphorae up the Rhone valley and beyond.
In fact, despite persistent mistranslation, Diodorus indicates (V.26), slightly unspeciŽcally,
,
a crock of wine (oínou kerámion) for a young slave boy (diákonoV) – not necessarily a
whole amphora then, which might have bought several. And the reality in many places,
as at Cetã þ enii din Vale in the lower Danube basin, is that there was mass transfer of
amphora contents into wineskins in order to facilitate the journey onward, beyond the
Carpathians (Taylor 1994: 400). Such a wineskin is depicted, with attendant drunkenness,
on a gilded Scythian silver wine cup from Gaimanova Mogila (Taylor 1996).
If the wine owing one way becomes untraceable as it is drunk, so are the sad streams
of captives that may have paid for it. Something of the order of Žfty iron shackles and
gang-chains are known from the later pre-Roman Iron Age and Roman period from
Europe, like those from Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey, and – illustrated here (Plate 1) –
Hay Hill, Lord’s Bridge, Cambridge (Clark 1821; Cunliffe 1988b; Gollop 1994), but these
are exceptional. Iron was re-forgeable, and, where slaves were transported using such

Plate 1 Six-slave iron neck ring chain from Hay Hill, Lord’s Bridge, Cambridge. Photo-
graph: Adrian Gollop.
Believing the ancients 29

chains, they may usually have been struck off and made into other objects. Such slave
chains may have been a useful ‘self-transporting’ form of iron, just as East African ivory
tusks were tied to slaves for the convenient transport of both. Chains are referred to in
texts, and clearly depicted in iconography where we have no ferrous evidence, as on the
Trajanic war memorial at Adamklisi on the lower Danube. Such chains indicate the stan-
dard way that very substantial numbers of Dacians (perhaps half a million; see below)
were exported after the fall of Sarmizegethusa, but no single example survives.
In an important paper of 1962 entitled ‘The Black Sea and Danubian regions and the
slave trade in antiquity’, Moses Finley set out, against a background of longstanding schol-
arly scepticism on the issue, the principal historical arguments for believing that a system-
atic, large-scale and long-lived slave trade had existed in classical times in eastern Europe.
It was not that the existence of slaves in Greece and Rome had previously been doubted,
but that their occurrence had been seen, essentially, as epiphenomenal – a sporadic func-
tion of piracy, for example – rather than systemic. Slaves on this score were of the butler-
ing or high-class concubine sort. No mass slave-force could be envisaged in agriculture,
mining and industrial production, because slaves were few, and obtained more or less
informally.
Although the ‘informal model’ runs in the face of much textual and archaeological
evidence it has not been completely superseded: witness the typically eeting acknow-
ledgement of slaving in Derek Williams’s Romans and Barbarians (1998: 12f.). In large
part this may be because Finley was essentially pessimistic about quantiŽcation (‘No very
signiŽcant or reliable quantitative results can be expected’: 1962: 56), and only a few
order-of-magnitude studies have been attempted. Among these, Madden (1996) argues
that directly captured prisoners of war and, subsequently, foundlings (abandoned infants)
contributed signiŽcantly to the basic requirements of the classical world, reproduction
among slaves themselves being low. Scheidel (1997), on the other hand, rejects the idea
of a signiŽcant foundling contribution and makes up numbers by assuming a high rate of
slave reproduction (vernae – children born by slaves into slavery). Neither seems able to
envisage a fully integrated mass slave trade as a principal mechanism (e.g. Scheidel 1997:
164, n. 34). Crawford’s interesting 1977 quantiŽcations for Dacia are discussed below.
That ancient Žgures for slavery are rare may, paradoxically, be precisely because the
phenomenon was so widespread and highly organized – just as one might vainly scour
newspaper after newspaper today, searching for Žgures relating to total national electric-
ity or water consumption, the ready availability of which is simply assumed. Atheneus
preserved a fragment of Ctesicles reporting a census by Demetrius of Phaleron taken
some time between 317 and 307 BC (Atheneus 272C). According to this, Attica had 21,000
citizens, 10,000 resident aliens (metics) and 400,000 slaves. This provides us with both
absolute and relative information. Although the census was taken at a time of demo-
graphic upheaval (Garnsey 1988: 136), and thus cannot be generalized without reection,
it is clear that Atheneus does not expect his audience to Žnd the idea of a society in which
just over 7 per cent are unenslaved implausible. Yet most modern commentators Žnd it
hard to imagine slavery running at much more than 20 per cent in ancient society (e.g.
Scheidel, for the early Roman Empire, goes for 10 per cent: 1997: 158).
The absolute values are rejected too. Fisher (1998) believes that, while there were large
chattel slave populations engaged in Greek agriculture, ‘the only surviving ancient Žgures
30 Timothy Taylor

are totally incredible: 400,000 slaves in Attica, 470,000 slaves in Aegina, 460,000 slaves in
Corinth, all of which imply impossibly high population densities for those states’ (1998:
199f.). Finley accepted 80–100,000 as the total for Žfth–fourth century BC Attic slaves.
Thus the best numbers we have, census Žgures that the Greeks themselves provide, are
dismissed – ‘generally considered worthless’ by Garnsey (1988: 136) who (note 3) also
directs us to Hyperides, fragment 29 ‘for another implausible Žgure’. This is done without
careful reection on what 400,000 might mean when all the slaves in all the Athenian-
owned silver-mining concessions are added to those engaged in quarrying stone, power-
ing trade galleys on the seaways, felling and transporting timber, and sowing and reaping
on landed estates. (It should not be forgotten that this landscape had a rather higher
subsistence carrying capacity than its highly eroded and degraded present-day incarna-
tion might immediately suggest.) It remains the case that carefully weighed general state-
ments, such as Cunliffe’s ‘There is no reason why the slave trade should not have been
well organized before 125 BC’ (1988a: 78), lack agreed quantitative support.

Quantitative extrapolations and inferences

Two investigative modes for estimating the scale of eastern European Iron Age slaving
and slavery are: extrapolations from known Žgures and value ratios; and inferences from
other information sources that may be construed as more or less proportional indices of
scale.
The sorts of Žgures that could be useful to extrapolate order-of-magnitude Žgures for
slave numbers are slave costs in terms of silver, silver output rates and tribute sizes. For
Žfth- and fourth-century Thrace we know that slaves were purchased by Greeks; that
silver was a monetary metal in Greece and ‘proto-monetary’ in Thrace (being frequently
worked and deposited in units of known value); that tributes in silver were levied by local
dynasts; and that slaves worked Greek- and Thracian-owned silver mines in Thrace. The
proŽt margins for a Greek of running a silver mine must connect in some way with the
cost of using silver to buy and maintain slaves.
Xenophon, writing around 355 BC when Athenian Žnances were in disarray, gives
advice on how to revitalize silver mining using public–private partnerships (advice that
appears to have been successful for the mines at Lavrion: Xenophon, Ways and Means
IV: Marchant 1925: xxvi). These are some salient things that he says, with commentary:
[W]e all agree that the mines have been worked for many generations . . . it is continu-
ally being found that, so far from shrinking, the silver yielding area extends further and
further . . . even at the present day [i.e. during an economic crisis] no owner of slaves
employed in the mines reduces the number of his men; on the contrary, every master
obtains as many more as he can.
(Xenophon IV.2–4)
That there is plenty of silver to mine, in Lavrion, Thasos and elsewhere, is clear. ProŽts
can be made in proportion to the available workforce, who are slaves.
[N]either is silver like furniture, of which a man never buys more when once he has got
enough for his house. No one ever yet possessed so much silver as to want no more; if
Believing the ancients 31

a man Žnds himself with a huge amount of it, he takes as much pleasure in burying the
surplus as in using it.
(Xenophon IV.7)
Silver was in plentiful circulation at this time (Vickers and Gill 1996) and was deposited
in hoards. The archaeologically uncovered silver hoards of Thrace represent a tiny frac-
tion of the total.

Nicias son of Niceratus once owned a thousand men in the mines, and let them out to
Socias the Thracian, on condition that Socias paid him an obol a day per man net and
Žlled all vacancies as they occurred. . . . Hipponicus, again, had six hundred slaves let
out on the same terms and received a rent of a mina a day net. Philemonides had three
hundred and received half a mina. There were others too, owning numbers in propor-
tion, I presume, to their capital.
(Xenophon IV.14–15)

The Žfth-century leasing of slaves was well organized and large-scale: a total of 1,900 slaves
are cited here as examples of only some among many lease agreements. There are 600
obols in a mina, so the obol a day rate is standard in the three examples Xenophon cites.
Total employment of mine slaves in the Aegean world in the later Žfth century must have
been at least an order of magnitude higher (19,000) and possibly much greater. An obol a
day per man must be a fraction of total net proŽts (Sosias must have been making a proŽt),
and represents less than a gram of silver (one obol = 0.72 gm). The per-slave production
of Žnished metal must have varied considerably, but would have outstripped this Žgure in
a smooth-running silver mine by at least a factor of a hundred (e.g. 72gm per day of silver;
I shall round this estimate down to 50gm to make subsequent calculations easier to follow).
There were, obviously, costs and risks involved: buying and developing the mine in the Žrst
place, housing and feeding mine workers, obtaining charcoal for smelting and producing
silver in a Žnished, negotiable form. A mine could be struck by the bad luck of seams
running out and shafts falling in. ‘Vacancies’ is probably a euphemistic reference to mortal-
ity rates, which, in the absence of speciŽc evidence, must be considered relatively high. As
slaves were wholly owned and relatively cheap (see below), there was no economic impera-
tive for, or even nudge towards, health-and-safety measures. Some skilled workers and
foremen may have been prized, but conditions may well have been such that the Žrst year
of a mining slave’s life was the most proŽtable from the owner’s point of view.

[On the potential state acquisition of slaves to supply to lessees for mining] Assume . . .
that the total number of slaves to begin with is twelve hundred. By using the revenue
derived from these, the number might in all probability be raised to six thousand at the
least in the course of Žve or six years. Further, if each man brings in a clear obol a day,
the annual revenue derived from that number of men is sixty talents.
(Xenophon IV.23)

A talent is c.26 kg of silver. The weight scheme drifted and varied slightly over space and
time; the Žgures I shall use here are 1 talent (at 25,920gm), equivalent to 60 minai (at
432gm), or 6000 drachmai (at 4.32gm), or 36,000 obols (at 0.72gm). Thus, 1,200 slaves will
bring lease fees of 12 talents (in a 360-day year) and six thousand will produce 60 talents.
32 Timothy Taylor

Out of this sum [the 60 talents above], if twenty talents are invested in additional slaves,
the state will have forty talents available for any other necessary purchase. And when
a total of ten thousand men is reached, the revenue will be a hundred talents. . . . But
the state will have received far more than that, as anyone will testify who is old enough
to remember how much the charge for slave labour brought in before the trouble at
Decelea [413 BC, when slave labour in the mines was hit by mass desertion].
(Xenophon IV.24–5)

Xenophon sets a target of ten thousand slaves to be state owned. He also suggests a
conservative factor in his estimate. Slaves can be bought cheap and leased at good proŽt.
Fortunately, we have a clear record of what some slaves cost the year before the deser-
tion at Decelea. Surviving epigraphic fragments listing conŽscated property sold at
Athens in 414 BC refer to forty-Žve slaves, of varied origin, with prices preserved for
twenty-four of them. Three of them are expensive: a Carian goldsmith (male) at 360
drachmai (2160 obols or 3.6 minai), a Syrian man (301 drachmai), and a Macedonian
woman (310 drachmai). The median price was 157 drachmai, and many could be had for
around 100 drachmai or less (Meiggs and Lewis 1975: 247). What the difference in price
was between, on the one hand, a proven and trained-up house slave in Athens and, on
the other hand, basic mine fodder, brought down from inland Thrace to Thasos or by sea
directly to the Lavrion peninsula, is unclear. If we stick with a 100-drachmai Žgure, which
is probably too expensive for a mine slave even more than half century later, we can see
that Xenophon’s projected 20 talents would buy 1,200 slaves to add to the 6,000 already
invested in. Given that the lessee replaces ‘wastage’, using this percentage rate the state-
owned slaves could be built up by 20 per cent a year.
The projected revenue from Xenophon’s scheme would obviously not in itself solve the
economic crisis he was addressing, but it must have been intended to demonstrate that a
signiŽcant contribution to Athenian Žnances could be made in this way. At the end of the
Žfth century a single gold monument, celebrating the victory of Selinus, cost 60 talents
(Meiggs and Lewis 1975: 82), which sets the sum in context.
It would be useful to see how this projected revenue might compare with actual
revenues drawn in by those who controlled the slave supply, and to whom a proportion
of the silver went, in payments and tribute. Thucydides, himself a silver mine owner on
Thasos and thus precise and reliable in money matters (as in much else), tells us of the
king of the Odrysian Thracians, Seuthes, who, in the later Žfth century, had raised his
tribute (implied as annual) to around 400 talents (Thuc. 2.97). Thucydides does not
express surprise at this Žgure; for him it was representative of Odrysian economic power,
concerning which he endeavoured to paint a realistic picture. He adds that ‘at least an
equal amount of gold and silver was contributed in presents’, on top of which again were
non-precious metal tributes and gifts.
Seuthes’ tribute as a percentage of the total production of wealth by his tributaries can
be assumed to have been of the order of 10 per cent and no more than 25 per cent (taking
a higher cut than this, historically speaking, might have been militarily, politically and
economically untenable). A glimpse of what form such tribute might have taken is
provided, if we move forward in time to the mid-fourth century BC, by the hoard Žnd from
Rogozen (Cook 1989) in north-western Bulgaria. This comprised 165 silver and silver-gilt
Believing the ancients 33

drinking vessels weighing a fraction under 20kg, probably assembled as part of a tribute
payment and buried in two portions for safe keeping, apparently at the same time. Metro-
logical analysis by Vickers (1989) suggests that it was made up of units of known value,
totalling exactly 3,600 Persian sigloi (equivalent to four-Žfths of a talent).
It is interesting to see what Seuthes could have done with his tribute. If we imagine that
Seuthes was to use just 10 per cent of it to buy mine slaves at Greek prices (a preposter-
ous notion, given that he was indubitably a supplier of Thracian slaves as well as a
controller of local silver mines in the Sredna gora), he could buy 2,400 of them. The slave-
worth of his precisely accounted 400 talents alone is thus 24,000 slaves. Owned and leased
out, they would produce a revenue of 240 talents in one year and double Seuthes’ money
in less than two. A further order-of-magnitude calculation can be made to show how many
days of mine-slave work Seuthes’ tribute represented on the basis of the 50gm per day of
Žnished silver production estimate. Here the calculation is 400 talents = 10,368kg. This is
over ten tonnes of silver (and well over twenty if we add the presents) – a lot, but a drop
in the ocean compared with the amount Trajan was much later to plunder out of Dacia
(Taylor 1994: 406f.). This equals 207,360 slave days or 576 slaves working a mine for a
year (numbers to at least double with the presents added).
I suggested that the percentage of silver paid as tribute to Seuthes by the Greek colonies
he was connected with, and by indigenous vassal kings, can be estimated reasonably as of
the order of 10 per cent. Thus, the mine activity required to support the local economy of
Odrysian Thrace would have involved of the order of 5,000 mine slaves (10,000 for Thucy-
dides’s total Žgure). Hypothetical though this is, it is satisfying that this number falls within
an order of magnitude similar to the numbers Xenophon directly refers to for the Greek-
controlled mines he discusses. The big picture, including Thasos and Lavrion to the south,
Triballian-controlled silver in northern Bulgaria and the precious metal sources of the
Apuseni mountains in the (Agathyrsian-controlled?) Carpathian basin, and so on,
compels us to envisage a further ten-fold multiplication of miners (although the legal
status of those beyond the Greek world is not directly known).
Seuthes’ 10,000kg of silver can be compared to what has been archaeologically acces-
sioned, of which there is no more than 100kg, i.e. 1 per cent. But this is catalogued
Thracian silver for the whole period of the Žfth and fourth centuries BC and across the
entire Carpatho-Balkan region – it is not the rump of Seuthes’ local, limited-percentage,
annual tribute. Questions of gift-exchange, use-lives and recycling over several centuries
have to be taken into account in calculations of the total amount of silver in circulation
at any one time, and its percentage relationship to the annual production of new indigen-
ous silver within the region and what came in as payment from the Greek colonies. Never-
theless, based on these, and on other, similar quantitative data, it can be demonstrated
that, archaeologically speaking, there is at best of the order of a 0.01 per cent representa-
tivity for silverwork in the archaeological record (Taylor 1999). That is, of what was once
in circulation, no more than a one hundred-thousandth part is now known. The same ratio
holds for reusable and valuable copper metal in earlier periods, where ancient mine
extraction tonnages can be compared to archaeological material. It is, in part, an inabil-
ity to grasp this massive under-representation in what has survived through two-and-a-
half millennia to be accessioned by museums and published, that has led to such a
profound underestimation of the scale of Iron Age Eurasian economies.
34 Timothy Taylor

Crawford (1977) provides useful comparator Žgures in his discussion of the inux of
silver denarii to Dacia in relation to the Roman slave trade. His calculations support the
idea of an export of some 30,000 Dacian slaves per year in the period 65–30 BC (‘a substan-
tial part of the annual requirement of Italy, if one assumes a total slave population of
2,000,000’: 1977: 123). He assumes a slave to cost 50 denarii at source and that the 25,000
archaeologically recorded denarii from Romania are representative at a 0.1 per cent level.
But this is, as I have indicated above, likely to be a factor of ten too high; thus the total
export Žgure might be better reckoned at 300,000 slaves per year (if no cattle, honey, wax
and Žsh were exported, which, of course they were). This estimate would allow us to
accept the Žgures given by John the Lydian (De Mag. 2.28) that 500,000 Dacians were
enslaved at the conclusion of Trajan’s campaign – a Žgure otherwise rejected out of hand
by Madden (1996).
We could of course reject all the original classical Žgures and ratios, along with any
extrapolations based on their comparison with what is archaeologically known. But the
consistent picture that arises when one takes them seriously suggests that this is unwise.
Just because the Greeks were proudly literate and liked art there is no reason to suppose
them innumerate and uncovetous of wealth.
The Žgures demonstrate that silver mining in the Balkan-Aegean world in the mid-Žrst
millennium BC, at least periodically and according to macro-economic cycles, involved the
contemporaneous utilization and maintenance of tens of thousands of mine-slaves. This
could not have been achieved without the establishment of reliable supply zones, the exist-
ence of primary acquisition strategies, organized secure transportation, trans-shipment
nodes, frameworks of custom and law governing ownership of humans and transfers of
property in them, and so on – in short a large-scale, organized slave trade. This is evident
inferentially from the ethnic diversity of slaves sold in Athens. Buyers wanted comple-
ments of slaves of diverse origin so as to inhibit solidarity and the chance of trouble (Finley
1962: 55; Ps.-Arist. Oeconomica 1.5), and competition between different local and regional
suppliers must have driven prices down. Slaves from Asia Minor, Thrace and Scythia Žgure
most commonly; in the surviving lists from 414 BC, the largest proportion of slaves whose
nationality is known were Thracians (twelve out of thirty-six or 30 per cent; there were also
seven Carians and three Scythians). But it is clear that there was further ethnic differenti-
ation under the surface (see Braund and Tsetskhladze 1989: 119ff.; Arnold 1988: 182). That
is, ‘Scythian’ slaves – agged by Polybius (IV.38) as being of good quality – were simply
slaves sold out of Scythia through the Pontic colonies. We are not to think of them as having
once belonged to the royal Scythian élites as described by Herodotus, but as having come
from their tributary peoples, and perhaps typically only via them.
Herodotus’s ethnic mapping of Thrace and Scythia is in its bare essentials a commodi-
ties digest (Taylor 1994: 390). All the ethnonyms Herodotus records may in fact relate to
regional and inter-regional élites alone – those peoples the Greek traders dealt with on a
more or less equal footing. The locals who were preyed upon to supply the majority of
market slaves were, most probably, the unnamed ‘people without history’ (in Eric Wolf’s
memorable phrase). Jack Goody has written that there is:

no slavery without the slave trade. But the social consequences begin further back,
because in order to supply the trade, violence has to be applied by someone, in many
Believing the ancients 35

cases far removed from the eventual slave owner. So that the consequence of the sliding
status of the slave is the continual violence required to replenish the ever-emptying pool
of forced labour.
(Goody 1980: 41)

The violence is something Herodotus mapped as well.

Indigenous institutions and responses

Classical slavery has been understood through the lenses of European medieval slavery
(our word deriving from the ethnonym ‘Slav’, the people who constituted the majority of
the target or ‘resource’ population for the Viking–Arab trade) and the most recent mass
slave-trading episode involving the European and American enslavement of East and
West African populations. This historical alchemy has produced a synoptic view or Gestalt
of ‘the slave’, a term that can be sensibly used to translate Herodotean doulos. But to what
extent were the Greeks responsible for the emergence of slavery? Goody’s deŽnition does
not require a speciŽcally monetary economy; trade is to be understood here anthropo-
logically, for it is clear that slave-owning and the existence of agreed terms for exchang-
ing people with (other) material items occurs in the majority of pre-state formations that
have been ethnographically documented, and can be reasonably inferred for prehistoric
Europe as well (Gronenborn 1999). Indeed, one basic value unit may be the slave, as in
the term cumal, known from the Irish early medieval texts and designating a female slave.
One cumal was equivalent to six heifers or three milch cows, and could be used to express
the worth of a chariot or a piece of land (Powell 1981: 119f.).
Slavery begins, perhaps, with women, and with children. Engels drew attention to what
he termed ‘the slavery latent in the family’ and it is salutary to see, under the newspaper
headline ‘Auctions for sex: Europe’s thriving slavery industry’ (Carroll 2000), a descrip-
tion of a mass trade in young Balkan women of a kind that Herodotus might well have
recognized (Hdt 5.6: ‘There is a custom among the . . . Thracians that they sell their chil-
dren for export, and as far as young maidens are concerned, they keep no watch over them
but let them couple with whom they will’). It is as socially embedded now as it appears to
have been then: the contemporary women, who are sold and resold among pimps for sums
of the order of £1,000 (and perform oral sex for £15), do not try to escape as ‘they are
inhibited by fear of retaliation against their families back home’.
The roots of slavery are in the non-consensual and habitual extraction of value from
one person and its transfer and conversion to beneŽt others with a controlling interest,
and in their sovereign right to dispose of that interest as and when they see Žt. This usually
occurs where a person is already weaker than another, in certain speciŽed ways (hence
Engels’s telling phrase). Chattel slavery indicates a named status where this tends to be
absolute and without limit: the enslaved person has no rights at all, no means of produc-
tion, and is tradable as an item (Patterson 1982).
Gronenborn (1999) considers that some form of slavery was in existence in central
Europe from at least the beginning of the Neolithic, inferable from more general archaeo-
logical indices of inter-personal conict, warfare and human sacriŽce. Similar indirect
36 Timothy Taylor

methods have been used by Arnold (1988), while two fascinating, largely text-based
studies investigate indigenous categories of ‘slave’ type among the Germans (Grünert
1969) and the Gauls (Daubigney 1979). Daubigney argues that between the later Iron Age
LTI and LTIII domestic servants of various kinds, such as the ambacti (termed comites for
the Germans) who work for, eat with and die for their masters according to various
embedded and customary forms of subordination (dépendance), and who are distin-
guished from more servile ranks (such as adolescent magu-), ultimately become anony-
mous objects of commerce when they are sold to Rome (1979: 175).
For the Balkan and Pontic regions Herodotus also provides information on many types
of indigenous servitude and slavery among the Thracians and the Scythians (Khazanov
1975). The mass funerary sacriŽce of dependent servants in royal tombs was described in
detail by him, and has been clearly attested archaeologically (e.g. Rolle et al. 1998). Other
information concerns: the sale of Thracian children by the Thracians (Hdt 5.6, noted
already); the sexual and reproductive relationship that sprung up between the Scythian
women and their slaves while the male Scythian warriors were on a twenty-eight-yea r
campaign south of the Caucasus (Hdt 4.1); and how the Scythian king has ‘no purchased
slaves’ but is served only by those of Scythian birth (Hdt 4.72). To these descriptions of
types of dépendance we must add the initially enigmatic passage reproduced below, in
which Herodotus tells us that the Scythians blind all their slaves. It occurs near the begin-
ning of Book IV, and thus introduces us to Scythia. It might be that it contains something
Herodotus felt was essential or particularly representative, and that is why I want to give
it careful consideration:
Now the Scythians make all their slaves blind [ToùV dè doúlouV oi Skúqai pántaV
tujloûsi] and this custom is because of the milk – for the Scythians are milk drinkers.
This is how they do the milking: they take a kind of bellows, with a ute-like bone pipe,
and insert it into the female oriŽce of their mares. They blow down this by mouth as
others milk the mare. They say that blowing makes the mare’s veins swell and her udder
descend. When they have taken the milk, they pour it into wooden vats, about which
they range the blind whose job it is to churn. The top part of the milk they draw off and
think the most valuable; that which sinks to the bottom, less so. This then, is why they
blind all their prisoners of war. The Scythians are, you see, not cultivators at all, but
nomads.
(History, Book 4.2; translation based on Grene 1987
with reference to the standard Greek text)
This is considered opaque and problematic by modern commentators and translators (e.g.
Grene 1987: 279f., n.2: ‘most insoluble. . . . No editor has any deŽnitive answer to the difŽ-
culties’). De Selincourt, in his translation for the Penguin Classics series (1970: 273), edi-
torializes so far as to have his English version say ‘The Scythians blind their slaves, a
practice in some way connected to the milk which they prepare for drinking’ – as if
Herodotus were himself uncertain of the reason why, when it is plain from the original
that he in fact considers it so obvious as to be beneath mention. De Selincourt also twice
ignores Herodotus’s categorical assertion that all the slaves were blinded. It is as if De
Selincourt himself, unable to comprehend what is really being described, has sought to
minimize it. (Herodotus has, as noted above, referred in other places, to other kinds of
Believing the ancients 37

slavery in Scythia, and Scythian slaves sold in Athens were not habitually blind; but the
all is very clear and I take it to mean all of this, as I shall argue, predominant type of
indigenous slave.)
A different approach is taken by Stephanie West. She believes Herodotus has made the
milking method up: ‘The use of any apparatus other than the human lips is not easily
paralleled’ (West 1999: 79), and that Herodotus’s description of the ute-like pipe is
‘bizarre’. She argues that his description of processing milk into fermented koumiss (the
latter being an extrapolation from what Herodotus actually says) is ‘simply wrong’ (West
2000: 31f.) and concludes ‘That all those whom the Scythians took captive are supposed
to be engaged in an imaginary occupation enhances the improbability of these opening
chapters [of Book 4]’. West does not think Herodotus ever actually visited the northern
Black Sea region in person, and her arguments are detailed and interesting. The deŽ-
ciencies of Herodotus’s description, as she sees them, ‘Žrmly discourage us from suppos-
ing that he had enjoyed the hospitality of a nomad encampment’.
There is no space here to make a detailed defence of the idea of Herodotus having actu-
ally visited Scythia. He implies that he did, and I believe him (my views are clearly stated
elsewhere: e.g. Sulimirski and Taylor 1992; Taylor 1994). The milking techniques he
describes that West doubts are in fact well supported anthropologically, and tubes for
gently inating rectum or vulva are known from early pastoralist archaeological sites in
southern Russia (Sherratt 1997: 177, with reference to Galkin 1975). I do agree with West
that Herodotus may never have been a guest at a nomad encampment. Not, however,
because he was never in Scythia, but because he was not some kind of Aurel Stein Žgure,
wandering the landscape, and the élite Scythians were not rough Kazakh herders. Olbia,
home to many, many Greeks, had become, by the Žfth century BC, the centre of a truly
massive trade enterprise with the steppe and forest steppe regions, attested both by
imports and defended production centres (Rolle 1985). Belsk on the Vorskla, with its
33km of imposing ramparts – equal in length to the Boulevard Périphérique that encloses
modern Paris, has been identiŽed by its excavator (Boris Shramko) with Herodotus’s
Gelonus (Taylor 1994: 387, A.ii), but it is one of several and perhaps not the largest.
Herodotus would have stayed in comfort in Olbia, and met traders and members of the
Scythian élite in high social circles. Indeed, whether such an élite would have known how
to construct a ‘nomad encampment’ is a moot point. They had by this time become so
aggrandized, with several social strata beneath them in a complex mesh of lateral and
vertical ethnicity, that they were insulated from pastoral realities. Their wealth was based
on slaves, iron and grain, none of which they dirtied their own hands producing. Greek
whitesmiths worked in the colonial centres, producing toreutic for the Scythian élite,
which is eloquently (and rather uniquely) uncondescending in its narrative portrayal of
native lifeways (Taylor 1996).
I read Herodotus’ passage as follows:

1 The slaves are those whom the Scythians have caught, bred or bought and chosen not
to trade through the colonies. Endemic warfare (as evidenced by both texts and archae-
ology) provides the Scythians with many tens of thousands of captives. Unlike those
who serve the king in life and death (therapontes, like ambacti or comites), such slaves
are from Scythia but not ‘Scythians’.
38 Timothy Taylor

2 The blind slaves are the principal workforce in horse dairying, which is not a small-scale
business, but something involving large wooden vats and truly massive herds (that is,
unlike what is ethnographically known from the steppe in recent times, with its skin
koumiss-makers and relatively small volumetric output). Some idea of the size of
Scythian herds is suggested by the Žfth-century BC burial of Ulski Aul, where the articu-
lated skeletons of 360 contemporaneously sacriŽced riding horses were discovered. The
excavator, Veselovsky, simply gave up counting further horse bones in the subsequent
sacriŽces of the upper layers of the kurgan mound (Taylor 1994: 392, ii), and it may be
that over a thousand horses were provided for this particular noble’s entourage to ride
in the afterlife.
3 The reason the slaves are blinded is to stop them deserting across the steppe, riding the
horses they work with. Stephanie West notes that Shalmaneser I seems to have blinded
14,400 prisoners of war so that they could be employed in dire drudgery without risk of
escape or insurrection (West 1999: 78, citing Gelb). Blakesley (in contrast to modern
commentators) was quite clear on this: ‘Of course their blindness prevented the possi-
bility of their ever absconding, which would otherwise be rendered very easy by the
nomad life their masters led’ (Blakesley 1854: 437, note 9).
4 The Scythian churning by the blind slaves is indeed hard drudgery. In relation to it
Herodotus fortuitously signals to us something that, if it was so, his audience would
have known anyway: that they do this because they are not cultivators, i.e. not Greek.
That is, they do not brand their slaves for sighted use in the Želd as the Greeks do; from
which we may understand that it was previously understood that Greek agricultural
labourers were indeed typically slaves – something many scholars have suspected
(though many have questioned it too).
5 If the ratio of free Scythians to slaves was similar to that adduced for Attica by
Demetrius of Phaleron (that is, if the élite and their families were outnumbered ten to
one by those forced to fuel their massive economy) then, given the ready availability of
swords, spears and, most pertinently, vicious composite reex bows, blinding would
have been a prudent security measure.

This passage dramatically qualiŽes Homer’s epithet from c700 BC, the ‘mare-milking
Scythians’, to inform us of relations of dépendance among them, arising from the scale
of their pastoral economy and – which is almost the same thing – the scale of their war-
making. Stronger than Greece, they had threatened the Persian Empire at home in the
sixth century, and Herodotus’s audience would have no illusions that this is a charac-
terization of a great and powerful nation, not a quaint local tribe. To be able to conduct
the blinding of prisoners of war, en masse, effectively (without undue wastage from septi-
caemia for example) implies a particular specialism and, alongside it, a particular system
for classifying human beings – or, to put it perhaps more precisely, the absence of a
universalizing category ‘human being’. It is a truism that those who conducted the blind-
ing must have been exposed to behavioural models of a type that were compatible with
a capacity for developing and maintaining such a custom, and thus the practice must have
emerged over a period of several generations. It seems possible that this form of pastoral
enslavement pre-dated Greek colonial activity, emerging with earlier pastoral élites on
the north Pontic region some time in the preceding Bronze Age (for example, with the
Believing the ancients 39

Seima-Turbino group). It is hard, in any case, to see this class of slaves primarily as a
reex of the establishment of a Greek slave-trading operation in the Black Sea.
What the Greeks were, perhaps, partly responsible for was the sharpening of the
conceptual distinction between slavery and freedom in the regions from which their slaves
were sourced. The legal and philosophical clarity of Greek chattel slavery must have had
an effect on indigenous forms of subordination in Eurasia, beyond the point of sale where
magu- became doulos, just as the symbolic grandeur of Persian imperial command
inspired imitation (Taylor 1988). Thus, the emergence of a new, more inclusive (though
obviously selective) cemetery style among the La Tène Celts, and their military, Männer-
bund expansionism, have suggested to many an entrepreneurial spirit and a particular
valorization of ‘freedom’. The provocative and compelling idea that ‘freedom’ may orig-
inally have emerged as an explicit value in meaningful contradistinction to the institution
of slavery proposed by Finley and examined by Patterson (1991).
It is in this connexion that the élite neck torcs of the La Tène Celts and the Dacians
(see Plate 2), inspired in part by those of Persia (the Trichtigen ring being the earliest
example in a central European context), are a reex of the existence of slave chains. Torcs
in some way symbolize enslavement, not to a superior human but to a superior power. To
wear a gold or silver neckpiece signalled enslavement to deity and, by that very token,
freedom on earth. The Celtic invasion of the Transylvanian and lower Danube basins,
culminating in the establishment of the kingdom of Tylis in the Balkans, was intimately
connected to an economy of trade and raid, in which the capture of precious metal booty
was at least balanced by the capture of prisoners to sell and the gaining of slave source
zones. In this context, it is hard not to see their voluntary adoption of a heavy precious
metal neck ring as a classic item of personal adornment as embodying a statement about
their position vis-à-vis those whose necks involuntarily wore iron or rope.
We do, that is, have to explain the appearance of torcs as indicators of rank, both visu-
ally and chronologically. In Poseidonius’s description of a Gaulish banquet, the chief sits
(or squats) with the person he is receiving next to him, with others in the hierarchy tailing
off, according to rank on either side. The shield bearers of these warriors are behind them,
but the spear carriers, ambactes of a higher rank, close the circle in front of the warriors.
The drinking vessels are brought around by servants, who pass from right to left in front
of the feasters and Poseidonius notes, in this context, that prayers are offered to their gods
in the same way, turning (as the servants have to do) to the right (Poseidonius in Atheneus
IV, 36, 152; discussed by Daubigney 1979: 164f.). No mention of torcs here, but what is
telling is the way that status is choreographed, and the orientation of service to chiefs is
explicitly equated with the orientation of chiefs towards deities. It is just such a relational,
symbolic, grammar which, I believe, we can see being activated in the appearance of
precious metal neck torcs as an élite signiŽer. This begins no earlier than the Žfth century
BC, when classical trade with the late Hallstatt is already well established, and when we
know from textual references that slave chains are already in use (though none has been
archaeologically recorded).
There are many ways of enslaving and being enslaved, some more permanent than
others. The Scythians’ milking slaves each lost their sight for ever, irrespective of whether
they escaped or were manumitted. There are times when an extreme form, often termed
chattel slavery, achieves such widespread economic importance that it becomes iconic,
40 Timothy Taylor

Plate 2 Dacian silver neck rings from Moroda and Marca in Transylvania. Photograph: the author.
Believing the ancients 41

blinding us as much to the myriad other nascent and evolved forms of unfreedom in its
shadow, as to the signiŽcant nuances of the major phenomenon itself.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Michael Vickers for help with metrological and Žscal issues, Irina Levin-
skaya and Tom Braun for help, at various times, with the Greek textual material, and Detlef
Gronenborn for sight of the text of his unpublished 1999 paper. I should also like to thank
Bettina Arnold, David Braund, Barry Cunliffe, Adrian Gollop, John Madden, Stephen
Mac-Namara, Orlando Patterson, Gerhard Trnka, Stephanie West and Sarah Wright. It
should be clear that responsibility for the argument and the calculations above is my own.

Department of Archaeological Sciences


University of Bradford

References

Alföldy, G. 1988. Antike Skaverei. Widersprüche, Sonderformen, Grundstrukturen. Bamberg:


Buchner.
Arnold, B. 1988. Slavery in late prehistoric Europe: recovering evidence for social structure in Iron
Age society. In Tribe and Polity in Late Prehistoric Europe: Demography, Production, and Exchange
in the Evolution of Complex Social Systems (eds D. B. Gibson and M. N. Geselowitz). New York:
Plenum, pp. 179–92.
Blakesley, J. W. 1854. Herodotus, with a Commentary. London: Whittaker.
Braund, D. C. and Tsetskhladze, G. R. 1989. The export of slaves from Colchis. Classical Quarterly,
39(i): 114–25.
Carroll, R. 2000. Auctions for sex: Europe’s thriving slavery industry. Guardian, 23 May: 19.
Clark, E. D. 1821. Letter. Archaeologia, 19: 61.
Cook, B. F. (ed.) 1989. The Rogozen Treasure. London: British Museum Publications.
Crawford, M. H. 1977. Republican denarii in Romania: the suppression of piracy and the slave trade.
Journal of Roman Studies, 67: 117–25.
Cunliffe, B. 1988a. Greeks, Romans and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction. London: Batsford.
Cunliffe, B. 1988b. Iron Age Communities in Britain. London: Routledge.
Daubigney, A. 1979. Reconnaissance des formes de la dépendence Gauloise. Dialogues d’Histoire
Ancienne 5: 145–93.
De Selincourt, A. (trans.) 1970. Herodotus: The Histories (with an introduction by A. R. Burn).
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Finley, M. I. 1962. The Black Sea and Danubian regions and the slave trade in antiquity. Klio, 40: 51–9.
Fisher, N. 1998. Work and leisure. In Ancient Greece (Cambridge Illustrated History) (ed. P.
Cartledge). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 193–218.
Galkin, L. L. 1975. Odno iz drevneishikh prakticheskikh prisposoblenii skotovodov. Sovetskaya
Arkheologiya, 3: 186–92.
42 Timothy Taylor

Garnsey, P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and
Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gollop, A. 1994. ‘Slave chains, slavery and slave trade in Iron Age Europe: a conceptual overview’.
Unpublished UG dissertation, Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford.
Goody, J. 1980. Slavery in time and space. In Asian and African Systems of Slavery (ed. J. L.Watson).
Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 16–42.
Grene, D. (trans. and intro.) 1987. The History. Herodotus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gronenborn, D. 1999. Zum Nachweis von Sklaven/Unfreien in prähistorischen Gesellschaften
Mitteleuropas. Paper given at the 3rd German Congress of Archaeologists, Heidelberg, 27 May.
Grünert, H. 1969. Zu den Anfängen und zur Rolle der Sklaverei und des Sklavenhandels im ur- und
frühgeschichtlichen Europa, speziell bei den germanischen Stämmen. Ethnographisch-archäologis-
che Zeitschrift, 10: 501–15.
Khazanov, A. M. 1975. Sotsialnaya istoriya skifov. Moscow: Nauka.
Kristiansen, K. 1998. Europe Before History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Madden, J. 1996. Slavery in the Roman Empire: numbers and origins. Classics Ireland, 3: 109–28.
Marchant, E. C. (trans.) 1925. Xenophon in Seven Volumes VII: Scripta Minora. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library.
Meiggs, R. and Lewis, D. (eds) 1975. A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the
Fifth Century B.C. Oxford: Clarendon.
Nash, D. 1985. Celtic territorial expansion and the Mediterrranean world. In Settlement and Society:
Aspects of West European Prehistory in the First Millennium B.C. (eds T. Champion and J. V. S.
Megaw). Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 45–67.
Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Patterson, O. 1991. Freedom I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. New York: Basic Books.
Powell, T. G. E. 1981. The Celts, new edn. London: Thames & Hudson.
Rolle, R. 1985 Der greichische Handel der Antike zu den osteuropäischen Reiternomaden aufgrund
archäologischer Zeugnisse. In Untersuchungen zu Handel und verkehr der vor- und
frühgeschichtlichen Zeit in Mittel- und Nordeuropa 1: Methodische Grundlagen und Darstellungen
zum Handel in vorgeschichtlicher Zeit und in der Antike (eds K. Düwel, H. Jankuhn, H. Siems and
S.Timpe). Göttingen: Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Phil.-Hist.
Klasse 3(143): 460–90.
Rolle, R., Murzin, V. Ju. and Alekseev, A. Ju. 1998. Königskurgan È ertomlyk: ein skythischer
Grabhügel des 4. vorchristlichen Jahrhunderts, 2 vols, Hamburger Forschungen zur Archäologie.
Mainz: Philipp von Zabern.
Scheidel, W. 1997. Quantifying the sources of slaves in the Early Roman Empire. Journal of Roman
Studies, 87: 156–69.
Sherratt, A. 1997. Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe: Changing Perspectives. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Sulimirski, T. and Taylor, T. 1991. The Scythians. In The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd edn, Vol.
III, part 2 (eds J. Boardman, I. Edwards, N. G. L. Hammond and E. Sollberger). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 547–90.
Taylor, T. 1988. The Persian Empire, 6(d) International craft traditions (ii): In Europe. In The
Cambridge Ancient History plates to Vol. IV, new edn (ed. J. Boardman). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 78–94.
Believing the ancients 43

Taylor, T. 1994. Thracians, Scythians, and Dacians. In The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe
(ed. B. Cunliffe). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 373–410.
Taylor, T. 1996. Scythian and Sarmatian art. In The Dictionary of Art 28 (ed. J. Turner). London
and New York: Macmillan/Grove, pp. 319–26.
Taylor, T. 1999. Envaluing metal: theorizing the Eneolithic ‘hiatus’. In Metals in Antiquity (eds S.
M. M. Young, A. M. Pollard, P. Budd and R. A. Ixer). Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 22–32.
Vickers, M. 1989. Panagyurischte, Dalboki, Loukovit and Rogozen: questions of metrology and
status. In The Rogozen Treasure (ed. B. F. Cook). London: British Museum Publications, pp. 101–11.
Vickers, M. and Gill, D. 1996. Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Wiedemann, T. 1980. Greek and Roman Slavery. London: Routledge.
West, S. 1999. Introducing the Scythians: Herodotus on koumiss (4.2). Museum Helveticum, 56:
76–86.
West, S. 2000. Herodotus in the north? Reections on a colossal cauldron (4.18). Scripta Classica
Israelica, 19: 15–34
Williams, D. 1998. Romans and Barbarians: Four Views from the Empire’s Edge, 1st Century A.D.
London: Constable.

Você também pode gostar