Debt-Bondage and Serfdom

Greeks saw all around them persons whose legal status gave them an intermediate position between the full citizens of self-governing democratic communities and chattel slaves in the absolute ownership of their masters—‘between free men and slaves’, as they were called by the second century AD lexicographer Pollux. It is interesting that Livy describes the events leading to the abolition of debt-bondage at Rome in terms reminiscent of the overthrow of tyranny at Athens: political and economic factors are ignored in favour of a good story clearly based on that of Harmodios and Aristogeiton. For quite different reasons, neither Athens nor Rome happened to have a legally distinct class of dependent serfs: this led to a tendency for Greeks and Romans when they were describing other societies to classify as a chattel slave anyone who did not fit the description of a citizen. Greeks always found it difficult to express the hierarchy of dependence in oriental kingdoms.

Debt · Economic history · Economics · Macroeconomics · Monetary economics · Serfdom · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism