P aulin I smard . Democracy’s Slaves

The fact of slavery in ancient Greece is explicit in the primary written sources beginning with the Linear B tablets documenting the Late Bronze “Mycenaean” age and continuing with that age’s questionably historical Trojan War, celebrated in the much later epic poems of the archaic poet Homer. Still later, classical Athens’s chattel slave population may have equaled the free population of citizens and resident aliens (the one number we have from antiquity, 400,000—close to twenty times the number of adult male citizens at the time the census was taken late in the fourth century b.c.e.—is almost certainly the result of textual corruption, if not a wild speculation), while the state-owned helots of classical Sparta, the other great Greek city-state and Athens’s eventual adversary in the Peloponnesian War, are recorded to have numbered as many as seven to each Spartiate hoplite soldier at the time of the Battle of Plataea in 479 b.c.e. But the uncomplicated notion of slavery on a major scale was taken further by the ancient historian Moses I. Finley when, in contrast to mere “societies with slaves” (or “slaveholding societies”), he counted ancient Greece among the much rarer five “slave societies” (along with ancient Rome, the United States, the West Indies, and Brazil)—the distinction marked by the fact that the very nature and maintenance of these societies were tied in a more fundamental way to the presence of its servile population. Now, Paulin Ismard’s new book, Democracy’s Slaves (the French original was published in 2015), has attempted to contribute another major advance. At Athens, he argues, a corps of “between one thousand and two thousand public slaves” (2; cf. 49) was employed to perform a range of expert functions without which the demokratia could not have survived, at least at the level its ideology, institutions, and procedures demanded. Not subject to election and reelection, and therefore not annually replaced, as were the Council of Five Hundred and the many boards of magistrates with their non-repeat rules, the dēmosioi came to constitute a sort of permanent bureaucracy of civil servants. So essential—and impactful—were these functions that “democracy’s slaves” deserve credit, believes Ismard, for “ma[king] the citizen’s political activity possible”—“slavery,” indeed, “was the price to be paid for direct democracy” (135).

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