The experience of slavery in Athens varied from one enslaved person to another. Slaves could do a range of jobs: miner, prostitute, fieldworker, personal attendant, wool worker, bureaucrat, craftsman, manager or even banker. Their hopes for a family, retention of ethnic identity and chances of manumission could be drastically different. If comparative evidence is any guide, the diverse personalities of individual slaveholders, for example violent and drunk or not, must also have impacted their lives. P.’s excellent volume discusses all these aspects of Athenian slavery, but the novelty of his approach lies rather in the subtitle with its reference to the ‘slaving strategies’ of slaveholders. The lives of enslaved people depended as much on these strategies – and how they acted in response – as on the jobs they did. Although P. discusses different goals of slaving, his main interest is the economic trade-off (from the point of view of slaveholders) between maximising what they got from their slaves and minimising the various costs of supervising them. P. stresses above all the distinction between slaves for whom, or from whom, slaveholders received a rent and those they supervised themselves – sometimes via a subordinate.
Modernising historians sometimes assume the primacy of economic motivations behind slavery, but this was only one goal of slavers. Slaves could provide their owners with a more pleasant lifestyle and serve as status symbols, perhaps having an impact greater than other displays of wealth. And domination itself could be a motivation for slaving. Despite his focus on the tactics of elite slaveholders – where we have better evidence – P. argues persuasively that from one third to more than one half of Athenian citizen households included slaves. Next, P. lays out the two slaving strategies that aimed at generating a rent. The first involved the simple renting out of slaves to third parties for a misthos. According to the second, slaves worked with little or no supervision; they brought their owners a set apophora at regular intervals and were presumably entitled to whatever surplus they managed to earn. In both cases the strategy relieved the slaveowner of having to supervise the enslaved person, but it yielded less profit and sometimes sacrificed some of the other goals of slaving, for example domination. P. acknowledges that, though renting out slaves and taking an apophora had common features as slaving strategies, they created different environments for enslaved individuals.
Since slaves could keep any income beyond the apophora, this slaving strategy relied more on incentives than on punishment. The Italian economist S. Fenoaltea argued in broad terms that such a strategy is advantageous in the case of slaves who do skilled work whereas slaves doing unskilled work can be motivated by punishments (Journal of Economic History 44 [1984], 635–68). But P. emphasises the difficulty of supervision rather than skill alone as determining when slaveholders favoured incentives. An enslaved couple making charcoal in the countryside – characters in Menander’s Epitrepontes – and the possibility that enslaved porters too brought in an apophora illustrate cases where distance and the difficulty or inconvenience of supervision played the decisive role. Those slaves who worked in supervisory positions, such as managers of farms or craft shops, also fall into this category of (typically) incentivised slaves along with the skilful, the trusted and the hard-to-supervise.
P. next considers slaving strategies used in three job categories: animal husbandry, sex work and mining. Within each we find a variety of slaving strategies: some direct supervision but also apophora-bearing slaves. For example, shepherds working in distant hills over the summer were probably incentivised whereas those working in proximity to a farm may have endured close supervision and ‘pain incentives’. Thanks to inscriptions and law court speeches we know that mine slaves were often rented. But this had little effect on the experience of mine slavery: who owned you or rented you mattered little as long as you were forced to work in harsh conditions and under close supervision. Despite P.’s thorough research and ingenuity, the evidence for apophora-bearing slaves is sparse – for example, in sex work. This is especially the case if we subtract enslaved managers – always likely to be incentivised, though not necessarily via the apophora system – from the ranks of shepherds, sex workers and mine slaves.
Xenophon’s idealised farm in the Oeconomicus fits under the direct supervision part of P.’s scheme and constitutes his next topic. Supervision was sometimes exercised by the slaveholder and sometimes by the enslaved managers, male and female. Historians have studied this text carefully; so there are few surprises here. P. argues for year-round and varied labour demands as well as production for the market, all of which made slave labour more economical. He emphasises the crucial ‘maintenance activities’ of enslaved women (p. 111) – food preparation, reproduction, wool working – but also allows for commercial clothing production and even some shifting of female workers to agriculture during the harvest. As in other sectors of the economy, we find a hierarchy even among enslaved people. Those at its top, the epitropos and tamia, were managers in positions of trust and more likely to be incentivised.
P. next uses the speeches of Demosthenes against his guardians as evidence for Demosthenes’ slaving strategies and those of his father. Both took a rent for their blade and sofa workshops, which somewhat distanced them from the stigma of engaging in crafts and allowed Demosthenes to devote himself to his political career. Beyond this, P.’s arguments are detailed and complex; it may be impossible to fit together consistently all the pieces of our tendentious and incomplete evidence. Three tentative conclusions emerge: Milyas probably managed the blade workshop as a slave paying an apophora and then leased it once he had his freedom, a noteworthy continuity; contrary to our usual association of apophora with independence and distance, at least one workshop was attached to Demosthenes’ residence; the financial arrangements – for feeding the enslaved workers and providing raw materials, for example – were more complex than the simple idea of an apophora may suggest.
The final chapter emphasises the varied consequences for slaves even of the same slaving strategy. Some of the most brutal forms of Athenian slavery (mining and milling) involved close supervision. Though Xenophon, in his idealised picture of the direct supervision of agricultural slaves, stresses the use of incentives, comparative evidence from Rome and the South shows that the proclamation of such ideals is consistent with a reliance on punishment in practice. P. also cautions against too rosy a picture of apophora: the terms were revocable and set by the slaveholder. We tend to picture industrious slaves getting ahead and saving up, perhaps for manumission, but slaveholders set the amount of apophora and had no reason to set it low. Turning to rented slaves, P. explores the famous letter of Lesis, written or dictated by an enslaved person rented to a foundry. The harsh treatment of which Lesis complains seems to go against Fenoaltea’s basic model connecting incentives with skilled labour, but P. sensibly points out that this is just a general tendency. And conceivably renters did not even have an owner’s long-term interest in an enslaved person’s health and productivity – which still did not prevent cruelty and abuse.
Readers may end up with an exaggerated picture of the frequency of apophora arrangements, both in comparison with other ways to incentivise enslaved workers and in contrast to the direct supervision and punishment of slaves. But P. shows an impressive command of a wide range of ancient texts, material evidence where appropriate (e.g. p. 115) and modern scholarship, and the book is closely reasoned and clear. His categorisation in terms of two basic slaving strategies, rents versus supervision, is innovative and yields insights relevant to many aspects of the lives both of Greek slaveholders and of enslaved persons.
