Recovering the voices of subaltern groups is one of the great challenges facing ancient historians. Whether conceived of as a moral imperative or a historiographical one, attempts to re-centre historical victims of oppression, exploitation and abuse in our picture of ancient societies have become a mainstay of ancient historical research. The three books under review differ in their form, methodologies and outlook. Together, they offer a representative sample of the high quality of recent research conducted on the subjects of slavery and subaltern groups in ancient Greece and of the direction of travel in these areas.

Recent years have seen the publication of several introductory works on the subject of Greek slavery.Footnote ¹ But Kamen's Greek Slavery is rather different. As the author stresses in the preface, it is an introduction not to Greek slavery per se but to its study. In line with the aims of the Trends in Classics series, to which it belongs, the book's emphasis is on identifying the scholarly trends in the subject and not on introducing the sources. The book is structured into seven thematic chapters, an introduction and an epilogue.

The strengths of the book are well illustrated by its introduction. Sections 1.1–3 provide a descriptive overview of many of the most significant contributions of the twenty-first century to the scholarship on Greek slavery, while sections 1.4–5 tackle two vital and contentious issues: the definition of slavery and the notion of a ‘slave society’. Kamen rarely explicitly evaluates the works that she cites (with the notable exceptions of D. Lewis's Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context [2018] and K. Vlassopoulos's Historicising Ancient Slavery [2021], which she calls ‘paradigm-shifting’), an exercise of admirable restraint that characterises the remainder of the book. A newcomer will find here a valuable bibliographical essay, without being prejudiced in one direction or another.

Chapter 2, ‘Epichoric Slave Systems’, takes its lead from the work of Lewis in making the essential point that Greek slavery was not monolithic and that different systems of enslavement operated across space and time throughout Greek antiquity. Discussed here are works on the slave systems of Mycenaean and Homeric Greece, Athens in the Archaic and classical periods, Crete and Sparta. The latter's inclusion in a book with ‘slavery’ in its title is a welcome reflection of a move in the last two decades away from treating Spartan helotage as an altogether different form of human exploitation.

Chapter 3, ‘Economics of Slavery’, deftly surveys the perennial (and largely irresolvable) debates on the slave supply and modes of acquiring slaves; the demography of slavery; and the economic roles of the enslaved, both as individuals and as a structural component of the Greek economy.

Chapter 4, ‘Treatment of Enslaved People’, first elucidates the concept of ‘slaving strategies’ and the varied arsenal of incentives and punishments employed by Greek slaveowners. Kamen then proceeds to the inherent violence of Greek slave systems, from the first act of enslavement and the physical and sexual violence experienced within the household to institutionalised violence such as the Athenian basanos procedure. The chapter ends with a consideration of the protection of enslaved people from violence (themes explored in the volume considered below, by S. Forsdyke and by Kamen herself).

Perhaps because, as Kamen notes, Chapter 5 (‘Sex and Gender’) concerns a relatively new sub-field in the study of Greek slavery, it deals more directly with the ancient sources than the others, which centre scholarly disputes and interpretations. Kamen notes that the free often defined themselves in opposition to the unfree, and that this was frequently gendered (through notions of sexual purity as well as physical beauty). Furthermore, household labour could be heavily divided on gendered lines, and patterns in manumission rates (skewing female) are partly attributable to the gendered roles attributed to enslaved persons. The rest of the chapter is occupied with sexuality and slavery. Kamen lays out the debates on hetairai and pornai, and on the legal status of those engaged in prostitution, and highlights her own work on enslaved women using sex work to purchase their freedom. Kamen is of the highly justified view that, though some behavioural norms curbed excessive sexual (ab)use of enslaved persons, their impact was limited. This contrasts with the relatively optimistic view of E. Cohen (one of the few scholars with whom Kamen expresses explicit disagreement) that Athenian laws ensured the protection of slaves and other subaltern groups in classical Athens.

Chapter 6, ‘Agency, Resistance, and Revolt’, takes up this theme of agency and recent attempts to move beyond a top-down perspective by centring the communities and networks cultivated by, and the hopes and fears of, the enslaved.Footnote ² Kamen, though clearly an advocate of these approaches, does point out some of the pitfalls of this kind of exercise, which can obscure or diminish the constraints imposed upon the enslaved. The remainder of the chapter treats individual acts of resistance and full-scale revolts.

Chapter 7, ‘Manumission’, covers the modes of manumission extant in the Greek sources; so-called paramonē conditions; and the status of freed persons. Kamen intervenes more in this chapter than in perhaps any other. This results, no doubt, from her extensive work on the topic, but it is also a function of the complexity of the debates plaguing this field of research (obscure inscribed documents; legal fictions; in-between statuses). As regards the phialai exeleutherikai inscriptions, Kamen provides a remarkably good short summary of the various scholarly positions on these texts (an exceptionally complex interpretational problem to explain to first-timers). However, she rather abruptly sidesteps E. Meyer's challenge to the status of these inscriptions as evidence for the manumission of slaves, without fully contending with Meyer's objections (see E. Meyer, Metics and the Athenian “Phialai”-Inscriptions [2010]). In a book of this length and scope it might be inappropriate to get into the weeds of the debate, but Kamen risks oversimplification and the false reassurance that the debate can be brushed aside and the inscriptions used as evidence for Athenian freed persons.

Chapter 8, ‘Representations, Metaphors, Legacies’, summarises work on literary and artistic representations of enslaved persons, the metaphorical uses of the language of enslavement and the reception of classical slavery in the modern world, including its invocation by both abolitionists and slaveholders.

We are at a critical juncture in the study of ancient slavery. As scholarship emerges from the long shadow cast by Moses Finley over the study of ancient slavery, we are faced with the pedagogical conundrum of integrating new paradigms with traditional models in the teaching of Greek slavery. Kamen's volume is an important step in that it provides a clear and concise overview of how and why these new paradigms have arisen, providing newcomers with an orientation that does not require that they immerse themselves in more than half a century of historiography. The book deliberately prioritises scholarship written in English, but the bibliography includes a great many important non-Anglophone works. As a concise, comprehensive, up-to-date and fairly neutral guide to the extensive scholarship on Greek slavery, the volume will be an invaluable tool to students and scholars seeking orientation in a rapidly developing sub-field of ancient historical research. In the epilogue Kamen points to two future directions in which she sees scholarship developing in the near future: the study of slavery in a global and comparative perspective, and further explorations of the ‘lived experience’ of the enslaved. The latter anticipates nicely the second volume to be reviewed.

Voiceless, Invisible, and Countless in Ancient Greece is a handsome volume resulting from a conference held at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 2017, with some additional contributions added thereafter. Though not restricted to enslaved persons, the volume is explicitly engaged in the project underscored by Kamen as a vital new area of research: uncovering the voices and experiences of those traditionally expunged from the sources.

In the introductory chapter the editors explain their choice of concentrating on subordination rather than subalternity. Subordination captures not only the conditions experienced by subaltern groups, but also ‘the processes that put them there’, while permitting a focus on the efforts of these individuals to alleviate their condition (p. 1). The volume's principle aim is ‘to reconsider the varieties of subordination practised and experienced within the Greek world’ (p. 11). The editors advocate for nuanced approaches to the experiences of subordination that, where possible, look for the intersections between social and political histories;Footnote ³ move beyond top-down histories prioritising elite actors; recognise that processes of subordination are not static; and engage compassionately with their subjects. The volume overwhelmingly succeeds in its project. The eleven papers are of the highest quality: innovative and dynamic, many of the contributions will have significance for years to come.

Aside from setting out their goals for the volume, Gartland and Tandy begin with two vignettes of Boiotian ‘landscapes of subordination’: Hesiod's Askra in the seventh century bce and Boiotia of the fourth century during the depredations of a hegemonic Thebes. The former is revealed as a world of fixed social hierarchies. In the second landscape the life of the famous Thespian hetaira Mnasarete (or Phryne) is presented as emblematic of how a subordinated individual (a low status exile from a depopulated city) could rise in spite of her subordination to a degree of wealth, fame and autonomy.

In an outstanding essay J. Zurbach applies E.P. Thompson's notion of the moral economy to the archaic Greek demos. The moral economy is defined as ‘a corpus of ideas and value about the relationship between social groups, with food allocation as its main object’ (p. 26), and the essential argument is that we can trace in the sources the ideas and demands of non-elite groups in the political and social conflicts of the archaic period. This approach establishes conflicts between groups as a historical problem contingent on real events rather than as a clash of ideologies. The demos becomes a rational agent that responds and adapts to events and influences both the discourses and realities of archaic society.

A. Edwards's contribution neatly dovetails with the model proposed by Zurbach. Edwards seeks to disentangle a ‘demotic’ voice from Solon's poetry, identifying an implicit opposing discourse, against which Solon sets himself up, as that of the rural demos increasingly exploited by urban elites. Embedded in Solon's justifications of his policies and castigations of the demos, Edwards finds a popular demand for the restoration of enslaved citizens, a redistribution of land, and sees demotic support for tyranny as a rational choice in the face of the increasing monopolisation of land and power by the elite. Like Zurbach, Edwards presents a demos with its own set of expectations and demands that influence the policies of the elite, even if they were ultimately unsuccessful.

S. Murray seeks to reconstruct a ‘cultural history of the urban worker in Archaic and Classical Greece’ (p. 68). Beginning with the definition of the craftsman, the Greek banausos, and diachronic changes in attitudes towards them, Murray examines the archaeological and epigraphic evidence for craftspeople and their identities. The most extensive discussion is of the finds in buildings identified as workshops, which Murray often reads against the grain of previous interpretations. For example, a ‘saucer’ pyre excavated at ‘House D’ near the Athenian agora, typically associated with cleansing rituals following some change or calamity, has been thought to reflect the liability of metalworkers to suffer accidents. Murray argues instead that this might reflect a kind of marketing strategy: ‘it may be that craftsmen consciously engaged in obscure, mysterious rituals to enhance outsiders’ awe at the extraordinary nature and mystical characteristics of their work, and in so doing to increase their own status’ (p. 84). Some of the arguments are more creative than convincing, yet Murray's approach successfully problematises the assumptions previously brought to the evidence. In a conclusion similar to subsequent chapters, Murray argues that banausos is not a particularly useful label. The banausoi are a category of the elite imagination, laced with a derogatory flavour.

L. Cecchet explores the identity and visibility of those belonging to the lowest Solonian property class: the thetes. The two important conclusions are first that no one in Athens self-described as thes, partly because it was associated with servility and partly because it was meaningless in the classical period in the sense that it did not necessarily reflect one's wealth (for which penetes is a better descriptor). Second, Cecchet finds that a discourse against manual labour penetrated below the elite level and prevented thetes from expressing pride in their work, though there is some evidence of a counter discourse. Precisely because the terminology of thetes is so sparse, Cecchet ends up discussing ‘the poor’ or ‘manual workers’ or ‘lower classes’ in a way that sometimes blurs the boundaries of the category of people she is seeking to describe, though this blurriness may rather be the point.

H. van Wees's contribution likewise concerns the thetes, though his conclusions are somewhat different. He agrees on the inherently pejorative nature of the term in Athenian discourse, but, in contrast to Cecchet and other scholars, van Wees argues that the Solonian property classes remained legally valid and coherent (if somewhat less relevant) well into the classical period. He reasons that the top Solonian property class (the pentakosiomedimnoi) corresponds more or less to the liturgical class of the fourth century, while the distinction between the two lowest classes (the zeugitai and the thetes) was intended to be that of the minimum property required to belong to the leisure class. The thetes, Athens’ ‘working class’, he argues, were primarily badly treated and poorly remunerated wage-labourers, and not the peasant farmers that scholarship has often depicted them as. He calculates that they constituted as much as 90% of Athenian society in the sixth century and around 45% in 322 bce, by which time a middling class had appeared of small independent farmers and non-agricultural small traders and craftspeople. The ramifications of this argument can hardly be understated: this is a near-total rethink of Athenian society in the archaic and classical periods. Van Wees does not recover the voices of the working class, but rather argues for the gross underestimation of their existence, itself a result of their subordination. The proportions that van Wees calculates might be open to scepticism, but any counterargument would be equally contingent. This recalculation must be contended with, significant as it is for our concept of Athenian economy and political ideology.

In the next chapter Lewis continues to promote an epichoric approach to the study of Greek slavery. Combatting the Atheno-centrism, which he identifies as a symptom of the distribution of our evidence and of long-held scholarly taxonomies, he expertly demonstrates how a single entry of Pollux's second-century ce Onomasticon has been privileged over more contemporary sources, in raising the idea that so-called ‘helotic’ populations were intrinsically different from ‘chattel’ slaves to an axiom of modern scholarship. After busting this myth, Lewis draws ‘thumbnail sketches’ of four slave systems (Thessaly, Lokris, Herakleia Pontike and Chios), each of which differs according to local ecological, economic, political and social factors. This approach, Lewis notes, ‘allows us to move away from generalizations about “the slave experience,” to specific circumstances, calibrated in terms of regional specificities’ (p. 176). As with van Wees's contribution, Lewis lays essential groundwork for our understanding of the processes and experiences of subordination. The question for future scholarship is the number of slave systems upon which we can elaborate, and the depth of these elaborations.

Forsdyke seeks to locate the agency of enslaved people trying to ameliorate their condition within slavery, as opposed to attempts to escape slavery through flight or revolt. Forsdyke argues persuasively that the provision found in Plato's Laws, against collusion between alleged victims of assault and slaves to exploit the procedure of noxal surrender (the turning over of a slave perpetrator by their owner to the victim of the crime), must derive from real Athenian law. Such provision, she argues, must have been added in the face of real instances of collusion. Forsdyke identifies other opportunities that enslaved persons might have seized upon in the ancient world (for example the antidosis procedure), before turning to the phenomenon of temple asylum, a subject well in need of reappraisal. One might be more sceptical than Forsdyke about the frequency with which the enslaved employed these legal loopholes (the passing of the provision against collusion need only have been sparked by one case), but she illustrates the potential for such strategies, the ingenuity of the enslaved in exploiting them, and the networks of support and information upon which they must have relied.

Building upon her previous work, S. Wijma conducts a study of the self-representation of metics in Athens on the basis of a corpus of funerary monuments (125) and inscriptions (c. 500) from the fifth and fourth centuries. Wijma illustrates the limitations of ‘metic’ as a category: like thes or banausos, metoikos is a top-down category with which almost nobody self-identified. In one of the highlights of the volume Wijma does an excellent job of drawing out the multifaceted nature of the identities of Athens’ non-citizen residents. In large part, they are found to have conformed and assimilated to Athenian customs in their self-representation, but this is not to be interpreted as passive acceptance of a hegemonic narrative: integration and assimilation can also be understood as active strategies. And, crucially, they are shown not to be the only ones available: non-Athenians could express their identities in ways that, if they did not reject Athenian customs, certainly adapted them to express other facets of their identities (ethnic, professional, religious, personal).

The final two contributions concern the Athenian legal system and specifically its failure to protect subordinate groups. Kamen returns to the infamous problem of the graphē hubreōs and the extent to which it protected those of lower status, in particular the enslaved who otherwise had no legal protection or personality. The crux of Kamen's argument is that, regardless of their entitlement, a variety of factors (wealth, legal standing, the reliance upon citizen representation) will have ensured that individuals of lower status and means were unable to gain redress through this law. The thesis is eminently plausible and well argued, though it invites the inevitable counterargument that even the evidence for graphai undertaken on behalf of full male citizens is very slight, and in most cases our sources refer only to the potential for doing so.

R.F. Kennedy likewise identifies the inequality baked into the Athenian judicial system in the cases of female citizens and heirs. Kennedy demonstrates that the strategies of male litigants staking a claim to an inheritance fallen to a female relative frequently consisted of questioning the latter's legitimacy and impugning her character. Kennedy persuasively argues that these were not merely part and parcel of Athenian courtroom dramas, but represented tried-and-tested strategies that could result in the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of even well-to-do Athenian women. Their legal incapacity to defend themselves directly, coupled with the poor or non-existent documentary practices that existed in relation to women in Athens, ensured that they were in a perpetual state of precarity and dependence.

Voiceless contains some outstanding scholarship in contributions that, for the most part, cohere and complement one another. Whether providing dramatic reappraisals of the subordinate relationships upon which Greek societies were built (van Wees, Lewis), identifying the voices of subordinate groups or individuals (Zurbach, Edwards, Murray, Cecchet, Forsdyke, Wijma) or the modes of keeping them voiceless (Kamen, Kennedy), the contributors certainly fulfil the editors’ vision. Perhaps the most consequential theme of the volume is its constant destabilisation of top-down categories of analysis that have often been adopted wholesale in modern scholarship from ancient authors. Future research will no doubt be inspired by the question of the common or divergent experiences of subordination experienced by different subordinate groups.

Le miroir d’Œdipe. Penser l'esclavage is the latest work by Ismard and builds upon his two major interventions on the subject of slavery in classical Athens: Democracy's Slaves (2017) and La cité et ses esclaves (2019). In a certain respect, this book pairs rather neatly with Voiceless, Invisible, and Countless in that it is framed as a study of silence, an absence, a non-existence. Ismard's starting point is the stark disparity between the centrality of slavery to Greek society and the distinct lack of elaborated thought on the subject in the ancient sources. The relative invisibility of slaves and of slavery, according to Ismard, cannot simply be attributed to the chance survival of the sources nor their lack of interest in the subject. The silence, he maintains, is reflective of an ideology that infused Greek (and, more particularly, Athenian) thought. (This is different from the notion found in P. Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians [1998], that the role of slavery was suppressed or downplayed by ancient sources due to their discomfort.) Inspired by the work of N. Loraux, Ismard pursues an ‘anthropology of the implicit’, examining Greek literary sources through a psychoanalytical lens that recognises the role of ‘the unconscious’ or ‘the unknown’.

Drawing on an eclectic bibliography that includes Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Edgar Allen Poe, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Ismard identifies Greek thought about slavery ‘in the margins’ of lesser-known texts, supplemented by ‘entrelectures’ of modern literature. This approach, and no doubt its conclusions, may be polarising among traditional ancient historians. But Ismard is a compelling writer, and his insights are serious and penetrating.

Le miroir comprises six thematic chapters, bookended by a short introduction and conclusion. As for its audience, one can imagine the book appealing to erudite non-specialists, and its affordable price may point in that direction. Primarily, however, one suspects, it will be historians of ancient slavery and thought who will find this book of most interest.

Chapter 1, ‘Le Philosophe est un maître qui s'ignore’, pursues a variation of the much-quoted notion of Moses Finley's (and elaborated by O. Patterson in Freedom in the Making of Western Culture [1991]), that slavery developed in tandem with, and in direct opposition to, freedom (and specifically radical democratic freedom). Beginning with a discussion of Plato's Theaetetus, Ismard explores a discourse that holds that the purest philosophical life is that of complete leisure (scholē), and the assimilation of anything less than this to a form of slavery. The ideal of breaking free from the social world – of a privileged ignorance not only of everyday tasks, but civic life entirely – was not, according to Ismard, the product of a hyper-aristocratic attitude towards work or society, but a function of the democracy and the existence of slave labour. Broadly, Ismard succeeds in fleshing out more precisely the ideological development of freedom in the negative image of slavery in Athenian thought. Some of the arguments assembled are a little less grounded. In an analysis of the tradition about Plato's own apparent enslavement,Footnote ⁴ Ismard picks up on a variant recorded by Diogenes Laertius (3.20) that has Anniceris of Cyrene pay Plato's ransom. When the philosopher's friends attempted to reimburse him, Anniceris is said to have used the money to purchase the garden of the Academy. Ismard is non-committal about the historical veracity of the tradition, but nevertheless contends that ‘l'anecdote suggère que la liberté par excellence, qui a pour nom «philosophie», procède du renversement et de la transfiguration de l'esclavage dont l'enceinte même de l'Académie conservait silencieusement la mémoire’ (p. 36). The symbolism is compelling, but difficult to read into the source tradition.

In Chapter 2, ‘Le miroir d’Œdipe’, Ismard reinserts slavery into the myth of Oedipus, an element he claims has been largely overlooked in Freudian (or vulgate Freudian) interpretations. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex the messenger speech that reveals to Oedipus his true identity and lays bare the tragic consequences of his ignorance, is delivered by the enslaved herdsman who discovered him exposed as a baby. Furthermore, Oedipus’ status, and the possibility that he himself was a slave, is a preoccupation of the protagonist – one that Ismard identifies as particularly pertinent in the fifth century following the Periclean citizenship law. The interpretation is supplemented by two comparative readings from radically different contexts: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, rife with racial and filial tension, and Herodotus’ account of the childhood of Cyrus the Great, another ‘slave king’ left for dead only to fulfil a terrible destiny. The first sharpens Ismard's notion of the ‘specular’ quality at the heart of slavery: slavery is at once a reflective mirror and an opaque screen for the free protagonists of both dramas. The second illuminates the conception of the king and the slave as liminal figures in the Athenian imagination.

Perhaps the finest application of Ismard's sharp insight is to be found in Chapter 3 (‘Un autre, mais lequel?’). A Herodotean digression on how the Pelasgians came to occupy the island of Lemnos (6.137) records the tradition that, having previously been settled in Attica, they were driven out for violating Athenian women as they went to fetch water from the enneakrounos fountain south of the Acropolis. An – at first glance, rather innocuous – explanatory aside that ‘at this time there were no slaves among the Athenians or any of the other Greeks’ is interpreted by Ismard as something akin to an aetiology of slavery in Athens, comparable to Spartan legends justifying the subjugation of Messenia. On his reading, this tradition locates the origins of slavery not in the interests of economic development, but in the protection of free women's bodies from dishonour. This, Ismard goes on to argue, chimes well with a mainstay of classical Athenian ideology: that the principal difference between free and slave was the inviolability of the former's body.

Chapter 4, ‘Des esclaves inventent le théâtre documentaire’, concerns one of the few episodes of ancient history in which traces of the voices of the enslaved can be found, in the context of the first Sicilian slave revolt. Acknowledging the difficulty of identifying any kind of ideological coherence undergirding the revolt, Ismard emphasises the fluidity and historical contingence of the goals and expectations of those involved, and the role of ‘l'inconscient’ in history. Ismard turns to the account found in Diodorus Siculus of Eunous, the leader of the revolt, staging a mime at Enna depicting domestic scenes of slaves revolting against their masters. He pushes the argument that the mime involved the performers and their audience in a collective experience that did not merely reflect but manifested their uprising, citing the parallel of documentary theatre from 1920s Berlin.

Chapter 5, ‘Organologie’, investigates the notion of the slave as a part of the master in Greek thought, from Artemidorus of Daldis’ Oneirocritica and its consistent association of enslaved persons with the body of their masters, back to Aristotle's theories, and through Athenian notions of ‘integral representation’, by which a slave was completely represented in legal terms by their master. The identification of a slave with their master was ideologically so complete that a fear is detectable, according to Ismard, that they will become indistinguishable.

The final chapter, ‘Dans cette mort où se tiennent les vivants’, concerns the association between slavery and death, and the notion of slaves as somehow surviving death. This idea will be familiar to anyone involved in the study of slavery, most probably in the form of Patterson's Slavery and Social Death (2018), but Ismard pushes the association further. This chapter, it must be said, spends longer interpreting the work of Edgar Allen Poe than the ancient sources.

The ambition of the book is to be commended, even where the interpretation is uneven. The overarching sense one gets from reading the volume is of a bubbling tension underlying Greek discourses with regard to slavery: slavery was a total, incontestable fact of life in classical Greece, but this did not render it banal or neutral. As the internal, invisible ‘other’, the conscious appendage of the master, or as the living dead, the figure of the slave emerges as an integral, yet often destabilising element of Greek thought.

What binds these three excellent, in their own ways, books is primarily their focus on the development of new ways of looking at, or indeed listening to, the ancient evidence in order to perceive the presence of those traditionally obscured from view by both the ancient literary sources and their modern interpreters. In part this consists in attempts to restore a modicum of agency to the subordinated of the ancient Greek world: to recover their experiences and to rationalise their behaviour in terms that do not reduce them to featureless victims. Yet in the vast majority of instances, the experience of marginalised groups is fundamentally inaccessible and will forever remain so. Therefore an equally important part of this kind of undertaking is to anatomise systems of subordination and the discourses that have come down to us and have often fossilised this subordination.

The sceptic might question how far this endeavour can be pushed and how many novel conclusions can be drawn from old evidence before good intentions supersede historical precision. Readers of any one of these volumes ought to be encouraged that, despite the silences, our sources still have a lot to say on these subjects, and a variety of ways of speaking.