This volume – the first book-length study of public slaves in Greece to appear in over 80 years – represents an important effort to advance our understanding of slavery in the Greek world. However, I.'s project is far from a straightforward update or expansion of O. Jacob's Les esclaves publics à Athènes (1928). Caveat lector: this is not simply a monograph about slaves, but a book about the relationship between democracy, knowledge and power; I. engages with current debates over representative democracy and the power wielded by experts (especially EU technocrats) whose decisions shape life in France and other modern democracies. However, it is around the institution of public slavery in the Greek polis that I. weaves his argument, and the book's polemical focus on modern political debates does not rule out its usefulness to the student of Greek slavery.
The book is well grounded in a thorough reading of recent comparative literature on slavery. I. rightly (and refreshingly) underscores the inadequacy of the old view that only five genuine slave societies existed in world history (pp. 20–1; 162); but situating this work among recent anthropological studies of slavery occasionally entails accepting some of the more modish yet untenable aspects of this body of scholarship, such as Patterson's rejection of property as central to the definition of slavery (pp. 21–2). I. begins his study by tracing the origins and evolution of public slavery in archaic Greece, beginning with the Homeric demiourgos and then analysing the process of transition whereby slaves began to occupy such roles. Although I. raises many interesting points, this chapter sidesteps two key debates. The first is the issue of state formation and the development of polis institutions; thus public slaves are not contextualised alongside other public investments in property that grew in extent and complexity during the archaic period. Second, I. follows Finley's view of a sixth-century ‘rise’ of chattel slavery tied to the concomitant rise of democracy (pp. 29–30), a point he views as instrumental in the appearance of public slavery. But Finley's theory is riddled with flaws that have been pointed out by scholars such as H. van Wees, T. Rihll and E.M. Harris, whose criticisms are not addressed. There remains more to be said, therefore, on the origins of public slavery in the Greek world.
Chapter 2 surveys the different roles that demosioi played in the classical city, and readers will profit from I.'s useful discussion as well as his references to epigraphic material from outside Athens. These roles included assisting with judicial procedures, acting as notaries, working in archives and sanctuaries, assisting magistrates in the arsenal, testing coins, working in the public mint, assisting the agoranomoi, running the public prison and executing criminals. A brief section discusses the so-called ‘Scythian archers’ at Athens, a body of state-owned heavies who assisted magistrates in maintaining law and order. This chapter therefore forms the empirical core of the book.
Chapter 3 engages with the fraught issue of status. Here, I. contends that public slaves held several genuine legal rights not enjoyed by privately owned slaves. For example, he cites one of the phialai inscriptions, IG II2 1570, that mentions a demosios as an unsuccessful litigant (ll. 78–9). This document raises interesting questions about the legal capacity of demosioi; but I., taking the old view that these documents relate to manumissions, views the demosios as the ex-owner of the other litigant, thus proving that public slaves were the owners (and not just possessors) of other slaves. This body of inscriptions is currently subject to considerable debate, but one does not have to accept E. Meyer's revisionist argument in toto to reject these inscriptions as evidence for manumitted persons. If the old view is wrong (and I think it is, but we must await the publication of Harris’s forthcoming study of the problem for a more robust refutation of the orthodox position), then these inscriptions can no longer stand as evidence for the property rights of demosioi. I.'s other sources for public slaves having genuine rights of ownership (rather than mere possession) are not particularly conclusive: a right, as Honoré has shown, must be both formal and enforceable, which in the case of slaves means something that can be enforced against the will of their owners (in this case, the state and its representatives). I.'s evidence falls short of this, and merely illustrates how public slaves might possess resources and transact with them, including purchasing other slaves. Yet privately owned slaves were able to do the same thing from Homer's time onwards (Hom. Od. 14.449–52; Theopompus FGrHist 115 F 253), and in all cases legal title ultimately lay with their owners (e.g. D.L. 5.14). Another of I.'s key examples of the ‘rights’ of demosioi is Pittalakos (of Aeschines, Against Timarchus fame), called an anthrôpos dêmosios oiketês tês poleôs (§ 54). However, litigants sometimes referred to former slaves as if they were still slaves to drive home their servile origins (e.g. Alkê in Is. 6; cf. § 49; Lykidas in Dem. 20.131–3; Phormion in [Dem.] 45.75–6 and 83, etc.), so the use of these terms only proves that Pittalakos had been a demosios at some time before the date of Timarchus’ trial; one can explain his ‘rights’ regarding litigation as those of a freedman. The debate about whether these privileges (the existence of which is not to be doubted) were real ‘rights’ or not thus bypasses the more interesting question of why slaves were allowed to possess goods and the leeway to make use of them, which in ‘care intensive’ roles of the sort fulfilled by many public slaves surely lay in their incentive value.
Likewise, the evidence for demosioi having patronymics in some inscriptions hardly constitutes proof of a ‘right of parentage’, but it does raise interesting questions of how slaves did not (pace Patterson) fall outwith the system of social esteem. Athenians knew that slaves could be motivated through praise (e.g. Xen. Oec. 13.9), and the inclusion of demosioi in this dynamic is an important corrective to the general tendency of modern scholars to treat slaves as ‘socially dead’. To his credit, I.'s view of slavery and honour is more sophisticated than the standard approach, and he should be commended for highlighting a neglected facet of the institution that deserves further study.
Chapters 4 and 5 constitute the real polemic of the book to which the previous chapters serve as prolegomena. In Chapter 4 I. argues that while some citizens did exercise influence via expertise (e.g. Eubulus, Lycurgus), this was formally at odds with civic ideology. After exploring theories of civic knowledge in classical philosophy, he turns to the specifics of the knowledge of demosioi, which he rightly acknowledges as a difficulty given the state of our sources. Chapter 5 draws on the work of Pierre Clastres, who argued that the egalitarian ethos of primitive societies inhibited the growth of coercive state institutions. Demosioi thus constitute the ‘state’ qua a necessary but undesirable piece of administrative apparatus that intrudes into civic society; by foisting this role on slaves, the civic society attributes a sense of alterity to ‘state’ functions. I.'s intellectual lineage from the Centre Gernet is on full show here, with lively digressions into tragedy, philosophy, religious texts and theories of sexuality, peppered with references to the works of Foucault, Loraux, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet. Somewhat less attention is paid to more prosaic matters, and some readers may wish for a more detailed exploration of precisely where citizen expertise ended and slave expertise took over. The ideology of citizen amateurism masks more complex realities, and in some concrete circumstances at least, citizens were not hostile to experts (e.g. Pl. Prt. 319b–c; IG I3 78a.47ff.; Dem. 47.68ff.; [Dem.] 59.14–15). Further study will be needed to help bridge the gap between ideology (the real focus of I.'s study) and praxis, especially fine-grained work on the acquisition of expertise among the citizenry and its role ‘on the ground’. (For an important example of this sort, see R. Sobak's article in Hesperia 84 [2015], 669–712.)
The book is written in a lively and charming prose, and topics are introduced via arresting anecdotes drawn from other slave systems. I.'s claims are sure to provoke controversy and further debate, both on slavery and Greek politics. At €20, though, this thought-provoking study is a worthwhile purchase for students of Greek slavery and politics alike.
