The lands of Greece were unlike those of Egypt. Instead of warm, fertile, flat land like Egypt, Greece was a steep mountainous terrain that yielded hard living to their people.
The People:
Their beginnings are hard to trace. All that is certain is that around 2000B.C, tall, blond warriors of Indo-European stock came down upon the Aegean area from the lands of the North. Some came by sea and settled on the coasts and on the islands of the Aegean. Over the next centuries the invaders absorbed the advanced civilization of Crete (which dominated the Aegean area for almost 1000 years) and fused their culture with Cretan culture to become the Greeks.
After the Greeks settled on the mainland, they migrated to the islands and Asiatic shores of the Aegean. There, the colonists may have battled with earlier migrants (the struggle/ legend of the Trojan Wars). Around 1200B.C the last wave of invaders from the North, the Dorians, expanded into Central and Western Greece and into Crete, Rhodes, and the lower shores of Asia Minor. The migrations ended in 900B.C and the Greek people, with their language and culture, were solidly planted on both sides of the Aegean Sea.
Later, Greek Civilization would reach to the borders of the Black Sea, the coasts of North Africa, southern Italy and Sicily.
Question: Where did the Greeks get their foundation of their civilization?
Answer: Contrary to popular belief, civilization did not begin with the Greeks. Egypt had civilization for 3000 years before Greece came into existence. (According to Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of civilization is: a social organization of a high order, marked by the development and use of a written language and advances in the arts and sciences, government, etc.)
Egypt, an African nation, had a huge influence on Greek civilization. It is quite obvious that a civilization that had been around for 3000 years had to influence a barbarian culture, as the Greeks initially were when they came from the North into the Aegean area. The Greeks were smart enough to build upon the knowledge of Egypt and develop the first “European civilization.”
800- 600B.C- the Greeks planted colonies all along the Mediterranean and the Black Seas shorelines. These colonies began as agricultural settlements that divided the land among the people and this was the foundation of the new city- states that made up Greece.
These Greek colonists fought the natives to take the land and they either drove them off or reduced the natives into slavery. Greek merchants, in the older established cities, helped establish these “newer Greek colonists” by trading with them, which in turn, created permanent settlements in the Asiatic lands around the Aegean and Mediterranean. The established merchants took advantage of the new opportunities to buy raw materials from the newly settled Greeks, and they sold industrial products back to the colonists.
The Greeks became aware of themselves as a “nationality” by passing knowledge of previous generations to the next generation. This knowledge transfer over centuries eventually formed into one language, Greek, and a culture, which is identified today as Greek culture. The Greeks called their lands “Hellas”, to distinguish themselves from the surrounding cultures, and they called themselves “Hellene”, to distinguish themselves from all other peoples, which they called “barbarians.”
Greek expansion spurred the growth of industry and commerce. Growing cities, shipbuilding, aqueducts, tunnels, and agriculture were quickly transforming Greek civilization. The idea of democracy and liberty came out of the rise of the city- states, and the engine that created this civilization was slavery.
Greece and Slavery
Slavery had been part of Greek life right from the beginning, and the ideas of democracy and freedom did not challenge or interfere with the system. Slavery grew as the agricultural settlements grew into city- states. The need for a larger supply of labor and skills increased as the Greek economy increased. Domestic slavery transformed into industrial slavery. To the Greeks, slavery was necessary because society could not function without it. For them, forced labor of other men freed the Greek from manual labor and allowed him to pursue his higher interests.
How Greeks Acquired Slaves:
The traditional source was war captives. Greece usually bought their slaves off an auction from native tribes warring among themselves.
Another means that slaves were acquired; from peasants who lost their lands. They usually lost their lands for a number of reasons: unable to pay debts, rent, or loans. In order to pay off their debts, peasants mortgaged themselves, their wives, or the children, and they were sold into foreign lands or at home on the open market.
The war between the Greeks and the Persians in 500B.C produced lots of Persian slaves. Then the war between the two Greek city- states, Sparta and Athens, which ended in 405B.C produced many Athenian slaves because Sparta was the victor.
War raised higher the demand for slave labor. The constant fighting created a steady demand for war materials, and handicraft industries expanded, but the labor supply shrank as citizens working in the shops were recruited for the battlefield. As demand went up, traders roamed further off gathering foreign slaves like Egyptians, Libyans, and Persians. But the least expensive and the largest source of slaves came from the Greeks own back yard, prisoners of war gathered among the fighting Greek city- states. If these Greek prisoners of war had no ransom funds, they were sold into the slave market, called the Agora, that was usually located in the center of the city- states’ business section. As Greek culture expanded, slave trade became very big business for Greece.
The Greek Class Structure:
-At the top of the structure were the aristocrats, who lived on estates or in big city houses.
-Next came the peasants, who lived in villages or on the plains. They came into the city for trade.
-Then the working people came below the peasants. They were the laborers, craftsmen, and tradesmen.
-The metics, who were not Greeks but came to the city to engage in commerce, banking and industry, were ranked below the Greek working people. The metics came into Greece by choice, not due to being enslaved.
-At the bottom of society were the slaves, most of which were not Greek. They had no participation whatsoever in Greek life. The slave was an inferior subject outside the realm of democratic rights and was to be used for agriculture, trade, manufacture, public works, and war production. Aristotle said, “Slaves were human instruments expected to perform like machinery.”
The more slaves a Greek had, the richer he was. Plato died in the middle 4th century B.C and he left five domestic slaves. His pupil, Aristotle, left fourteen slaves to his estate, and Theophrastus, who was Aristotle’s famous pupil, had seven slaves. In the time of Plato it was estimated that ½ of the slave population in Athens was doing domestic service. The other half was doing industry and agriculture.
The Treatment of Slaves:
Aristotle said that a slave’s life had three ingredients: work, punishment and food.
Throughout the history of slavery flogging and incentives were the main means of forcing a slave to do work assigned. The greatest incentive was Manumission (the formal release of the slave by the slave’s master).
The most significant aspect of slavery in the ancient times was the absence of a color line. Although most of the slaves were foreigners, there was no slave race or a slave caste. Slaves came from peoples and races that lived outside the Greek world. Because the enslaved were mostly foreigners, some Greeks came to link slavery with barbarians, as though being born non-Greek made a person “by nature slavish,” using Aristotle’s words. His teacher, Plato, held the same view, but this racist attitude never took hold among the Greeks. The plain fact of life was that slavery was universally practiced. So many slaves were in bondage through warfare, piracy, kidnapping, and shipwreck, that “natural slavery” was self- evidently ridiculous. Bondage was not identified by color. Slavery was seen to rest on nothing but superior force.
Despite the universal custom of bondage, Greek history had very few slave revolts. The reason being in the fluidity of a man’s status. He could easily move from slavery to freedom as from freedom into slavery. One could borrow the money to buy his freedom and then pay it off if he had some type of skills.
Outline Source: SLAVERY: A World History, by Milton Meltzer; Da Capo Press 1993
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