Suchergebnisse

Chester G. Starr's recent article in the Journal (March 1958), "An Overdose of Slavery," does a fine job of showing that people other than slaves worked in antiquity, but it leaves hanging the crucial question regarding the place of slavery in the economy of the ancient world. Moreover, Starr enters a strong plea against comparing ancient and modern slavery. These two aspects of his paper I think merit some further comment.

When one compares ancient and modern economic institutions, the differences are many and deep. One of the most obvious is the appearance of slavery virtually everywhere among those societies that rose from simple village life to civilization. Social and economic specialization, the resulting necessity for interchange of goods, and a higher political organization in a firm, consciously organized state—these are aspects of the appearance of civilization, and with them one usually finds a spectrum of social classes from aristrocrats to slaves.

The formal structure of Thomas More'sUtopiais simple and well known. It consists of two books, the first of which contains, in the form of a dialogue between More and an imaginary traveller, Raphael Hythloday, a sharp criticism of English social conditions, the enclosure movement, the penal code and the existing pattern of international relations. The second, in the form of a lengthy tale related by Hythloday, is a description of the social, economic, political and religious conditions of the Isle of Nowhere, Utopia.

I have taken my title from theOnomastikonorWord-Bookof an Alexandrian Greek of the second century of our era named Julius Pollux. At the end of a longish section (3.73–83) listing, and sometimes exemplifying, the Greek words which meant "slave" or "enslave", in certain contexts at least, Pollux noted that there were also men like the helots in Sparta or thepenestaein Thessaly who stood "between the free men and the slaves". It is no use pretending that this work is very penetrating or systematic, at least in the abridged form in which it has come down to us, but the foundation was laid in a much earlier work by a very learned scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C. The interest in the brief passage I have cited is that it suggests in so pointed a way that social status could be viewed as a continuum or spectrum; that there were statuses which could only be defined, even if very crudely, as "between slavery and freedom". Customarily Greek and Roman writers were not concerned with such nuances. To be sure, the Romans had a special word for a freedman,libertus, as distinguished fromliber, a free man. When it came to political status, furthermore, distinctions of all kinds were made, necessarily so. But for social status (which I trust I may be permitted, at this stage, to distinguish from political status), and often for purposes of private law, they were satisfied with the simple antinomy, slave or free, even though they could hardly have been unaware of certain gradations.