Slavery in Athenian Democracy

Athenian Democracy & Slavery Was slavery essential to the development of Athenian democracy? The simple fact is that Athens in the fifth century BCE was, in fact, a slave-owning society.

Therefore to debate over whether this fact was essential to the social and political system that developed in Athens is like splitting hairs over whether the men who built the Parthenon were happier than the men who built Pharaoh's great Pyramid: if neither was actually a free man, then we are debating the question of the treatment of slaves, not whether slavery plays an important role in a country's political system.

The only reason this question seems worth consideration at all is because Athenian democracy itself would prove to be such an influential form of social organization, while being almost unique in the ancient world. The implication of the question would appear to be whether the existence of slavery in some way vitiates the high ideals preached by the Athenian democratic system; I argue that this indeed is the case.

Orlando Patterson usefully examines the historical evidence and concludes that a vast expansion of Athenian slavery occurred in the sixth century BCE.

The most interesting fact about Patterson's findings is the way in which the expansion of slavery to include greater numbers of captive persons actually resulted in the redefinition of freedom among the existing classes of person, noting that scholars agree on a "strong correlation between the development of the polis and the concept of citizenship, on the one hand, and a sharpened polarization between free and unfree, on the other." (Patterson 8).

The basic premise seems relatively easy to understand: as the class of unfree persons expands, the result is, as Patterson claims, that "men, for the first time, begin to take freedom seriously" (Patterson 8). In other words the expansion of slavery within Athens itself caused those who were free to more directly contemplate the meaning or possibility of unfreedom: and the result of this was not a movement toward emancipation or manumission.

However the larger question remains to what extent the institution of slavery was essential to the development of Athenian democracy, which implies that Athenian democracy would not have developed without it. Here Patterson offers a more interesting and novel argument: he observes the distinction between Athenian democracy in its theoretical form, in which any citizen could run for office or speak in assemblies, with the way in which the system worked in practice, wherein only the traditional ruling classes continued to participate in elective office.

In Patterson's account, this system was directly related to the expansion of slavery: "The demos accepted the rulership of the traditional ruling class because they saw its members as kinsmen, kith and kin against a world of unfree barbarians. It was slavery that created this conception of the world, one shared by rulers and demos alike" (Patterson 11).

The underlying process, which Patterson only alludes to, would seem to be one in which slavery, to be made tenable for the slaveowners, requires constructing the slave as an "other." Once this creates a separate.