Slavery and the Origins of Athenian Democracy

Introduction: Slavery in Athenian Society

Was slavery essential to the development of Athenian democracy? The simple fact is that Athens in the fifth century BCE was a slave-owning society. To debate whether this fact was essential to the social and political system that developed in Athens is, in some ways, like splitting hairs over whether the men who built the Parthenon were happier than the men who built the Pharaoh's great pyramid: if neither was actually a free man, then the real debate concerns 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 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 undermines the high ideals preached by the Athenian democratic system. I argue that this is indeed the case.

Patterson on the Expansion of Slavery and the Concept of Freedom

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 aspect of 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. Scholars agree, he notes, 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 caused those who were free to contemplate more directly the meaning and possibility of unfreedom — and the result of this was not a movement toward emancipation or manumission.

Slavery, Democratic Practice, and Political Solidarity

The larger question remains: to what extent was the institution of slavery essential to the development of Athenian democracy — that is, would Athenian democracy 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, and 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 gap between theory and practice 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 Patterson alludes to is one in which slavery, to be made tenable for the slaveowners, required constructing the slave as an other. Once this distinct identity was established, solidarity within Athenian society coalesced around the need for the slave as a separate conceptual category. This dynamic helps explain how ancient Greek social structures reinforced political hierarchy even within a nominally democratic system.

Conclusion

What Patterson ultimately demonstrates is that a slaveowning society defines the ruling class in ways we might not assume it does. Slavery was not incidental to the development of Athenian democracy; it was structurally embedded in how Athenians understood freedom, citizenship, and political solidarity. The democratic ideals Athens bequeathed to later civilizations cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the institution of slavery that helped give those ideals their shape and their limits.

Works Cited

Patterson, Orlando. "The Greek Origins of Freedom." In Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in the History of Western Civilization. Ed. Joseph Mitchell and Helen Buss Mitchell. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. Print.