Who Owned the Slaves in Lysias 1.42? The Role of Slavery in Agriculture and Criminal Violence in Classical Athens

Did Athenian Slaves Live Independently on Farmsteads? A Survey of Wider Evidence

Cautious suggestions that slaves might have lived independently on farmsteads in the Athenian countryside have been advanced on the basis of several inscriptions that indicate agricultural residencies that seem unlikely to have served as a primary residence for their owner or, in certain cases, their lessee. For example, in nine leases of land from Classical Athenian public bodies, Jones has argued we can infer some form of residency on the properties leased.^[4] In some cases the lessees of these properties were wealthy and this is potentially indicative of a broader trend in who was renting them. One lessee is known as a member of Athens’ most prestigious families.^[5] The cost of two other leases, one priced at 200 drachmae (IG II² 2499) per year and another at 600 (IG II² 1241), is equally telling.

Of course, lease inscriptions do not tell us for certain whether these buildings were occupied year-round or, if they were, who occupied them. Nevertheless, frequent residency often seems to be implied by the mention of a residential building (oikia) on the property and the stipulations of some leases which demand intensive cultivation of the rented land. Jones raises the question: what was the purpose of these houses and what are we to make of these stipulations? Are we really to believe that wealthy men rented these farms for a small period of time and lived on them themselves?^[6] One of Jones’ suggestions, that it may have been slaves belonging to these elite lessees who lived in these apparently residential farmsteads is, at least, plausible.^[7] A comparable but far more extensive set of inscriptions recording the leasing of land belonging to the Temple of Apollo in second-century BC Delos may be telling in this regard. In these inscriptions, it is much clearer that the lessees were men of high status.^[8] This, in addition to the fact that they sometimes leased multiple and often remote properties strongly suggests that they did not live in the buildings occasionally mentioned in the Delian leases.^[9] The survival of a law regulating this leasing of temple land, moreover, further suggests that the farm buildings in question frequently served to house a slave workforce owned by the lessee, since the law dictates that such a workforce should be seized in lieu of debt.^[10]

Outside of lease inscriptions, there is also an Athenian horos inscription (a record of land used as security) that lists a house in the city in addition to a house on a farm (oikia kai chōrion kai oikia hē en astei) owned by the same household.^[11] Jones also suggests that the specification of an oikia “in the countryside” in another horos inscription is meant to differentiate it from a second oikia owned by the same family in the city.^[12] Like the leases of public properties, these inscriptions indicate residential buildings on agricultural land – buildings that probably did not serve as the primary home of their owners and may well have housed slave workforces. Indeed, Pečírka suggested in the early 1970s that the house on the farm mentioned in the first of these horoi inscriptions was occupied by slaves, while their absentee owner lived in the city.^[13]

Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue on household management, the oikonomikos, provides the most extensive description of an Athenian agricultural estate dependent on a slave workforce in surviving Athenian literature. Before we move on to discuss one final piece of epigraphic evidence that has been used to argue that slaves might have lived independently on farmsteads, there are some observations we might make on the residency of slaves in the oikonomikos in light of the evidence we have looked at so far. Ischomachos, the model householder of Xenophon’s dialogue, is a wealthy citizen who lives in Athens and regularly ventures out to the countryside to take care of agricultural properties which are worked by slaves. As to the residency of these slaves, it is stated that they live in gendered accommodation to prevent them having unsanctioned intercourse with each other (9.5), and also that one of the duties of Ischomachos’ wife will be to send out from their city household slaves who “work outside”.

“ ‘Then I will have to do these things too?’ said my wife. ‘Indeed you will,’ said I, ‘your duty will be to stay inside the house and send out those slaves who work outside while supervising those who work indoors.’ ”

ἦ καὶ ἐμὲ οὖν, ἔφη ἡ γυνή, δεήσει ταῦτα ποιεῖν; δεήσει μέντοι σε, ἔφην ἐγώ, ἔνδον τε μένειν καὶ οἷς μὲν ἂν ἔξω τὸ ἔργον ᾖ τῶν οἰκετῶν, τούτους συνεκπέμπειν οἷς δ᾽ ἂν ἔνδον ἔργον ἐργαστέον. (Xen. Oec. 7.35)

From this, it would appear that the household’s agricultural slaves reside with Ischomachos and his wife in Athens and are directed out to work in the countryside every day. However, another passage that informs us of Ischomachos’ residency in the city describes his morning routine as such:

“I get up at a time when I will be able to find anyone at home if I want to pay them a visit… If there is nothing I need to do in the city, then my slave leads my horse to my farm in the country, and I take a walk by going there on foot… When I arrive at the farm, I may find planting, clearing, sowing or harvesting in progress. I observe whatever is going on and make any changes in its method if I know something better.”

ἀνίστασθαι μὲν ἐξ εὐνῆς εἴθισμαι ἡνίκ᾽ <ἂν> ἔτι ἔνδον καταλαμβάνοιμι, εἴ τινα δεόμενος ἰδεῖν τυγχάνοιμι… ἂν δὲ μηδὲν ἀναγκαῖον ᾖ κατὰ πόλιν, τὸν μὲν ἵππον ὁ παῖς προάγει εἰς ἀγρόν, ἐγὼ δὲ περιπάτῳ χρῶμαι τῇ εἰς ἀγρὸν ὁδῷ… ἐπειδὰν δὲ ἔλθω εἰς ἀγρόν, ἄν τέ μοι φυτεύοντες τυγχάνωσιν ἄν τε νειοποιοῦντες ἄν τε σπείροντες ἄν τε καρπὸν προσκομίζοντες, ταῦτα ἐπισκεψάμενος ὅπως ἕκαστα γίγνεται, μεταρρυθμίζω, ἐὰν ἔχω τι βέλτιον τοῦ παρόντος. (Xen. Oec. 11.14–16)

It is noteworthy that, although Ischomachos leaves the city in the morning, he finds his slaves already working when he arrives at his farm in the country.

The implication of the earlier passage seems to be that some of Ischomachos’ agricultural workforce was based in his city house. It does not, however, mean that the entirety of Ischomachos’ slave workforce lived in the city. It might well suit a larger household to keep some portion of their workforce in their city residency and send them out to different fields as needed while keeping another living on various farms. This would be especially true if the holdings of many Athenian households were scattered throughout the countryside due to land fragmentation, as we have good reason to believe many were.^[14] We need not even assume that the slaves directed to perform work away from the city house by Ischomachos’ wife were agricultural labourers. Other jobs might feasibly entail being sent “outside” the household. For example, Ischomachos refers at one point to his wife sending out a slave to the market (8.22).

There are two further points that support the idea that Ischomachos might have been imagined housing slaves on his land. The first is that Ischomachos highly values the productivity of his slave workforce; one gets the sense of this from the second passage quoted above.^[15] How much easier would it have been to exploit their labour to the fullest if at least a portion of them did not have to travel every day to a field? Secondly, Ischomachos’ slave workforce was expected to function independently of his supervision regardless of where they lived. From the quoted passage, these slaves at the very least started their daily work without him and, soon afterwards in the dialogue, Ischomachos states outright that his permanent presence on the farm is not required because he owns several enslaved supervisors (epitropoi) whom he trusts to manage his fields in his absence (12.2–5).

On the subject of epitropoi, a damaged fourth-century calendar engraved in stone has survived nearby a small farmstead in the Agrileza valley, along with a partially legible three-line inscription underneath it, which Merle Langdon and Livingston Watrous have convincingly argued should read a man’s name, followed by his title: “epitropos of this estate”.^[16] The farm’s owner was apparently a different man named Timesios, as indicated by a different inscription on the same property recording an invocation to the goddess Artemis by Timesios and his son.^[17] Langdon and Watrous argue, on the basis of this inscription and the small size of the remains of the farmhouse, that the epitropos was permanently based here away from his master. Their argument has been more recently followed by other specialists on Greek agriculture, including Carslen, Chandezon, and McHugh.^[18] Moreover, as Chandezon argues, the lack of a demotic in the man’s name may indicate that he was either a slave or a freedman. If this is correct, a logical further supposition is that he was owned by Timesios, as Ischomachos did his own epitropoi.

We know that there was a not inconsiderable group of slaves in Athens who worked (and often lived) independently from their master. Several slaves, in fact, had little to no oversight and instead returned their master a rent, called an apophora, from their independent labour (the remainder of their profits they were allowed to keep to maintain themselves and as an incentive).^[19] One example is a charcoal-burner named Syriskos in Menander’s “The Arbitration” who lives independently with his wife. The couple are depicted travelling a considerable distance to pay their master an apophora at his urban home (376–380).^[20] Obviously, then, highly independent slaves living alone in the countryside was not in itself unimaginable in Attica. Notably, however, these are the only certain example of rural apophora-paying slaves in our evidence and neither were they strictly involved in the sphere of arable agriculture. Indeed, it has been suggested that since arable farming was the most honourable way to make money according to Athenian sources, Athenians were more likely to take a direct role in managing agricultural slaves than in other sectors of the economy.^[21]

That is, to be clear, not to say from our highly limited evidence that Athenian slaves were never exploited for rents in the sphere of agriculture. However, it is also possible that, if agricultural properties were occupied by the slaves of a landowner that lived elsewhere, said owner may have travelled to the farm fairly regularly to check up on their work, in the manner described in Xenophon’s oikonomikos.^[22] This would probably also entail a master taking a direct role in providing for the maintenance of his slaves, so as to avoid the need for them to have possession of any of the farm’s profits and so he could directly collect the fruits of their labour for himself. Such a system would avoid the need for a system of rent extraction and its costs.

Even outside of apophora relations, we find slaves undertaking surprisingly independent work in Athens. A good example is Antigenes, a slave of a certain Nikoboulos, who appears to have collected rent from a silver refinery belonging to his master while Nikoboulos was abroad in the region of the Black Sea on business (Dem. 37.6; 22–3).^[23] This example also serves as a reminder that Athenians travelled abroad – not only for business but also for military service – and that many of those who possessed slaves must have frequently left some living and working at home (though the supervision of wives might be expected to help keep them in check, as we can again infer from Xenophon’s oikonomikos). There were evidently many situations in which Athenian slaves could work and even live independently of their master. Another consequence of the apparent pervasiveness of land fragmentation (mentioned above) was surely that landowners could not be expected to personally supervise work on all of their fields simultaneously.

There are also sources that indicate that individual slaves could be allowed a considerable degree of independence in agricultural work. A passage of Aristophanes’ Peace describes a slave being called from his work in his master’s vineyard where he is working apparently unsupervised (1146–1148). In Demosthenes’ Against Kallikles, we are told that Kallaros, a slave of the speaker, had been indicted for building a wall on his master’s land which caused damage to his neighbour’s property (55.31). We are also told that Kallaros had been convicted on these charges (55.34), meaning at the very least that Athenian judges could accept that a slave might exercise individual autonomy in the agricultural work of his master’s estate.^[24] It seems evident from these sources that Athenian agricultural slaves were not always closely monitored. Some were expected to work independently on behalf of their master.

Numerous scholars, then, have noted bits of epigraphic evidence that suggested to their mind that Athenians may have kept slave workforces residing separately on farmsteads and their conclusions are in keeping with what we know about Athenian slavery more generally. Indeed, partially or entirely absentee landowners managing their estates through enslaved proxies was a feature of agricultural production throughout ancient history. Arrangements of this kind are described in the “Odyssey” and the writings of the Roman agronomists.^[25] As well as inscriptions from Delos we have already discussed, the Spartan system of helotage extracted rents from an independent population of rural slaves.^[26] The Gortyn Code mentions farms in which slaves reside and cattle “belonging” to slaves (I.Cret. IV 72; IV 33–40) – though, it should be noted, in the context of who would inherit (and actually own) these assets after the death of the slaves’ owner.^[27] That this implies agricultural slaves with a good deal of independence is argued by Lewis.^[28] The adoptive parents of Daphnis in Longus’ Greek novel “Daphnis and Chloe” are slaves who live in the countryside of Lesbos under the Roman Empire, alongside poor rural freepersons. They work the estate of their city-dwelling master, who visits the estate only very rarely (3.26.3; 3.31.2–3; 4.8.4–15.4). Nevertheless, Athenian evidence for similar methods of slave exploitation is, at present, tenuous.

The Identity of the Slaves in Lysias 1.42

Euphiletos, the speaker of “On the Murder of Eratosthenes”, was defending a charge of murdering his wife’s lover Eratosthenes. The case being made against Euphiletos is somewhat unclear. The murder was carried out when he caught the pair committing adultery in his home and, according to an Athenian law quoted in the delivery of the speech (1.30), killing a man caught in the act of having sex with one’s wife was not illegal (cf. Dem. 23.53). Despite this, it would seem that Euphiletos had either potentially broken some condition of this law or responded in a potentially criminally drastic manner. Whatever the case, Euphiletos’ prosecutors appear to have been basing their case at least partially around an accusation that he plotted the killing and deliberately entrapped Eratosthenes.

Euphiletos admits that he knew of the affair beforehand. Nevertheless, the speech claims that he had not deliberately enticed Eratosthenes into his wife’s bed the day of the murder (37–42), as his accusers apparently alleged that he had. Attempting to persuade Athenian judges that he had not entrapped Eratosthenes, Euphiletos says the following:

“Yet if I had known [about the adulterer visiting my wife that night], do you not think that I would have brought slaves and summoned my friends, in order that I might have gone in as safely as possible (for how could I tell whether this terrible man had some sort of weapon?) and so that I might have as many witnesses there as possible?”

καίτοιγε εἰ προῄδη, οὐκ ἂν δοκῶ ὑμῖν καὶ θεράποντας παρασκευάσασθαι καὶ τοῖς φίλοις παραγγεῖλαι, ἵν᾽ ὡς ἀσφαλέστατα μὲν αὐτὸς εἰσῄα (τί γὰρ ᾔδη εἴ τι κἀκεῖνος εἶχε σιδήριον;), ὡς μετὰ πλείστων δὲ μαρτύρων τὴν τιμωρίαν ἐποιούμην. (Lys. 1.42)

As we can see, Euphiletos refers to slaves, in addition to friends, that he would have brought with him had he planned to lure his wife’s lover into a trap.^[29] As noted in the introduction of this paper, the majority of commentators on the speech believe we cannot know who these slaves belonged to. Hunter and Klees, on the other hand, insisted that these slaves belonged to Euphiletos and lived on his farm in the countryside.^[30] Neither provided much in the way of argument regarding their interpretation, but a cogent one can be put forward, based both on the passage itself and on corroborative evidence.

It should first be made clear, however, that what matters for the purposes of this essay’s wider argument is not whether or not Euphiletos could actually have summoned male slaves. Logographers may have felt it was in their client’s interest to lie about any number of individual details. Neither does it even really matter if this was not a real court case and Euphiletos a fictional character, as has been suggested.^[31] What matters is that this speech was written to be a convincing piece of rhetoric and we should therefore treat it as striving to be internally logical to its contemporary Athenian audience. Lysias could just as easily have elided any mention of slaves without much harming his argument here. By their inclusion, “On the Murder of Eratosthenes” suggests that someone in Euphiletos’ situation could be expected to call on enslaved men if he were planning criminal violence. As we will see shortly, his situation was that of a farmer living in an urban residence in which no male slaves resided, as is detailed at length in the earlier narrative of the speech.

Euphiletos’ statement contrasts the preparation of slaves and the rounding up of associates as two separate acts conducted on two different groups. If his statement was meant to be read as “I would gather my friends and their slaves”, it is certainly a peculiar way to phrase it. He would, moreover, have needed his friends’ permission – Athenians found the Spartan law allowing Spartiates to borrow freely their neighbour’s helots remarkable (Xen. Lac. 6.3; Aristot. Pol. 1263a35–7). Slaves in Athens were not available for use by the wider public. Admittedly, the hiring of slaves might be phrased as a differentiable action from summoning friends. There certainly were slaves for rent in classical Athens.^[32] However, there are numerous reasons to doubt that this was Lysias’ meaning here. For one thing, this would imply that Euphiletos would have travelled to an area of Athens where slaves could be rented and brought back to his house enslaved day labourers whose nerve and propensity for violence he would presumably have been unaware of.

Moreover, the idea that one could hire slaves for an illegal assault on another citizen – let alone a murder – is problematic in itself. Slaves could be prosecuted as legally culpable for crimes they committed, with their master being held ultimately liable.^[33] The same would appear to be true for rented slaves.^[34] In other words, a hired slave could be prosecuted for participating in the events described here and, ultimately, their master would pay the price. It seems unlikely, therefore, that masters regularly rented slaves for violent purposes, or that slaves (whose loyalty to the person renting them went only so far as their masters’ orders) could be assumed to willingly participate in violence by the person who rented them without being instructed to by their master. Moreover, if this passage were referring to hiring help, why restrict this possibility to slaves? Sources also indicate the availability of free labour for temporary work.^[35]

I do not think it unfair to posit that if we knew for certain that Euphiletos owned male slaves, the safe assumption would be that it was to them he was referring in the passage in question. The problem is that male slaves do not appear anywhere else in the speech. There are none at Euphiletos’ house when the murder takes place and Lysias provides a lengthy narration of the events leading up to the murder in enough detail to provide a fairly clear picture of the day-to-day domestic life of Euphiletos’ family, which does not feature any male slaves. However, this need not mean that Euphiletos did not own male slaves, but simply that they did not feature in his urban, domestic, life. The speech claims that Euphiletos lived with his wife, baby son, and a slave girl in an urban area, possibly in Athens itself, because he describes himself returning to it from regular visits to the countryside (1.11; 13; 20; 22–23). He, like a neighbour of his (1.22), was a farmer who travelled from his urban house to a plot of land he owned, as did Ischomachos from Xenophon’s oikonomikos, and on which he could have kept the slaves he mentions.

The main reason others have hesitated to accept that these slaves are Euphiletos’, one suspects, is that Euphiletos’ description of his household seems to indicate it was one of apparently moderate means. This is by no means certainly the case. Indeed, if one accepts that Euphiletos was not a particularly wealthy individual, one must also explain how he was able to acquire the expensive services of Lysias as a speechwriter.^[36] This is a problem which has been discussed at length. Some have argued for a connection between Euphiletos’ victim Eratosthenes and Eratosthenes of the Thirty Tyrants, whose confiscation of Lysias’ family property and execution of his brother is recorded in Lysias’ “Against Eratosthenes” (Lys. 12).^[37] If there was a relationship between the two, the argument goes, then Lysias may have reduced the fee he charged Euphiletos for his services or waived it entirely for the chance at revenge.^[38]

This line of reasoning is most lucidly presented by Todd, who argues that the two were blood relatives.^[39] Eratosthenes is a rarely attested name and both men came from the same tribe, but the lack of any reference to the family history of Eratosthenes in the speech counts against this interpretation.^[40] Todd’s counterargument that Lysias may have wanted to avoid insinuating an ulterior motive for the murder is a good one.^[41] A better explanation may be that the shared names were a coincidence and that Euphiletos was not quite so poor as the narrative he delivered suggests. Rich enough, in other words, to own a few slaves that he kept on a farmstead. Todd’s reason for doubting this explanation is not as well-founded. He writes: “there is no indication of farm buildings sufficient for permanent residence, even by slaves”.^[42] Nothing specific is said about Euphiletos’ land at all, but we have good reason to think that some kind of shelter existed on it because Euphiletos sometimes stayed there overnight (11; 20). He may have slept under the stars or carried an impermanent shelter with him, but either of these options would have been impractical.

A different speech of Lysias, “Against Simon”, also uses the fact that slaves were not brought to the scene of a conflict as evidence that the violence that ensued there was not premeditated (Lys. 3.33). It strengthens the argument of this paper in several regards. The passage is very similar to that of Lysias 1; it mentions friends and slaves that Athenian judges would have expected the speaker to call to his aid:

“Nevertheless, I came unprepared, without calling either friends or slaves or anybody at all, with the exception of this child, who not only could not have helped me in a fight, but also could have given witness under torture to any crime that I might have committed.”

οὕτω δὲ ἦλθον ἀπαράσκευος, ὥστε μήτε φίλους μήτε οἰκέτας μήτε ἄλλον ἄνθρωπον παρακαλέσαι μηδένα, εἰ μὴ τοῦτό γε τὸ παιδίον, ὃ ἐπικουρῆσαι μέν μοι οὐκ ἂν ἐδύνατο, μηνῦσαι δὲ ἱκανὸν ἦν βασανιζόμενον, εἴ τι ἐγὼ ἐξημάρτανον.

The considerable wealth of the speaker in Lysias 3 is apparent from reference to liturgies he has undertaken in the past (3.47). Since slave ownership is more or less ubiquitous in fictional and real elite households we know of, it is therefore almost a certainty that he possessed several slaves.^[43] To suggest, in this case, that he meant that he would have brought someone else’s slaves requires an explanation as to why the speaker could not have meant that he would bring his own. Again, one would have to assume that he was reminding the judges that his friends might also have brought or sent slaves in a remarkably strange way, or that he was referring to hiring slaves.

The only way to make sense of these passages as referring to the hiring of slaves, to my mind, is to assume the existence of businesses that leased out, essentially, slave thugs (again, the speakers claim they would have helped them participate in an unlawful assault and, in Euphiletos’ case, deliberate murder). This is an interesting possibility. However, would references to hired thugs really be phrased as ambiguous “slaves”? (Note that two different words for slaves are used in both Lys. 1.42 and 3.47, therapontes and oiketēs respectively). There is also little in the way of comparative-historical parallels for such businesses. On the other hand, there are clear parallels for masters using their own slaves as manpower in violent conflict with members of their community. During Odysseus’ homecoming in the “Odyssey”, though some slaves betray Odysseus, it is two loyal slaves, along with his son, who stand beside him in his battle against Penelope’s suitors (e.g. 21.330–45; 22.160–170; 265–269). Odysseus also briefly contemplates trying to raise a force of additional slaves of his from the countryside to further aid his cause (16.305–315). Many centuries later, Cicero in his “For Milo” notes the prominent part that retinues of slaves played in a violent confrontation between two Roman politicians (25–26; 29). In late antiquity, wealthy landowners used groups of slaves as private muscle.^[44] In 15th century Valencia, slaves are documented carrying out violent acts individually or alongside their masters during disputes or ongoing family feuds.^[45] In fact, we need not even look outside classical Athens for comparable examples. A speech of Isaeus describes a slave carrying out a murder on the orders of his master (8.41). Aristotle considered slaves, alongside weapons, as possible accessories to murder not ultimately culpable for the crime (Eth. Nic. 1136b20).

The explanation for the use of slaves for violence is explicable by their legal status and what Patterson has called their “natal alienation”; slaves were beholden to their masters and socially isolated from wider society but for their membership as subordinates of their master’s household.^[46] The divorce of an enslaved person from kinship ties outside their master’s household that might split their allegiances – as well as the power over life and death which masters held over enslaved persons more generally – meant that slaves could be counted on to support their masters reliably in violent acts, should their masters demand it. For these reasons, slaves were probably an attractive tool to purveyors of criminal violence, even more so than hired thugs or friends.

Another advantage to using slaves in illegal activities in Athens, which is pointed out in Lysias 3.47, is that one’s own slaves could only in exceptional cases be compelled to give evidence against them in a court of law. Slaves had to be submitted for torture by their owners in order to give testimony in Athenian court at all, although there is disagreement about the extent to which slaves’ owners ever actually did so.^[47] Fortunately, this is largely irrelevant for the purposes of this present discussion. The evidence makes clear that a litigant was free to refuse to give up their slaves, even if a common rhetorical strategy was to point to this refusal as a sign of guilt. Effectively, therefore, a litigant’s own slaves could not give testimony against him unless he agreed to it. As the speaker of Lysias 3 notes, this was not true of another person’s slaves, such as the adolescent the speaker had brought with him.^[48] In certain cases slaves were offered their freedom for providing evidence against their master, though this appears to have happened only in cases concerning sacrilege or perhaps in those otherwise considered serious enough to be a threat to the city as a whole.^[49] In fact, speakers in two court cases of Lysias who became defendants in such cases pleaded that doing so gave slaves an undesirable amount of power over their masters (5.5; 7.16). Plato, on the other hand, believed considerable rewards and protection should be offered to slave informants in his ideal state (Leg. 9.872c; 11.914a; 917d; 932b) – probably founded on his understanding that illegal conspiracies in classical Athens often involved or were witnessed by slaves who kept them secret. Indeed, the first of Antiphon’s “Tetralogies” claims that the word of slaves should not be trusted specifically when it regarded their own misdemeanours or their “plotting together with” (sunkruptōsi) their masters (2.3.4, cf. 2.4.7).

The ambiguity of the slaves’ identity in Lysias 1.42 deserves an explanation in and of itself: Lysias was a professional, and a famous one, so we should assume he chose his words carefully. One of two possibilities presents itself. Firstly, it may have been the case that the statement was deliberately ambiguous, possibly with the intention of obscuring Euphiletos’ wealth while simultaneously making its point. If this is the case, it is more likely that Lysias was trying to gloss over the extent of Euphiletos’ property, rather than imply out of hand that he was a wealthier individual, based both on Euphiletos’ representation throughout the speech and the fact that it seems to have been wise for a litigant to emphasise their moderate means to Athenian judges.^[50] A second suggestion (and it is worth noting that the reference in Lysias 3.33 is also ambiguous and in this speech the wealth of the speaker was clearly not disguised) is that Lysias believed that Athenians would understand this statement without the need for more precise language. If Lysias thought that the statement was clear to his contemporaries, and the interpretation of it I have argued for in this paper is correct, then we can infer that such situations were relatively normal, and that Athenian judges would not be puzzled by the suggestion that a man living in the city could have slaves living on his country properties. This, in turn, fits well with wider Greek history, the farmhouses rented by wealthy individuals and second houses in the countryside evident in inscriptions, and with literary sources describing autonomous slaves in Athens more generally.

The Exploitation of Slaves Living Independently on Farmsteads – Problems and Solutions for Athenian Slave Owners

The regular supervision of the slaves belonging to Ischomachus (and, as I have suggested, Euphiletus) marks a notable difference between his strategies and those of other non-Athenian, basically absentee, landholders discussed above who kept slaves resident in the countryside – perhaps most notably the Spartans’ methods of exploiting helots in Messenia.^[51] Odysseus’ slave Eumaeus watched over his master’s property while Odysseus was absent during the Trojan war and was able to accumulate his own property from this labour, including a slave of his own (14.61–64). He claims, moreover, that had his master been present over the years, he would have had his own house and wife (14.449–452). In “Daphnis and Chloe”, written many centuries later, the family of Daphnis manage their master’s estate independent of supervision to the extent that Daphnis is a young man before he first meets his master (4.14.2–3). From their labour on this estate, Daphnis’ family reap their own benefit and are said to give gifts (dōra), for example, to their master’s son in gratitude (4.10.3). The ability of these slaves, who worked with little to no oversight from their master, to accumulate property from their masters’ agricultural holdings can be viewed, as in Athenian apophora relations, as at least partially a necessary incentive to motivate their work in their master’s absence.

The far greater direct involvement of an Ischomachos or Euphiletos, in contrast, suggests that their slaves did not hold de facto ownership of land or produce. This is important because while apophora-paying slaves had a financial incentive to perform their labour built into the very system under which they were exploited, this was not true of more directly managed slaves. Absent these incentives, there are several problems we might anticipate slave owners experiencing in seeking to directly exploit a workforce of slaves that lived and often worked independently, which may make the reader hesitant to accept the interpretation of Lysias 1.42 I have argued for so far. Several of these are discussed in the oikonomikos, as are strategies a slave owner might adopt to mitigate them. Masters might fear that slaves would not perform the work expected of them (12.10–16) and that slaves would steal their property (14.2), to list two specific examples.^[52] Xenophon’s answer to these problems is to select as supervisors those of his slaves who show themselves hardworking and trustworthy and to encourage these virtues through a system of material rewards, sexual privileges, and honourable treatment from their master.^[53]

The workforce of Euphiletus was almost certainly much smaller than that of the exorbitantly wealthy Ischomachus, but he, and other Athenians exploiting agricultural slaves in similar ways may also have had a trusted slave or slaves that they depended on for supervision. They may also have offered small incentives to such slaves and their workforce more generally to ensure their cooperation. The promise of manumission would almost certainly have been one of the most crucial tools in maintaining the loyalty of slaves, as stated by another handbook on household management by a student of Aristotle ([Arist.] Oec. 1344b15–18). Another measure that both this handbook (1345a2–5) and Xenophon’s Oikonomikos (12.20) emphasise as critical to a good estate is very frequent direct supervision of its activities by its owner. Even if the presence of Euphiletos on his land, like that of Ischomachos, was not constant enough to provide continuous supervision of his slaves, it would presumably have been enough to ensure they were broadly following whatever schedule for work he had in mind.

Euphiletos’ personal oversight of his slaves brings us to the vital importance of the threat of violence in maintaining these arrangements. Xenophon has Ischomachos mention the punishment of uncooperative slaves but chooses not to have him dwell on the subject.^[54] However, an idea of the consequences for slaves of being caught acting against their masters’ wishes or, caught in deliberate rebellion, can be gleaned from the threat Euphiletos uses to extract information from his slave girl about his wife’s infidelity when he learns of her complicity in the affair:

“ ‘So it is up to you,’ I said, ‘to decide between two options as you wish, either to be whipped and thrown into a mill and for you to experience such suffering forever, or to tell me everything truthfully.’ ”

‘σοὶ οὖν’ ἔφην ‘ἔξεστι δυοῖν ὁπότερον βούλει ἑλέσθαι, ἢ μαστιγωθεῖσαν εἰς μύλωνα ἐμπεσεῖν καὶ μηδέποτε παύσασθαι κακοῖς τοιούτοις συνεχομένην, ἢ κατειποῦσαν ἅπαντα τἀληθῆ’. (Lys. 1.18)

This passage illustrates the coercive tools available to Athenian slave owners.

Another problem which masters might have in exploiting slaves living on their own in the countryside was that these slaves had more opportunity to run away. Slaves sometimes did. We have literary evidence that reveals masters’ fears of this possibility and anecdotes of individual slave refugees, in addition to Thucydides’ (7.27.5) famous account of 20,000 slaves fleeing the attic countryside when Sparta permanently occupied Dekeleia in the Peloponnesian War.^[55] Moses Finley had the following to say about this episode and what it tells us about ancient slavery:

“I should stress very heavily that so many skilled slaves (who must be presumed to have been, on the average, among the best treated) took the risk and tried to flee. The risk was no light one, at least for the barbarians among them: no Thracian or Carian [ethnicities from which Athenians commonly drew slaves] wandering about the Greek countryside without credentials could be sure of what lay ahead in Boeotia or Thessaly.”^[56]

One other reason we know that slaves escaping their bondage was a problem for ancient Greeks was the existence of treaties between poleis for the return of runaway slaves.^[57] These equally demonstrate, however, the very serious steps taken by states to limit the ability of slaves to do so successfully. Flight from slavery was an act of extreme bravery. It carried no certain promise of freedom and the threat of serious consequences if caught.

A well-known article amongst ancient Greek historians argues that the ubiquitous towers dotted around the ancient Athenian countryside and that of Greece more generally were used to supervise slave workforces and keep them locked up at night.^[58] If correct, this suggests a far greater degree of supervision and constraint over slave workforces than argued for here. However, I am inclined to agree with McHugh, who views these towers as serving a primarily defensive purpose on a small, private, scale.^[59] Their use as such is described in a speech of Demosthenes, in which a group of female slaves blockade themselves in a tower in which they lived to protect themselves from overly zealous debt-collectors (46.56). In this case, as possibly in many others, the tower may have served as accommodation for the slave workforce. Nevertheless, the fact that the archaeological evidence of certain towers indicates that they could be locked from the outside need not imply that slaves were locked inside as Morris and Papadopoulos suggest, but might more simply reflect a use of towers to hold produce and valuable tools, if we make the reasonable assumption that its residents might occasionally need to leave it unguarded.

As we saw in the first section of this paper, slaves frequently worked on their own in the Athenian countryside and elsewhere, and not always to earn apophorai. The fact that such slaves might play truant, steal, or run away was no doubt a concern for Athenian slave owners. Nevertheless, it was evidently not enough of a concern to outweigh the advantage of independently working slaves: that a master would not have to invest their time and money in constantly supervising them or hiring someone else to do so. As we have seen in this section, moreover, there were several ways in which slave owners could hope to mitigate any concerns arising from the independence of their slaves, through systems of incentives and threats, alongside semi-regular supervision of their work.

Readers may also question the economic viability of holding slaves in an entirely rural setting. The labour demands of agriculture are highly varied throughout the year, and highest during two short periods of the year (planting and harvesting).^[60] As such, the purchase of slaves as agricultural workers, as opposed to hiring seasonal labourers, has been questioned in the past, probably most notably by Wood.^[61] However, Jameson in the 1970s pointed out evidence for numerous agricultural practices in which a permanent labour force of slaves could be productively employed on Athenian farms year-round.^[62] Such a labour force, moreover, could be supplemented at times of peak labour demand by hired labourers and, one might add, a permanent workforce of slaves could be rented to others throughout the year, to make the most financially of their ownership. Moreover, the residence of slaves in the countryside does not preclude their occasional use for work in an urban centre. Euphiletos travelled to his farm and back to the city in a day; there is no reason to think that slaves could not have made the same trip in reverse. There is, in short, no reason to believe that it was not profitable for Athenian masters to keep slaves living independently on their farms.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that in Lysias 1.42 we can detect a reference to a method of slave exploitation dependent on housing slaves on agricultural plots, a situation that is evidenced in other ancient societies and has been read into Athenian epigraphic evidence in the past, but for which there has been no certain evidence from Athens. Of course, this particular exploitation strategy would not have been practised by every Athenian with slaves. Many will have lived in the countryside with their slaves, as do the Aristophanic heroes Dikaiopolis (“Acharnians”) and Trygaios (“Peace”), for example. Indeed, the notion that there was a single Athenian method of land exploitation oversimplifies the incredibly diverse strategies that exist in any society.^[63] A farmer’s choice of whether to live in the country or an urban area would probably be dependent on such factors as the remoteness of their farm and their personal preferences, as well as whether or not they owned slaves whom they felt they could trust.

Nevertheless, this understanding of Euphiletos’ exploitation of his slaves has interesting implications for Athenian social history, especially if it was not entirely unusual. The residency of landowners like Euphiletos and Ischomachos away from their land in the city is telling about how highly they valued elements of community life and political engagement as noted by Robin Osborne.^[64] Nevertheless, a permanent workforce living on the land may well be indicative of forms of intensive land exploitation in Athens argued for by many, but often thought to be partially incompatible with farmers who have to travel a long distance to their fields.^[65] Lysias 1.42 also suggests, in this context at least, a more active supervisory role played by the slave-owning landowner than in many other examples of slaves living on the land elsewhere in ancient Greece. Lysias 1.42 and 3.47 also suggest the overlooked point that owning slaves could serve as a source of manpower in the kind of hostile confrontations between Athenians that we read of in the Attic Orators or political philosophy. Again, the ambiguity of the passages in Lysias is telling – Athenians would have understood this as a matter of course.

The use of slaves for violence is a strong further indication of their natal alienation and concurrent dependence on the household of their master. Indeed, as well as the strategies of slave owners, this paper also has ramifications for how we understand what it meant to be enslaved and coerced into agricultural work in Athens. Its interpretation of Lysias 1.42 underlines the sometimes-considerable degree of independence certain Athenian slaves experienced, and in particular that of enslaved agricultural workers, who probably made up a significant proportion of Athens’ servile population. The slaves we have discussed in the paper were not free of their master (as indicated by Euphiletos’ forays into the countryside) nor, presumably, from many of the cruelties and indignities of slavery. They lived relatively independent lives, nonetheless. It is a shame that the evidence is insufficient for a detailed study of the impact this had on slave lives, including their relationships with their masters and such factors as manumission rates. This conclusion does, however, give cause for further reflection on these issues, and also on the lives and communities that slaves may have fashioned for themselves living alone in the countryside.^[66]