The History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 3 (of 3)St. John, James Augustus
History
The History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 3 (of 3)
St. John, James Augustus
Greece -- Social life and customs
The Chians, as I have already observed, are said to have been the first
Grecian people who engaged in a regular slave-trade.[54] For, although
the Thessalians and Spartans possessed, at a period much anterior, their
Penestæ and their Helots, they obtained them by different means: the
latter, by reducing to subjection the ancient Achæan inhabitants of
Peloponnesos;[55] the former, by their conquests over the Magnesians,
Perrhæbians, and Bœotians of Arnè. But the Chians possessed only such
barbarian slaves as they had purchased with money, in which they more
nearly resembled the slave-holding nations of modern times.[56] Other
circumstances, likewise, in the history of slavery among the Chians,[57]
strongly suggest the parallel, and deserve to be studied with more care
than appears to have been bestowed upon them. We have here, perhaps, the
first type of the Maroon wars, though on a smaller scale, and marked by
fewer outbreaks of atrocity. It is not, indeed, stated that the females
were flogged, though throughout Greece the males were so corrected; but,
whatever the nature of the severities practised on them may have
been,[58] the yoke of bondage was found too galling to be borne,[59] and
whole gangs took refuge in the mountains. Fortunately for them, the
interior of the island abounded in fastnesses, and was, in those days,
covered with forest.
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Footnote 54:
Steph. Byzant. v. Χῖος. p. 758. b. Arrian. in Indic. p. 529.
Footnote 55:
Cœl. Rhodig. xxv. 19.
Footnote 56:
Athen. vi. 88.
Footnote 57:
The servile wars of Sicily assumed a far more important character, and
resembled rather those civil commotions in states in which one
division of the citizens carries on hostilities against the other; for
the wealth of the islanders increasing rapidly after the expulsion of
the Carthaginians, they purchased great multitudes of slaves, chiefly
from the East, whom they employed in the usual drudgery, and treated
with extraordinary rigour, branding them in the body like
cattle:—Χαρακτῆρα ἐπέβαλλον καὶ στιγμὰς τοῖς σώμασιν. Diodor. Sicul.
34. ap. Phot. Biblioth. Cod. 244. p. 384. Bekk.
Footnote 58:
We may probably, however, form some conjecture respecting the injuries
they endured from the description of the atrocities practised by the
Sicilians against their slaves. These unhappy men were compelled, as
history informs us, to forego even the common reward of labour, and,
though they toiled incessantly for their owners, to provide for their
daily subsistence by plunder and murder:—βαρέως δ᾽ αὐτοῖς κατά τε τὰς
ὑπηρεσίας ἐχρῶντο, καὶ ἐπιμελείας παντελῶς ὀλίγης ἠξίουν ὅσα τε
ἐντρέφεσθαι καὶ ὅσα ἐνδύσασθαι· ἐξ ὠν οἱ πλείους ἀπὸ λῃστείας τὸ ζῇν
ἐπορίζοντο, καὶ μεστὰ φόνον ἦν ἅπαντα καθάπερ στρατευμάτων
διεσπαρμένων τῶν λῃστῶν. Diodor. Sicul. ap. Phot. ubi supra.
Footnote 59:
They, as well as the Achæans, had a prison called Zetreion, where
their slaves worked in chains. Etym. Mag. 411. 33.
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