Once again, we're going to pause for a moment in the chronological push, after the Athenian disaster, or the Syracusan triumph in Sicily. And we're going to stop to think about groups that are fundamentally important to Athenian life. But about whom the evidence is very, very sparse and contradictory. And that is foreigners and slaves. We've talked about the role of women already, a little bit. But today we're going to think about two other groups that were marginalized. That is to say marginalized in terms of their political presence. Because, as I've said before and just repeat again very quickly, a citizen is by definition not a women, not a foreigner, not a slave. Now, I know that demographic tables are almost guaranteed to have people shoot by them, but pause for just a moment and look at these. The numbers are very chancy. They're the best estimates of some of the best scholars around. I've done sort of two slices, one right at the end of the Persian war and one just before the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. And you can see among other things, a couple of things that really reach out, one is that the number, that the increase in the number of citizens is relatively small. This is almost certainly due to the fact that, as we noted in 451, the law for citizenship was changed so that a citizen now had to have a mother who was the daughter of a citizen. The reason for this restriction has been debated and has practically everything else. But one reason may have been to stem the influx of foreigners into Athens, as Athens was reaching a peak of prosperity. Another might have been to slow or to prevent what we have seen before, which is the alliance by intermarriage among the elites, so that I betroth my daughter to your son who is from somewhere else. We would bring the family fortunes together or vice versa. So, that's not going to happen anymore. At least not in a way that can created citizens. The other thing that, as you can see, is that in terms of percentage, the estimated number of resident foreigners almost doubles and the number of slaves, perhaps, as much as triples. This is a result, we'll come back to this as the need for slaves in various forms of production. Now, there's another problem that we have to confront, in addition to the chancy evidence, as I've said before. And that is that the Greeks did not think as we do in terms of economy or economics. Obviously, they engaged in exchange of goods and labor. But it was sort of subsumed into the larger idea of the household of oikonomeia, that's what economics comes from. And so, when we're talking about the Greek economy, we're talking about what one great scholar has called a phenomenon that is embedded in cultural values. And one of those cultural values is a very ambivalent attitude toward work. The Greek word for work, like the English word labor can mean both manual activity and pain, when woman goes into labor to give birth. The work that people performed was seen as essential, of course, but kind of regrettable. It was something that one had to do. Can think all the way back to Hesiod and the idea of a decline from a Golden Age when men didn't have to work to our age where we have to work day in and day out just to keep our body and soul together. And this attitude toward work extended not only to agricultural labor, the foundation of this entire society, but even to, what we would think of skilled labor or craft. The Greeks were aware that they depended on skilled craftsmen to make everything from the various vases that we have been looking at throughout the course, to the buildings and the sculptures to much more humble objects cookware, tables and beds, chairs and the like that we all need everyday, but look, at the god of craft. He's Hephaestus. He is here shown in a famous scene from the Iliad where he has crafted new armor for Achilles and is giving it to Achilles' mother Thetas. But Hephaestus is a brilliant craftsman, a master. His workshop is described as a, a sort of wonder world of automata moving around. But he's lame, he's the only god whom we would describe as disabled, to use the current phrase. And he is honored in Athens with a temple that overlooks the agora, the central meeting place, marketplace, etcetera. He is linked in cult with Athena and with Prometheus, but he's not one of the elite deities on Olympus. This is just by way of prologue now or prelude, to thinking about these two populations, that of foreigners and slaves. We've already seen or mentioned, at least, that a lot of work in Athens was done by foreigners and slaves. You might remember the great temple called the Erechtheion on the acropolis. It was begun in 421. It was not finished until some 15 years later, right near the end of the war. And we have the construction records for the Erechtheion and they show us that 24 citizens, 42 metics, and 20 slaves worked side by side and were paid at an equal rate depending on the complexity of the work that they had to do. The carving of stone, primarily. So, what are metics? Well the word is, again, as so many of the words we've seen, based on the stem oikos, home, household, house, and a metic is someone who has changed his residence. I'm just putting this up very quickly just so, to familiar, familiarize you with a couple of the terms I'll be using. The metic has to pay a special metic tax, called a metoikion. And has to have a citizen sponsor, called a prostates. In addition, a metic had to perform military service when he was called on. So, how do we understand metic status. The older interpretation the, perhaps, the oldest interpretation where that the metics were sort of exploited and down trodden. And then, there was a reversal and it was claimed that metic status was actually a kind of privilege status for foreigners. And now, it's sort of the, the needle has settled between these two extremes. And metic status has been described correctly, I think, as a mixed blessing. After all having to pay tax and serving the army is not entirely a benefit. What is it that made you a metic? Well, we have a late inscription that says a metic is when a foreigner comes to the city. If he is residence for a short time, he's just a visitor, after that time, he has to pay a tax and become a metic. We don't know how long that period of time was. Again another caution, our emphasis is so strongly skewed toward Athens. There were resident foreigners in virtually all the other Polis, except for Sparta, of course. But we know most about Athens, so once again, we're going to talk primarily about the Athenian situation. It might have been about a month that a foreigner had before he had to find a citizen sponsor and register as a metic. A metic had a certain amount of legal protection, but had no political rights, obviously, could not vote in the assembly. Morevover, metics could not own land in Attica. Nor could they intermarry with Athenians. So, they're fairly restricted. Why do it? The answer is simple, money, economic opportunity. The location of metics in society were primarily, they were primarily tradesman, shopkeepers, craftsmen. On this wonderful vase, you see the goddess Athena visiting a workshop where they're carving sculptures of horses and the master is sitting off to the side and the workmen with his hammer and chisel is standing behind the horse that is near completing. So the, as I mentioned before, the relation, Athena, who is a goddess of craft as well with Hephaestus. Metics were, could become extremely wealthy and socially very important. I'm going to have one case study, there is a man named Lysseus. He was a famous orator, he was originally, ironically, from Syracuse. He came to Athens, associated with the Athenian elite. During the Oligarchic Revolution, which we'll be talking about shortly, he had to leave Athens and during the same revolution, his brother was killed, but he provided enormous benefits to the Athenian state. He bought a lot of military equipment for the democratic army. And despite this, he was never granted citizenship. He became one of the, the best known orators or speech writers of his time. But even so, the Athenian is so jealously guarded their citizen prerogatives. The metics were very, very important, but if you think back to the little demographic table I just showed you, they were much less in number than slaves. To understand slavery, we have to understand a few fundamental principles. One is that there is a variety of unfree labor. Think, for example, of the helots at Sparta or those who had been sold into death bondage in Athens before the reforms of Solon. There's also serfdom, and then, there is whats called chattel slavery that is when one person actually owns another. These are all fundamentally different, but they're also all together fundamentally different from free labor working for a wage. Chattel slaves were present in all Greek communities. And their sources for slaves were, primarily, captives in war. And then, various markets, especially in Ionia. We've talked already, about the suppression of Milos and how the adult males were killed and the women and children sold into slavery. In Athens, after the laws of Solon, no Athenian could hold another Athenian as a slave and slaves were, therefore, were by definition always foreigners. And so, they were from a variety of different original communities. And so, they were atomized. There was no slave consciousness, despite what some comedies might have us believe. And there was, as a result, never anything like a slave revolt. The one place we did see a revolt was in Sparta, but that was the helots, who had a common ethnic identity as Messenians. What did slaves do? They worked. They worked in agriculture, of course, they also worked in workshops. This is a famous vase by the so-called foundry painter and it shows a group of workmen, almost certainly, slaves and what they're doing is they're building life-sized bronze statues. It looks like some sort of awful scene of slaughter, but this is not human corpses here or a human head or a human hand and foot hung off the wall, but parts of a statue that are being assembled. And you see one gentlemen squatting there stoking the fire. Slaves were also, of course, used for the dangerous jobs. In quarries, for example, or as we've seen before in the mines. And slaves were also used in household service. Some of the most extraordinary examples we have of what one might call slave iconography are from the funerary steles. That is these gravestones that were set up in Athens. Here you have a woman who has died, who has a tiny slave standing next to her. That's probably her son standing in front of her. As far back as the Odyssey, we see household slaves. There is Euryclea, the old nurse who identifies Odysseus. There is Eumaeus, the loyal swineherd who becomes Odysseus's ally as he reestablishes his control. Imagery both sculpted and painted shows us the relation between mistress and female slave. Here is one who is bringing a box of some kind of adornment. One of the things you might notice is, as we've said before, that if the mistress stood up she would be much taller than the slave. Just as on that vase painting where the slave is depicted as tiny. And one of the most famous and most touching of these is from the so-called Kerameikos in Athens, the so-called stele of Hegeso, that is her name. And she's there as her slave brings her a box of jewelry, which was probably originally painted on the background here. These give us a sense of slaves as sort of part of the household, which of course they were. But as kind of treated all right. We have to be very, very careful about this. Because we have to remember that a slave, whether a female slave here, is property. Slaves could also work as tutors for the young. Here is a statue of a pedagog, as he's called, with his young charge walking together. I repeat, slaves were property. They could be bought, sold, loaned out, rented, bequeathed in a will. They owned no property of their own. They could be subject to abuse of virtually any kind except for murder, that had less to do with human rights than of the pollution that attached to murder of any kind. We don't want to romanticize the image of slave life. In some households, obviously, they were treated well and they were esteemed. In others, they were clearly brutalized, used for among other things, the sexual release of the master, etcetera. There's enough evidence, evidence about this as well. Give you one small example of the status of a slave. Which is that if a slave was to give evidence in a law court, he could do so only under torture, because it was assumed that otherwise, he'd lie. There are some counter examples. A slave, if freed, would become a metic, with his former owner as his sponsor, as his prostates. And we have one extraordinary story of a man named Pasion, who in the late fifth century, was bought off the slave block by a family of bankers in Athens. He was brilliant, honest, extremely hard working. He was eventually freed by his masters and was given control of the business. As master of this bank, he doubt his owned slaves himself, but he rose to a position of enormous wealth. And he had his eye set on that elusive goal of citizenship. He gave fantastic service to the Athenians. He outfitted triremes, he supplied shields and weapons, and finally, remarkably, he was granted citizenship which then, of course, would be handed down to his descendants. This, I think is a one-off, as we say, but it's clear that some slaves could thrive and prosper. What about the Athenian attitude toward them. Well, again, evidence is very, very sketchy. We have one remarkable pamphlet, which in the nineteenth century was dubbed the Old Oligarch. And this is a political screed that was written by somebody who was opposed to democracy, in the fifth century. It's a great it's a great piece of evidence to have voice from the other side and the old Oligarch just reviles democratic practice, but he says the Athenian democracy is good as, is good at what it does. It supports those who support it. And one of the pieces of evidence that he uses for the general leveling effect of Athenian democracy is, that you're walking down the street and you can be jostled by a foreigner or a slave. And you're not even allowed to hit them, because you can't distinguish them from the ordinary Athenian citizen. We'll come back to the Old Oligarch a little bit later, but one of the things that has happened in the study of ancient history which I find most interesting and sort of most heartening is the new scholarly attention being played, being paid to these groups that were formerly acknowledged, but were never really studied. And I think that by looking in a little bit more detail at the lives of foreigners and slaves, we get a much more three dimensional picture of what's happening in the Polis of Athens and elsewhere.
