THE SLAVE STATES OP ANTIQUITY.*
IN this remarkable book Mr. Romaine Paterson has torn away the veil which formed the background of the ancient world, and he shows us, naked and undisguised, the appalling mass of human misery on which rested the civilisation of the most polished nations of antiquity. As we follow the mighty line of Aeschylus and the gracious dialogue of Plato, the urbane philosophy of Horace and the stately music of Virgil, it is difficult not to ignore the harsh realities that underlay those golden centuries. To have been a contemporary of Pericles or to have flourished in the Augustan age is held up as the summit of felicity, without thought of what was the motive-power of Greece and Rome. Mr. Paterson reminds us that behind the splendid facade of Athens the most superficial inquirer must discover an industrial tyranny and workshops full of slaves. The triumphs of Roman civilisation, her palaces, her amphitheatres, her roads, the thousand appanages which made life easy and joyous, were the work of servile hands, of men labouring, often literally, in chains:— " When we remember that the economic systems of all ancient States were organised upon the same basis, and that., in the hope of making that basis permanent, ceaseless activity was kept up in the gold mines of Egypt, in the copper mines of Cyprus and Sinai, in the iron, salt, and sulphur mines of Persia, in European and Asiatic tin, lead, and silver mines, in Caucasian naphtha pits and ruby mines of Bactria, in the quarries of Numidia and Greece, and in the vast brickfields of Rome and Babylon, we are almost able to descry the dim masses of chained men whose labour was the creative force of antiquity. Those States appear to have been incapable of profiting by each other's social and economic errors. Each of them reproduced, even in detail, the same scheme, and they all died bankrupt."
This is Mr. Paterson's thesis,--the Nemesis of nations. He attributes the supineness of India beneath her perennial invaders, the collapse of Babylon before Cyrus, to the uni- versal slavery which left the bulk of the population indifferent to any change of master. It was not only in the Apocalyptic vision that Babylon the Great was typical of the Eternal City. The part played by Rome in the West, as Mr. Paterson justly points out, had long ago been played by Babylon in the East. The Code of Hammurabi is a strange anticipation of the Roman law, and the mighty Babylon which Nebuchad- nezzar builded sprang, like the glories of Rome, from the enforced and unpaid labour of enslaved communities. Her palaces and temples, her walls and her canals, were all the work of captives ; the " navvy " of to-day, the free craftsman of mediaeval Europe, had no place in the social structure of the ancient world.
But it is in Greece and Rome, nations of our own Aryan stock, of whose literature and laws and philosophy we are the heirs and transmitters, that the dark, side of antiquity is most minutely displayed. It is a shock to all our notions to conceive of Athens, the nurse of freedom, as a slave State pure and simple; but such was the fact :— "This gleaming city was one of the great slave markets of the ancient world. She passed special laws for the protection of slave dealers, upon whose prosperity part' of her revenues depended. A tax was levied on the sale of slaves, and the oftener a human being changed. hands the better for the State. Her slave merchants carried on business both wholesale and retail. During war they were allowed to follow the armies, and were afforded special facilities for purchasing prisoneis and for importing or exporting them. Owing to her position as a naval power, Athens enjoyed a monopoly in this merchandise of the • The Nemesis of Nations: Studies in History. The Ancient World. By W. Bomome Patorson. London X. M. Dent and Co..[the. id. set.] human body, and her ships, laden with the human freight, kept lying between such slave centres as Chios, Samos, Cyprus, and
In the market a special place was reserved for the exhibition of the slaves ; the chalk which covered their feet was the con- ventional sign that they bad traversed the foam of the sea. And the most melancholy side of Greek life was the doom that awaited the free-born citizens of rival States who succumbed to bow and spear. The unwritten law that Greeks should never enslave Greeks broke down early in the Peloponnesian War. The menace of slavery was never absent from Greek life, and freedom was guaranteed to no man. Amid the captive multitude gathered from the heart of Asia, from the Persian Gulf, and from the coasts of the Black Sea might be heard all the dialects of Hellas,—Doric, Aeolic, and Ionic. Nor did birth or nationality, age or sex, exempt the " bodies," as these human chattels were termed in the slang of the slave market, from the rough physical diagnosis of the intending purchaser. A slave auction in ancient Athena differed little from a similar function in New Orleans or in Richmond before the war. Simon Degree has his original in the slave-dealers whom Plautus has " con- veyed" from the lost comedies of Diphilus and Menander.
A horror of mechanical labour was engrained in the cultured Greek of the decadence. "Any action," we are told, " which contorted the body of a freeman was condemned "; and Plato was at one with Aristotle in regarding labour with the bands as unworthy of a free citizen of Athens. There would have been few loiterers in the Porch or the Academy but for the toiling multitudes who formed the wealth of the Athenian man-about-town. " War, politics, athletics, philosophy, and in a more restricted sense music, were the proper occupations of a gentleman. An unproductive minority were the spectators of the compulsory labour of thousands of slaves," whose abundance and cheapness'crushed free labOur out of existence. The bakers, the carpenters, the shoesmiths, the spinners, were all in turn forced into the ranks of the unemployed. Almost the whole industrial activity of the State was carried on by the servile population, whose masters were only overseers, drawing incomes from the involuntary labour of those who were their captives
"Athenian society was based upon a system of kidnapping and pressgang. If a citizen took a walk into the country he saw agricultural labourers working chained in the fields. If he. went into a friend's garden he found that the gardener was a slave and probably a Persian, because the Athenians, who were lovers of gardens, preferred the Oriental methods of horticulture which at that period were famous. If, again, an Athenian returned to Athens to call upon another friend, he was admitted by a slave porter."
And although the nobler minds among poets and philosophers stirred uneasily in the face of this daily crime against humanity, the Greek law was pitiless. The voluntary testimony of a slave was inadmissible both, in civil and in criminal proceedings ; to possess any value it had to be extracted by torture. Experts called Baaanistae conducted the examination, and we have an inventory of their imple- ments not unworthy of the Spanish Inquisition. A slave's only chance of tolerable treatment lay in his market value. Life was cheap enough in the field-gangs, and the ordinary domestics met with scant indulgence unless they were endowed with special accomplishments.
But the darkest lot of the Athenian slave was in the silver mines of Laurion, the extreme southern promontory of Sunium's grassy steep. Thence was derived the main revenue of Athens, apart from the tribute of the confederate islands earmarked for the maintenance of her fleet ; there were found the sinews of war, the money for her statues and her temples. Needless to say, that the miners were slaves, farmed out by Athenian capitalists, of whom Nicias, the devout hero of Thucydides, was the most famous. They have left indelible traces behind them, the actual tools with which they fought their way through the hard rock, creating galleries as they went,—iron hammers, chisels with bent edges where the blows had been struck, shovels, pickaxes, and spades. Two thousand shafts have been discovered, some of these reaching to a depth of four hundred feet, and in the perpendicular can be seen the niches where the ladders once rested ; other niches in the interminable galleries show where the workman set his lamp as he hewed his way along. It has been calculated that at least twenty thousand slaves were employed at the same time, shackled, in almost total darkness,in foul air. and filth.
And it seems that the worst iniquities of our own factory system were perpetrated in the mines of Lamion; sometimes the windings and openings are so narrow that only a child could have entered them to gather the precious debris. No wonder that the life of a miner was short.
It is hard not to think of Nemesis as one gazes down the tangled mouths of the quarries at Syracuse where the Athenian host perished so miserably, and from which Nicias himself was only saved by a death of torment. And Greece paid her debt to the uttermost farthing when she passed under Roman sway. The maid of Andros and the virgins that bore her company were a staple commodity of the Roman slave market; in Epirus alone Aemilius Paulus is said to have taken one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, who were put up to auction and the proceeds divided among the soldiers.
The slave system of the Greeks is dwarfed into insig- nificance by the huge servile Empire of Rome. From the earliest days of the Republic—we may say from the first dawnings of civilisation in Italy—slavery bad been inherent in the soil. The Etruscan Seine, " Whose eight hundred slaves Sicken in Ilva's mines,"
was no figment of Macaulay's imagination. And the pages of Livy, whatever their exact historical value, may at least be accepted as a truthful description of the steps by which the bourgeois became first a beggar and then a slave. The con- centration of land in the hands of a few capitalists, conjoined with a legal system which bore most cruelly upon the debtor, led speedily to the extinction of that class from which the armies of the Republic had been originally drawn. But the process of squeezing out the freeman and the farmer would have been impossible had it not been for the presence of a mass of slave labour, which destroyed all competition. The latifundia had begun to ruin Italy even before Carthage was destroyed.
Gibbon was probably misled when he declared that during the reign of Claudius Rome possessed throughout the whole of her Empire from the banks of the Euphrates to the waves of the Atlantic sixty million slaves. But his other calcula- tion, that the number of slaves in any period of Roman history probably balanced the number of freemen, may be more readily accepted. It is not the "Decline and Fall" at which we wonder, but the miracle of organisation which kept Rome so many centuries as a going concern. More than once a servile or a gladiatorial war shook the Republic to its foundation. The "poor blind Samson" was an ever-present dread to his owners, and when the Goths marched on Italy the memory of the ruthless toll in human flesh served to whet their ire. Alaric at the gates of Rome demanded as the first condition of capitulation the immediate surrender of all the barbarian slaves.
Though Christianity helped to ameliorate the lot of the individual slave, it did not condemn the institution. Our author promises another volume, in which he hopes to treat the revival of slavery under altered conditions and with the added misery of racial and religious motive. The Spaniard sent the Indians to toil in the mines for the good of their souls ; the Devon adventurers exploited the negroes from the coast of Guinea with the curse of Ham as their Scriptural warrant. The Turks and the Algerine pirates alone preserved a fine impartiality; Christian or True Believer was equally the prey of the long, snake-like galleys. Mr. Paterson has accomplished a very valuable piece of work in 'illustrating from the chief nations of the old world' he doom which sooner or later overtakes the proudest civilisation that rests on servile labour. It was only late in the eighteenth century that the conscience of Europe and America was really awakened, and some of the most urgent problems of the present generation are a heritage from the African voyages of old John Hawkins.
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