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This book is important because it corrects a long-standing
misrepresentation in both ancient sources and modern historians. Peter
Hunt proves that slaves were present on battlefields and in battleships
more often and more plentifully than one can easily gather from Herodotus or
Thucydides. Just as importantly, he explains precisely why the major
ancient historians omitted or glossed over slave combatants.
Hunt culls references to slave soldiers and sailors from a range of
ancient authors. For example, we know from Pausanias, a second-century AD
travel writer, that slaves were granted freedom and fought alongside
Athenian citizens for the first time at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC,
something completely ignored by Herodotus. Also canvassed are passing but
revealing mentions in the major historians themselves: Herodotus,
describing the aftermath of Thermopylae in 480, notes that Persians
inspecting the battlefield mistook corpses of helots—the state-owned,
serf-like slaves of the Spartans—for citizen-soldiers, inflating the
number of casualties among the free Spartan and Thespian troops. The laugh
is on the Persians, but also on Herodotus, who has let slip evidence of
helot combatants:
The
bravery of the three hundred Spartans who died under Leonidas has become a
by-word for patriotic courage. That greater numbers of Helots, whom the
Spartans called their “slaves,” also died defending Greece puts the noble
struggle for freedom in a rather different light. (32)
This putting of things in “a rather different light” typifies Hunt’s book
throughout.
Herodotus does say 35,000 light-armed (psiloi) helots accompanied
the 5,000 Spartiates at Plataea in 479. While modern scholars have
confined these men to “support personnel” or the like,[1]
Hunt promotes them to full hoplite status. He thinks they made up the
seven rear ranks of the standard eight-rank phalanx, with the Spartiates
in the first rank. Here I must demur: despite the neat seven-to-one ratio,
these helot-hoplites are illusions. In the first place, psiloi normally designates archers or slingers, never “hoplites.” Nor will it do
to imagine “light-armed hoplites”: at a minimum, they will have needed a
helmet, shield, and thrusting spear—that is, 35,000 helmets, shields, and
spears in all. Anything less would have made the phalanx fatally soft once
the thin red line at the front was breached or even hard-pressed. It
strains credulity to imagine Sparta or the other allied poleis
together possessed such a surplus of expensive armor. Moreover, general
logistical considerations make Herodotus’s numbers for Spartan forces
(50,000) and for the Greek army as a whole (110,000) wildly implausible.[2]
To cite only one exigency: such a force would have required at least 110
tons of grain per day, apart from the feed and fodder for horses and pack
animals. All this said, Hunt is right to underscore the participation of a
large number of helots in some capacity during combat at Plataea:
Plataea is a case where Herodotus is explicit … that the Helots fought in
the battle…. Modern scholars with few exceptions either dismiss the Helots
from the battle altogether, put them in the supply train, or merely state
that they were unimportant, light armed soldiers …. Herodotus most
definitely places the Helots on the battlefield, but modern scholars
minimize their role. (45)
He is able to cite a surprising number of other instances of battle
participation by helots or neodamodeis (helots freed expressly for
military service).
Although Thucydides, too, minimizes or excludes slave soldiers in his
history, he does hint at the effect of desertion of slave labor on both
sides in the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, as we know from other sources, the
encouragement of slave desertion, often by the promise of freedom, was a
deliberate strategy during the war. The Athenians adopted it after their
fortification of Pylos in the Peloponnese in 425, and the Spartans
returned the favor after establishing a permanent base at Decelea in
Attica in 413. Though Thucydides notes that the Spartans depleted the
Athenian work force by 20,000 men, undoubtedly inflicting severe economic
strain on the city-state in wartime, “he is brief and conceals the active
role that the antagonists took in encouraging slaves to desert or rebel”
(115), an indication of the offensiveness of a policy that flouted the
ingrained ideology of free vs. unfree.
Xenophon’s experience was different. He actually served in fourth-century
armies, like that of Agesilaus, with sizeable contingents of slave
combatants. He even endorses the use of slaves in both army and navy to
forestall invasion of Attica. He also tells of the Athenians’
commandeering of slaves from the Laurion mines to serve in the fleet that
defeated Spartan forces at the battle of the Arginusae Islands in 406.[3]
Emerging from Hunt’s convincing, well-documented demonstration of the
military and economic value of slaves in Greek warfare is a glaring
contradiction:
Practices such as recruiting slaves or Helots for the army were contrary
to Greek ideology; they occurred nevertheless. When the sources talk about
such unsavory—to ancient slave-owning eyes—methods, the information has
already slipped through the screen of an ancient ideology which would
rather not see it. We should not make the mistake of adding a second
screen and discounting attested practices on the grounds that they were
not consonant with ancient ideology. This dissonance between practice and
ideology needs to be explored, not eliminated by disregard of known
practices. (175)
The
explication of the Greek ideology of slavery, as much as his corrective
reassessment of slave soldiers and sailors, is at the heart of Hunt’s
book. The Greeks attempted to justify the institution of slavery by a kind
of spurious anthropology that classified slaves as essentially inferior to
free persons—in Aristotle’s famous formulation (Politics
1253b–1254b) “property with souls” and “living tools,” different by
nature from the free. Enslaved captives of war had, the Greeks
maintained, shown their true natures by having lost in battle. This
centuries-old bias was sorely tested by accumulating instances of free
Athenians suffering enslavement (as at Syracuse in 413) and of slaves
serving competently on battlefields and aboard triremes. Nonetheless,
Herodotus and Thucydides could dissemble the fact of slave combatants
because their contemporary audiences would never complain, for the
prevailing ideology secured free citizens a cherished sense of individual
and civic value. Hunt also suggests that upper-class citizens adapted the
same ideology to distance themselves from the working classes, both free
and unfree.
The
ideal of the freedom-loving city-state glorified in Pericles’ Funeral
Speech (Thuc. 2.35-46) is a hoary historiographical topos. It has been
exploded in the past half century or so by a hardnosed scholarly audit of
the social and political balance sheets of imperial Athens and
militaristic Sparta. Peter Hunt furthers that larger enterprise by giving
slaves their due in the annals of ancient Greek warfare and cautioning
against uncritical reading of biased sources, however classic they may be.
Eastern Michigan University
jholoka@emich.edu
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