III. THE HOMERIC POEMS.
The Iliad. In a great war-poem we can hardly expect to find many references to the economic labours of peace. And an army fighting far from home in a foreign land would naturally be out of touch with the rustic life of Greece. Nor was the poet concerned to offer us the details of supply-service, though he represents the commissariat as efficient. Free labour appears[18] in various forms of handicraft, and the mention of pay (μισθός)[19] shews wage-earning as a recognized fact. We hear of serving for hire (θητεύειν)[20], and the ἔριθοι or farm-labourers[21] seem to be θῆτες under a special name. That labour is not viewed as a great degradation may fairly be inferred from the case of Hephaestus the smith-god, from the wage-service of Poseidon and Apollo under Laomedon, and from the herdsman-service of Apollo under Admetus. Agriculture is assumed, and in the Catalogue ‘works’ (ἔργα)[22] occurs in the sense of ‘tilled lands.’ But it is chiefly in similes or idyllic scenes that we get glimpses of farming[23] operations. Thus we have ploughing, reaping, binding, threshing, winnowing. Most striking of all is the passage in which the work of irrigation[24] is graphically described. There is no reason to suppose that any of the workers in these scenes are slaves: they would seem to be wage-earners. But I must admit that, if slaves were employed under the free workers, the poet would very likely not mention such a detail: that is, if slavery were a normal institution taken for granted. For the present I assume only free labour in these cases. We are made aware of a clear social difference between the rich and powerful employer and the employed labourer. The mowers are at work in the field of some rich man[25] (ἀνδρὸς μάκαρος κατ’ ἄρουραν), who does not appear to lend a hand himself. Or again in the close of a ruler (τέμενος βασιλήιον)[26], with binders following them, a busy scene. The βασιλεὺς himself stands watching them in dignified silence, staff in hand. There is nothing here to suggest that the small working farmer was a typical figure in the portraiture of rural life. Flocks and herds are of great importance, indeed the ox is a normal standard of value. But the herdsmen are mean freemen. Achilles is disgusted[27] at the prospect of being drowned by Scamander ‘like a young swineherd swept away by a stream in flood.’ For the heroes of the poem are warrior-lords: the humble toilers of daily life are of no account beside them.
And yet the fact of slavery stands out clearly, and also its connexion with the fact of capture in war. The normal way of dealing with enemies is to slay the men and enslave the women. The wife of a great warrior has many handmaidens, captives of her lord’s prowess. A slave-trade exists, and we hear of males being spared[28] and ‘sold abroad’: for they are sent ‘to islands far away’ or ‘beyond the salt sea.’ We do not find male slaves with the army: perhaps we may guess that they were not wanted. A single reference to δμῶες (properly slave-captives) appears in XIX 333, where Achilles, speaking of his property at home in Phthia, says κτῆσιν ἐμὴν δμῶάς τε. But we cannot be certain that these slaves are farm-hands. We can only reflect that a slave bought and paid for was not likely to be fed in idleness or put to the lightest work. In general it seems that what weighed upon the slave, male or female, was the pressure of constraint, the loss of freedom, not the fear of cruel treatment. What Hector keeps from the Trojans[29] is the ‘day of constraint,’ ἦμαρ ἀναγκαῖον, also expressed by δούλιον ἦμαρ. Viewed from the other side we find enslavement consisting in a taking away[30] the ‘day of freedom,’ ἐλεύθερον ἦμαρ. The words δούλην III 409 and ἀνδραπόδεσσι VII 475 are isolated cases of substantives in passages the genuineness of which has been questioned. On the whole it is I think not an unfair guess that, if the poet had been depicting the life of this same Greek society in their homeland, and not under conditions of present war, we should have found more references to slavery as a working institution. As it is, we get a momentary glimpse[31] of neighbour landowners, evidently on a small scale, engaged in a dispute concerning their boundaries, measuring-rod in hand; and nothing to shew whether such persons supplied the whole of their own labour in tillage or supplemented it by employing hired men or slaves.
The Odyssey is generally held to be of later date than the Iliad. A far more important distinction is that its scenes are not episodes of war. A curious difference of terms[32] is seen in the case of the word οἰκῆες, which in the Iliad seems to mean ‘house-folk’ including both free and slave, in the Odyssey to mean slaves only. But as to the condition of slaves there is practically no difference. A conquered foe was spared on the battlefield by grace of the conqueror, whose ownership of his slave was unlimited: and this unlimited right could be conveyed by sale[33] to a third party. We find Odysseus ready to consign offending slaves[34] to torture mutilation or death. In the story of his visit to Troy[35] as a spy we hear that he passed for a slave, and that part of his disguise consisted in the marks of flogging. Yet the relations of master and mistress to their slaves are most kindly in ordinary circumstances. The faithful slave is a type glorified in the Odyssey: loyalty is the first virtue of a slave, and it is disloyalty, however shewn, that justifies the master’s vengeance. For they live on intimate terms[36] with their master and mistress and are trusted to a wonderful degree. In short we may say that the social atmosphere of the Odyssey is full of mild slavery, but that in the background there is always the grim possibility of atrocities committed by absolute power. And we have a trace even of secondary[37] slavery: for the swineherd, himself a slave, has an under-slave of his own, bought with his own goods from slave-dealers while his own master was abroad. Naturally enough we find slaves classed as a part of the lord’s estate. Odysseus hopes[38] that before he dies he may set eyes on his property, his slaves and his lofty mansion. But another and perhaps socially more marked distinction seems implied in the suitors’ question[39] about Telemachus—‘who were the lads that went with him on his journey? were they young nobles of Ithaca, or his own hired men and slaves (θῆτές τε δμῶές τε)?’ The answer is that they were ‘the pick of the community, present company excepted.’ The wage-earner and the slave do not seem to be parted by any broad social line. Indeed civilization had a long road yet to travel before levelling movement among the free classes drew a vital distinction between them on the one side and slaves on the other.
Free workers of various kinds are often referred to, and we are, owing to the circumstances of the story, brought more into touch with them than in the Iliad. Handicraftsmen[40] are a part of the life of the time, and we must assume the smith the carpenter and the rest of the males to be free: female slaves skilled in working wool do not justify us in supposing that the corresponding men are slaves. Beside these are other men who practise a trade useful to the community, ‘public-workers’ (δημιοεργοί)[41], but not necessarily handworkers. Thus we find the seer, the leech, the bard, classed with the carpenter as persons whom all men would readily entertain as guests; the wandering beggar none would invite. The last is a type of ‘mean freeman,’ evidently common in that society. He is too much akin to the suppliant, whom religion[42] protects, to be roughly shewn the door: he is αἰδοῖος ἀλήτης[43], and trades on the reverence felt for one who appeals as stranger to hospitable custom. Thus he picks up a living[44] from the scraps and offals of great houses. But he is despised, and, what concerns us here, despised[45] not only for his abject poverty but for his aversion to honest work. That the poet admires industry is clear, and is curiously illustrated by his contrasted pictures of civilization and barbarism. In Phaeacia are the fenced-in gardens[46] that supply Alcinous and his people with never-failing fruits: the excellence of their naval craftsmen is expressed in the ‘yarn’ of ships that navigate themselves. In the land of the Cyclopes, nature provides[47] them with corn and wine, but they neither sow nor plough. They have flocks of sheep and goats. They have no ships or men to build them. They live in caves, isolated savages with no rudiments of civil life. It is not too much to say that the poet is a believer in work and a contemner of idleness: the presence of slaves does not suggest that the free man is to be lazy. Odysseus boasts of his activities (δρηστοσύνη)[48]. He is ready to split wood and lay a fire, to prepare and serve a meal, and in short to wait on the insolent suitors as inferiors do on nobles. Of course he is still the unknown wanderer: but the contrast[49] between him and the genuine beggar Irus is an effective piece of by-play in the poem.
Turning to agriculture, we may note that it fills no small place. Wheat and barley, pounded or ground to meal, seem to furnish the basis of civilized diet. The Cyclops[50] does not look like a ‘bread-eating man,’ and wine completely upsets him to his ruin. Evidently the bounty of nature has been wasted on such a savage. But the cultivation of cereal crops is rather assumed than emphasized in the pictures of Greek life. We hear of tilled lands (ἔργα)[51], and farm-labour (ἔργον)[52] is mentioned as too wearisome for a high-spirited warrior noble. The tired and hungry plowman[53] appears in a simile. But the favourite culture is that of the vine and olive and other fruits in orchards carefully fenced and tended. One of the suitors makes a jesting offer[54] to the unknown Odysseus ‘Stranger, would you be willing to serve for hire (θητευέμεν), if I took you on, in an outlying field—you shall have a sufficient wage—gathering stuff for fences and planting tall trees? I would see that you were regularly fed clothed and shod. No, you are a ne’er-do-weel (ἔργα κάκ’ ἔμμαθες) and will not do farm-work (ἔργον): you prefer to go round cringing for food to fill your insatiate belly.’ This scornful proposal sets the noble’s contempt for wage-earning labour in a clear light. And the shade of Achilles, repudiating[55] the suggestion that it is a great thing to be a ruler among the dead in the ghostly world, says ‘I had rather be one bound to the soil, serving another for hire, employed by some landless man of little property, than be king of all the dead.’ He is speaking strongly: to work for hire, a mean destiny at best, is at its meanest when the employer is a man with no land-lot of his own (ἄκληρος), presumably occupying on precarious tenure a bit of some lord’s estate. After such utterances we cannot wonder that as we saw above, θῆτες and δμῶες are mentioned[56] in the same breath.
That slaves are employed on the farm is clear enough. When Penelope sends for old Dolius[57], a servus dotalis of hers (to use the Roman expression) she adds ‘who is in charge of my fruit-garden,’ So too the aged Laertes, living a hard life on his farm, has a staff of slaves[58] to do his will, and their quarters and farm duties are a marked detail of the picture. The old man, in dirty rags like a slave, is a contrast[59] to the garden, in which every plant and tree attests the devoted toil of his gardeners under his own skilled direction. Odysseus, as yet unrecognized by his father, asks him how he comes to be in such a mean attire, though under it he has the look of a king. Then he drops this tone and says ‘but tell me, whose slave[60] are you, and who owns the orchard you are tending?’ The hero knows his father, but to preserve for the present his own incognito he addresses him as the slave that he appears to be. Now if garden work was done by slaves, surely the rougher operations of corn-growing were not confined to free labour, and slaves pass unmentioned as a matter of course. Or are we to suppose that free labour had been found more economical in the long run, and so was employed for the production of a staple food? I can hardly venture to attribute so mature a view to the society of the Odyssey. We must not forget that animal food, flesh and milk, was an important element of diet, and that the management of flocks and herds was therefore a great part of rustic economy. But the herdsmen in charge are slaves, such as Eumaeus, bought in his youth by Laertes[61] of Phoenician kidnappers. In romancing about his own past experiences Odysseus describes a raid in Egypt, and how the natives rallied[62] and took their revenge. ‘Many of our company they slew: others they took alive into the country, to serve them in forced labour.’ As the ravaging of their ‘beautiful farms’ was a chief part of the raiders’ offence, the labour exacted from these captives seems most probably agricultural.
An interesting question arises in reference to the faithful slaves, the swineherd and the goatherd. When Odysseus promises them rewards in the event of his destroying the suitors with their help, does this include an offer of freedom? Have we here, as some have thought, a case of manumission—of course in primitive form, without the legal refinements of later times? The promise is made[63] so to speak in the character of a father-in-law: ‘I will provide you both with wives and give you possessions and well-built houses near to me, and you shall in future be to me comrades and brothers of Telemachus.’ The ‘brotherhood’ suggested sounds as if it must imply freedom. But does it? Eumaeus had been brought up[64] by Laertes as the playmate of his daughter Ctimene; yet he remained nevertheless a slave. Earlier in the poem Eumaeus, excusing the poor entertainment that he can offer the stranger (Odysseus), laments the absence[65] of his lord, ‘who’ he says ‘would have shewn me hearty affection and given me possessions such as a kindly lord gives his slave (οἰκῆι), a house and a land-lot (κλῆρον) and a wife of recognized worth (πολυμνήστην), as a reward for laborious and profitable service.’ Here also there is no direct reference to an expected grant of freedom: nor do I think that it is indirectly implied. It is no doubt tempting to detect in these passages the germ of the later manumission. But it is not easy to say why, in a world of little groups ruled by noble chiefs, the gift of freedom should have been a longed-for boon. However high-born the slave might have been in his native land, in Ithaca he was simply a slave. If by belonging to a lord he got material comfort and protection, what had he to gain by becoming a mere wage-earner? surely nothing. I can see no ground for believing that in the society of the ‘heroic’ age the bare name of freedom was greatly coveted. It was high birth that really mattered, but the effect of this would be local: nothing would make Eumaeus, though son of a king, noble in Ithaca. No doubt the slave might be at the mercy of a cruel lord. Such a slave would long for freedom, but such a lord was not likely to grant it. On the whole, it is rash to read manumission into the poet’s words.
Reviewing the evidence presented by these ‘Homeric’ poems, it may be well to insist on the obvious truism that we are not dealing with formal treatises, charged with precise definitions and accurate statistics. The information given by the poet drops out incidentally while he is telling his tale and making his characters live. It is all the more genuine because it is not furnished in support of a particular argument: but it is at the same time all the less complete. And it is not possible to say how far this or that detail may have been coloured by imagination. Still, allowing freely for the difficulty suggested by these considerations, I think we are justified in drawing a general inference as to the position of handworkers, particularly on the land, in Greek ‘heroic’ society as conceived by the poet. If the men who practise handicrafts are freemen, and their presence welcome, this does not exalt them to anything like equality with the warrior nobles and chiefs. And in agriculture the labourer is either a slave or a wage-earner of a very dependent kind. The lord shews no inclination to set his own hand to the plough. When one of the suitors derisively invites the supposed beggar to abandon his idle vagrancy for a wage-earning ‘job on the land,’ the disguised Odysseus retorts[66] ‘Ah, if only you and I could compete in a match as reapers hard at work fasting from dawn to dark, or at ploughing a big field with a pair of full-fed spirited oxen,—you would soon see what I could do.’ He adds that, if it came to war, his prowess would soon silence the sneer at his begging for food instead of working. Now, does the hero imply that he would really be willing to reap or plough? I do not think so: what he means is that he is conscious of that reserve of bodily strength which appears later in the poem, dramatically shewn in the bending of the famous bow.