The Ionic race had no serfs or Helots, either in Attica or elsewhere. But in Attica, as in other Greek communities, and indeed throughout the whole world, from among the primitive yeomen or peasants, emerged those who, more thrifty, more successful, or more brave, accumulated wealth in various ways. Such was one mode in which aristocracy originated. These yeomen growing richer, acquired more land, bought out smaller farmers, and could hire more field hands. Even before Solon the aim of the rich was to transform freeholders into tenants, but Solon stemmed this current for a long period of time.
Parents could sell their children into slavery; Solon reduced this right to such daughters as willingly submitted to seduction. A poor man could sell himself into slavery, and children exposed by their parents were enslaved by the public authorities.
War and traffic furnished the great supplies of slaves or chattels for the Athenians. Such chattels were from all nations and races, and the black slaves constituted an accidental and imperceptible minority. Witness Æsop telling the story of a rustic who bought a black slave and unsuccessfully tried to bleach or to whitewash it. If blacks had been common merchandise, the rustic would have been familiar with its nature. Slavery was transmitted from parents to children, if the prisoner of war was not ransomed or the slave not manumitted. But at any time a slave could receive or buy his freedom, and a chattel once liberated could not, under penalty of capital punishment, again be violently enslaved. In the South they begin to legislate for the re-enslavement of the liberated: the odium no longer falls on the individual but on the whole body politic. All over the ancient world the state watched over and protected the once enfranchised slave: the modern slave-holding polity expels him or legislates for his disfranchisement. In Athens, as all over Greece, the offspring of freemen and slave-women were free.
At first slaves performed domestic service, and afterward, when their number increased, they were employed in various trades. The state used them in public works, sometimes to row the ships. But the greatest number were employed to work the mills and mines of Attica. However, the state itself did not work the mines, but rented them generally without the slave labor; though private individuals rented them for a term of years, together with the slaves who worked them. Slowly chattelhood spread over the rural economy of Attica.
About the time of the Persian wars, rural property was still nearly equally divided among the citizens. Wealth was accumulated and represented in commerce, in various industries, and in the precious metals. But at that time slaves nowhere outnumbered the freemen. At the battle of Marathon the Athenians had ten thousand hoplites or heavily armed able-bodied citizens; at Platea eight thousand; and in both battles nearly as many peltasts or lightly-armed troops—poorer citizens, but not serfs, or retainers, or slaves. Before the invasion of Xerxes, the free population of Attica probably amounted to more than one hundred and twenty thousand of both sexes and all ages. The slave population is estimated at the utmost as sixty thousand.
Athens, like all the other Greek republics, colonized other countries with the surplus of their free—mostly poor—population. Herodotus died in such an expedition. The Dorians very likely colonized Sicily, the Ionians Italy or Magna Grecia. Such colonizations relieved the over-populated mother-country, extended the Hellenic culture, but likewise, in more than one way, fostered and nursed slavery. The Greek colonists in Sicily and in Italy, conquering or pushing into the interior the aborigines of these lands, enslaved, kidnapped and sold them. Then the Greek cities warred with and enslaved each other. Such was the case between Sybaris and Crotona, or in Sicily between Syracuse, Girgentum, etc. The rich men of Athens bought more and more slaves, purchased the lands of the poor, substituted in various handicrafts their gangs of slave laborers for freemen, and exported the impoverished freemen.[13] The increase of large estates and chattels went hand in hand with the decrease of freemen and public spirit in Athens; and the same was the case in other large commercial cities of Greece.
After the Persian war Athens became the wealthiest of commercial cities, and the Athenians a conquering nation. Both circumstances increased the number of slaves. But still the landed property was not yet absorbed. Alcibiades owned only about three hundred plethra, or about seventy-five acres of land in Attica. The wealthy slave-owners and oligarchs were not in power, but they owned mines in Attica and landed estates in various Greek dependencies and colonies. Slavery prevailed in the city, and it became more and more common on the farms. However, on the eve of the Peloponnesian war, democracy still prevailed. The oligarchs, proud of their slaves, mines, plantations and estates, scorned the democracy of Athens, composed of artists, yeomen, operatives, artisans—who really formed the soul of the great Periclean epoch.
Oligarchies are alike all over the world; in most of them, slave-holders, however called, live upon the labor of others; all of them scorn the laboring classes. The Southern militant planters and their Northern servile retainers scorn the enlightened masses of working-men, the farmers and operatives of the free states. But it is those masses which exclusively give original signification to America in the history of human development. Athens and the various monuments of the Periclean epoch coruscate over doomed Hellas: so the villages of the free states, with their schools and laborious, intelligent, self-reliant populations, shed their rays now over the Christian world. And the sight of such a village is a far different subject of contemplation from that of the slave-crowded plantation.
Slavery increased rapidly in Athens, as in all the great commercial centres, and in the adjacent isles of Greece. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, Attica had a population of about twenty thousand male adults, or a little over one hundred thousand free persons of all ages and sexes. The whole free population of Greece is estimated to have been at that time about eight hundred thousand souls; and the slaves—the Spartan serfs or Helots included—perhaps outnumbered the freemen. Thucydides says that the island of Chios had about two hundred and ten thousand slaves, the largest number next to Sparta; then came Athens, with nearly two hundred thousand human chattels; while other great commercial cities of Greece, as Sycyon and Corinth, likewise contained very large numbers.
The Peloponnesian war was waged with all the violence of a family feud. It spread desolation, impoverishment, carnage and slavery over Greece. Captives made by the one or the other contending party, were sold by tens of thousands into slavery; these captives were principally the small freeholders, the thetes and geomori—operatives, artisans, and, indeed, free workmen of every kind. Their number consequently diminished, and their small estates were either bought or taken violently by the rich, who thus simultaneously increased the number of their chattels and their acres of land. Thus did slavery permeate more and more the Greek social polity, until, at the epoch between Pericles and the beginning of the Macedonian wars, the number of slaves in Athens and Attica was nearly doubled: but the free population did not thus increase. Large landed estates became more and more common, till, in the time of Demosthenes, the soil of Attica, was concentrated in comparatively few hands. At Cheronea, the Athenians fought against Philip with mercenary troops, and even armed their slaves. But the spirit of Marathon and of Platæa was gone, and Athens succumbed. The gold of Philip was acceptable to the rich slave-holders, and went principally into the hands of the oligarchs; but alas! no second Miltiades ever emerged from their ranks.