A small body of free citizens now ruled immense masses of slaves. The normal economy of nature was thus destroyed, and the depopulation of Greece went on rapidly. At the time of Cicero, almost the whole of Attica formed the estate of a single slaveholder, who also owned other estates in other parts of Greece. Many militant slave oligarchs doubtless envy that Athenian slaveholder; at any rate they are doing their utmost to bring the Southern States to a condition similar to that just depicted in Athens and Greece.
During the Peloponnesian wars, insurrections of slaves often took place in Attica, especially in the mines. But the greatest slave rebellion, as far as history has recorded, was under the Roman administration. The revolted slaves then seized upon the fortress of Sunium, and for a long time fought bravely for their freedom.
The Greeks, as in some degree all the peoples of antiquity, considered domestic slavery a social misfortune to the enslavers, and an accursed fatality inherent in human society. They never presented it under the false colors of a normal and integral social element. The striking analogies between the workings of slavery in the ancient world and in the American republic, show that the disease is everywhere and eternally the same, and that it does not ennoble either the community or the individual slaveholder, as the pro-slavery combatants apodictically assert.
If in the despotic oriental empires, domestic and political slavery at times played into each other's hands until they jointly destroyed national life, it was domestic slavery, single-handed, which did the work in Greece, and particularly in Sparta and Athens. Domestic slavery enervated the nation and made it an easy prey to foreign conquest. It converted into a putrescent mass the once great and brilliant Grecian world.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Edward A. Pollard, letter to the Tribune.
[13] So the poor whites of the South emigrate and settle in the Western territories, and the planters magnify their plantations and their chattels.