Characters make comments such as “slaves cause problems” and “a slave is a difficult thing to own” and there is the narration of the slave war on Chios, led by an individual named Drimakos, which takes up several pages. Then there are accounts of the slave wars in Sicily and Italy as well as references to other less well-documented revolts. They also talk about times when there were no slaves — then women did all the work. And the diners discuss the huge numbers of slaves held by their contemporaries, for no good reason apart from show.

The discussion of slaves takes up the last quarter of Book VI — the discussion before slaves was about parasites and flatterers, so the diners were getting depressed and negative. A quarter might not sound like much, but this is a long book, and for those starved of information about slaves, it is very valuable. More crucially, a large part of this discussion is about slave hostility and slave revolts. There are no nice stories of slaves heroically defending their masters, there are no stories of loyalty and devotion. The non-revolt material is neutral information about how slaves become slaves, about the different words for slaves, about the enslavement of peoples, about their jobs, but a large section is about direct hostility and problems for the owners, leading to downright war.

There is something satisfying about these very privileged individuals being disturbed by the thought of slave revolts while in the middle of this orgy of physical pleasure.

The emphasis then is on the dangers of slaves, of too many slaves, of slaves rebelling. The story of Drimakos is how a group of slaves on the island of Chios forced their former owners to make an agreement with them. The slaves remained at large but agreed not to steal too much and not to accept all runaways. The owners could not defeat their former slaves and were forced into this negotiation through their own weaknesses. The slaves, on the other hand, were not strong enough to completely take over the island, although the owners found, to their cost, that when Drimakos had gone, the ex-slaves caused more damage than when he was alive. They (the owners) had seen him as the threat, as an influential leader because they put a price on his head. None of his slaves betrayed their leader but the story is that Drimakos told his boyfriend to cut off his head and collect his freedom and the large sum of money, which he did, after a little persuasion. However, the Chians did not restore order to the island afterwards. We are told this explicitly. In fact they missed Drimakos so much that they set up a shrine to him.

The speaker then moves on to discuss Athens. Athens is mentioned as having passed a law protecting slaves from abusive treatment. Athenaeus is very clear about the motivation for this. Having just talked about slaves defeating their masters, he says, “The Athenians were concerned about what might happen to their slaves” and passed this law from a desire to stop rebellion, rather than from any humanitarian motives. This leads on to the reference to how a thousand slaves from the island of Samos settled in Ephesus. He explains that they, having originally fled to the mountainous parts of Samos, were raiding, like the slaves on Chios, their former masters’ territory and causing a lot of damage. So much damage, in fact, that the Samians came to an agreement and allowed them to leave the island, which they did. They sailed off to Ephesus and settled there. Athenaeus comments that the present Ephesians were descended from these slaves.

From this work of Athenaeus, then, it would seem that the main issue about slavery for men of this time was the dangers it posed if not dealt with correctly. This is striking because it is normally assumed that the Romans knew how to control their slaves, especially by the second to third centuries A.D. The major slave wars, such as that led by Spartacus, had occurred in the first century B.C. and it is often assumed that with the change of regime, from Republic to Empire, and the general lack of expansion in this period, that the slaves were no longer a threat. However, this work alone would seem to indicate otherwise. The reason why we have an honest discussion for once is because Atheneaus does want to give us an accurate picture of this dinner party. When men drink and relax this is how they behave – and of course there were no women there, or if there were, they were courtesans whose opinions did not matter and certainly were not recorded. One could argue that this is what men think about mostly, on such occasions: food, wine, more food, more wine, some sex, some music, more food and wine. And slave revolts. There is something satisfying about these very privileged individuals being disturbed by the thought of slave revolts while in the middle of this orgy of physical pleasure.