Deipnosophists, 1657
BY Athenaeus
EDITED BY Isaac Casaubon
PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Finding out about slaves in antiquity is not easy. First, we only have literature written by their masters, who generally were not interested in their slaves. Secondly, we only have a fraction of the literature surviving that was written. In the case of slave revolts, it is even more problematic since there are various reasons why masters would not wish to record such actions on the part of their slaves: they were ashamed that they could not control their slaves; they did not wish to celebrate rebellions by recording them (after all, one of the stated aims of many historians was to immortalise their subjects by recounting their deeds); and lastly but perhaps most importantly, they did not wish to encourage further subversion by advertising it.

There exists from antiquity a long work by a man called Athenaeus, a Greek writer from Naucratis in Egypt, who wrote The Philosophers at Dinner.^[1] It is not a particularly famous work, but it contains some comments about slaves and slavery that are unlike anything else from the works that remain from ancient Greece and Rome. Slaves were everywhere in classical antiquity, in the temples, in the mines, in the fields, in the shops, in the streets, in the home, in the bedroom, everywhere except represented in art or literature. There are exceptions to this, but for the ancient historian trying to find information about slaves, as about women, the search is often time-consuming. Usually one has to make do with a passing reference, but for once in a work, there is an entire discussion. However, the work of Athenaeus is not very well read even by academics. A relatively recent volume of essays on this particular text starts its introduction with the words “Few modern scholars admire Athenaeus.”^[2] And it continues: “But then few would claim even to have read him.”

The work as a whole is rather daunting. It is very long and mainly about food. It purports to give an account of a banquet hosted by a man called Larensius, and Athenaeus, who was present at the banquet, tells his friend Timocrates what they talked about at dinner. So it is a story within a story.^[3]

To get an idea of the topics of conversation, one only has to look at the index of the Loeb translation – fish, for instance, had thirty-nine entries, and one of those entries is forty-five pages long and several are more than a page each. Then there were entries for fish-baskets, fish diviners, fishing, fish paste, fish pickle and of course entries for individual fish like cod, which had only two entries, while mullet had thirteen. Wine had one and a half columns of entries. There were entries for wine biscuit, wine clarifiers, wine coolers, wine drinking, wine mixer, wine pourer, wine press, wine shops, and wineskins. Snails had four entries but one entry was six pages long, another four. There were twenty-three mentions of figs, and of course further entries for fig leaves and fig sellers. Slaves had eleven references for that entry, fewer than for mullet. There is virtually no politics or religion.

One book — Book XIII — is all about women. One learns very little about women, but perhaps more than one would like about men’s attitudes toward them. In fact, the topic is more about sex than women. One quotation will perhaps give the flavour:

In particular, it was upon reading the discussion in this book that I reconsidered the nature of the information about slaves earlier on. This discussion of women was so unrestrained (so much so that the earlier translator translated some parts into Latin rather than English) that it seemed, perhaps, a fairly realistic rendition of male conversation after a big dinner with lots of wine. The banqueters naturally — having talked about wine, water, fruit, vegetables, seasonings, salt, figs, meat, fish, shellfish, saltwater fish, freshwater fish, music, luxury, more fish, eels, octopus, the sexlife of shellfish, fish sauce, birds, pork, fat and thin people — move on to consider falling in love with girls’ bottoms and then sex with men as well as women. In Book XIV, they return to wine and go on to music and dancing and figs, and in the final book, they talk about wine, wreaths, flowers, perfumes and poetry.

In other words, this was the discussion at a dinner party of a group of well-educated men, who liked their food, wine and extravagant living. So what is the discussion of slaves doing there? It is introduced because like women, music, food, wine and fish, slaves play their part at banquets. The reader is informed when slaves bring in more food, and what delicacies they are bringing in and one of the characters, Democritus, comments on the self-restraint shown by slaves. Although they bring in plate after plate of the most delicious food, they somehow can stop themselves from eating it. The diners are supposed to be philosophers, so they are interested in the concept of self-control even if they show very little of it themselves. This leads on to a discussion of slavery which is unique in its range and length.

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.