Slavery in Athenian Democracy Term Paper

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Athenian Democracy & Slavery

Was slavery essential to the development of Athenian democracy? The simple fact is that Athens in the fifth century BCE was, in fact, a slave-owning society. Therefore to debate over whether this fact was essential to the social and political system that developed in Athens is like splitting hairs over whether the men who built the Parthenon were happier than the men who built Pharaoh's great Pyramid: if neither was actually a free man, then we are debating the question of the treatment of slaves, not whether slavery plays an important role in a country's political system. The only reason this question seems worth consideration at all is because Athenian democracy itself would prove to be such an influential form of social organization, while being almost unique in the ancient world. The implication of the question would appear to be whether the existence of slavery in some way vitiates the high ideals preached by the Athenian democratic system; I argue that this indeed is the case.

Orlando Patterson usefully examines the historical evidence and concludes that a vast expansion of Athenian slavery occurred in the sixth century BCE. The most interesting fact about Patterson's findings is the way in which the expansion of slavery to include greater numbers of captive persons actually resulted in the redefinition of freedom among the existing classes of person, noting that scholars agree on a "strong correlation between the development of the polis and the concept of citizenship, on the one hand, and a sharpened polarization between free and unfree, on the other.

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" (Patterson 8). The basic premise seems relatively easy to understand: as the class of unfree persons expands, the result is, as Patterson claims, that "men, for the first time, begin to take freedom seriously" (Patterson 8). In other words the expansion of slavery within Athens itself caused those who were free to more directly contemplate the meaning or possibility….....

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