Download Slavery in Ancient Greece: The History of Slaves Across the Greek City-States AudioBook Free

Slavery was a universal and totally accepted feature of ancient greek language society, so much so that as the conditions under which slaves lived and worked assorted considerably, many typical citizens retained at least one slave, often working alongside their owners, while larger commercial enterprises included huge numbers, many of whom could climb to positions of specialist and wealth. It was possible for some slaves to buy their flexibility, while others lived and perished in conditions of appalling brutality, notably in the silver mines at Laurium. The income from these mines paid for the fleet with which Athens defeated Xerxes and were the foundation of the Attic owls, the four drachma coins that revolutionized the Athenian overall economy. The mines were often leased to companies and worked by slaves and condemned criminals. The galleries averaged roughly three . 5 feet high, so most miners needed to focus on their hands and knees. Another specific group of slaves that suffered particularly brutal treatment was the pornai, slaves found in the brothels as prostitutes. While those sound like the conditions of slavery people are accustomed to reading about in more modern times, other forms of slavery in Greece were quite unique, and perhaps fittingly, Sparta might have got the most unusual system of all. Sparta will permanently be known for its armed service prowess, but the importance the Spartans positioned upon being a warrior society meant their way of life was entirely reliant on a school of indentured servants known as the helots. The Spartans needed the helots to keep the domestic entry, nonetheless they also frequently helped bring helots to the battlefield with them, and they repeatedly had to carefully turn their own hoplites on unruly helots to suppress potential rebellions. As this makes clear, however unpalatable it might be to modern historians who expound on the virtues of the Greek legacy to american civilization, it is indisputably the situation that slavery constituted a central part of this legacy. Indeed, slavery underpinned to a sizable extent the foundations of the classical Greek way of life.

Category: Classics

Details

Publisher	Charles River Editors
Language	English
ISBN
DATE	2016-12
Author	Charles River Editors

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