A Study Of The Agricultural Slaves In Classical Athens

Athens was one of the city states in which ancient slavery was fully developed. It represented the highest degreed of developed slavery in ancient Greece. Since agriculture was the major production department in Athens, analyzing agricultural slaves thus became very important for us to understand the social structure and the social nature of Athens. But due to the lack of historical materials, there were many controversies about agricultural slaves among scholars.This thesis aims to use the classical literature, the study of modern scholars, archaeological materials, the relative knowledge of demography and economy to analyze agricultural slaves, and tries to compute their number, makes out the distribution of them in each citizen rank. At the same time, this thesis uses Historical Materialism of Marxism to explore the historical status of agricultural slaves, and draws a tentative conclusion on the social nature of Athens.This thesis is composed of preface, literature review, text, conclusion, reference and appendix. The text consists of four parts:Part one makes comments on the different understandings of scholars about the meaning of 'agricultural slaves', and uses Historical Materialism of Marxism to explain it. 'Agricultural slaves' were those slaves who worked on the big estates and produced surplus value for the wealth. But the slaves whom peasants possessed were domestic slaves, because their production aimed to satisfy the slave owner's family needs.Part two gives a brief introduction of Athenian agriculture. In classical period, Athenian agriculture made a great progress. People used mix planting to improve the unit production of land. Carefully farming needed more labor and stimulated the progress of slavery to some degree. Part three analyzes the possibility of those who could possess slaves among citizens according to an analysis of the cost of slave labor and the estate and income of citizens. In Athens, An ordinary citizen could possess a plot of land not more than 4 hectares which provided a small income only sufficient for the family living. He had no much surplus, and could not afford a slave. But in Pericles' time, Athens exploited the allied states, possessed their lands and properties. The result increased the non-agricultural income of citizens. At the same time, Athenian Empire needed many citizens to govern. Thus, the population of the citizens who owned slaves increased rapidly. In this time, there were about 4,000 agricultural slaves in Athens. They mostly belonged to the first and second rank citizens. The third rank citizens could also afford one or two slaves. But since they had small plots of lands, the aim of their slaves' production was to satisfy their own needs, thus their slaves must be domestic slaves, and the numbers of them was about 20,000. In the fourth century BC, owing to the destruction of the Peloponnesian war and the fall of Athenian Empire, the Athenian economy could not reach its peak time although it recovered to some degree after the war. Correspondingly, the trend of the developing of Athenian slavery was descended. In this period, the number of Athenian agricultural slaves was about 2,500, and they were mostly belonged to the wealth. As for the citizens of the middle and the lower class, they had no sufficient income to afford a slave. The number of domestic slaves of them was not more than 5,000.Part four tries to draw a tentative conclusion on the social nature of Athens from a comparative study of the different impacts of agricultural slaves on society between Athens and Rome. In Athens, agricultural slaves never supplanted free peasants. The economy of the big estates which based on slave labors did not play a leading role in Athenian economy. Thus, the view that Athens should be a slave society was questionable.