On The Abolitionism of the Ancients (There Was Never Such a Thing)

I have a certain fondness for antiquity, despite all it really is. Homer’s bronze-age barbarism is alloyed with a supramodern maturity of spirit, and despite the vast supply of senseless violence there remains one humane and decent thread woven without compromise through the tragic view of life. Antigone has more respect for humankind than every pomoid nihilist put together; a work like The Trojan Women would get you crucified while we were in Iraq. And the Iliad - which glorifies the war but not the cause or victory, which dutifully reports the Achaeans’ preening vanity and mourns the Trojan dead - could still not be made today.

But it was also a brutal slave society, a barely-human nightmare to put the modern age to shame; it cannot be excused and it cannot be redeemed. Here we find the other side of nobly suffering whatever comes, come whatever may: something always comes. You have no doubt heard it said by every sort of creeping thing within our rotted timber piles, by old romantic Oxford dons and Marble Statue freaks alike, that we must not be too harsh on them, who laid the groundwork of the West; that slavery in the ancient world was more moderate, more reasonable, more civilized, than that of the modern age. This is a lie. Both spill off any human scale, an oceanic suffering too large to apprehend. There is nothing decent, nothing civilized, nothing human about either; nothing to defend in the sentencing to social death, whatever might be said this time about why it’s not the same.

But it is the same. It always is. For every cultured Hellene made a household slave whose treatment might, in the right half-light, just barely seem humane, thousands lived and died in darkness to keep the master’s table laden high with silverware and salt. For every freedman’s son who might take their place upon the course of honors, countless more freeborn Romans were sent down to bondage in their youth. Here Homer too is more humane than we might have expected from his age: poor Briseis gets little mention, except as Agammemnon’s spoils - until that is, she speaks, and fears her future as a slave. But then Achilles takes up the spear again, and again the laws go silent - more silent still for being written nowhere yet but upon the hearts of man. By code and custom, to the victors go the spoils, first among them the defeated - so it may have been in Homer’s age, so it was in Caesar's. Social mobility connotes ascent, but motion dictates no direction, and there is nothing good in the terror of Rome’s neighbors, nothing worth admiring in the ease with which the Roman poor might fall.

Thirty percent of the city of Rome lived in chains at the empire’s height; they lived, on average, to the age of seventeen. And these were the lucky ones: out of the fields, out of the mines, out of the pits and quarries. We have little detailed evidence of how victims of the latifundia would fare; the welfare of their farm equipment is not a historian’s concern. And then at last there were the mines - and they were only ever last, for those condemned to work them. Chains around the feet and salt dust in the lungs - in the eyes, in the throat, in every mucous membrane that you might care to name. Or else silver dust, or lead, building up within the blood, organ racing bone to failure and relief. “Hence gout and stone afflict the human race; hence lazy jaundice with her saffron face”, wrote an unknown Roman poet, who knew what Romans did. Children, toddlers even, went down beneath the skin of the Earth - and did not come out again.

Diodorus Siceliotes described the life of an enslaved miner in the late Republic as not so far from being dead:

For no respite or pause is granted them in their labours, but compelled beneath blows of the overseers to endure the severity of their plight, they throw away their lives in this wretched manner, although certain of them who can endure it, by virtue of their bodily strength and their persevering souls, suffer such hardships over a long period; indeed death in their eyes is more to be desired than life, because of the magnitude of the hardships they must bear.

The Roman State, it seemed, agreed with him: damnatio ad metalla became the punishment of choice in later Christian persecutions. Early martyrs pulled up Spanish silver by the kilotalent; their heirs condemned heresiarchs to suffer just the same. You don’t hear much about that last part from your average Constantinus Magnus fan. There’s a certain sort of Christian who (to their credit) has grasped much or all of the above - and would like to let you know that you can thank their holy mother church, which made the nightmare end.

Never mind that Roman slavery did not so much “end” as merge seamlessly into serfdom, and the middle ages’ vast profusion of new and slightly varied ways to find yourself unfree: servus and colonus both dissolved into a vast morass of ancient rights and liberties, which by their presence prove that you are bound, as your children will be. Never mind, for that matter, how readily they made compromise with Empire, and its understanding of just what and who was Caesar’s. Never mind the ease with which Augustine suggested rebellious slaves be lashed, though with a “loving spirit”. The mills of God grind things slow and fine, too slow and fine to see - but never mind all that. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, and the Church alone survived.

Still, the story is a good one. It resonates with mythic power; it rings what-might-have-been. All the requisite mental materiel is present, though it would be some fifteen hundred years or more before the Quakers took up arms. But there was plenty there to work with all along for those with eyes to see. St. Gregory of Nyssa, born in the 4th century A.D., is sometimes cited as the first recorded abolitionist in the Western tradition. His Homilies on Ecclesiastes certainly denounces the practice with a rare intensity:

For what is such a gross example of arrogance in the matters enumerated above – an opulent house. and an abundance of vines, and ripeness in vegetable-plots, and collecting waters in pools and channelling them in gardens – as for a human being to think himself the master of his own kind? I got me slaves and slave-girls, he says, and homebred slaves were born for me.

Do you notice the enormity of the boast? This kind of language is raised up as a challenge to God.

…

I got me slaves and slave-girls. For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?

Gregory was exceptional in many ways. In the murder of all of Egypt’s firstborn sons, he saw proof that Exodus was allegory - for Thou Shalt Not Murder, and God is not unjust. The war in heaven begins for him not just in pride, but in “the disease of the love of rule”. Titles, says Gregory, are only titles; “that mistaken masquerade of government” does not confer the right to rule. The authority of all dead generations, too, Gregory denies:

Most people do not judge for themselves how things stand by nature. Instead, they look to the customs of their forebears and fail to achieve a sound judgment about reality, because they set up an irrational habit as their criterion of the good rather than any intelligent consideration. Consequently, they thrust themselves into positions of authority and power and make much of prominence in this world…

In arguing for the coeternality of Christ, he insists that to divide created things into “slave and ruling power, one part in command, the other in subjection” would not be rightful kingship, but simple tyranny - God-the-Son as King or no. What that might mean for kings who were certainly begotten, and not so long ago, is not said outright, but it is not unclear. It is human instinct, he says, for “all to make themselves equal with the dominant party”, for “all are of the same blood”; thus are governments so often overthrown. Man is born free, we can almost hear him say, but is everywhere in chains.

It is here that the key Christian contribution was made, if you believe in that sort of thing. It is not selfless loving-kindness, or the essential unity of man - these are old, old themes, and though they never took the ancient world by storm, they were thick enough upon the ground for anyone to see. It is not the gap between the world’s proper nature and the way the world is - this is Greco-Roman through and through and through. In the Stoics most especially, though sometimes less and sometimes more, we see all of these reflected: all men are truly slaves, they say, and it is by luck alone that you are the lord and not the servant. Treat your servants well, therefore, as you would yourself be treated: this is in accord with the principle of things. But behind it all lies resignation: this is how things are. What is new in Gregory is not a view at all, but a great and mad refusal. It is the messianic edge which says that one way or another, things are going to change. True Faith has its advantages - chief among them that it leaves no room for a washing of the hands.

Still, Gregory was not an anarchist, as we understand the term; he could not have been. It was just not in the water yet, and despite his many other virtues, Gregory was not quite fit to drag the future back a thousand years upstream. When he condemns our Earthly kings, he bears witness and he waits; he does not immanentize the eschaton, and can conceive of no such thing. Justice is, he says, not the mere recognition of equality; it is not a matter of ruling fairly or administering well. Justice is what God is, for Gregory’s God is not the bloodsoaked Dominus who butchered Egypt’s children, asleep at home in bed; his God is not unjust; his Good News is only ever good. Politics is of this world, and Gregory is not. His King has left but not been strung up; his armies are of fire and of light. His cause is just, his triumph certain - but he will not go to war. In him we have the anti-Homer: all steady joy and virtue and quietly awaiting what God has planned for you.

And so Gregory could not bring himself to make that last essential leap - not just to condemn but to abolish. He may well be the closest thing the ancient world has to offer, or at least the closest thing permitted pen and parchment; he was not close enough. I am happy to blame slavery’s persistence on material forces alone, on who the real good organ stabbers would listen to and why - but shift the goalposts back to being prominent, or even just non-negligible, and certain death becomes cognitive dissonance, and that has quite a bit less power than an answer would require. I fear I must conclude that it was culture - which is to say, something else, beyond objective factors that any human being would face. Which is to say, really, that I can offer no account at all.

I suspect the cultural ingredients were always there, though they took too long to meet. What abolitionism in such impossible circumstances would demand is first and foremost the will to lose - the understanding that the world is wrong, for deeply rooted reasons which a lifetime’s work will not resolve, and conclude that nonetheless it is better to be right - that come death and mutilation, it is still better to be good. The modern abolitionists risked their lives, though the risk would wildly vary; an antique one would risk the same, with no hope of progress to sustain them - these were slave societies through and through, and short of civilizational collapse, slavery would remain.

It demands the manic singlemindedness of an early Christian martyr and the egomania of a Hero in the old sense. It demands a will to glory and the good; a contempt for riches and comfort and wisdom and fame. It demands the sort of madness that springs up from within, that defies whatever gods might be and says I AM THAT I AM, and that what is must not be. It demands the spirit channeled by Bertolt Brecht, when he laments

And yet we knew:
Even the hatred of squalor
Distorts one’s features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow hoarse. We
Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.

It demands the will to martyrdom for the sake of this world, not the next. It demands modernity - the sacrifice of virtue on the altar of effect; the rejection of the world as it is, and all its consolations; the conviction that there can be no compromise with sin, and that whatever world may come cannot repair those sins the present still commits - and this is why it could not be. It demands a body, mouldering in the grave, and a soul gone marching on.