54. Captivity in antiquity: the problem with getting all curious again
Or how I started Doing A Research again and now I can't stop.
I encountered someone on the internet making gross generalisations about captivity, ransom, and prisoner status in ancient Greece and Rome. This annoyed me. But I realised that, while I knew the generalisations were wrong, I did not in fact know specifically:
- the status and treatment of prisoners in practice: captivity, slavery, hostageship, ransom, release, and whether there were patterns in who was liable to what;
- change in patterns over time and between Greece and Rome;
- whether return to one's home city (or territory) after capture and enslavement resulted in a return to one's previous status in terms of rights and freedoms, or whether permanent or temporary disabilities applied, and how this differed between Greece and Rome;
- how fragmentary is the evidence.
What particularly interests me now is the zone of transition: temporary captivity, followed by functional assimilation as a free person into the society of one's captors or a return to one's previous home territory as a free person.
What happens in the space of captivity and in the transition, what makes return possible, and what social consequences attend it?
So I set out to answer these questions to my own satisfaction.
I'm still in the process of answering them.
There doesn't seem to be a single volume or article, or at least I have not yet found and read one, that answers these questions as a whole, though there are treatments of (male) prisoners of war and the issue of hostageship and ransom, largely in the form of unpublished PhD theses. (The one published monograph1 on hostageship appears to have attracted several snarky academic reviews.)
It may be useful to outline how I've set about trying to answer these questions. While I'm a historian of antiquity by training, my PhD was on healing cult practice (the cult of Asklepios in Greece between the 5th century BCE and the 2nd century CE2), not anything associated with ancient warfare or social practices around warfare3, and I'm fairly rusty to boot.
The first thing I did was several online searches. I used the terms "captivity in the ancient Mediterranean," "captivity in the ancient Greek world," "captivity in the Roman world," "hostages in...," "ransom in..." etc.4
I also used search terms for captivity, hostageship and ransom "...in Hellenistic Greece," "in Classical Greece," "in the Roman Republic" to see what that threw up.5 Google is terrible, and DuckDuckGo is differently bad, so I discarded any results not on JSTOR or not from a reputable university's repository of Ph.D theses.6 (I also made some remarks on social media, which gave me some other resources to chase.)
One of the top results using this method was a Ph.D thesis submitted at Liverpool in 2014 by Jason Paul Wickham7 on "The Enslavement of War Captives by the Romans to 146 BC." Wickham's thesis is a useful survey of the early Roman evidence, and discusses some Greek material by way of comparison. His arguments are useful in beginning to answer some of my questions. Tracking down his references, in addition to the previous search engine and social media queries, has filled out my reading list substantially, and helped me narrow down the ancient authors (and the passages in them) that might relate to these question.
No one wants to have to read the entire ancient canon with a notebook, pen, and a set of stickynotes to hand. No one. (These days you can wing it by searching specific terms through the Loeb online collection, or a few other places, thank heaven, but that requires a day out in a library with access for me.)
Wickham also reminded me that the Law Code of Gortyn8 (online here in Greek form, translated in 1967 by Ronald F. Willetts as The Law Code of Gortyn as a supplement to the journal Kadmos, accessible here) has a very small passage relevant to my interests.
The passage, which comes near the end of column 6, is given as follows by Willetts:
αἰ κ’ ἐδδυσ̣[άμενον] πέρα̣[νδε] ἐκς ἀλλοπολίας ὐπ’ ἀν-άνκας ἐκόμενος κελομένοˉ τις λύσεται, ἐπὶ το͂ι ἀλλυσαμέοˉι ἔˉμεˉν πρίν κ’ ἀποδο͂ι τὸ ἐπιβάλλον.
My Greek was never very good to start with, and the Gortyn inscription is in the Cretan dialect, which makes things even more complicated. It took me an hour to come up with a translation (undoubtedly a bad one) for this one sentence:
"Anyone who has been called on for aid, who ransoms out of foreign cities those who were forcibly got away abroad in order to be sold, the ransomed ones belong to him until they pay the debt."
This largely agrees with Willetts:
"If anyone, bound by necessity, should get a man gone away to a strange place set free from a foreign city at his own request, he shall be in the power of the one who ransomed him until he pay what is due."
There is another passage about how if a man is ransomed but can prove it wasn't at his request, he doesn't owe anything. I did not do my own translation for that one, since the first one took me so long.
Why did I struggle to do my own translation? What I wanted to know, specifically, was the status of the ransomee who had been returned home. Some translators, particularly older ones, are inclined to play down Greek and Roman slavery: translating "servant" and "maid" for male and female slave, for example, or choosing the most gentle and generous interpretation of a verb. It's a verb here that matters: ἐπιβάλλον.
ἐπὶ το͂ι ἀλλυσαμέν-οˉι ἔˉμεˉν πρίν κ’ ἀποδο͂ι τὸ ἐπιβάλλον is the kicker clause, the one I'm interested in. It's reasonably straightforward by the standards of Greek, but alas for my hopes of certainty, its meaning can definitely be argued. Old ἐπιβάλλον has a multiplicity of meanings.
It's important to note that at this time, Gortyn distinguished between unfree persons who were bound to masters but could dispose of property (the 1967 translation calls them serfs) and chattel slaves. The ransomee "falls to the share of" or "follows" or "belongs to" (that's what ἐπιβάλλον is doing there) the ransomer until the debt is paid.
But does the ransomee become the slave of the ransomer? His serf? His debt-bound client? Does he have restricted civic rights? (Likely.) Can we straightforwardly read this as continued enslavement albeit in home territory, or is it a form of indenture or forced clientage? The text does not in fact securely answer the question of status.
It is unlikely but not impossible that this means a form of chattel slavery in practice: the ransomed person, in this case, has had to ask someone to ransom them, thereby voluntarily putting themselves under obligation. If their friends and kin are actively trying to find and ransom them, ransoms them without their direct request, the law code does not see the ransomee as owing a debt. Presumably the ransomee who asks someone else for ransom (as opposed to asking their friends and kin to arrange it from their own resources) has to ask someone with more wealth than their own household and kin. And the ransomed person would likely be either killed or enslaved without a ransom: in very general terms, the ancient world understands that when you're captured in battle you belong to the victor. You are in essence your captor's property, though your captor may choose to release you freely or for terms. If you're taken by pirates or brigands, on the other hand, you may be illegally enslaved but in practical terms it makes little difference to what happens if you're not ransomed.
So the status of chattel slavery seems possible for a free person from Gortyn captured and returned to their home territory. But given the social context, some form of indenture seems more likely, possibly including a reduction in status to serfdom. It really all depends on what ἐπιβάλλον means here.
If I want to dig at the meaning of the Gortyn code, I need to find comparable Greek references to ransomed people. And/or ἐπιβάλλον in relation to people. I don't know whether I want to dig at the meaning of the Gortyn code yet, though, especially when I still need to read more widely and more deeply in the whole subject.
Next up in my reading is Joshua Sosin's article on "Ransom at Athens," and a couple of Kathy L. Gaca's articles on martial rape in Greek antiquity, to see if that bears any fruit in putting ancient captive-making in context. There's also a thesis from 1980 and a couple of texts in French that should be fruitful if I can manage to cudgel my brain around them, particularly Anne Bielman's 1994 Retour à la liberté, in addition to a bunch of works in English that seem to be mostly about Romans.
I would do a minor crime for W. Kendrick Pritchett's The Greek State At War Part V, from 1991, which never made it as far as Trinity College Library (the research library where I have reader privileges). It has been cited by nearly every article I've read so far. But it's a little pricey for the individual to acquire, even electronically, on intellectual whim. (At least it is available electronically: Yvon Garlan's Slavery in Ancient Greece, also frequently cited, has not been given a new lease of life in that form.)
If you want to hear more on this topic, let me know: I don’t think I’m going to stop following it up until I’m either satisfied or have run out of accessible works to chase.
1 A monograph is a book-length detailed study of a single particular subject area, usually with only one author.
2 In retrospect I'm not very happy with my Ph.D: it's not comprehensive enough to be broadly useful to future researchers, and my European language skills weren’t up to the challenge of assimilating the German and Italian material in time to have anything ready for my submission deadline. It's narrowly useful, maybe: it was certainly original research.
3 I certainly think we may call captivity arising from warfare a social practice
4If you use the search term "X" + "in ancient Greece" or "in Rome," rather than "in the ancient Greek world," you get so much more bullshit. Some of it is fashionable fashy bullshit, some of it is the search engine prioritising "ancient Greece" rather than your whole query, and most of it is the gross over-simplification that happens when people design instructional materials to cover wide swathes of history in too short a time for complexity, and assume their audience can't handle complexity anyway. But adding "world" brings up more detailed material, probably on account of titling conventions among academics.
5 In the days of yore, one would have gone to a research library's card catalogue, or to a subject librarian, for a starting point. I've never not had a search engine.
6 Oxford calls a Ph.D a D.Phil. It's the same thing.
7 Who appears to since have had an "alt-ac" career since, rather than a purely academic one. Pity: I think he might have written interesting papers.
8 Gortyn was a city on the island of Crete, and the law code (written in boustrophedon or ox-turning style, alternating lines from left to right and right to left) most likely dates to the first half of the 5th century BCE: it might be contemporary with the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, but it's more likely to have been composed sometime between then and 450 BCE.