Enslaved Persons and Cross-cultural Interactions in the First-millennium BCE Mediterranean

The study of slavery is among the major preoccupations of ancient historians; the same applies to the study of cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean world. Despite the voluminous scholarship of the last twenty years in both fields of research, it is remarkable that the two subjects are almost never examined together. This is particularly remarkable, given the strong link between the study of slavery and the study of mobilities, diasporas and cultural interactions in the case of the early modern Atlantic world. The purpose of this project is to present a framework for a systematic study of the agency of enslaved persons in the processes of cultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE.

The study of ancient slavery is one of the most intensively explored aspects of the ancient world, with thousands of books and articles devoted to it over the last six decades. The study of cross-cultural relations in the ancient Mediterranean world has become equally fashionable over the last three decades. Given the popularity of both subjects, one would have expected that there would have been substantial cross-over between the studies devoted to slavery and the studies devoted to cross-cultural interaction. Nevertheless, until extremely recently this has not been the case. I initially became interested to explore further this issue when I realized the existence of an invisible wall in my own work; I had published books and articles on either subject, but my work on slavery rarely concerned cross-cultural relations, and my work on cross-cultural relations rarely focused on slavery.

The reasons for this strange disjuncture are not difficult to perceive. The study of slavery has largely focused on social and economic aspects, and has paid far less attention to cultural issues; at the same time, the study of cross-cultural interaction has largely focused on the elites that are mainly represented in our sources. But the role of enslaved persons in cross-cultural interaction is quite evident. A significant proportion, if not the overwhelming majority, of enslaved persons in ancient societies were first-generation slaves, people who were born in a different society than the one they ended up living; war, captivity and the slave trade were the main mechanisms that transferred them from their societies of birth into the societies they ended up as slaves. Given this basic fact, it is natural to assume that enslaved persons played important roles in intercultural interaction in antiquity and constituted a major vector of technological, conceptual and cultural transfer between different ancient societies. The role of enslaved persons from the Hellenistic Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean in the creation of Latin literature and the globalisation of Greek culture in the Western Mediterranean is the best known example of this phenomenon; and yet, despite a surge of recent studies on the creation of Latin literature, the phenomenon of slave cultural agency has never been examined systematically.

The aim of this project is to create a framework for the study of the agency of enslaved persons in the processes of cross-cultural interaction that connected the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East in the first millennium BCE. It is strongly linked to a wider project which I am currently directing. The project, funded by the European Research Council, is titled [https://www.ims.forth.gr/en/project/view?id=272] SLaVEgents: enslaved persons in the making of societies and cultures across Western Eurasia and North Africa, 1000 BCE-300 CE. It will run between 2023 and 2028, and involves an international team of 22 specialist scholars. The major aim of the project is to create a digital prosopography of all enslaved and freed persons attested within the spatial and temporal parameters described above. The prosopography will also include all relevant sources in the major ancient languages (Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), in both the original and in English translation. This is the necessary evidential foundation in order to study systematically the agency of enslaved persons in space and time. As of June 2024, the prosopography has already collected more than 7.000 enslaved persons attested in more than 4.500 texts.

Alongside the large-scale collection of evidence, the study of the cultural agency of enslaved persons requires a proper framework. To construct such a framework, the comparative study of other slaveholding societies has much to offer. The early modern Portuguese and Spanish colonial societies employed an interesting scheme to classify their slaves: they distinguished between criollos, second-generation slaves who were born in the Americas; ladinos, acculturated first-generation Africa-born slaves, who could speak Spanish/Portuguese and had adopted Christianity; and finally, bozales, unacculturated Africa-born first-generation slaves.

The advantage of this conceptual scheme is that it puts at the center of our attention the issue of the processes of cultural interaction and their various consequences. What were the contexts and the processes through which enslaved persons became familiar with the cultural practices and traditions of the new societies they lived in? To what extent did acculturation allow foreign-born slaves to also maintain their own cultural traditions? What conditions, contexts and requirements of the slaveholding societies they lived in created opportunities for foreign-born slaves to act as vectors of intercultural transmission from their societies of origin?

At the same time, we need to take into account some major peculiarities of ancient Mediterranean history, which set it apart from the comparative history of the early modern Atlantic. Twelve million African slaves were transported across the Atlantic in the early modern period; but there was effectively no current of free migration from Africa to the New World during the same period. This contrasts strongly with the ancient Mediterranean; the places from which large numbers of first-generation slaves originated, were often the places that also generated substantial currents of free immigrants. There were plenty of Thracian slaves in classical Athens, but there were also many free Thracian immigrants. As a result, ancient diasporic communities usually involved both constrained and free migrants; the Jewish community at Rome is a good example of this phenomenon. This creates important complications for how to study the cultural agency of enslaved persons. Slaves from the eastern Mediterranean played a key role in the creation of Latin literary culture; but the same role was also played by Greek-speaking free migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean. In what ways did the cultural agency of enslaved migrants differ from that of free migrants, if it did at all?

Furthermore, another major peculiarity of the Mediterranean is exactly the opposite from the first: the key role of enslaved persons in diasporas generated by free people. The Roman and Italian diaspora of Roman and Italian negotiatores that emerged in the late Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean was a consequence of the expansion of the Roman Empire; but this diaspora also included substantial numbers of Greek-speaking slaves and freed-persons, who became acculturated within it. The example of slaves and freed-persons with Greek names organizing the quintessential Italian and Roman festival of the Compitalia at Delos is an excellent illustration of the complexity of the role of enslaved persons as brokers in cross-cultural encounters. The cultural transformation of the Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire involved the agency of slaves and freedmen of the imperial household and in the army communities, of public slaves and freedmen of the newly emerging cities and of elite Romans and traders.

In the course of the fellowship, alongside developing the conceptual framework described above, I have focused on the sources for slave agency in cross-cultural encounters during the archaic and classical periods. This is the period before the mass appearance of enslaved persons as key brokers in the fundamental transfer of cultural and technological knowledge between the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Mediterranean in the late republican period. I have explored a series of encounters, some well-known, but mostly little explored. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess, who pretends to be an elite woman from Phrygia, tries to explain to Anchises her ability to speak the Trojan language by referring to her Trojan nurse, who taught her the language (107-116). The story illustrates how enslaved persons, in their role in nursing and educating young children, could constitute an important source of linguistic dexterity and cross-cultural transmission.

Equally fascinating is the story of Naris, narrated by the fifth-century historian Charon of Lampsacus (fr. 1). Naris was a Bisaltian slave barber in the city of Cardia, where he found out about a prophecy that the Cardians would be defeated by the Bisaltians and that the Cardian horses danced to the rhythm of flutes. He escaped and returned to his country, became leader of the Bisaltians, and bought a slave girl from Cardia who taught the Bisaltians how to play the flute. In the battle, the Bisaltians flute players managed to destabilize the Cardian cavalry, leading to a major Bisaltian victory. Both Naris and the anonymous female slave were key players in cross-cultural transmission and its military consequences.

But undoubtedly it is Herodotus which has the most fascinating examples of the cultural agency of slaves. What is remarkable about the Herodotean stories is what he simply takes for granted. Thus, he narrates a story in which the foundation of the oracle of Dodona is attributed to an Egyptian captive woman sold as a slave in Dodona (2.54-7); while the historicity of the tale is obviously doubtful, Herodotus finds it unremarkable that a foreign female slave could start a major new cult. Equally fascinating is the tales concerning Zalmoxis, who is represented as a Getan slave of the philosopher Pythagoras, who after his manumission returned to his country and promulgated a new cult based on Pythagorean ideas (4.94-6). Finally, the stories about Rhodopis, a Thracian slave courtesan at Naucratis, a Greek colony in Egypt, who made a major dedication at the Panhellenic sanctuary of Delphi, illustrates the issue of slave acculturation in a particularly telling way (2.134-5).

I intend to incorporate the results of research conducted during the fellowship in an article I am currently writing on the agency of enslaved persons. This article sets out to present an agenda for the study of slave agency, and the cultural agency of slaves in antiquity will be an important part of the argument.

The article will be published in a major journal in the field of slavery studies. The contribution of the CHS fellowship will be mentioned in any articles related to this project as well.