Yesterday I talked about the many ways that people were enslaved in antiquity. For my dissertation I will be focusing on how pirates enslaved people. This is because there are a number of interesting Greek inscriptions in the Aegean that relate to freeing and protecting people from being enslaved by pirates. No doubt you’ll see some of these inscriptions on this blog later on.
Pirates have long been seen as important to the Greek and Roman slave trade. This appears to have always been the case. In Iliad 21, Homer tells us that Achilles had captured and sold the Trojan prince Lycaon to Lemnos. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ most loyal slave Eumaeus is rightfully a prince, but had been captured by pirates and sold as slave to Odysseus’ father Laertes.
Scholars had long been interested in the connection of piracy and slavery in the Hellenistic period because of an intriguing comment by the Greek geographer Strabo about the island of Delos in the middle of the 2nd BCE:
“The export of slaves was an especially strong inducement to this wrongdoing, as it was extremely profitable. They were easily caught and not too far away there was the market of Delos; large and wealthy, it could have a turnover of ten thousand slaves a day. From where comes the proverb, ‘Merchant, sail in, unload, everything has been sold’. The cause of all this was that the Romans became wealthy after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth and used many slaves. The pirates, seeing what easy profit there was, bloomed forth in large numbers, operating as both pirates and slave-traders.”
(14.5.2)
In this passage, Strabo combines a variety of evidence, ranging from history to the study of phrases and subjects it to a particular kind of economic analysis. We need to be very careful when using this paragraph as evidence: note how easily Strabo swaps the descriptions of merchant, pirate and slave trader. I’ll talk more about the problems of identifying pirates in historical sources later on.
Pirates have long been seen as important to the Greek and Roman slave trade. This appears to have always been the case. In Iliad 21, Homer tells us that Achilles had captured and sold the Trojan prince Lycaon to Lemnos. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ most loyal slave Eumaeus is rightfully a prince, but had been captured by pirates and sold as slave to Odysseus’ father Laertes.
Scholars had long been interested in the connection of piracy and slavery in the Hellenistic period because of an intriguing comment by the Greek geographer Strabo about the island of Delos in the middle of the 2nd BCE:
“The export of slaves was an especially strong inducement to this wrongdoing, as it was extremely profitable. They were easily caught and not too far away there was the market of Delos; large and wealthy, it could have a turnover of ten thousand slaves a day. From where comes the proverb, ‘Merchant, sail in, unload, everything has been sold’. The cause of all this was that the Romans became wealthy after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth and used many slaves. The pirates, seeing what easy profit there was, bloomed forth in large numbers, operating as both pirates and slave-traders.”
(14.5.2)
In this passage, Strabo combines a variety of evidence, ranging from history to the study of phrases and subjects it to a particular kind of economic analysis. We need to be very careful when using this paragraph as evidence: note how easily Strabo swaps the descriptions of merchant, pirate and slave trader. I’ll talk more about the problems of identifying pirates in historical sources later on.