Iliad. Odyssey 17 



young swineherd swept away by a stream in flood.' For the heroes 

 of the poem are warrior-lords : the humble toilers of daily life are of 

 no account beside them. 



And yet the fact of slavery stands out clearly, and also its con- 

 nexion with the fact of capture in war. The normal way of dealing 

 with enemies is to slay the men and enslave the women. The wife of 

 a great warrior has many handmaidens, captives of her lord's prowess. 

 A slave-trade exists, and we hear of males being spared 1 and 'sold 

 abroad': for they are sent 'to islands far away' or 'beyond the salt sea.' 

 We do not find male slaves with the army: perhaps we may guess 

 that they were not wanted. A single reference to S/^cSe? (properly slave- 

 captives) appears in XIX 333, where Achilles, speaking of his property 

 at home in Phthia, says /crfja-iv e^v Spaa? re. But we cannot be certain 

 that these slaves are farm-hands. We can only reflect that a slave 

 bought and paid for was npt likely to be fed in idleness or put to 

 the lightest work. In general it seems that what weighed upon the 

 slave, male or female, was the pressure of constraint, the loss of freedom, 

 not the fear of cruel treatment. What Hector keeps from the Trojans 2 

 is the 'day of constraint,' tf/juap dvay/calov, also expressed by Sov\t,ov 

 fi^ap. Viewed from the other side we find enslavement consisting in 

 a taking away 3 the 'day of freedom,' e\ev6epov r^ap. The words SovXijv 

 III 409 and dvSpairoSeo-o-i, VII 475 are isolated cases of substantives in 

 passages the genuineness of which has been questioned. On the whole 

 it is I think not an unfair guess that, if the poet had been depicting the 

 life of this same Greek society in their homeland, and not under con- 

 ditions of present war, we should have found more references to slavery 

 as a working institution. As it is, we get a momentary glimpse 4 of 

 neighbour landowners, evidently on a small scale, engaged in a dispute 

 concerning their boundaries, measuring- rod in hand ; and nothing to 

 shew whether such persons supplied the whole of their own labour in 

 tillage or supplemented it by employing hired men or slaves. 



The Odyssey is generally held to be of later date than the Iliad. 

 A far more important distinction is that its scenes are not episodes of 

 war. A curious difference of terms 5 is seen in the case of the word 

 ol/cij^ which in the Iliad seems to mean 'house-folk' including both 

 free and slave, in the Odyssey to mean slaves only. But as to the con- 

 dition of slaves there is practically no difference. A conquered foe was 

 spared on the battlefield by grace of the conqueror, whose ownership 

 of his slave was unlimited: and this unlimited right could be conveyed 



1 xxi 40-2, 78-80, 101-3, 453-4, xxn 45, xxiv 751-2. 



2 xvi 835-6, vi 463. 



3 vi 455, xvi 831, xx 193. ^ xii 421-4. 



5 iv 245, xiv 3-4, 62-5, xvi 302-3, xvn 533. (Iliad v 413, vi 366.) 



H. A. 2 



