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Religion never played the important role in the development of Greek slavery that it did among the Roman, Islamic, or many Christian peoples. The practice of having the slave worship at the Greek family hearth continued well into the classical period. This hardly met the religious needs of the slaves any more than it would have sufficed for their masters. But slaves again were largely excluded from the extrahousehold religious cults of their masters. What is more, restraints were placed on their attempts to develop their own cults. The religious isolation and confinement of their slaves hardly bothered the Greek masters, for they did not care for any form of incorporation of slaves into the Greek community. […]

Roman slaves had more freedom in every part of their lives than Greek slaves. The Greek polis was an ethnically exclusive unit, whereas Rome was, from relatively early on, an ethnically and politically open system. It was not just slaves who were excluded from the Greek community, but all foreigners.

There were three respects, however, in which Greek religion aided in the adjustment of the slave to his social death. Along with women, slaves were allowed to participate in the state cult of Eleusis. The second important representation of slavery in Greek religion was the saturnalia-type festivals associated with a variety of cults. During these festivities (the oldest being the Cronia ritual) there was a reversal of roles in which slaves ate, drank, and played with their masters.14 The late British anthropologist Max Gluckman has suggested that such rites of reversal both vented feelings of tension in conflictridden relationships and reaffirmed the rightness of the established order: “The acceptance of the established order as right and good, and even sacred, seems to allow unbridled license, even rituals of rebellion, for the order itself keeps this rebellion within bounds. Hence to act the conflicts, whether directly or by inversion or in other symbolical forms, emphasizes the social cohesion within which the conflicts exist.”15 It may be speculated that these rituals of reversal involved not just a means of releasing the tension inherent in the master-slave relationship, and thereby maintaining order, but emphasized the social death of the slave and his total alienation from Greek life. By playing the master, the slave came to realize, however fleetingly, what it was really like to be not just a free man, but more, a truly free man – that is to say, a Greek. When the playing was over and the roles were reversed to normal, the slave would know then with the sinking feeling of the morning after that socially and politically he was dead. The master, in his turn, learned from the role reversal not compassion for his slave, but the bliss it was to be free and Greek. The Cronia, then, was really a death and resurrection ritual: for the master, it was an affirmation of the life principle and freedom; for the slave, it was a confirmation of his living death, powerlessness, and degradation.

The third, perhaps most important, way in which Greek religion related to the condition of slavery was by sacred manumission. The problem of manumission will be discussed at length in a later chapter; I am concerned here only with the role of religion in its legitimization. Sacred manumission was the technique of selling the slave to a god who, by not exercising his proprietary powers, allowed the slave to behave like a free man. The interesting thing about this practice is how secular it actually was. Religion was brought in as a means of legitimizing the manumission transaction only where formal legal mechanisms were absent. Where (as in Athens) legal mechanisms existed, we find no trace of sacred manumission. Bömer demolishes the traditional view that Apollo was a defender of slaves and the great symbol of Greek humanity. The idea of finding freedom in servitude to a god remained alien to Greek thought. The slave who was sold to Apollo was not given his freedom by the god; he merely acquired a de facto freedom by virtue of the fact that the god did not exercise his proprietary powers. This was a neat way of solving the problem created by the naturalistic theory of slavery. If the slave was by nature fit for nothing else, how could he become free? If he was socially dead, how could he be made socially alive? It was not possible. Thus selling the slave to a god salvaged the idea of his slaveness and the permanence of his servile status. Apollo was no defender of slaves, no oasis of universal humanity in the desert of Greek chauvinistic tyranny; on the contrary, he was the ideological salvation of the most inhuman product of the Greek mind – the Aristotelian notion of innate slavishness. […]

Rome was different, and the slaves’ religious life a great deal better. Not that Roman masters were any less cruel; they may have been even more brutal. Rather, Rome had a culture that was far more inclusive, with institutions that were incomparably more flexible, and in no area more so than religion. In primitive Rome and even as late as midrepublic times, slaves participated in the religion of the household, especially in the Lares cult. Originally the head of the cult was the paterfamilias. But as the latifundia replaced the household farm, the master withdrew from this role. By Cato’s day the slave villicus or overseer directed the cult. With urbanization and the further growth of the latifundia, toward the end of the republic the Lares cult became increasingly attractive to slaves and freedmen.16 The saturnalia and matronalia (festivals in honor of Mars and Hera originally celebrated by married women) were also important ritual supports for the slaveholding system from early times, the former quite possibly influenced by Greek traditions.17

As the gesellschaft principle of social organization replaced the gemeinschaft principle in Roman life, ritual specialization increased further. The slave-oriented cults, however, could only initiate the new slaves into the slave sector. There remained the urgent need to incorporate the slave and still more, his descendants, into the wider community. Several kinds of religious organizations were adapted to meet both the specific ritual needs of the slaves and the wider super-structural problem of somehow representing the slave system in supernatural terms.

There were, first, the interclass cults. In Jupiter, Juno, and especially Silvanus, we find originally Roman deities who were associated by the slaves with eastern counterparts with which they were more familiar. Many of the cults were of foreign origin – a good number of them brought to Rome by the slaves themselves. Most notable was Mithras, famous for the rapidity with which it attained popularity and the equality of master and slave in the performance of ritual practices.18

In the institution of the collegia, which constituted the organizational aspect of worship, the slave found not only a church but “a social club, a craft guild, and a funeral society”;19 and in holding one of the many offices, he or she experienced some vicarious sense of importance. The names of some of these colleges are very revealing. In the light of what we have said about slavery as a state of social death, it is not unreasonable to suppose that when the members of one college called themselves “comrades in death”, they were referring not solely to their coming physical death.20 […]

Of much greater interest was the phenomenon of emperor worship and the extraordinary role of the slaves and ex-slaves in the imperial cults. The earliest of these, the Augustan Lares, was in fact a revival of the dying Lares cult to which the emperor added his own imprint. Keith Hopkins argues that this cult had been started by ex-slaves, Augustus simply institutionalizing the informal local celebrations into a state cult devoted partly to his worship. “The cult provided rich ex-slaves, as organizers of the cult, with a prestigious and public outlet for social display. And it allowed emperor worship to flourish at street level.”21

It was not long, however, before emperor worship was accepted at all levels of society. It was a major legitimizing force among slaves for the simple reason that the emperor’s cult introduced into Roman law the alien principle of asylum for slaves. The granting of the right of appeal to Caesar’s statue was one of the few ways in which the state intervened between master and slave. The state was, of course, sensitive to this intrusion on the authority of the master, and in practice very few slaves attempted such an appeal. But in enhancing the authority of the emperor in the eyes of all, including even the meanest of slaves, the legitimacy of the system as a whole was reinforced. What the master lost in individual authority, the slave system as a whole gained embodied as it was in the divine protective power of the deified emperor.22

Anmerkungen

1 C. Meillassoux, L’esclavage en Afrique précloniale, Paris 1975, esp. 11-26.

2 I. Origo, ‘The Domestic Enemy’: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, in: Speculum 30, 1955. 321-366.

3 On the words used for “slaves” and their sources see W.L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, in: American Philosophical Society, 1955, 5-12. Also M. I. Finley, Was Greek Civilization Based on Slavery?, in: Finley, Slavery in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge, 1960, 146.

4 P.R.C. Weaver, Vicarius and Vicarianus in Familia Caesaris, in: JRS 54, 1964, 118.

5 W.W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, Cambridge, 1908, 291-312.

6 See P.P. Spranger, Historische Untersuchungen zu den Sklavenfiguren des Plautus und Terenz, Wiesbaden 1961, 65 (durchges. u. erw. Aufl. 1984 = FAS 17).

7 Lev. 25,44.

8 On Jamaica see O. Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655-1838, Rutherford/ N.J. 1969, chap. 6. On the U.S. South see E.D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, New York, 1974), esp. bk. 2. See also the detailed discussion of the slaves’ cultural life in: C.W. Joyner, Slave Folklife on the Waccaman Neck: Antebellum Black Culture in the South Carolina Low Country, Pennsylvania 1977, chap. 3.

9 There were, however, many peculiarly servile names, the best-known being perhaps “Rufio”. This and other names suggest the national origins of the slaves, but as Gordon, Solin, and others have pointed out, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about the ethnic origins of Roman slaves on the basis of the available distribution of ethnic names. Slaves were often named for the place of purchase, which tells us nothing about their origin – a good case in point being the common slave name “Corinthus”. Greek or hellenized names were often taken for cultural reasons. In an exceptional case a captive was allowed to keep his original name, the most famous example being Spartacus. Whatever the new name, the overwhelming tendency was for the slave’s master or superior to select it. Principally for this reason slave names “do not often take the form of nicknames derived from physical characteristics.” See M.L. Gordon, The Nationality of Slaves under the Early Roman Empire, in: Finley, Slavery in Classical Antiquity, 171-211; L.R. Taylor, Freedman and Freeborn in the Epitaphs of Imperial Rome, in: American Journal of Philology 82, 1961, 113-132; and, more recently, H. Solin, Beiträge zur Kenntnis der griechischen Personennamen in Rom, Helsinki 1971.

10 On the ancient Near East see I. Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East, Oxford 1949, 31; on China see E.G. Pulleyblank, The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China, in: JESHO 1 (1958), 217; on Egypt see Abd el-Mohsen Bakir, Slavery in Pharaonic Egypt (SASAE 18), Kairo 1952,103-107, 114.

11 See B. Lewis, The African Diaspora and the Civilization of Islam, in: M.L. Kilson/R.I. Rotberg (Hrsg.), The African Diaspora, Cambridge/Massachusetts 1976, 37-56.

12 For further discussion see V. Ehrenberg, The People of Aristophanes, New York 1962, 184.

13 We do not know when this incident, referred to by Seneca, occurred. See Sen. clem. 1,24,1, Plautus also refers to the slaves’ different style of dress although, of course, the setting is supposedly Greece. Plaut. Amph. 114, in: Plautus, The Rope and other Plays, ed. and trans. E.F. Watling, New York 1964, 232.

14 F. Bömer, Untersuchungen über die Religion der Sklaven in Griechenland und Rom. Teil III: Die wichtigsten Kulte der griechischen Welt. 2., durchges. u. erw. Aufl. (FAS 14), Wiesbaden 1990, 173-195.

15 Custom and Conflict in Africa, Oxford 1955, 125; also chap. 5.

16 F. Bömer, Untersuchungen über die Religion der Sklaven. Teil I: Die wichtigsten Kulte und Religionen in Rom und im lateinischen Westen, 2., durchges. u. erw. Aufl. (FAS 14), Wiesbaden 1981, 32-86.

17 For a good discussion of the saturnalia see E.O. James, Seasonal Feasts and Festivals, London 1961, 175-177.

18 Bömer (s. Anm.14), 87-98.

19 R.H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, London 1928, 164.

20 Barrow (s. Anm.19), 168.

21 K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge 1978, 212-213. See also R.E.A. Palmer, Roman Religion and Roman Empire: Five Essays, Philadelphia 1974, 114-120.

22 Hopkins (s. Anm.21), chap. 5.