The Ordinary Logic of Slavery in the Ancient World
World Civ. | Nobody argued against slavery in the ancient world?
The ancient world did not argue first about whether slavery should exist. It argued about how it should function. To modern readers, this fact is jarring, even disorienting. Yet the primary sources themselves speak with remarkable calm about a system that, to them, was not an aberration but infrastructure.
In ancient Egypt, slavery appears not as a moral crisis but as a demographic and administrative question. Scholars continue to debate its prevalence, but the sources themselves describe a society in which “Egyptians increasingly used slaves from the Middle Kingdom onward.” Most were “prisoners of war or slaves brought from Asia.”
They labored “in agricultural fields, served in the army, worked in construction, helped their merchant owners in shops, and were domestic servants for the Egyptian elite.” They were “branded and, if possible, would be captured and returned to their masters if they tried to escape.” Abuse undoubtedly occurred, but even the corrective note in the record — that “the image of thousands of slaves sacrificed to be buried with pharaohs incorrectly depicts dynastic Egypt” — suggests normalization rather than condemnation.
Manumission (release from slavery)was rare, yet if granted, former slaves were “considered part of the general free population.” Slavery, in other words, was embedded within the normal rhythms of Egyptian economic and social life.
The same ordinariness pervades the Code of Hammurabi. The law does not debate whether slavery is just. It defines, regulates, and categorizes it. Society, the Code explains, consists of three classes: “the amelu, the muskinu and the ardu.” The ardu “was a slave, his master’s chattel, and formed a very numerous class.” That phrase — formed a very numerous class — carries no rhetorical alarm. It is an administrative description.
The Code’s detail underscores normalization. A slave “could acquire property and even hold other slaves.” His master “clothed and fed him, paid his doctor’s fees, but took all compensation paid for injury done to him.” If he ran away, “the captor was bound to restore him to his master,” and the Code fixed “a reward of two shekels.” To “detain, harbour, etc., a slave was punished by death.” The slave bore “an identification mark, which could only be removed by a surgical operation and which later consisted of his owner’s name tattooed or branded on the arm.” Such provisions do not justify slavery, as we have seen in our other readings — law organizes what society has already accepted.
Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BC, elevates that acceptance into a philosophical principle. In Politics, he begins not with outrage but with household management: “Property is a part of the household… and a slave is a living possession.” More starkly: “The slave is not only the slave of his master, but wholly belongs to him.” The formulation is clinical. The master “does not belong” to the slave — the slave “wholly belongs” to the master. No rhetorical flourish softens the asymmetry.
Aristotle presses further. “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” Slavery, he argues, is not merely conventional but natural. “He who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave.” And again: “It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.” Even when he acknowledges disputes about “slavery by law” — the enslavement of war captives — the debate remains internal to the system. The question is not whether slavery should exist, but which slaves are legitimate.
Such arguments reveal a world in which slavery required explanation only at the margins. The structure itself stood unquestioned. Even when jurists “detest the notion that, because one man has the power of doing violence… another shall be his slave,” they dispute legal mechanism, not institutional permanence. Slavery is woven into anthropology, politics, and metaphysics.
Across Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, then, the pattern holds. Slaves are agricultural laborers, domestic servants, soldiers, and craftsmen. They are property yet sometimes property-holders. They may marry, they may purchase freedom, they may be branded, they may be returned. None of this is presented as moral rupture. It is presented as life.
The ancients did not view slavery as a deviation from order. They viewed it as one of its instruments — a “living possession,” an “instrument of action.” The assumption is itself the most arresting fact. Slavery was not defended because it was rarely doubted. It was not hidden because it was everywhere visible. It was, simply, part of normal life.
Bibliography | Notes
Apuleius. The Golden Ass.
Aristotle. The Politics. “On Slavery,” c. 330 BCE. (Excerpt as provided in notes.)
Berger, Eugene; Israel, George; Miller, Charlotte; Parkinson, Brian; Reeves, Andrew; and Williams, Nadejda, “World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500” (2016). History Open Textbooks.
Davis, William Stearns, ed. Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources. 2 vols. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912–13. Vol. II: Rome and the West, 90–97.
Petronius. Satyricon.
The Code of Hammurabi, c. 1780 BCE.