Recall for a moment Redfield’s argument that the omission of buying and selling in the epics is a literary strategy, meant to evade new and destabilizing socioeconomic practices. Redfield acknowledges one exception, though only to effectively ignore it. “The heroes,” he tells us, “do not buy and sell—except perhaps to purchase a slave.” Yet, rather than exceptional, the buying and selling of enslaved people was one of the most routine of archaic market activities. Redfield evades this by denying that purchase and sale of enslaved people is in fact a market action. Trafficking in women and children, he insists, “does not establish in any important sense a market relation.”92 But this claim simply will not hold. Human trafficking was (and is) quintessentially a market relation. That it might sometimes occur outside geographically settled markets is of little consequence. In fact, descriptions of commercial exchange in the epics often involve the episodic markets that were typical of much early archaic trade—what can best be characterized as a one-time market. Homer describes just this, during a pause in the siege of Troy: the heroes turn their eyes to the sea to discover that “ships had come from Lemnos bringing wine, many of them, sent by Jason’s son Euneos … From these ships the long-haired Achaeans bought their wine. Some paid in bronze, some by gleaming iron, some in hides, some in live oxen, some in slaves” (Iliad, 7.473–75).
To be sure, this is trade without a generalized equivalent: bronze, iron, hides, oxen, and enslaved people are all used here to purchase wine. But it is certainly market activity, organized by seafaring traders. Furthermore, we do in fact find clear allusions to settled markets in the epics. The Iliad contains multiple references to ports of trade, particularly to towns that specialized in slave markets, including Samos, Imbros, and Euneos’s town of Lemnos. The poet says of one captive that Achilles “took him on board ship to well-founded Lemnos and sold him there” (Iliad, 21.40). And in the final pages of the epic, Hekabe laments that if Achilles were to capture her sons, he would sell them by “sending them over the harvestless sea to Samos and Imbros and misty Lemnos” (Iliad, 24.753–55). Redfield downplays these references, largely because he insists on separating slaving from commerce, and theft from trade.93 Yet this is to promote a sanitized liberal image of trade and markets, one that evades the overwhelming evidence of piracy, plunder, and slaving as constitutive of early commerce. As one historian of ancient Rome comments, “Pillage and commerce were two complimentary and interconnected methods of exchange … it was a long time before the ancient world established a clear distinction between them.”94 Preferring idyllic fables of primitive barter, mainstream economists and historians have elided the profound ties linking markets to slavery.95 Nevertheless, as we have seen, enslaved people were among the earliest goods traded in countless human societies, and frequently the most significant items of long-distance exchange.96 Rather than the product of peaceful encounters for mutually beneficial exchanges of basic or luxury goods, markets were frequently born of the violent capture and sale of persons.
This growth of markets in enslaved people prompted Giuseppe Salvioli to declare that enslaved people were the first commodities regularly sold for a profit in the Greek world.97 While the evidence is sketchy, it does seem that enslaved people were among the first commodities bought and sold—and among the most significant. Not only were ancient wars “slave hunts,” as Max Weber suggested;98 they also fueled some of the most active large-scale markets in the world at the time. In the Greek society captured in Homer’s epics, the prevailing aristocratic-warrior ethos meant that slavery was highly gendered. The victors typically killed the men who survived the field of battle, while enslaving the women and children. Warrior elites appropriated for themselves a select number of female and child captives, distributed some as booty, and sold off others for commercial gain, as Achilles brags of doing. In classical antiquity, as across most of human history, enslaved people were disproportionately female, and their primary role was domestic—labor in the home and its fields, including sexual favors for their masters, and the bearing and rearing of the children the latter fathered (both with them and with other women).99 Over time, however, enslaved adult male, too, became available through commercial markets, and even the epics portray such sales. Homer instructs us that Odysseus purchased his loyal male swineherd, Eumaeus, from Taphian pirates; and the old swineherd later purchased an enslaved male of his own (Odyssey; 14:511–14, 15.429–30). We know that merchants trafficking in the “barbarian” regions on the edges of the Greek world carried thousands of enslaved people, many from the Danubian and Black Sea areas, to markets on the main trade routes, like Delos, Corinth, Chios, and Rhodes. Following the end of the Peloponnesian War (414–404 BCE), an extremely active trade in war captives and victims of raids developed at Delos, perhaps peaking around 100 BCE. And by the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, public slave auctions were held every month in the Athenian agora, by which time commerce had supplanted warfare as the principal source of enslaved people in Greece.100
The pattern was somewhat different in the case of Rome. While slave markets burgeoned throughout the empire, a majority of enslaved people may have been direct captives of war and of predatory raiding by the imperial army, though large numbers were undoubtedly sold off after capture, as Cicero clearly intimates in his visions of sesterces.101 It is striking that by the second half of the first century CE, chains with manacles were “part of the standard equipment of the Roman soldier.”102 Various snippets of historical evidence on this front are revealing. Following the defeat of Gallic forces in 52 BCE, Julius Caesar distributed one enslaved captive to every soldier in his army. Over one hundred years later, in the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, approximately ninety-seven thousand apprehended Jews are said to have been enslaved by the victorious Romans. Equally telling, in the subsequent victory procession organized by Titus, son of the emperor, 700 of these enslaved people were paraded as part of the wealth plundered in battle, alongside the animals, and precious objects of gold, silver, and ivory that had been looted.103 Enslaved people, in short, were plunder; they were objects of wealth, no different in principle from cattle.
Walking with the Feet of Other People: Animals, Possessions, and Enslaved Bodies
“Those commodities which are the first necessaries of existence, cattle and slaves.”
—Polybius104
Polybius’s matter-of-fact description of the commodities most necessary to life in ancient Rome expressed the common sense of his social class. Enslaved people were an essential good, a possession vital to aristocratic comfort in the same way that cattle were necessary to a flourishing agricultural estate. Indeed, enslaved people were of the same category as cattle, a sort of human livestock indispensable to lordly refinement. The conflation of enslaved people with animals also permeated the symbolic registers of classical Greek culture.105 The only unambiguous term for enslaved person—andrapodon—was related etymologically to tetrapodon (a being with four feet), which denoted livestock. Literally, therefore, andrapodon meant a beast with human feet. And in a military context, the term signified a prisoner, not merely in the sense of a captive, but, crucially, that of “an object acquired as booty.”106 The semantic connection of andrapodon to both animals and war loot is arresting. We know that by Homeric times oxen had become the standard measure for the value of commodities, including enslaved persons. We learn in the epics, for instance, that an enslaved woman, Eurycleia, had been purchased for the equivalent of twenty oxen, while bronze armor was valued at nine, and a tripod at twelve (Odyssey, 1:490–91; Iliad,