Abstract
This article discusses differences and continuity in responses to issues of slave management in two texts from different periods of Greek history (Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the Odyssey) and compares these responses to those of slave owners in the Antebellum South, ancient Rome, and the ancient Near East. In particular, it examines different expressions of paternalistic attitudes towards slaves (a well-studied feature of slave-owning classes throughout history) that it finds are present in both of these examples. The article explores the possibility that intertextual links were responsible for these similarities but suggests instead that they are reflective of real Greek slaveholding ideology across hundreds of years, which primarily served to justify an exploitative system and disguise the cruelty and violence inherent in maintaining it.
Highlights
Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), which remains one of the most influential works on slavery in the American South, demonstrated the existence among slave owners of a ‘paternalistic’ ideology that helped justify the institution to those who benefited from it
The article explores the possibility that intertextual links were responsible for these similarities but suggests instead that they are reflective of real Greek slaveholding ideology across hundreds of years, which primarily served to justify an exploitative system and disguise the cruelty and violence inherent in maintaining it
This includes, as we will see, a form of proto-paternalism that, like the paternalism we find in American sources, portrayed slave owners as the benefactors of their slaves
Summary
This present study contends that we can observe similar continuity in attitudes towards slaves in earlier Greek literature of the same type – Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Despite significant differences arising from the perspective of authors and genre considerations, many of the attitudes towards slave management observable in the Oeconomicus can be found in the earlier archaic epic the Odyssey. Some of these correspond to what Thalmann has termed the ‘suspicious model’ of attitudes towards slaves, which views a slave class as naturally opposed to the interests of masters. Worthy of particular note is Leanne Hunnings’ argument that the Odyssey strongly influenced later discourse on slave management.[4] Though the Homeric poems had an undeniably profound effect on Greek culture and literature generally, I will argue that, while both texts contain a strain of paternalistic thinking, they represent this ideology in markedly different ways. I believe that the findings of this article add further weight to Patterson’s conclusion and to the broader idea that slavery evoked similar responses from slave owners throughout its history
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