WAS GREEK CIVILIZATION BASED ON SLAVE LABOUR.

The article examines the condition of slavery in the Greek civilization. There is one region of slave work in particular, where the theory can only be applied with great reservations--the household. In speaking of slave masters, chattels, and apprentices, theory tends to assume the chattels working in mines and quarries, the apprentices in manufacturing workshops, and the masters as modern business men. Serfs were always recognized by the ancients as being in a different status from ordinary bought slaves, and they bore a distinctive name in every locality. Serfs are apprentice-slaves working with a peculiar and specialized motive. Among Greeks, serfdom falls under the head of chattel-slavery, and the states which are dependent upon it for the whole or the greater part of their labour are slave-states, while among the barbarians it falls under the head of apprentice-slavery. Mining may be taken as the typical industry for the employment of chattel slaves. Thus the Greek society was not a slave-society, but it contained a sediment of slaves to perform its most degrading tasks, while the main body of its so-called slaves consisted of apprentices haled in from outside to assist, together and almost on equal terms with their masters, in creating the material basis of a civilization in which they were hereafter to share.