This scene has no Thucydides to narrate it, and very few ancient historians count it among the great political confrontations of fifth-century Athens. Aristotle and Xenophon only mention it in the course of more extensive developments, almost reluctantly, as if a nagging discomfort persisted by simply recalling it. Let us summarize it, once again: Following his victory, Thrasybulus proposed a decree granting citizenship to ‘all those who had come back together from Piraeus, some of whom were clearly slaves.’Footnote ¹ Acting as a ‘good citizen,’ as Aristotle writes, Archinus sued him for ‘indictment for illegality’ (graphē paranomōn) and won the case.

The laconism of ancient sources has not prevented some modern scholars from making this a major episode in the history of Athenian slavery, to the point of designating Thrasybulus as one of the precursors of modern abolitionism. The man who had given freedom back to the Athenian citizens had also been the defender of the freedom of all men. Thrasybulus thus became the name under whose aegis the humanist heritage of classical Athens and the abolitionist movement could meet, even proving, for some, that there was a hidden link, a common source, for democratic principles and the abolition of the slave order.

To this desire, or this fantasy, one must issue a firm denial. Thrasybulus’ proposal aimed only to grant citizenship to the slaves who had joined his fight and not to emancipate all enslaved people. Above all, there is no evidence that in democratic Athens chattel slaves were treated better than elsewhere because of the existence of democratic institutions. On the contrary, Athens seems to offer the first example in history of a genuine slave society; indeed, the experience of political freedom to which we attach the name of democracy is inseparable from it.Footnote ²

Let us listen again to the way Theramenes harangues his judges as his execution is imminent: ‘But I, Critias, am forever at war with the men who do not think there could be a beautiful democracy until the slaves and those who would sell the city for lack of a drachma should share in the public affairs.’Footnote ³ The sentence is surprising, and if it echoes the violence of the political controversy rife in the city of the final two decades of the fifth century, it seems at first sight to deny the intimate link between the democratic regime and the exploitation of slaves. Did such a discourse providing for those ‘without shares’ ever exist in classical Athens? Or is it a pure rhetorical exaggeration, with Theramenes imputing to his ancient adversaries an unthinkable transgression? The dilemma is difficult to solve. Theramenes’ statement at least invites us to grasp in the same hand two propositions that are ostensibly contradictory, but whose combination condenses the peculiarities of the Athenian experience: On the one hand, slavery was an indispensable condition for the emergence of a direct democracy; on the other hand, the term dēmokratia contained in itself the principle of equality that potentially, at least, could lead to the granting of political rights to slaves, however unlikely that may have been in practice.

Slave Names

Theramenes’ statement comes at a singular moment in the history of the Athenian institution of slavery, which was severely tested during the final decades of the Peloponnesian War. Many slaves had made the most of the repeated invasions of Attica by the Spartan troops to take flight, contributing to the disorganization of Athenian production. So, in 413, more than 20,000 slaves had fled following the Spartan occupation of the fortress of Deceleia.Footnote ⁴ Faced with adversity, the Athenians had also had to integrate contingents of slaves into their army, de facto dissociating the privilege of carrying a weapon and fighting for the city from the status of citizen.

It is during these same years that slavery acquires an exceptional visibility on the documentary level. Several epigraphic documents tell us the names of hundreds of Athenian slaves, briefly freeing them from the anonymity in which literary sources traditionally kept them. The stelai of the Hermokopidai (also known as the Attic stelai), engraved in 411, take stock of the goods seized by the city from the men convicted for having mutilated the Herms. Among these goods were forty-five slaves whose names the inscriptions provide. If some of these names are very conventional (such as Pistos, the ‘faithful man’), the majority indicate their ethnic origin (for example, the name Thraitta, ‘Thracian woman,’ is used to indicate a female Thracian slave).Footnote ⁵ The accounts of the building of the Erechtheion temple on the Acropolis, compiled in 407/6, moreover provide the names of several dozen slaves alongside their masters, who worked for the city in the company of free men, citizens or metics. Finally, a long inscription from the last decade of the fifth century lists the men hired to work on eight Athenian triremes during one of the last battles of the Peloponnesian War. Under the category of ‘servants’ (therapontes), the names of 146 slaves are listed, representing between a quarter and a half of the whole naval crew.Footnote ⁶

What use can the historian make of these lists? The matter is more complex than it seems. If the scholarly poetics of history indeed imply that ‘we must name subjects [and] attribute to them states, affections, events,’Footnote ⁷ they certainly meet a limit here, due to the onomastic regime specific to all slave societies. Let us remember that the name of a slave does not follow the same rules as those of a free man.Footnote ⁸ Nothing is more eloquent in this respect than the acts by which a master manumitted one of his slaves, consecrating or selling his body (sôma) to a divinity. Thus, in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, in the second century BC, according to a well-documented formulary model, ‘Ateisidas son of Orthaios sold to Pythian Apollo three female bodies, whose names are Antigona, of Jewish origin, and her daughters Theodora and Dorothea, at the price of seven silver mines, and he has the whole price.’Footnote ⁹ By dissociating the body, gender and the name, the formula emphasizes the social death that characterized slave status. The name given to a ‘body’ that is also a commodity is no more than a pure artifact and not the repository of any civil or legal identity. Masters were free to change any slave’s name without affecting their identity: ‘When we give names to our domestic slaves, the new ones are as correct as the old,’ Hermogenes asserts in Plato’s Cratylus.Footnote ¹⁰ In short, the servile regime removed all names from their own truth – that is to say, from being registered in the order of filiation.

Because it does not cover any positive identity, servile onomastics alone reveals the difficulties encountered in analyzing the institution of slavery through the ordinary methods of social history. In fact, if historians have sometimes considered slaves as a collective subject, to be appraised as a class or an order, and if they have questioned the civic imagination of Greek slavery, they have hardly ever ventured to tell the story of an Athenian slave. Let’s try to do so, however, by following the exceptional adventures of one of the soldiers in Thrasybulus’ army …

An Exemplary Greengrocer

The decree voted by the Athenians in 401 lists the name of several hundred combatants by distinguishing between two categories of individuals. The men present by Thrasybulus’ side in Phyle are granted the statute of citizen, probably without being integrated into the demes and the phratries. On the other hand, for those who joined the combat later, the Athenians granted only isoteleia (tax equality) and engguēsis (the right to marry a member of the Athenian community and produce legitimate offspring). These men, around 850 in all,Footnote ¹¹ were registered as members of the Athenian tribes, within which they enjoyed the privilege of being able to fight for the city. On the thirteenth line of the third column of this long inscription, one can easily decipher the name of a certain Gerys. Let us try to unroll a series of hypotheses to identify who he was.

On the onomastic level, it is initially tempting to consider that before 403 Gerys was a slave. Certainly, when we encounter him in 401, he has just acquired the status of a privileged metic (isotelēs), but there is every indication that he had been one of the slaves fighting at Thrasybulus’ side. This name can indeed be found nine times in the Athenian documentation of the last decade of the fifth century and the beginning of the fourth centuryFootnote ¹²; and, in eight cases out of nine, it refers to a slave: The name obviously carries a servile stigma. As Kostas Vlassopoulos noted, it is therefore necessary to admit that Gerys kept his slave name when he became an isotelēs in 401. This is completely exceptional: In doing so, he undoubtedly aimed to commemorate his democratic engagement in 403.

Derived from gēruō (‘to make a voice heard, to celebrate’), the name Gerys is nevertheless paradoxical for a slave, symbolically designating as the holder of a ‘voice’ one who, legally speaking, was deprived of precisely this. This is perhaps the result of the Hellenization of a name of Thracian origin: Based on the Thracian root Ger-, the Greeks may have come up with a name of Greek appearance, but whose foreign origin remained perfectly audible.Footnote ¹³ This attractive hypothesis would therefore make Gerys one of the many Athenian slaves originating from Thrace, a region that became, with Scythia and Anatolia, the main source for slaves in the Greek world of the classical era.

Exceptionally, the decree mentions the profession of each of the individuals that the Athenians chose to honor. Beside the name Gerys was engraved the word lachanopō(lēs), greengrocer. Our man therefore sold figs, cabbages or turnips on the Athenian markets, and we like to imagine him going every morning to the Agora and setting up in his allotted place, where the fruit and vegetables were sold. In the center of one of the circles (kukloi) in which sales took place, we envision him, under the watchful eye of the agoranomoi, haranguing the passersby. His activity undoubtedly forced him to make frequent round trips into the Attic countryside to fetch supplies, but also to sell his products in the local markets spread across the demes of Attica. If Gerys was indeed a greengrocer slave even before he became an isotelēs in 403, one must suppose that his activity granted him a certain independence from his master, so he may in fact represent a specific category of slaves well known in Athens: ‘Settled slaves,’ placed by their masters at the head of a store or a workshop, in exchange for which they paid them a regular income, while enjoying a certain autonomy in running the business.Footnote ¹⁴ Once he became a metic, Gerys had to pay a special tax, created in 403, which targeted foreign merchants in the Agora.Footnote ¹⁵

Thrasybulus’ decree therefore illuminates fleetingly, in the manner of a snapshot, the situation of the former slave Gerys in 401, just as he acquired the status of metic. Two further inscriptions allow us to reconstruct the activities of our character both before and after this crucial date.

If Dying Is a Beautiful Thing …

Perhaps Gerys was involved in the final battles of the Peloponnesian War. The name Gerys indeed appears five times in the list of the fighting slaves present on the eight Athenian triremes during this period.Footnote ¹⁶ The man who fought on the hill of Mounychia by Thrasybulus’ side in 403 was perhaps experienced in military matters.

But our knowledge of Gerys comes above all from a splendid epitaph that was engraved in the fourth century on a stele and placed within a family funeral enclosure. On it, Gerys, his wife, Nico, and his son, Theophilos, recall their status of isotelēs: We can therefore be sure this is the same Gerys to whom this privilege had been granted because of his participation in the battle at Mounychia.Footnote ¹⁷ The epitaph gives voice to two speakers, Gerys and Nico:

Dating from between 340 and 317, the inscription was engraved after the death of Theophilos. As a son, he recalled the privilege of isoteleia once granted to his father, perhaps indirectly celebrating the glorious deed that gave rise to it. The mark of honor (geras) formerly granted to Gerys is undoubtedly the isoteleia that had been conferred to him by the city in 401. Since his son Theophilos designates himself as an isotelēs metic, we must imagine that Gerys did not benefit from the privilege of egguēsis, by virtue of which he could have married an Athenian and given birth to a citizen. His wife, Nico, is probably therefore not be Athenian, and perhaps their union took place prior to the events of 403.Footnote ²⁰

Philologists agree that the first lines of the epitaph are a paraphrase of an epigram attributed to Simonides: ‘If the greatest part of virtue is to die nobly, then Fortune granted it to us above all others; for we strove to crown Greece with freedom and lie here in possession of unaging praise.’Footnote ²¹ This epigram, which seems to have been engraved on the tomb of the Athenians who died at Plataea (479) or at Chaeronea (338),Footnote ²² celebrates the military action of the Athenians in the service of their fatherland and of the freedom of the Greeks. The civic ideology is implicitly used by Theophilos for the benefit of his own lineage, as if his father’s participation in the liberation of Athens in 403 echoed the combat of Athenian citizens in the most heroic moments of their history. The epitaph therefore seems to correlate the military glory of Gerys with that of the heroes of Athenian history who had given their lives for the fatherland.Footnote ²³ Moreover, by mentioning the three names of Gerys, Nico and Theophilos, it celebrates the exemplary integration of the family of a former slave who became not only a metic but an isotelēs. If one accepts that Gerys, once freed, kept his slave name, it must simultaneously be noted that he gave his son, Theophilos, a very common Athenian name.

But assimilating Gerys to the heroes of Athenian history also deserves to be examined in relation to the complex rhetorical strategy implied by epigrammatic writing itself, which is based on the convergence of several identities. Jesper Svenbro emphasized the unusual position of the epigrammatic genre between orality and writing, by which the reader of an epitaph becomes the ‘the vocal instrument of the writing that cannot do without it.’Footnote ²⁴ Written in the first person, an epitaph is intended to be read publicly. ‘For the text to achieve complete fulfilment, the reader must lend his voice to the writing’Footnote ²⁵: The reader is therefore invited to project themself onto the figure of the deceased, for whom they become the spokesperson. The epitaph conjures up an open stage upon which different identities converge by exalting service to the city. The glorious combat of Gerys is placed under the aegis of the Athenians who died in heroic circumstances at Plataea or Chaeronea, and the audience of the inscription becomes the instrument of his fame and his memory by embodying him, even if only for as long as they are reading the inscription.

Now, this singular device truly comes into it own when you read aloud the text of the epitaph. Gerys boasts of having given himself entirely to all men (pasin anthrōpoisi), by which he means all human beings in the broadest possible sense, whether they are men or women, citizens, metics or slaves. The epitaph claims to offer an ethical lesson to passersby of all social statuses: that of a pious and good man, whose life was devoted to serving the Athenian city. In a funerary context, it shows how status distinctions have been suspended in favor of the exaltation of Athenian patriotic rhetoric.

With what thread should we weave our hero into Athenian social life? Reconstructing a social context in which slaves may have participated is obviously perilous, considering the act of fundamental desocialization that is at the origin of slavery and seems to forbid slaves from any participation in the shared world of free men. Aristotle thus establishes that a master and his slave cannot share the bond of friendship (philia) necessary for the existence of any community:

Aristotle’s statement is revealing of an ideology of slavery that envisages the relationship of a master to his slave in its instrumental dimension. If it is based on violence, the bond of mutual, dissymmetrical, involuntary dependence that unites a master and his slave is obviously much more complex and often includes an emotional dimension. More broadly, no slave society can survive without the development of spaces within which free and enslaved people come to mingle, and classical Athens is no exception. As a slave and then as an isotelēs, Gerys was obviously involved in all sorts of relationships with Athenians, both free and unfree. Several choruses can be inferred at the various sites where this former slave was active.

Men and Women of the Agora

The Agora is the first of these. As the speeches of the fourth century show, the vast space of the Agora and the set of stalls that occupied it were regular gathering places for all forms of groups in Athens. The residents of the deme of Deceleia, in the north of Attica, used to gather around a barber’s stall, while the Plataeans, recently integrated into the civic community, used to meet once a month at the fresh cheese market.Footnote ²⁷ In this vast open space, at the center of the urban arena, men and women of very different statuses rubbed shoulders, the logic of commercial exchange neutralizing the status distinctions that structured political life. One document among others reveals the heterogeneous and variegated character of the Athenian Agora. A curse tablet from the fourth century, written by a merchant, dooms a multitude of individuals to misfortune:

It is likely that some sort of commercial rivalry is at the origin of these threats, but that is not the main point. The tablet offers above all a striking insight into the Athenian commercial sphere, in which individuals of very different statuses crossed paths. Only one individual is mentioned with a demotic, which attests to his citizenship (Aristandros of Eleusis); beyond this, determining the legal status of these people proves difficult. While some of them have names that were widespread among Athenian citizens, such as Callias or Philon, others by contrast have typical slave names, such as Carpos or Thraitta. The writer of the tablet did not bother to qualify all his opponents with their legal status: Within the world of the agoraioi – the craftsmen and merchants of the Agora – legal distinctions had only marginal importance compared to the professional activity of each of its members. There is even an example of a man with a typically servile name, Sosimenes, who owns or at least has in his possession slaves, which confuses things still further. This curse also shows the extent to which women played a role in the economic activity of the Agora. Finally, it appears that slaves are at the head of real stalls and, under the more or less rigorous control of their master, seem to enjoy a certain autonomy. Carpos, the slave of Sosimenes, therefore manages a stall, whereas Cittos, with his name of servile origin, seems to have been a manufacturer of ropes. Our greengrocer Gerys, a slave then a metic, blends into this landscape perfectly, and one can imagine how he came to find his place within the chorus of the agoraioi.

It would be wrong, however, to reduce the Agora to its commercial dimension and to imagine, consequently, the world of the agoraioi as cut off from a political life reserved for citizens only. The Agora was both a market and a politicized space within which political information circulated during particularly bitter debates. In this sense, it constituted well and truly one ‘of the complementary, even parallel, places of political participation,’Footnote ²⁹ where noncitizens found their rightful place. In Aristophanes’ Wasps, Bdelycleon gives voice to a colleague of Gerys, who is also a greengrocer, suggesting that the political fate of the city could rest on plots hashed out at the vegetable stall:

It does not matter here the reasons for which buying a leek came to constitute a sign of rallying to the oligarchic camp or an aspiration to tyranny; the important thing is to note that the behavior of each person in the marketplace of the Agora could be observed, analyzed and discussed in political terms and that, in this passage, a woman played the role of political analyst. It may be in this same Agora that Gerys forged the democratic convictions that led to him joining the army of Thrasybulus.

The Thracian Chorus of Mounychia

There is proof of Gerys’ presence at another site in 403: the Piraeus. Now, Piraeus, and more precisely the hill of Mounychia at its heart, constituted a place of utmost importance for the Thracian population residing in Attica. This community can be observed during the annual festival in honor of the goddess Bendis, the Bendideia, of which Plato offers a vibrant description in the first lines of the Republic.Footnote ³¹ The entry of this Thracian divinity into Athens can be traced back to the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Each year, two distinct processions – that of the Thracians and that of the citizens – wound their way up to the sanctuary at the top of the hill of Mounychia. The festival, which ended with the organization of a race with horses and torches (lampadēdromia) followed by a great nocturnal celebration (pannuchis), was of a considerable scale and involved the sacrifice of several dozen animals.Footnote ³²

The organization of the festival was the responsibility of the city, represented by the priestess of the divinity and its magistrates (the hieropoioi), and of a religious association made up of Thracian men and women (the orgeōnes). This association was undoubtedly also responsible for building the sanctuary of the goddess on the hill of Mounychia.Footnote ³³ The orgeōnes and the magistrates of the city organized cult practices for both the Athenian citizens and for all the Thracians of Attica. However, the sanctuary of Mounychia formed the center of a Bendidean cult network whose branches extended across the entire southern coast of Attica: On the island of Salamis, as in Laurion, the goddess was honored by various Thracian communities, some of whom were mainly composed of slaves.Footnote ³⁴ However, this Bendidean network was closely associated with another cult network linked to Artemis, to which it offered a sort of counterpart. Whereas in Mounychia, the Bendideion adjoined a sanctuary of Artemis, in Kamatero, on the island of Salamis, the two sanctuaries faced each other. The celebration of Bendis seems to have played on a complex set of echoes between Thracian and Athenian identities, as demonstrated by the procession of Piraeus being divided into two separate lines, one including citizens and the other Thracians, and by the duality of the sanctuaries of Artemis and Bendis in Piraeus and Salamis. In this, these festivities helped integrate all of the Thracians residing in Attica, whether they were free men or slaves.

Pausanias documents the existence of a similar configuration when he reports the introduction of the cult of Heracles to Erythrae in Asia Minor. The celebration of Heracles was here entrusted to the members of a Thracian community, composed of free men and women as well as slaves. The story of the cult began when the Erythraeans failed to transfer the statue of the god from Tyre in Phoenicia. A blind man from Erythrae, named Phormion, had a vision in a dream in which all the Erythraean women cut off their braids to make a cable and managed to bring the statue back to the city. However, according to Pausanias, the Erythraean women refused to submit to the dream. In contrast, he notes that ‘the Thracian women, both the slaves and the free who lived there, offered themselves to be shorn. And so the men of Erythrae towed the raft ashore. Accordingly no women except Thracian women are allowed within the sanctuary of Heracles, and the hair rope is still kept by the locals.’Footnote ³⁵ Pausanias thus describes a Thracian community in charge of a civic cult in Erythrae that brings together free and slave women. The Thracian orgeōnes of Bendis must have likewise blurred the legal distinction between free men and slaves.

Furthermore, there are a few hints that suggest the presence of many Thracians within the army of Thrasybulus in the Piraeus. If the Thracian identity of Gerys cannot be definitively proven, one of his brothers in arms was named Bendiphanes, a name directly related to the Bendis goddess herself.Footnote ³⁶ Better still, among the twenty or so names that we can read on Thrasybulus’ decree, several of them – Blepon, Egersis, Epictas, Dexios – hint at a Thracian origin.Footnote ³⁷ It is therefore tempting to reconstruct a Thracian chorus around Thrasybulus, of which Gerys may have been a member.

Another argument also supports this assumption. According to Xenophon’s account, Thrasybulus’ army was composed essentially of lightly armed soldiers. A few scant rows of hoplites supported by a heterogeneous troop of men of all classes armed with lances and light shields: These are the men who routed the oligarchs in 403.Footnote ³⁸ However, Thracians were unanimously known in the Greek world to provide the best peltastai (soldiers with light weapons), and the Athenians had already called on them during the first decade of the Peloponnesian War. The Battle of Mounychia was perhaps the theater of a war ‘in the Thracian style,’ carried out by a composite army, reinforced by men of all classes. Moreover, Thrasybulus deliberately chose to fight the army of the Thirty from a strategic position: the hill of Mounychia. This choice of site, protected by the goddess Bendis, is far from innocent once the presence of a strong Thracian contingent is acknowledged. It is, in fact, beside the sanctuaries of Bendis and Artemis that Thrasybulus and his men found refuge, and it is thanks to the assistance of the two goddesses – and of the Thracian chorus of Gerys – that, in spite of being outnumbered, they still managed to crush the army of the Thirty.

* * *

The figure of Gerys, a slave who became an isotelēs, agoraios and member of the Thracian community of Piraeus, is exceptional. If his case is revealing of the multiple affiliations that cross Athenian society, his upward trajectory undoubtedly tells us very little of the ordinary destiny of the slaves of classical Athens. It even serves to create a mirage. Indeed, he makes it look as if the slave population only ever spoke up to offer us an image reassuring to our democratic sensibilities: that of individuals able to free themselves from their servile condition and to obtain privileged positions within Athenian society. Gerys cannot stand for all slaves, nor for all Athenian metics, as the figure of Lysias, antinomic to this in almost in every way, will show. Ultimately, it is within a Thracian chorus, made up of free men and slaves, that our character should be placed.

But how can we represent this Thracian community that brought together men and women of different statuses? Athenian society by no means consisted of a mosaic of ethnically homogeneous communities closed on themselves, since it was dominated by a core of autochthonous Athenians. Indeed, Gerys’ epitaph allows us a glimpse into the complex logic of identification, through which the family of this former slave mimics patriotic civic rhetoric, but for their own benefit. Meanwhile, the orgeōnes of Bendis maintained close relations with civic authorities in the name of the entire Thracian population, and the Bendidean cult network unfolded like a mirror image of the Artemisian cult network of civic origin. We can only understand this Thracian community through its relations with the whole civic community around the cult of Bendis. Gerys is the coryphaeus of a Thracian chorus that, far from constituting a community closed in on itself, is in constant contact with the other components of the city, and conceives of itself as part of the community of Athenians.

Once our representation of Athenian society acknowledges the standing owed to the Thracians of Piraeus, our overall perspective on the events of the year 403 is reversed. It is from the topographic and symbolic periphery of Athens – and thanks to some of its Thracian metics and slaves – that democracy was restored; it is in Mounychia – where the Thracians of Attica met in honor of Bendis – that the men of Thrasybulus took shelter and carried off their greatest victory. We usually imagine that the great Thrasybulus accommodated within his army the various components of Athenian society gradually. On this day, however, it was perhaps the Thracians of Attica who welcomed the brilliant Athenian soldier and his men and then led them on to victory and the restoration of democracy.