Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/31

Rh Possibly the practice was borrowed from the East, where the mention of slaves occurs in the remotest ages. In later times, the Queen of Persia is represented to have urged Darius into the Grecian war, that she might possess Athenian, Spartan, Argive and Corinthian slaves. The practice was, when a number of prisoners had been taken, to make a division of them among the chiefs, generally by lot, and then to sell them for slaves.

Examples occur in antiquity of whole cities and states being at once subjected to servitude. Thus the inhabitants of Judea were twice carried away captive to Babylon, where their masters, not perhaps from mockery, required of them to sing some of their national songs; to which, as we learn from the prophet, they replied, "How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?" The citizens of Miletos, after the unsuccessful revolt of Aristagoras, were carried into Persia, as were those also of other places. Like the Israelites, those Greeks long preserved in captivity their national manners and language, though surrounded by strangers, and urged by every inducement to assimilate themselves to their conquerors. A similar fate overtook the inhabitants of Thebes, who were sold into slavery by Alexander.

As the supply produced by war seldom equaled the demand, the race of kidnappers alluded to in a former chapter, sprung up, who, partly merchants and partly pirates, roamed about the shores of the Mediterranean, as similar miscreants now do about the slave coasts of Africa. Neither war, however, nor piracy, sufficed at length to furnish that vast multitude of slaves which the growing luxury of the times induced the Greeks to consider necessary. Commerce, by degrees, conducted them to Caria and other parts of Asia Minor, particularly the southern coasts of the Black Sea, those great nurseries of slaves from that time until now. The first Greeks who engaged in this traffic, which even by the Pagans was supposed to be attended by a curse, are Baid to have been the Chians. They purchased their slaves from the barbarians, among whom the Lydians, the Phrygians and the natives of Pontos, with many others, were accustomed, like the modern Circassians, to carry on a trade in their own people.

Before proceeding farther with the history of the traffic, it may be well to describe the power possessed by masters over their domestics during the heroic ages. Every man appears then to have been a king in his own house, and to have exercised his authority most regally. Power, generally, when unchecked by law, is fierce and inhuman; and over their household, gentlemen, in those ages, exercised the greatest and most awful power, that of life and death, as they afterwards did at Rome. When supposed to deserve death, the slaves were executed ignominiously by hanging. This was regarded as an impure end. To die honorably was to perish by the sword.

The Chians, as before observed, are said to have been the first Grecian people who engaged in a regular slave-trade. For although the Thessalians and Spartans possessed slaves at a period much anterior, they obtained them by different means; the latter by reducing to subjection the ancient Achaean