Slave Revolts as epiphenomenon of the political conflicts in the Greek world

Abstract

According to a widespread belief in modern studies, in classical Greece the slave revolts would have seen almost exclusively helots and hilotic slaves as protagonists, but not the so-called chattel-slaves, who were too heterogeneous to form a common front against the free people. Yet classical sources convey the idea of a creeping fear about the possibility of a slave revolt and the article intends to examine the apparent contradiction between the expression of such fears and the rarity of slave revolts in classical Greece. It turns out that slaves often took part in internal struggles within the poleis or in wars between poleis by placing themselves alongside one of the parties in conflict, revealing how slave revolts did not take on the contours of spontaneous insurrections against the community of free people, but were instead part of internal conflicts within the latter as an epiphenomenon of such conflicts.