Slavery and Worse
In a side room of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin I discovered a stone tablet on a wall. It was an edict, very probably Diocletian’s, that had been displayed in the marketplace at Aizanoi. It gave the binding price of commodities in dinars, in relation to the price of gold - one pound of gold equalling 72,000 dinars. Livestock prices included the following: cow (formae primae)...2,000 dinars; goat formae primae...600 dinars; domedarius optimus...20,000; two-humped camel...60,000; human male from 16 to 40 years...30,000; female in the same age span...25,000; male over 60 or under 8...15,000; female same age...10,000; riding horse (equus currulis)...100,000; military horse formae primae...36,000.
It was very reassuring to see these fixed prices in our realm of vague values. Harold Morowitz estimated in the mid-seventies that the simple chemical materials making up our body were worth 97 cents, but that if you calculated, more properly, the value of regulatory, signalling and effector biochemicals such as enzymes, hormones, nucleic acids, haemoglobin, contractile proteins, albumins, globulines, hyaluronic acids, collagens (not to mention interleukins and endorphins), you might come up with 6,000,015.44 dollars for a man weighing 168 pounds.
If we take the present price of gold as $350 per troy ounce, the biochemically defined male slave in prime age and weighing 168 pounds would cost around $275,000 in a hypothetical market, the equivalent of about 4 million 3rd century dinars. Not a tremendous difference, taking into account that the 6 million dollar man might have lots more skills, imagination, information and education than a Phrygian slave in a Roman market.
This is of course an abhorrent calculation in the realm of human values, 315 years after the Habeas Corpus Act. Even if the price of all human organs that may be used for transplantation is about $80,000 and the highest life insurance may be somewhere around $1.5 million, just about 5.5 times higher than the hypothetical present price of a 168 pound slave under the age of 60.
One must not, however, forget the market prices of our sportsmen, prices dependent not only on experience, achievements and skills, age, sex and weight, but also on the country of origin. Czech hockey players are a lot cheaper than Canadians, Czech soccer players are a lot cheaper than Germans. The Czech handball associations obtain for the sale of a 20-year old male player abroad 10,000 German marks, for a female 7,000, in addition to the amount paid to the club and to the individuals making use of his or her habeas corpus... Modern gladiators do not kill each other (though they may eventually kill themselves by anabolics or steroids), and they may have a positive role in the culture of the epoch. Still, they show the hypocrisy of “eternal human values” in the practical life of our centuries.
And are we really in the twentieth century in all locations on the planet? One of the troubles on the spaceship is that we live not only in different places, we live also in different times. And we always did. The peculiar trait of mankind is that almost nothing is ever really solved. Nothing in the history of life and in the history of man ever ends. We have no Stone Age anymore, but there are still secluded human groups using only stone tools. We have no Middle Ages, but we have dominant Middle-Age parasitic diseases like malaria, which killed more people - 2 million - in 1991 than in any medieval year. We still have social and racial ghettos. We have pre-Columbian myths prevalent in very post-Columbian Americans, and twelve centuries after the Mayan priest-astronomers met in the holy city of Copan to synchronize the two calendars, the time of the gods and the time of man, we live even numerically in different years and centuries of different profane and sacred traditions.
Joseph and his brothers, sons of Jacob, were sold in biblical times to Potiphar, the Egyptian. There are still some biblical times, not only in terms of human and divine values. Slaves no longer form a vast majority of people as they did in ancient Rome or Greece. The last legal slavery was abolished in the nineteen-sixties in Saudi Arabia and in 1975 or even later among Berber Tuaregs in the Sahara, but there are still slaves at some dark spots of the planet, like the border of Angola and Zaire, southern Ethiopia and Sudan, in the southern part of the Arabic peninsula, and maybe in some remote corners of Southeast Asia and Melanesia where the worst kind of slavery, feeding captured people for slaughter and cannibalism, was recorded within the last hundred years. A similar report came out of civil war-torn Angola within the last ten years.
There must still be millions of slaves around if you take the definition that slaves are not legal subjects but legal objects, people who are the property of other people.
We have slaves with nicer titles but more desperate conditions. There are indentured servants, debt slaves, sold children, and peons and illegal immigrants who are more cruelly exploited at times than the slaves in Rome or China. Slaves in the old days were regarded as a kind of investment, a long term staple commodity whose value would drop after maltreatment or be lost by killing. Today, there is only a short term interest in the survival and health of indentured servants and purchased child prostitutes or drug traffickers, even if we distrust the reports and artistic assumptions that people are sometimes sold in pieces for organ transplantation, as in Coma, by Michael Crichton.
Fewer slaves are generated now by slave-raiding and by capture in war, but there are still clandestine slave markets with less clear prices than in Aizanoi edict. There is a certain amount of self-selling. There are sales of women and children, as in China with its successful population-control policy. There is the sale of insolvent debtors and there is a vastly expanded institution of state slaves, among whom a male over 60 priced at 15,000 dinars would be vastly overpriced, as for example with a Jew in Nazi times or a kulak under flourishing Stalinism. And there were no manumitted Jews or kulaks.
And how could one even compare an ancient Chinese concubine slave to the present-day white flesh and brown flesh teenage girls taken anywhere from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, or Eastern Europe and sold for brothels anywhere from Arabia to Germany. Among our abducted girls there has been no known example like that of Malinche, the multilingual Aztec girl of noble origin, reduced to slavery by family rivalries and given by the chiefs of Tabasco to Cortez. She had a significant political role and she gave Cortez his son Martin. Our girls, unfortunately, didn’t learn languages quickly enough.
How could one even compare a 110,000 dinar slave family in Diocletian’s time, or in ancient Egypt, where the smarter ones could achieve even high bureaucratic or scholarly positions, to the situation of the 18 million refugees from famine and war areas in Africa and Asia nowadays who can only beg and die? By chance, the same figure, 18 million, is the number of Africans delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slaves trades between 659 and 1905.
No slave in the Ottoman Empire, from the janissary soldier to the harem girl, and not many slaves in the Caribbean plantations of the 17th to the 19th centuries can be compared to the status of people in the Gulag from 1920 to 1956. About fifteen million people died in the NKVD and GPU camps, and 6 million died as serfs in Ukraine and North Caucasus from famine induced by forced collectivization in 1932-33 alone. There was no recorded cannibalism among the slaves working the Laurium silver mines in 5th to 3rd century B.C. Athens. There were about 8,000 proven cases of cannibalism in the Volga region in the 1920s.
It is unlikely that the female slave sold in Aizanoi for 25,000 dinars was mutilated. About 80 million girls and women living today in sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world, Malaysia and Indonesia (not to mention migrant populations even in Great Britain where some 10,000 girls are at risk) have undergone or will undergo female genital mutilation due to religious, traditional, ritual and other “very natural” reasons in the context of indigenous cultures and their paradigms of illiteracy and superstition, otherwise known as the context of original, paradisal human values.
Female genital mutilation is not a horror of slavery. It is a cruel session of torture one would not choose to perform on a woman slave, since the shock, infections, injuries to adjacent organs, difficult labour and risk of infertility would decrease her value to well below 25,000 dinars.
Even self-sold indentured servants in modern sports may achieve, under good totalitarian conditions, a status comparable to the Roman gladiators before Spartacus, rich slaves without any human rights. There is the story of the Soviet soccer team Zarja Voroshilovgrad in the nineteen seventies. The Party and city bosses decided that they would propel the team into the first division by means of an efficient Soviet amateurism. The players’ salaries were increased and they were forced to marry local prostitutes. They had to spend most of their time in their training facility outside the city, which left the ladies at the disposal of the Party and city bosses and allowed the players to save their vital forces for performance on the field. The highest hopes were pinned on an excellent striker who was made to sign with Zarja in return for the promise that his brother, who was awaiting execution somewhere in Doneck, would be claimed by a Voroshilovgrad court for another trial (although he never did anything in the Voroshilovgrad area) and never returned. In spite of all these measures, Zarja stayed in the first division for only one year. The brother was sent back to Doneck and executed. I don’t know what happened to the prostitutes, but otherwise the story sounds like Seven Against Thebes, including Polyneices and Eteocles. Without Antigone.
Not many victories grow out of moral indignation. The only thing that all ecology, including the remarkably clear and evident ecology of human despair, can rely upon is slow, tedious and lasting economic and civic improvement, an improvement known even to Diocletian and Marcus Aurelius, that great stoic example to civic and ecologic radicals who think they can fight slaveries by becoming slaves to their own neuroses.
Translated by David Young andMiroslav Holub
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