Slavery was a widely accepted practice in ancient Greece , as it was in contemporaneous societies. Modern historiographical practice distinguishes between chattel slavery where the slave was regarded as a piece of property, as opposed to a member of human society and land-bonded groups such as the penestae of Thessaly or the Spartan helots , who were more like medieval serfs an enhancement to real estate.
The academic study of slavery in ancient Greece is beset by significant methodological problems. No treatises are specifically devoted to the subject, and jurisprudence was interested in slavery only as much as it provided a source of revenue. Greek comedies and tragedies represented stereotypes , while iconography made no substantial differentiation between slaves and craftsmen.
The ancient Greeks had several words to indicate slaves, which leads to textual ambiguity when they are studied out of their proper context. Slaves of the god are always mentioned by name and own their own land; their legal status is close to that of freemen. The names of common slaves show that some of them came from Kythera , Chios , Lemnos , or Halicarnassus and were probably enslaved as a result of piracy.
The tablets indicate that unions between slaves and freemen were common and that slaves could work and own land. It appears that the major division in Mycenaean civilization was not between a free individual and a slave but rather if the individual was in the palace or not. There is no continuity between the Mycenaean era and the time of Homer , where social structures reflected those of the Greek Dark Ages.
In the Odyssey , the slaves also seem to be mostly women. These slaves were servants and sometimes are concubines. There were some male slaves, especially in the Odyssey , a prime example being the swineherd Eumaeus. The slave was distinctive in being a member of the core part of the oikos "family unit", "household" : Laertes eats and drinks with his servants; in the winter, he sleeps in their company.
