Slavery and Manumission

A soldier takes ten years to sail home from a war that already took ten. He loses every ship and every man he started with. Meanwhile his wife holds off a hundred and eight suitors who have moved into his house and are eating it empty, and his son goes looking for news of a father he has never met. When he finally lands on his own island he arrives alone, asleep, and disguised as a beggar — and spends the second half of the poem finding out who in his own household can be trusted.

Ischomachus explains how he took delivery of a wife who was not yet fifteen, had been raised to see and hear and ask as little as possible, and taught her to run his household — the storerooms, the inventory, the slaves, the accounts. The fullest account anyone in classical Greece wrote of what a woman's work actually was, told entirely by her husband.

Athens has lost her empire and the income with it, and the obvious remedy is to squeeze the remaining allies harder. Xenophon, near eighty, argues instead that the city is sitting on assets it has never counted: silver under Laurium, the best harbour in Greece, and a resident foreign population it taxes for the privilege of staying.

Athens in about 594 BCE was close to civil war: the poor were mortgaged to the rich, and those who defaulted were being sold abroad as slaves. Solon was given power to write the laws and used it to void every debt at a stroke, free the enslaved, and forbid lending on the security of a person ever again. Then he left the country for ten years so nobody could ask him to change anything.

A biography in two halves that do not agree. The first is a dossier of everything Epicurus's enemies said: that he was an uneducated schoolmaster's son, that he vomited twice a day from over-indulgence, that he wrote to courtesans, that he stole his atoms from Democritus and his pleasure from Aristippus. It is set down at length, with the sources named. Then Diogenes turns in a single sentence — "but these people are stark mad" — and spends the rest defending him, leaning on the will: a document that manumits four people by name, funds a birthday dinner in perpetuity, and provides for a dead friend's children. It closes with the letter Epicurus dictated on the last day of his life, in agony from a blocked bladder, saying he was happy.