11-05-2006
SLAVERY
In most advanced states of Persian Empire a slave labor was widely used in main economic fields. Beside that, a large quantity of slaves was used for different kinds of household work.
Sometimes masters could not use slaves in farming or at workshops, or they considered such use of the slave labor to be unprofitable. In this case salves very often were left on their own with an obligation to pay certain fixed tribute. Slaves could not participate in the economic activity of the country; they did not have the right to have their own seals and witness different bargains between free and enslaved people.
A slave-owing society appeared as a result of the decay of the tribal system in Greek families. Slavery in the Ancient Greece differed from the patriarchal slavery. Individual slave-owners had more slaves; dozens and hundreds of slaves were whipped up to the fields and workshops. The exploitation of slaves increased and became more violent and inhuman. These measures increased the productivity of the slave labor.
Free population started to live entirely at the expense of the slave labor and began to despise the work because this was a lot of slaves only; due to the increase of slavery slave-owners had more spare time which they could spend on the war craft study.
Slave-owing militia of Greek city states led wars in order to seize more slaves, steal reaches that belonged to others and enslave neighbors.
Sparta was mainly an agrarian city state where primitive forms of slavery used to dominate. A relative geographical isolation of Sparta from other Greek city states determined its socio-economic backwardness.