Ancient Greece In Ancient Greece, publicly owned slaves were used by magistrates as police. In Athens, a group of 300 Scythian slaves (the ῥαβδοῦχοι, "rod-bearers") was used to guard public meetings to keep order and for crowd control, and also assisted with dealing with criminals, handling prisoners, and making arrests. Other duties associated with modern policing, such as investigating crimes, were left to the citizens themselves.[9]
In Ancient Greece, publicly owned slaves were used by magistrates as police. In Athens, a group of 300 Scythian slaves (the ῥαβδοῦχοι, "rod-bearers") was used to guard public meetings to keep order and for crowd control, and also assisted with dealing with criminals, handling prisoners, and making arrests. Other duties associated with modern policing, such as investigating crimes, were left to the citizens themselves.[9]
now someone please explain how these "slaves" were coerced into remaining slaves? The military? Did these slaves live in fear of hard-nosed aristocrats? Or was there a voluntary component?
Well yes, we don't really know exactly. My guess is that they were comprised of non-Greek slaves experienced and specialised as guards, bought from foreign masters (probably mostly from Asia Minor and Thrace). Thus they were technically slaves owned by the polis, but that doesn't mean that they had the same status as typical chattel slaves in practice. Because they were foreigners employed purely for that role, there wasn't much for them to do in Athens apart from that particular occupation, but if they wanted to flee there probably wasn't much the Athenians could do about it.
Consider the Judenrat in Nazi Germany. The grant of limited temporary administrative privileges doesn't change the coercive nature of the arrangement
They were probably employed.
http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/scythian_archers.pdf
In Athens the so-called “Scythian Archers” served as a police force. They were public slaves (δημόσιοι) who served as guards (φύλακες) or watchmen (ὕποπτοι) in the city. There is very little evidence that provides any details about these, and what evidence we have is either from the 5th century comedy of Aristophanes – which is difficult evidence to interpret – or from ancient scholarship from many centuries later.
Luckily, he frequents these forums, we can ask him...
They most likely functioned more as mercenaries than as slaves, if they were even slaves at all (they might have just been considered slaves since they were barbarian state dependents and were lumped together with the other public slaves, δημόσιοι).
There was a class of people between slaves and citizens - the metics (foreign residents).
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
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