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Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean cultures was a mixture of debt-slavery, slavery as a punishment for crime, and the enslavement of prisoners of war.

Undoubtedly a majority of slaves were condemned to agricultural or industrial labour and lived hard lives. In some of the city-states of Greece and in the Roman Empire, slaves were a very large part of the economy, and the Roman Empire built a large part of its wealth on slaves acquired through conquest. In both Greek and Roman societies, slavery had the effect of providing the ownership class with the leisure to engage in intellectual and cultural pursuits that built a civilization which later became the foundations of today's western civilization.

Slaves could be freed by their masters and in many cases went on to rise to positions of power, or sometimes they were encourage to save money for buying their freedom.

Slavery in the Bible

See Sabbatical year, Onesimus, Bible-based advocacy of slavery, in addition to the details of the Book of Exodus.

Old Testament or Tanakh

Leviticus draws a distinction between Hebrew debt slavery:

25:39 If your brother becomes impoverished with regard to you so that he sells himself to you, you must not subject him to slave service.

25:40 He must be with you as a hired worker, as a resident foreigner; he must serve with you until the year of jubilee,

25:41 but then he may go free, he and his children with him, and may return to his family and to the property of his ancestors.

25:42 Since they are my servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt, they must not be sold in a slave sale.

25:43 You must not rule over him harshly, but you must fear your God.

and "bondslaves", foreigners:

25:44 As for your male and female slaves who may belong to you, you may buy male and female slaves from the nations all around you.

25:45 Also you may buy slaves from the children of the foreigners who reside with you, and from their families that are with you, whom they have fathered in your land, they may become your property.

25:46 You may give them as inheritance to your children after you to possess as property. You may enslave them perpetually. However, as for your brothers the Israelites, no man may rule over his brother harshly.

Slavery in Greece

The term slave (doulos - δούλος), in ancient greek, is defined as a person whithout voting rights who is forced to obey to whatever his master commands him. A doulos is the opposite term of the ancient greek word "eleutheros - ελεύθερος" (Some people translate doulos word as "worker", as long as the word doyleia (δουλειά) is translated by them as "work". The accuracy of this translation is disputed by others which believe that the correct translation of the ancient word doyleia is "slavery"). The word "eleutheros" has several meanings, but the political meaning of the word is defined as someone who is subject to no one and to nothing, except the laws of his city-state that are decided using the majoritarian voting method. An ancient greek slave-doulos, despite the contemporary popular belief, is not necessarely a person with no rights at all. Slaves, in many city-states, were protected by laws decided by the assembly of their masters,and, especially in Athens, they had rights like the right of property or the right of life.

Some philosophers of antiquity defended slavery-douleia (the idea that not everyone should have voting rights and that some people should be forced to obey to masters) as a natural and necessary institution; Aristotle believed that the practice of any manual or banausic job should be disqualifying for citizenship. Quoting Euripedes, Aristotle declared all non Greeks to be slaves by birth fit for nothing but obedience.

Some other philosophers, especially in Athens, opposed slavery and believed that every person who lives in a city-state has the right to be free and to be subject to no one, except only to laws that are decided using majoritarianism. Alcidamas, for example, said "God has set everyone free. No one is created doulos by nature." A fragment of a poem of Philemon also shows that he opposed slavery-douleia.

Greece consisted of many independent city-states, each with its own laws. All of them permitted slavery, but the rules differed greatly from region to region.

Greek athenian slaves had the chance at escape from their master, as they could become suppliants in temples and change their masters in case of maltreatment. In Athens, in case a maltreated slave become suppliant in a temple, his master was forced by law to sell him to another master. This law protected slaves, though a slave's master had the right to beat him at will. And a slave's testimony would be taken under torture - fear of the fact that a trusty slave may protect his masters secrets or fear of his master might otherwise make him lie, which reveals the kind of relation slaves had with their masters.

Slaves in Athens had the right of property and they were highly encouraged to save for their freedom, and there are records of slaves operating businesses by themselves, with only a fixed tax payment to their masters. There was also a law in Athens, forbidding the striking of slaves— if a person struck someone who seemed to be a slave at Athens, the person might be hitting a fellow citizen, because many citizens dressed no better. Other Greeks were startled by the fact that Athenians tolerated back-chat from slaves (Old Oligarch, Constitution of the Athenians). We are told, from nearly seven centuries afterward, that Athenian slaves fought together with Athenian freemen in the Battle of Marathon, and there is a separate battle-monument for the slaves and allies, , or possibly they fought in another battle a little before. Also Plutarch mentions that, during the Battle of Salamis, Athenians were doing their best to save their "women, children and slaves."

On the other hand, much of the wealth of Athens came from its silver mines at Laurion, and the greatest part of it were worked, under extremely poor conditions, by slaves (although recent excavations seem to suggest the presence of free workers at Laureion). During the war between Athens and Sparta, twenty thousand Athenian slaves, including both mine-workers and artisans, escaped to the Spartans when their army camped at Decelea in 413 BC.

Other than flight, resistance from slaves was rare. GEM de Ste. Croix gives two reasons. First they came from various regions and spoke various languages. Second that a slave holder could rely on the support of fellow slaverholders if his slaves offered resistance.

They were many classes of unfree (douloi) people in ancient Athens, which were not part of the decision making electorate and which were forced to obey to laws not decided by them but by their masters:

• House slaves, living in their master's home and working at home or land or shop.
• Freelance slaves, who didn't live with their master but worked in their master's shop or fields and paid him taxes from money they get from their own properties (as long as property was allowed to be owned by slaves).
• Public sector slaves, who worked as police officers, secretaries, street sweepers, ushers, etc.
• War captives (andrapoda) who were primarily used in unskilled labor at which they could be chained: for example, rowers in commercial ships or miners. (Excavations may suggest that free persons also worked in the mines of Laurion.) The miners' work was very hard and their living conditions very bad.
• Women in general

The comedies of Menander show how the Athenians preferred to view a house slave: as an enterprising and unscrupulous rascal, who must use his wits to profit from his master, rescue him from his troubles, or gain him the girl of his dreams. We have most of these in translations by Plautus and Terence, suggesting that the Romans liked the same genre—which is not yet extinct, as the popularity of Jeeves and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum attest.

Helots and penestae

In some areas of Greece, like Thessaly and Sparta, there existed a class of unfree laborers who were tied to the land called penestae or helots respectively. (The Spartan perioikoi were free non-citizens, as in the example below.) These were not chattel slaves; they could not be bought and sold freely. Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Sainte Croix has argued that helots and similar groups had a major advantage over other slaves because they could not be sold at will by their masters. This stability left them free to form family life without the fear that they might be divided one from another by being sold separately. That helots and similar groups were in a kind of half way position between chattel slave and free is fairly uncontroversal. M I Finley takes issue with those who choose to give this intermediate status the label serf. Partly, this is because he gives greater emphasis on the many graduations amongst unfree laborers in the Ancient world. His prime objection, however, is that for him serf is a precise term, and serfs can only exist under feudal obligations. Geoffrey de Ste. Croix believed in economic determinism, and attempted to show that ancient society passed through the same economic, and consequently social, forms as medieval and modern Europe. He therefore argues that serfdom as a the form of unfree labor where that laborer is bound to the land and has to render fixed services; it is unclear that either of these qualifications apply to the helots or the penestae. Peter Green takes a middle position saying that such groups between slave and free could be loosely “if somewhat anachronistically” called serfs.

Sparta, in particular, treated her slaves very harshly. We are told the Spartans blooded their young men by having them go out and kill some helots. Helots were compelled to get drunk, to demonstrate the ill consequences of drunkenness; and any Spartan might beat any helot at whim. The Spartans did take perioikoi (and in some cases helots) with them to war, where they usually had light arms; and freed the helots afterwards - especially during the difficult parts of the Peloponnesian Wars. After the peace, however, some thousands of these neodamodeis disappeared one night, and were never heard from again.

Spartan severity has been accounted for by the constant fear of an organized rebellion of the Helots, and at least one such rebellion actually occurred in 464 BC. Ste. Croix explained this fear from the helots largely having a common culture and language and hence being more able to take joint action than chattel slaves. Both the explanation and the underlying conjecture are controversial. I Finley explains the greater rebelliousness of helots to rebel compared with chattel slaves by the fact that the helots being half free wanted more.

Slavery in Rome

According to the Roman law, "slaves had no head in the State, no name, no title, no register"; they had no rights of matrimony, and no protection against adultery; they could be bought and sold, or given away, as personal property; they might be tortured for evidence, or even put to death, at the discretion of their master." Cato the Elder expelled his old and sick slaves out of house and home. Hadrian, one of the most humane of the Roman Emperors, wilfully destroyed the eye of one of his slaves with a stylus. Roman ladies punished their maids with sharp iron instruments for the most trifling offences. A proverb prevailed in the Roman empire: "As many enemies as slaves." Hence the constant danger of servile insurrections, which more than once brought the republic to the brink of ruin, and seemed to justify the severest measures in self-defence—including the law of collective responsibility: if a slave killed his master, all slaves in the household were put to death.

Estimates for the prevelance of slavery in the Roman Empire vary. Some estimate it was approximately 1/3 of the population in the 1st century. The Roman economy was certainly heavily dependent on slavery, but was not (as is sometimes mistakenly stated) the most slave-dependent culture in the history of the world. That distiction probably belongs to the Spartans, with helots (the Spartan term for slave) outnumbering the Spartans around seven to one (Herodotus; book IX, 10). While we have from Herodotus an ancient source to place Spartan slavery at 7:1, few cite a similar source for the Roman 1:2 so it should be viewed as less reliable. A high proportion of the populations in Italy, what is today Tunisia, southern Spain and western Anatolia was slave. The actual proportion may have been less than 20% for the whole Empire, 12 million people, but we cannot be sure. Since there was a labor shortage in the Roman Empire, there was a constant need to find slaves to tie down the labor supply in various regions of the Empire. In the Later Empire emperors tried to tie people into hereditary occupations to secure vital services as the supply of slaves dried up.

In Republican Rome, slaves were organised as a social class, and some authors found in their condition the earliest concept of proletariat, given that the only property they were allowed to own was the gift of reproduction. Slaves lived then within this class with very little hope of a better life, and they were owned and exchanged, just like goods, by free men. They had a price as "human instruments"; their life had not, and their patron could freely even kill them.

Most of the gladiators were slaves. One of them, Spartacus, formed an army of slaves that battled the Roman armies in the Servile War for several years.

Augustus punished a wealthy Roman, one Vedius Pollio, for feeding clumsy slaves to his eels; and under the Empire laws restricting the power of masters over their slaves and children came into being and were steadily extended; however, we cannot know how well-enforced these were. Claudius ruled that if a master abandoned an old or sick slave, the slave became free. Under Nero, slaves were given the right to complain against their masters in court. Under Antoninus Pius, a slave could claim his freedom if treated cruelly, and a master who killed his slave without just cause could be tried for homicide. At the same time, it became more difficult for a person to fall into slavery under Roman law. By the time of Diocletian, free men could not sell their children or even themselves into slavery and creditors could not claim insolvent debtors as slaves.

Freedmen and freedwomen, called liberti, formed a separate class in Roman society at all periods. Their symbol was the Phrygian cap. These people were not numerous, but Rome needed to demonstrate at times the great frank spirit of this "civitas," so the freed slaves were made famous, as hopeful examples. Freed people suffered some minor legal disabilities that show in fact how otherwise open the society was to them—they could not hold certain high offices and they could not marry into the senatorial classes. They might grow rich and influential, but were still looked down on by free-born Romans as vulgar nouveaux riches, like Trimalchio. Their children had no prohibitions.

The Latin poet Horace, son of a freedman, served as a military officer in the army of Marcus Junius Brutus and seemed headed for a political career before the defeat of Brutus by Octavian and Mark Antony. Though Horace may have been an exceptional case, freedmen were an important part of Roman administrative functions. Freedmen of the Imperial families often were the main functionaries in the Imperial administration. Some rose to positions of great power and influence, for example Narcissus, a freedman of the Emperor Claudius.

This improvement is often credited to the influence of Stoicism and Christianity. The Stoics taught that all men were manifestations of the same universal spirit, and thus by nature equal. At the same time, however, Stoicism held that external circumstances (such as being enslaved) did not truly impede a person from practicing the Stoic ideal of inner self-mastery: one of the more important Roman stoics, Epictetus, spent his youth as a slave.

Both the Stoics and the early Christians opposed the ill-treatment of slaves, rather than slavery itself. Keith R. Bradley argues, indeed, that the influence of such texts as "obey your masters...with fear and trembling" may have made beatings more common in late Antiquity. Many Christian leaders (such as Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom) often called for good treatment for slaves and condemned slavery. In fact Pope Clement I (term c. 92 - 99), Pope Pius I (term c. 158 - 167) and Pope Callixtus I (term c. 217 - 222) are traditionally described as former slaves.

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