ABSTRACT

The existence of the institution of slavery in Etruria has never been doubted. Ancient historians and, more frequently, antiquarian sources refer repeatedly to Etruscan slaves; their somehow abnormal behavior (as seen from Greek standards) is a major component in the build-up of the image of Etruscan tryphè.1 It is precisely these sources that inspired a reconstruction of Etruscan slavery as something completely different from similar Greek and Roman institutions; historians, at least before the last decades of the twentieth century, attempted to demonstrate that the Etruscan civilization, usually conceived as genuinely anti-classical before the diffusion of the historical approach first introduced by PallottinO's methods in the new discipline of Etruscology, never knew the inhumane custom of chattel slavery before its incorporation in the Roman world (and forced adoption of Roman laws and behaviors). This is the outcome of a long debate about the existence in Antiquity of more “humane” and morally acceptable forms of slavery, based on long-established family bonds, in which the relationship between master and slave assumed the paternalistic overtones that usually served to justify the various forms of serfdom widely diffused in modern Europe until at least the beginnings of the nineteenth century (but in some places even later); examples were found mostly in the Greek world, first of all in the Spartan institution of helotage. The widespread repugnance for chattel slavery favored an equally diffused appreciation of these forms of dependence, thought of as milder, morally justifiable, and somehow “humane” and “natural” (an idea about which the Helots themselves would have presumably dissented).2