ABSTRACT
Various kinds of ancient texts bear witness to the difficulty of sustaining a stable discourse on the question of slavery and freedom. Herodotos, for example, devotes attention to this issue, since one of the codes determining his history of the Persian Wars is an opposition drawn between free Greeks and barbarians enslaved to the emperor of Persia. In the Politics Aristotle claims that some people are slaves 'by nature'. Aristotle recapitulates various arguments concerning slavery, and concludes temperately that in some cases natural slavery exists. Much of the debate in legal matters concerning the use of torture in ancient Athens obliquely supports a similar reading of the interrogation of the slave's body. The discourse on the use of torture in ancient Athenian law forms part of an attempt to manage the opposition between slaves and free, and it betrays both need and anxiety. Athenian citizens treasured the freedom from torture as a privilege of their elevated status.
