Voiceless, Invisible, and Countless in Ancient Greece

This volume brings together an international group of scholars to explore the experiences of subordinates and the nature of their subordination in ancient Greece. The work focusses on improving techniques for witnessing the lives of such groups, understanding their common experiences, and through these, seeing their common humanity.

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Voiceless, Invisible, and Countless in Ancient Greece explores the experiences of subordinates and the nature of their subordination in the Greek world 700—300 BCE. Throughout the course of the ten contributions it aims to bring forth the voices of the various groups and individuals affected by differing structures and degrees of subordination, and explore what can be gained by examining these together. What did these various and numerous groups, especially those who are underrepresented in scholarship, hold in common?

Most people belonged to one of these subordinated groups, but recovering their existence is particularly difficult in archaic and classical Greece. Some groups we cannot hear about because they are not subjects of surviving discourses; some groups were systematically ignored or deliberately excluded from the historical record. The many with only partial or zero legal rights-slaves, metics, exiles-all benefit from renewed revelatory efforts, and by putting their experiences into conversation with other subordinated groups.

This volume contains individual studies of slaves and indentured labourers, exiles, women, and disenfranchised of many kinds. It brings together leading scholars in the field and covers a broad range of philological, historical, and archaeological approaches to the discussion in an effort to better understand both the processes and the conditions of subordination.