In ancient times, it was a tradition for the victorious armies to claim the possession of the defeated armies as war booty. Since women too were considered as mere chattels in the ancient times, they also formed the part of the spoil and turned into a slave.
It was also the tradition that the captivated men were killed in order to preempt future danger. While the women were either distributed among the winning army or were sold as slaves in markets.
During Troy’s war, when an Athenian commander took Achilles’s slave, he refused to take part in the war.
Troy’s war became an important topic for the Athenian dramatists. Euripides wrote a drama depicting women who were to become slaves. Those women were in agony that they would become the slaves of those soldiers who had killed their husbands, brothers, and sons.
It was an irony, and yet the fate of those women who were enslaved before being dragged into the markets for bidding.
Women in Athens
Athens was famous for its democracy, liberty, and laws, but even that scrupulous society would not allow its women the freedom to vote. The Athenian women could not come out of their houses, neither could they go to the parties, nor could they talk to the men.
Naturally, it made an environment that increased the value of the slave women, who were responsible for outdoor works.
Besides, the slave women became more important commodity when the rich women began to depend on them in most of their works.
More:
These slave women were equally important for the men, for entirely different reasons as they would fulfill their sexual desires.
However, if a child was born out of the sexual relations between the man and his slave woman, that child was killed as it was not legal to have children from concubines.
Marriage was an established institution among the Athenian aristocracy, and wedding functions were the norm. However, the slaves had no such custom.
Since these slave women would do most of the menial works for their ladies, it would form a gradual bond between the ladies and their slave women. Often those concubines would serve as the spies for their ladies.
In religious matters too, the slave women were relatively free in performing their rites.
Slave Women under Romans and Jews
In the Roman empire, the citizens could free their male slaves, but not the concubines, who would become part of the household. Under the custom, the resulting offspring between a slave man and woman would be the property of their lord.
In the Old Testament, the Jews were directed to kill their enemies in wars and keep the women as slaves. According to it, if the women would not obey their masters, they should be kept in isolation without food unless they would be forced into submission.
Women under Muslims
When Muslims captured Roman and Persian Empires, they received a massive number of women slaves as war booty.
Those foreign slave women formed the part of Abbasid’s seraglio. The famous Abbasid Caliph al Mamun, too, was the son of a concubine.
In the Ottoman Empire, the slave women were imported from the various parts of eastern Europe. It is said that following the war of Ancra in which Timurlane defeated Ottoman Sultan Yaldrum and captured his wife, after which Ottoman Sultans stopped practicing marriage. Instead, they began to have relations with slave women without marrying them.
In India, too, the sale and purchase of women was the norm. Sometimes, parents would sell their daughters out of poverty. History tells us that not only the freed women but also the slave women passed through an unending crisis.
It took centuries before the women’s equal role was acknowledged in politics. The previous two centuries are vital regarding the global realization of women’s role in society.
