Slave Medical Treatment in Classical Greece Before and After the Slave Market

Slaves’ legal status and owners’ and doctors’ “humanitarianism” have often been privileged in discussions of the medical treatment of slaves in the Greek world. This article looks beyond these inherited views and puts centre stage an overlooked but perhaps the most important variable of the equation, that of economics. Through careful analysis of literary and epigraphic material, it is shown that medical treatment could vary depending on a multiplicity of (logistical) factors as well as the presence or absence of relevant incentives, incentives that were sometimes shared by slave patients, owners, and doctors alike. In addition, close examination of the social and spatial context of treatment, including the role of relations of kinship, doctors’ motives, as well as slaves’ ability to procure their own treatment, enables us to acknowledge additional variables of what must have been a multivariate equation.