Wealthy Athenian Wives and the Female Slaves Missing from the Attic Stelai

The so-called Attic Stelai list far more enslaved men than enslaved women among the confiscated possessions of those condemned in 415 BCE for the mutilation of the Herms and the profanation of the Mysteries. One potential bias in this evidence is that the wives of the condemned could retain their own female slaves and thus keep them from being confiscated. The Attic Stelai thus record fewer women slaves than the households of the condemned originally contained. How many fewer is a difficult question, one deserving of as rigorous and as sophisticated an approach as possible. We can at best estimate a wide range of possibilities (see appendix) based on uncertain starting assumptions. But within the range of reasonable assumptions, the gender imbalance in the AS persists; only with extreme and unlikely starting assumptions can it be conjured away. Thus, these inscriptions continue to suggest that the slaves of the wealthiest Athenians were mostly male. This investigation also argues that Athenian women could sometimes assert their property rights in public, official settings. A focus on litigation in the courts and on strict concepts of ownership has led scholars to overlook the ways that Athenian women controlled their own property, not informally but officially. In the complicated and high-stakes process of confiscation, wives were able to play an active role and assert their property rights—including those over enslaved persons—in a public, official context.