The Kingdom of Drimacus

Theopompus, the Chian historian, recorded something about his own island that he cannot have enjoyed writing.

The Chians, he wrote, were the first of the Greeks — after the Thessalians and the Spartans — to make use of slaves, and the first to acquire them by purchase from barbarians, rather than by conquering their neighbours and reducing them to servitude, as the Spartans had done to the Messenians and the Thessalians to the penestai. And for this, Theopompus added, the gods punished them.

The passage, preserved in Athenaeus, is among the most frequently cited in the entire literature on ancient slavery, and it needs handling with care. Theopompus was writing in the fourth century about developments centuries before his own time; "first" claims in Greek writing are notoriously unreliable; and he was a moralist with a taste for indictment who was quite capable of attacking his own city for effect. But the underlying picture is corroborated from a better source. Thucydides states plainly that the Chians possessed more slaves than any other Greek state except Sparta. And the economics make sense: intensive viticulture and mastic cultivation are hungry for labour, the island was rich, and the Anatolian mainland and the Black Sea routes provided a supply.

The consequence was a society in which a wealthy minority worked a large, unfree, foreign-born majority on an island with a mountainous, roadless, waterless interior into which a determined man could disappear. That situation produced, at some point in the Hellenistic period, one of the strangest episodes in ancient social history.

Our source is Nymphodorus of Syracuse, again preserved by Athenaeus, and the story runs as follows.

Chian slaves, it says, ran away constantly. The interior of the island made pursuit hopeless — a man who got up into the mountains above the cultivated land could not be found by anyone who did not know the ground as well as he did — and from those mountains the runaways came down to raid the farms. This was a chronic condition, not an emergency. And in time, from among the runaways, one man emerged as leader: Drimacus.

Drimacus organised the fugitives. He imposed discipline on them, drilled them, and led them; and when the Chians sent out their militia against him, he defeated it, and then defeated it again. The Chians found that they could not win. Drimacus found that he could not be dislodged but could not, either, do anything more than raid.

And then he did something that no other figure in the history of ancient slave resistance is recorded as having done. He opened negotiations, and proposed a treaty.

His terms were precise. He would maintain order among the runaways and prevent indiscriminate raiding. He would take from the Chians' stores only what his people needed, and only in measured quantities — and he would seal each granary and storehouse he drew from with his own seal, so that afterwards there could be no dispute about what he had taken and no room for anyone to blame him for thefts he had not committed. He would not receive every slave who came to him: those who ran without cause he would return to their masters. Only those who could demonstrate that they had been genuinely ill-used would be granted refuge. In exchange, the Chians would leave his people alone.

And, according to Nymphodorus, it worked. It worked so well that both sides came to prefer it to the war. The number of runaways fell, because Drimacus turned away those without a case, and a slave who ran and was sent back was worse off than before. Masters improved their treatment of their slaves, because cruelty now had a documented and available consequence. Theft became predictable, quantified, and — this is the extraordinary part — audited. There was a maroon community in the mountains of Chios operating a formal treaty with the slave-owning state below, complete with an appeals procedure and a seal.

The end came, as these things do, from the next generation. Drimacus grew old. A new set of Chians, who had not fought him and did not remember the years before the agreement, resolved to be rid of him, and posted a reward for his head.

Drimacus heard of it. And he sent for the young man he loved, and told him — the account is quite specific about this — that he was an old man now and near the end of his life in any case, and that the young man was at the beginning of his; that the reward was large enough to set him up for good; and that he should therefore take Drimacus's head to the city and claim it. The young man refused. Drimacus insisted. And it was done.

What followed the Chians had not anticipated. With Drimacus gone, the discipline he had imposed on the mountains dissolved, and the raiding resumed at once, without limits, without seals, without any authority to whom a complaint could be brought. The Chians discovered that they had killed the only person who had been protecting them.

In time they went up into the mountains, to the place where he had lived, and built a shrine, and instituted a cult to him under the name Heros Eumenes — the Kindly Hero. Runaway slaves brought him the first fruits of what they stole. And masters, it was said, reported that Drimacus appeared to them in dreams to warn them when a robbery was coming.

How much of this is history? The tale has the shape of folklore, and the seals and quotas have the polish of a story improved in the telling. But it is not merely a fable, because the situation it describes is real and independently attested: a slave society with an unpoliceable interior and a permanent maroon problem. And the ending is not the ending a fable would have. A society that felt no unease about its arrangements would not have built a shrine to the man who ran the runaways, would not have brought him offerings, and would not have preserved a story in which the slaves are disciplined and honourable and the citizens are the treacherous ones.

Chios grew rich on a system its own historians called a crime, and it is the only Greek state known to have given a slave leader a hero-cult. The mountains where Drimacus lived are still there. They are still empty.