The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.214

c9.s2.214

Again, there are the Susa manumissions.⁵ There was an old form of quasi-manumission in Babylonia and Elam (practically a gift) by which the owner dedicated the slave to some god and the slave became the god's property.⁶ That had once been so in Greece also;⁷ there grew out of it in Greece (the process is unknown) that form of manumission (ἀνάθεσις-manumission) in which, though words of dedication were still used, the god became not the owner of the slave but only a quasi-trustee, so that the slave went free and the god guaranteed his freedom; and this form of manumission was still sometimes used¹ even after it had been largely superseded in the second century B.C. by manumission through a fictitious sale to the god. The Greeks of Susa treated Nanaia as their city goddess and manumitted their slaves in her temple, but they altered the old form to which Nanaia had been accustomed and which had made the slave her property; they imposed upon her their own more civilised practice of freeing the slave,² fitting on to the words of dedication³ the appropriate Greek clause in that behalf; and Nanaia, for all her power, had to acquiesce in the loss of what would once have become her own property, and did in her new position of quasi-trustee guarantee the slave’s freedom very effectually, judging by the heavy penalties which she was entitled to exact from wrongdoers. That is to say, Nanaia’s Greek worshippers, far from being orientalised by her, compelled her most thoroughly to serve their own purpose, a purpose purely Greek. Similarly we shall find, in India, that the one permanent mark which Greeks set upon Asia was nothing secular but was a mark set upon an eastern religion.