Blog Post #82: The Penestai of the Thessalians with Gino Canlas

Peopling the Past brings you an ongoing blog series, “Unknown Peoples”, featuring researchers who investigate understudied and/or marginalized peoples in the past.

A Marginalized Population from a Marginal Region

I’m Gino Canlas and I’m an archaeologist and historian of the region of Thessaly, Greece. For the last decade, I’ve been studying the identity formation processes of the inhabitants of the region through the material and written evidence for their sanctuaries from the Archaic to the Roman periods. Early scholars tended to portray Thessaly as ethnically homogenous, but the increase in research on the region has demonstrated the opposite. Far from being inhabited just by “Thessalians”, it was actually the home to people who identified as descendants of settlers or conquerors, people who identified as indigenous, people with varying degrees of enslavement, and to many immigrants from as close as Macedonia and as far away as Egypt and Syria. I am currently writing a book entitled Sacred Space and Community Identity in Ancient Thessaly, which, although primarily concerned with the region’s sanctuaries, discusses the different ancient populations who lived there and the ways in which they formed and negotiated their group identities. 

The Unknown Peoples in this post are called the Penestai, a marginalized group in a region that was often portrayed through stereotypes and is still understudied. They are, so far, invisible in the archaeological and epigraphic record and are only known from fragmentary literary sources. The Penestai were a serf class in the Thessalian plains (Fig. 1), whose work is largely agricultural and are often compared to the Helots of Sparta and were described as having been in a status “between slave and free”. The purpose of this post will not be able to explain exactly who and what the Penestai were—for all we know, the institution might not even have existed!—but I will discuss the complexity of unpeeling the layers to get to who they were.

The Fragmentary Sources

The only sources for the Penestai are from brief mentions in Greek literary sources. They are only spoken of in passing in the writings of ancient historians, playwrights, philosophers—and many of these writings only survive in fragmentary quotations in the works of other authors. They are spoken of in one or two sentences by scholiasts (commentators on ancient manuscripts, usually Byzantine), and given cursory definitions in ancient lexica. They are never the protagonists of any story. 

The various written sources on the Penestai were first compiled by Jean Ducat in his Les Pénestes de Thessalie, the only book ever written on the Penestai (Fig. 2). He found that there are only 35 mentions of them in Greek sources, if you include entries in lexica and Byzantine scholia. None of the authors were from Thessaly and most should not be considered experts on the region’s history.

A large number of these mentions (18 out of the 35), which include Theopompos’ Philippica, Aristotle’s Thessalian Constitution, and Strabo’s Geography, compare the Penestai to other subjugated populations, especially the Helots of Sparta (whom Pollux also describe as having been between free and slave). The enslavement of the Penestai is mentioned by almost all 35, but the nature of that enslavement varied. Ammonios ( 2^nd century CE), and the Suda (10^th century CE) claim that the Penestai were people enslaved in war. A 15^th century scholiast defines Penestai as slaves who received wages. Athenaeus refers to them as people who were not born enslaved but became enslaved. 

They are also described by other authors as having had roles, privileges, and degrees of social mobility that enslaved individuals did not usually possess in ancient Greece. A fragment of Archemachos (not later than the 3^rd century BCE) claims that under a treaty, they could not be killed or expelled from the region, and could sometimes become richer than their masters. Demosthenes’ Against Aristocrates says that Menon of Pharsalos supplied Athens with 300 Penestai as cavalrymen. It is rare (although not unattested) for ancient Greek slaves to be used in armies, as the ability to serve as a soldier was a political privilege, and it seems that the Penestai were entitled to this privilege. 

One possible case of penestic social mobility is found in a fragment of Theopompos, who says that a “penestes” named Agathokles became a close friend of Philip II of Macedon, rose to a high rank in Philip’s court, and was named governor of Perrhaibia (a region in northern Thessaly). Agathokles would become the father of Lysimachos, one Alexander the Great’s Successors, who became king of Macedon for seven years (288-281 BCE). But we should view this passage with suspicion as Theopompos was very hostile towards Philip’s inner circle and he was probably using the word penestes as an insult. Every other source on Agathokles (Arrian, Eusebius, Porphyry, Justin, Pausanias) simply refers to Agathokles as a Thessalian from Krannon, with no mention of a former origin as a slave or a serf. Justin, in fact, refers to him as having come from nobility. The use of “penestes” as an insult is also attested in Aristophanes’ Wasps when he jokes that an Athenian named Amynias went to Pharsalos in Thessaly to live with the Penestai and himself became the “least of the Penestai” (Aristophanes’ Wasps 1270-1274).

Finally, the sources do not seem to agree on the origin of the Penestai. We have already seen that some say they were enslaved through war, that they were slaves who were born free, while Archemachos says that the Penestai were among the original Aeolian inhabitants of Thessaly who refused to leave when they were conquered by the Thessalians (Dorians who invaded from Thesprotia and traced their descent to Thessalos, a son of Herakles, sometime after the Trojan War). They decided to stay to work the land for the Thessalians under treaty. Pausanias the Atticist (2^nd century CE) gives a folk etymology to the word penestai as having come from menestai, “those who stayed” (although it’s probably more likely that it came from penomai, “to labour”). A 15^th century scholiast even mentions that the Penestai were also descendants of Thessalos via an ancestor named Penestes, which might indicate that they were at some point assimilated among the Thessalians, made acceptable by the creation of a myth of common ancestry with the Thessalians.

As for the archaeological and epigraphic evidence, the Penestai are invisible. There are no inscriptions that explicitly mention a group of people named “Penestai” in all of Thessaly’s epigraphic corpus. Jean-Claude Decourt has argued that the incorporation of the Penestai into Thessalian society can be seen in a 3^rd-century BCE inscription found in the area of Rizi just south of Farsala (ancient Pharsalos). The inscription lists a grant of citizenship by Pharsalos to 176 men, and the reason given was that they had been living with the Pharsalians, fighting together with them and participating in their politics “since the beginning”. Because some sources claimed that the Penestai were indigenous inhabitants of Thessaly, Decourt took the phrase “since the beginning” as indicating that this list of names referred to people who had been living in the region before the Thessalians. But there is nothing in the text of the inscription that really indicates that they consisted of Penestai or a serf class. At most they comprised individuals that Maria Mili termed “half-citizens”. Most names listed consist only of a given name and their father’s name but some names indicate a place of origin like Istiaia or Euboia. It might just have been the case that these were individuals descended from immigrants who had some political and social rights, which were now formally granted. 

The Still-Unknown Penestai

So what do we make of the fragmentary sources that we have on the Penestai and how does this shed light on real people from the past? 

Given that we don’t really get any inscriptions from Thessaly that discuss the Penestai (or at least mention them by name), and that many of our literary sources were being written long after such an institution would still have been in place, we can’t be sure that such an institution actually existed in the region. The problem with our literary sources on Thessaly not being written by Thessalians is that the people of this region are often portrayed as stereotypes (e.g. Thessalian women were witches, Thessalians were untrustworthy and excessive). But we can be sure that there were indeed marginalized populations in Thessaly, which included slaves (we have many manumission inscriptions), and inhabitants of Thessaly with only partial citizenship rights. 

We do have ancient inhabitants that do not subscribe to the narrative that their Thessalian ancestors invaded the region in the Archaic period but claim to be indigenous to the region. For example, some aristocrats at Pharsalos and Krannon in the 6^th and 5^th centuries BCE built tholos tombs (a typical Mycenaean royal burial) to create a visual connection between themselves and more distant ancestors from the region (Fig. 3). The invention of a common ethnic (perhaps indigenous) origin for the Penestai (with a foundation myth concerning a common ancestor and an original homeland) also has several implications. It might indicate that a subjugated population living in the margins of Thessalian society began to identify as a social group at some point. Or it might have been an ethnicization of a population that did not formerly identify as an ethnic group as a rationale for social exclusion and control by the dominant population, as we still see in modern societies.

The only way we can shed light on this largely unknown group of people is by increasing the historical and archaeological research on Thessaly, which is still a region that is largely ignored in Classical scholarship. Since a lot of our non-Thessalian literary sources speak of Thessaly in exaggerated literary tropes and often-negative caricatures, it is more than likely that the picture we get concerning the Penestai is equally skewed. Only by continued research on ancient Thessaly’s political structures, its settlements, communities, religion, and other aspects of its society—and by keeping in mind that marginalized groups existed in all places at all times—can we ever hope to shed more light on the Penestai. 

Before I end, I first wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness about the current situation in Thessaly in the aftermath of Storm Daniel, which tore through Bulgaria, Turkey, Libya, and Greece—not long after a hard summer of wildfires. The shocking situation in Thessaly is appropriate for the topic of this post, as Thessaly was and is home to many marginalized groups, such as the Tsingani/Roma and temporary migrant labourers, who have also been affected by Storm Daniel and whose conditions have been largely ignored by most news sources. The destruction caused by this storm, one of the worst in modern Greek history, caused unprecedented rainfall and flooding in Thessaly (Figs 4a and 4b). Thousands of families have been displaced, entire villages were wiped out, sections of cities flushed into the sea, a hundred thousand livestock drowned, and the crops from a third of the region (the most agriculturally productive in all of Greece) were submerged in up to 6 metres of water. Many people, both in the cities and in the rural areas of Thessaly, are still left without access to clean water, food, and electricity. Waterborne diseases pose a great threat. Outside of Greece, this disaster has gone underreported in mainstream media.