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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

Well a trierarch would brag because he actually had to go on the trireme.

Presumably the best crew wants to be on the best boat with the most generous trierarch.

This doesn't hold in the age of slavery where you could get sold by the curt to slavery and serve on a galleon until you payed back your obligations.

Unfortunately that description isn't very different than today's wage slavery.

I assume you're being tongue-in-cheek, but just in case you're serious: No, today's wage "slavery" is not anything at all like the literal slavery of premodern times (taking aside the also literal slavery that still exists in many parts of the world today). A slave in antiquity or at any time prior to the general formal global abolition of the practice in the 19th century was literal property, with no more rights than a farm animal. Their owner could kill them, rape them, beat them or work them to death and so forth as they pleased, with no legal recourse for these human beings classed as property. Let's not insult either problems of modern life or the horrors of real slavery by equating the two just to be fashionably negative about modern capitalism..

Athenian slaves had a lot more rights than modern slaves. Sort of close to the lowest rungs of other caste systems.

Modern Capitalist workers actually have a very large spectrum they encompass, from very rich to very poor. Which is not totally unlike Athenian slaves, some of whom could become quite rich. But doubtless the modern worker has far more freedoms, and elects to restrict their life, in part due to institutionalized fear of no wages.

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