Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - Slavery

By Owain Williams

Firstly, I just want to thank everyone who has submitted for the Domination giveaway. I did not expect so many people to respond! However, unfortunately, there can only be one winner. I will get in touch with the winner to get their details. Keep an eye out for more giveaways in the future!

Now, on with your regularly scheduled content.

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I have been playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, an action RPG set during the Archidamian War, the first phase of the Peloponnesian War. As either Alexios or Kassandra, you travel the world seeking to combat the influence of the Cult of Kosmos, which seeks to control the Greek world. In doing so, you rub shoulders with major historical figures, such as Brasidas, Socrates, and Hippocrates. As the central premise of the game indicates, this is not simply a historical game seeking to immerse you in ancient Greece, but a historical fantasy – there are even mythological creatures wandering the world – so we shouldn’t expect too much historical accuracy. 

Still, even though the game is historical fantasy, I think there should be some attempt at the verisimilitude of the setting. By and large, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey does a good job at recreating the ancient Greek world as a setting. Yet when it comes to the content that players actually interact with the game is somewhat lacking. I have already mentioned the issue surrounding names of both characters and places, such as Markos, the Hellenised version of the Latin Marcus. To this can be added, for example, the oversimplification of the Peloponnesian War to a conflict between Athens and Sparta, with the forces of other poleis not represented, regardless of their involvement in the war, such as Corinth or Thebes. 

However, what I wanted to mention in this blog is the lack of enslaved persons in the game. While they crop up every now and again, with some characters simply being named ‘Slave’ or some variation of that, and the Helots are referred to as slaves (although the latter’s involvement in the game is very limited), the frequency with which they appear does disservice to how omnipresent slaves would have been in the ancient Greek world. The player is not given the option to interact with slaves very often, and when this option is available, the slaves have little agency or characterisation, never featuring in the story in any meaningful way. In Sparta, for example, the player is given the task of assassinating rogue members of the krypteia – a secretive Spartan organisation that may or may not have wantonly killed Helots – and the player can incite a Helot uprising in doing so. You would expect this to appear again in the game. Perhaps the player, having initially ignited the Helots, might choose to side with the uprising, or, as a Spartan wishing to be accepted back into the fold, might put it down? This is never mentioned again. Nor is it ever mentioned that, when the player destroys a bireme or trireme – which they will potentially do dozens of times – hundreds of slaves potentially die each time. Honestly, there is no mention of rowers, despite their historical significance, at all.

This is quite the blind spot. Considering just how much work was clearly put into the game and recreating ancient Greece, it is mind boggling how such a prevalent subject as slavery is omitted to such an extent. I am not the first person to notice this, as Justin Biggi, a graduate student at St Andrews, also wrote about the representation of slavery in the game.

Have you played Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey? What did you think of the game? Were there any things you wish they had done better?