In many ways, Atlantic slavery drew from a lot of previous models of slavery and took everything that sucked about each of them and combined them into a big ball so that it would be the biggest possible ball of suck. Stan, am I allowed to say suck on this show? Nice. Okay, to understand what I'm talking about, we need to look at some previous models of slavery. Let's go to the Thought Bubble. The Greeks were among the first to consider otherness a characteristic of slaves. Most Greek slaves were barbarians, and their inability to speak Greek kept them from talking back to their masters and also indicated their slave status.