ABSTRACT
When one thinks of the Greco-Roman world, one probably thinks of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. It was also, however, the world of Spartacus, perhaps the most famous slave in history, and tens of millions of its other inhabitants were also slaves. There is robust disagreement as to how to reconstruct their lives. This might seem surprising. Greek and Roman slavery have been studied for over 150 years and comparatively little new evidence has been discovered in that time. Historians have an inbuilt ability to disagree with one another, but one might still have expected increasing consensus. The continuing debate is, however, largely the product of three factors that lend the study of ancient slavery its distinctiveness and help it to make a very individual contribution to the general study of slaves. First, “Greco-Roman” actually covers a number of very different slave systems.
Our evidence allows us only snapshots of some of these, such as Athens between about 450 and 300 BC, and Roman Italy between about 100 BC and AD 200. These in turn were subject to considerable change over time. In addition, slaves fulfilled a great range of different roles within Athens and Rome. All these differences make generalisations difficult, but also offer interesting comparisons. Second, historians of Greek and Roman slavery lack the kind of bureaucratic records
used in the study of more modern slave societies. They are forced to glean information from a wide range of material, including drama and poetry. Their especial sensitivity to both the possibilities and the problems of such material is perhaps their most distinctive contribution to the overall study of slavery. The great variety of potential “readings” of texts, however, provides a second explanation for continued debate. Modern geography, curiously, provides the final reason (see McKeown, 2007, especially
ch. 2-4). While there are no “national” schools of thought on ancient slavery, different areas have developed somewhat different emphases in their work. English-speaking scholars have tended to emphasise conflict between master and slave. French and Italian scholars have often taken a similar line, though with a greater willingness to apply Marxist ideas of class conflict. On the other hand, some German-speaking scholars, while recognising the inhumanity of slavery, have also asked why slavery was able to function successfully as long as it did, and have examined how slaves and ex-slaves were assimilated into the wider society. If these differences help to explain why the past 150 years have not produced much
agreement, they also explain why historians of Greek and Roman slavery provide
provocative studies where one can find most of one’s assumptions about slavery challenged, as well as a variety of very different, though equally sophisticated, ways of reading evidence. Antiquity, moreover, offers us relatively well documented slave societies where, unlike many modern examples, neither capitalism nor race was crucial, even if racism existed and slave owners expected to profit from their slaves.
