The Slave Who Made It: Narratives of Manumitted Slaves in the Greek World

University of Edinburgh Press, 2024

2011

Wiley Blackwell, 2022

Slavery was foundational to Greek and Roman societies, affecting nearly all of their economic, social, political, and cultural practices. Greek and Roman Slaveries offers a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources, including many unfamiliar ones. This sourcebook ranges chronologically from the archaic period to late antiquity, covering the whole of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe. Readers will find an interactive and user-friendly engagement with past scholarship and new research agendas that focuses particularly on the agency of ancient slaves, the processes in which slavery was inscribed, the changing history of slavery in antiquity, and the comparative study of ancient slaveries. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on ancient slavery, as well as courses on slavery more generally, this sourcebook’s questions, cross-references, and bibliographies encourage an analytical and interactive approach to the various economic, social, and political processes and contexts in which slavery was employed while acknowledging the agency of enslaved persons.

Electryone, 2013

This article considers the relationship between interconnectivity and Greek slavery, in particular, the slave trade and the geographical sources of slaves in Greek city-states. Since there exists no extant treatment of the slave-trade from Greek antiquity, most of the evidence is indirect and focuses primarily upon the Classical period. A variety of source material is examined, including Greek drama, art, historiography, and inscriptions. Of specific interest is the often problematic nature of the evidence for the slave trade and the ethnicity of slaves. Although it is clear that the Greeks traded in foreign slaves, how most slaves were acquired and from where are questions that continue to confound modern scholars. This article does not seek to provide a definitive answer to these questions, but aims to further the discussion through a consideration of why the Greeks preferred foreign slaves, how slaves were procured and from where, how we might determine the ethnicity of slaves through indirect evidence (such as names), and the presence of foreign slaves in Attica, where most of the source material originates.

Living the End of Antiquity

Among the thousandsofEgyptian papyri dating from the mid-fifththrough the midseventh century, those explicitlym entioninge nslavement or (legally) enslavedp eople make up at inyp ercentage. Documents of slave sales can be counted on the fingers of one hand;the same is true of acts of manumission. This does not necessarily mean that slavery,ort he use of slave labor,underwent ap recipitous decline in late antiqueE gypt; it is not possiblet ou se the number of extant documents attesting slavery as evidence for anyk ind of quantitative studyo ns lavery in late antique Egypt.¹ In addition to the paucity of textual sources, moreover,i ti so ften difficult to know whether certain words refer to enslavedp eople or freew orkers.² Even in texts of the classical period there can be ambiguity about whether pais,oravariation of pais like paidion,r efers to ac hild or as lave (the same goes for the Latin word puer). Context is not always clear: for instance, in af ifth-century letter,am an named Timios tells his wife Sophia that he has been detained in Alexandria by Plouseios, to whom he owes money,a nd is "under much anxiety and pressure" to pay him. "Hurry therefore to put our little paidion Artemidoros underh ypothec, and, God willing,when If ind ab oat Iw ill come to youq uickly," Timios urges.³ Artemidoros wasc ertainlyachild, as the adjective "little" (mikron)i ndicates, but was he as lavewoman'sc hild or the couple'so wn offspring? Slavesc ould be mortgaged or used as ap ledge for al oan, as seen in af ragmentary papyrus from the first half of the seventh century,wheret he sames lave is pledged, redeemed, and then sold to payadebt.⁴ But therea re also cases from this period of the use of ac hild as a pledge for their parent'sd ebt.E veni faslave, "our" little Artemidoros probably had ap ersonal relationship with Timios and Sophia.⁵

2021

Greek Slavery, 2023

Slavery is attested throughout ancient Greek history and all over the Greek world. Unsurprisingly, then, scholarship on Greek slavery has proliferated in the past twenty-five or so years, making a holistic synthesis of such work especially desirable. This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to research on this subject, surveying recent scholarly trends and controversies and suggesting future directions for research. Topics include regional variation in slave systems; the economics of slavery; the treatment of enslaved people; sex and gender; agency, resistance, and revolt; manumission; and representations, metaphors, and legacies of Greek slavery. Readers, including those interested in slavery of other time periods, will find this book an essential resource in learning about key issues in Greek slavery studies or in pursuing their own research.

L.A.B. Independent Publishing , 2024

This paper will demonstrate that the mode of enslavement was unique in Ancient Greece because of the society’s primary reliance on enslaved persons originating from beyond the Greek world. While West African societies utilized the wartime enslavement of neighboring states as their preferred mode, and Ancient Roman peoples sourced their enslaved from regions within their own territories, the Greeks trusted that their long-standing slave markets generated constant demand to meet a foreign supply.

2012

he study of ancient slavery is, rightly, of enduring interest. From Wallon to Weber to Marx (Engels, really) to Finley and beyond, ancient slavery has never been neglected, either by ancient historians or by students of comparative slavery. Its study thrives not just because it is a subject where grand theory and tantalizing evidence intertwine; not just because the surviving sources do not allow slaves to speak for themselves, thus posing irresistible challenges to historians; not just because slaves made important economic contributions to their societies. It fascinates, above all, because ancient slavery as a system of human exploitation was a central institution of ancient life that endured for centuries despite the violence, and the instability of violence as a form of control, at its heart; and because, at some point and without voices challenging its existence or necessity, it declined. The recent books here under review are only components of the most recent wave of ancient slavery studies. One is the first of a four-part world history of slavery, The Cambridge World History of Slavery (CWHS), with twenty-two chapters by different authors; two are outstanding scholarly monographs, Harper's