Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery

Classical slavery provides fascinating, complex, and engaging, albeit sometimes grim, topics for the historian. Over the last generation, these have attracted the attention of many of the best minds in ancient social history. The issues involved have generated passionate debates; the challenge of the uneven evidence has elicited elegant arguments and painstaking investigations of tricky and obscure bodies of evidence. Although I have a couple of my own ideas to develop, the main aim of this book is to convey the excitement and interest of the field of ancient slavery to students of history.

The topic of Greek and Roman slavery is a large one. Rather than write a long book I will be selective in my treatment. The general introduction will provide the political and historical context for Greek and Roman slavery and briefly survey the institutions themselves. Each chapter will open with a section on "Background and Methodology." These will orient the reader for the chapter′s "Case Studies," one from Greece and one from Rome and sometimes a Hellenistic case that would constitute the bulk of the book. Some asymmetry will be unavoidable between the treatment of Greece and of Rome, since the questions our evidence allows us fruitfully to investigate are not the same in each case. For example, the chapter on slave families could treat slave families proper at Rome, but would have to focus on intimate slave–master relationships in Greece, since only a few passages mention slave families in classical Greece. In sum, interest will take a higher priority than coverage, although the reader should end up with a solid general knowledge of classical slavery.

My qualifications for this project include my published and forthcoming work in the field of ancient slavery see CV. In addition, I hope to incorporate two unpublished research projects: my work on Slave Culture at Athens, will be incorporated into the part of Chapter Four on that topic. My project at the NEH Summer Seminar in Rome (directed by Richard Saller and John Bodel) was a statistical and comparative–historical analysis of epitaphic evidence for Roman slave families, whose surprising results I have never had a chance to publish and which I will use in Chapter Five. Although my research has generally been more Greek than Roman, my graduate training and my original dissertation proposal covered both Greek and Roman slavery which is why Susan Treggiari, the prominent Roman social historian, was my dissertation director and Keith Bradley was on my committee. I have written articles about Roman slavery for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Slavery and have recently been invited to contribute articles on "Slavery: Slavery in Greece," Slavery: Slavery at Rome, and Spartacus for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, a commission that will dovetail well with the preparation of this book. I have taught courses on Comparative Slave Societies: Greece, Rome, and the South as well on Athenian Social History, which covered slavery. These teaching experiences will inform my composition of a book for such or similar courses.