The Invention of Ancient Slavery

by Niall McKeown

Slavery was a fundamental institution in the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but little agreement. The modern debate has sometimes been bitter - unsurprisingly, given its background in the abolitionist atmosphere of the 19th century. As we enter the 21st century the battleground has started to shift: can the historian hope to reconstruct the life of ancient slaves, or just fragments of their image in Greek and Roman literature? More than most topics, the ancient slave has therefore attracted constant modern redefinition. But how far do we see the slave better, and how far do we, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, use the idea of the slave to offer a refracted image of ourselves?

Genres: Classics

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Imogen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gives a nice over view of common views on slavery derived from texts using time, place, approach and others to distinguish ideas and explain how they came about.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very stimulating set of essays on both slavery and the writing of history, which shows how easily historians can fill the gaps left by ancient sources with narratives that they may favour for ethical-political reasons, but which are no more supported by the evidence than the alternatives. McKeown's point is not that we shouldn't offer interpretations of ambiguous evidence, but that we need to clearly label them as such. There are a few typos and some odd type-setting which makes this publication less high quality than it deserves to be.