Greek and Roman Slaveries. Eftychia Bathrellou

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Greek and Roman Slaveries - Eftychia Bathrellou


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the years; we hope that the final product has made the long journey worth its salt!Much of the final work for this book was done in lockdown conditions because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are grateful to colleagues and friends who gave us access to material we would not otherwise be able to consult in such circumstances. We would particularly like to thank Angelos Chaniotis, Eleanor Dickey, Kyriaki Konstantinidou, and the staff at the Library of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Lisbon for providing us with materials and going out of their way to help. Kostas Vlassopoulos would like to thank the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Crete, for the research leave in spring 2020, alongside with the Center of Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, for the Spring Fellowship during the same period; in combination, they provided the time and facilities for completing this volume. We would also like to express our gratitude to the following scholars and friends for their help and generosity in terms of finding the texts and images that appear in this volume: Elizabeth Fentress, Harriet Flower, Pavlina Karanastasi, Stephanie Maillot, Monica Trümper, Mantha Zarmakoupi, and Gabriel Zuchtriegel. We would also like to thank the British Museum, the Leiden Rijksmuseum, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and the Parco Archeologico di Pompeii for permission to reproduce the images included in this volume. Special thanks also go to Margherita Maria Di Nino for her help in our communication with Italian cultural authorities and to Timothy Duff and Fotini Hadjittofi, who always found time to discuss translation issues with us; Timothy Duff also read and improved large parts of our text, for which we are very grateful. Needless to add, all remaining errors and other shortcomings are our own responsibility.

      Finally, we would like to thank our families and friends, whose company and friendship supported us when writing this book and gave us joy: Katerina Arampatzi, Stamatis Bathrellos, Nikos and Vassiliki Boutsika, Apostolos Delis, Vanessa Hillebrand, Eleni Kalamara, Aleka Lianeri, Dunja Milenkovic, Christos Roussis, Vassiliki Stavrou, and Anastasia Theologou.

      The years during which we prepared this book were sadly marked by the death of many of our loved ones. This book is dedicated to the memory of our fathers, Gerasimos Vlassopoulos and Stavros Bathrellos, and of EB’s great aunt Metaxia Anaplioti; their sagacity and their love guided us, gave us strength, and to a great extent shaped our lives.

      Slavery was a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon of Greek and Roman societies. Slaves constituted a substantial proportion of the population of ancient communities. They worked in practically all sectors of ancient economies, as agricultural workers, artisans, traders, servants, performers, managers, and even civil servants. Their exploitation allowed their masters to live as they wished; the domination of slaves shaped the formation of households, relations of gender, constructions of identity, and cultural practices. Slavery was used as a powerful tool to think about hierarchy, power, religion, and the good life. There is hardly any aspect of ancient history, literature, or archaeology that does not involve, in one way or another, slaves and slavery. Consequently, a sourcebook on ancient slavery has immense value for those interested in the study of Classics, ancient history, and classical archaeology.

      Finally, our selection of sources has been guided by our selection of topics. We have obviously included important topics that have always generated important research, such as the brutality of slavery, the economic exploitation of slaves, and the practices of manumission and the conditions of freedpersons. At the same time, we wish to present new topics, perspectives, and approaches, which have been at the forefront of innovative research in the last fifteen years. Earlier approaches tended to see slavery from a unilateral and top-down perspective, as a relationship defined exclusively by the masters. This meant that slavery was approached as a static institution, while slaves were largely seen as passive objects of domination and exploitation. We have adopted a processual approach, which explores the variety of economic, social, political processes and contexts within which slavery was employed for a variety of purposes; at the same time, while masters played a major role in the historical configuration of slavery, the agency of enslaved persons and other groups and factors (the state, religious groups, voluntary associations) was also significant. The involvement of various processes, contexts, and agents generated important contradictions and conflicts, as well as both widespread diversity and convergent tendencies. We thus devote chapters to the various slaving strategies of masters and the dialectical relationships between masters and slaves, free and slave, and the communities of enslaved persons. In addition, we attempt a systematic comparison of ancient slave systems while also exploring how they changed in the course of the 1500 years of ancient history. Finally, while slavery is usually approached as a socioeconomic phenomenon, recent work has put at the forefront its cultural and political aspects. We have thus devoted substantial space to the geopolitical setting of ancient slave systems and the role of slaves within cultural and religious processes.

      All these various factors and topics were, of course, interrelated, and this means that the sources we have selected can be profitably juxtaposed and examined from a variety of viewpoints. We have included extensive cross-references to enable readers to explore sources in different contexts than those we have placed them; the detailed index is also a tool for using the sourcebook in multiple and alternative ways. We hope that this volume adequately reflects the diversity and richness both of the ancient evidence


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