Fear of slaves, fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean

Fear of slaves, fear of enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean
Author: Anastasia Serghidou
Publisher: Presses Univ. Franche-Comté
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9782848671697

Les intervenants analysent le couple du maître et de l'esclave au regard des schémas d'autorité et d'obéissance, de liberté et de servitude, de suprématie et de soumission, et les incidences de ces problématiques sur les mouvements du corps social dans l'Antiquité.

Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC

Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC
Author: David M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2018-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191082627

The orthodox view of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean holds that Greece and Rome were its only 'genuine slave societies', that is, societies in which slave labour contributed significantly to the economy and underpinned the wealth of elites. Other societies, traditionally labelled 'societies with slaves', are thought to have made little use of slave labour and therefore have been largely ignored in recent scholarship. This volume presents a radically different view of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world, showing that elite exploitation of slave labour in Greece and the Near East shared some fundamental similarities, although the degree of elite dependence on slaves varied from region to region. Whilst slavery was indeed particularly highly developed in Greece and Rome, it was also economically entrenched in Carthage, and played a not insignificant role in the affairs of elites in Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. The differing degrees to which Eastern Mediterranean elites exploited slave labour represents the outcome of a complex interplay between cultural, economic, political, geographical, and demographic factors. Proceeding on a regional basis, this book tracks the ways in which local conditions shaped a wide variety of Greek and Near Eastern slave systems, and how the legal architecture of slavery in individual regions was altered and adapted to accommodate these needs. The result is a nuanced exploration of the economic underpinnings of Greek elite culture that sets its reliance on slavery within a broader historical context and sheds light on the complex circumstances from which it emerged.

Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama

Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama
Author: Ben Akrigg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139619411

How did audiences of ancient Greek comedy react to the spectacle of masters and slaves? If they were expected to laugh at a slave threatened with a beating by his master at one moment but laugh with him when they bantered familiarly at the next, what does this tell us about ancient Greek slavery? This volume presents ten essays by leading specialists in ancient Greek literature, culture and history, exploring the changing roles and representations of slaves in comic drama from Aristophanes at the height of the Athenian Empire to the New Comedy of Menander and the Hellenistic World. The contributors focus variously on individual comic dramas or on particular historical periods, analysing a wide range of textual, material-culture and comparative data for the practices of slavery and their representation on the ancient Greek comic stage.

Slavery and Dependence in Ancient Egypt

Slavery and Dependence in Ancient Egypt
Author: Jane L. Rowlandson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2024-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009488287

Aimed at students, instructors and general readers interested in the experiences of enslaved persons in ancient Egypt, from the Old Kingdom to the early Islamic period. Provides nearly three hundred primary sources in translation, arranged both chronologically and thematically and accompanied by contextualising introductions.

Ancient Slavery and Abolition

Ancient Slavery and Abolition
Author: Edith Hall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2011-07-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199574677

"Originating in a conference organised in 2007 by the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, University of London, and held at the British Library ... this accessible volume offers a pathbreaking study of the role played by the interpreters of ancient Greek and roman texts in the debates over the abolition of slavery. Focusing on Britain, North America, the Caribbean, and South Africa from the late 17th century, the essays examine the arguments of critics and defenders of slavery and legacy of slavery, in later periods." --Book jacket.

Greek Slavery

Greek Slavery
Author: Deborah Kamen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2023-06-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110654768

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.

The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel

The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel
Author: William M. Owens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2019-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000754642

This volume offers the first comprehensive treatment of how the five canonical Greek novels represent slaves and slavery. In each novel, one or both elite protagonists are enslaved, and Owens explores the significance of the genre’s regular social degradation of these members of the elite. Reading the novels in the context of social attitudes and stereotypes about slaves, Owens argues for an ideological division within the genre: the earlier novelists, Xenophon of Ephesus and Chariton, challenge and undermine elite stereotypes; the three later novelists, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus, affirm them. The critique of elite thinking about slavery in Xenophon and Chariton opens the possibility that these earlier authors and their readers included literate ex-slaves. The interests and needs of these authors and their readers shaped the emerging genre and not only made the protagonists’ slavery a key motif but also made slavery itself a theme that helped define the genre. The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel will be of interest not only to students of the ancient novel but also to anyone working on slavery in the ancient world.

Plautus and Roman Slavery

Plautus and Roman Slavery
Author: Roberta Stewart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2012-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118274156

This book studies a crucial phase in the history of Roman slavery, beginning with the transition to chattel slavery in the third century bce and ending with antiquity’s first large-scale slave rebellion in the 130s bce. Slavery is a relationship of power, and to study slavery – and not simply masters or slaves – we need to see the interactions of individuals who speak to each other, a rare kind of evidence from the ancient world. Plautus’ comedies could be our most reliable source for reconstructing the lives of slaves in ancient Rome. By reading literature alongside the historical record, we can conjure a thickly contextualized picture of slavery in the late third and early second centuries bce, the earliest period for which we have such evidence. The book discusses how slaves were captured and sold; their treatment by the master and the community; the growth of the conception of the slave as “other than human,” and as chattel; and the problem of freedom for both slaves and society.

Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel

Slaves and Masters in the Ancient Novel
Author: Stelios Panayotakis
Publisher: Barkhuis
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9493194043

The present volume contains revised versions of most of the papers that were delivered at RICAN 7, which was held in Rethymnon, Crete, on 27-28 May 2013. The focus of the conference was on the portrayal and function of male and female slaves and their masters/mistresses in the ancient novel and related texts; the complex relationship between these social categories raises questions about slavery and freedom, gender and identity, stability of the self and social mobility, social control and social death. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: enslavement of elite women in Chariton's Callirhoe and Stoic ideas of moral slavery in Dio Chrysostom (Hilton); reversal of social status and techniques of (self-)characterization in Chariton (De Temmerman); the interaction between implicit and explicit narratives of slavery in Chariton and its effect on the readers of the novel (Owens); the narratological, structural and symbolic centrality of slavery in Xenophon's Ephesiaka (Trzaskoma); the socio-historical dimensions of slavery and the prominent discourse on despotism in Iamblichus' Babyloniaka (Dowden); the balance between historical accuracy and fiction in the representation of slavery in Achilles Tatius (Billault); animals, human slaves and elite masters, and the presence of Rome in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (Bowie); the distribution of slaves on the geographical, cultural and moral maps drawn in Heliodorus' Aithiopika (Montiglio); slave women and their relationships to their mistresses as positive and negative paradigms of love in Heliodorus' Aithiopika (Morgan and Repath); the freedman's world as a self-perpetuating and closed universe in Petronius' Satyrica (Bodel); beauty, slavery and the destabilization of societal norms and authority figures in Petronius' Satyrica (Panayotakis); the interaction between Roman comedy and elegy in the representation of the relationship of Lucius and Photis in Apuleius' Metamorphoses (May); a comparative analysis of the semantics and function of slavery-related terms in pseudo-Lucian's Onos and Apuleius' Metamorphoses (Paschalis); enslaved and free storytelling in the Life of Aesop and the history and evolution of the ancient fable tradition (Lefkowitz).