Figures

• Figure 1.1 A tablet from Pylos, ca. 1200 BCE, written in Linear B syllabograms.
• Figure 3.1 Epitaph of Timothea.
• Figure 4.1 Slave auction scene.
• Figure 7.1 Greek symposium scene depicted on a vase found in Campania.
• Figure 7.2 Letter about rent for live-in hetaira.
• Figure 8.1 Family tree of Pasion.
• Figure 8.2 Columbaria 1 in the Codini Vineyard near Rome.
• Figure 9.1 Slave holding chamber pot.
• Figure 9.2 Egyptian WANTED poster for runaway slave.
• Figure 10.1 Coin commemorating the suppression of the second Sicilian slave revolt.
• Figure 10.2 Coin of the slave king Antiochus (originally Eunus).
• Figure 11.1 Grave relief of Hegeso.
• Figure 11.2 Terracotta of a comic slave mask.
• Figure 11.3 Lararium in the House of the Vettii.
• Figure 12.1 EID MAR Denarius, Roman silver coin (42 BCE).
• Figure 12.2 Metal slave collar.

Maps

• Map 1 Mainland Greece and the Aegean.
• Map 2 The Roman Empire around 150 CE.
• Map 3 The powers of the Mediterranean in 220 BCE.
• Map 4 Origins of slaves at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.
• Map 5 Spartacus at large in Italy.
• Map 6 After the disintegration of the Roman Empire: Europe and the Mediterranean in 530 CE.

I wrote this book with two audiences in mind. I hope it will be a useful resource for college courses on Greek and Roman slavery and a supplementary text for more general classes involving ancient social history. But it should also provide a general introduction for any other reader who wants or needs to know more about this fascinating topic, for example, those interested in comparative slave societies or in other aspects of ancient Greek or Roman culture or history. These two intended audiences have determined many aspects of this book.

In particular, within the main text I have preferred what I consider the clearest and most interesting presentations of a topic rather than the most recent. I have kept references to secondary scholarship sparse and unobtrusive, and I have confined myself to works in English whenever possible. Nevertheless, my citations and “Suggested Reading” sections include recent works and should provide a good start for further investigations of particular topics—for the purpose, for instance, of research papers. I have also not hesitated to cite my own scholarly publications when these provide more detailed treatments of topics or arguments I mention. I do not claim to be a particularly important scholar of ancient slavery, but I am the one with whom I most frequently agree.

The book is organized topically rather than having a Greek and then a Roman half. Each chapter sets out a major issue in the study of slavery and considers theoretical approaches, our ancient evidence, and key controversies. Contrasts and parallels between Greek and Roman slavery usually play a role in either the introduction or conclusion of each chapter. The bodies of most chapters are devoted to case studies from classical Greece and Rome – and Hellenistic examples play a role in several chapters. The focus on particular cases allows greater depth and I have been willing to forgo general coverage for the sake of this goal. For example, in Chapter 7, I focus on slave prostitutes in classical Athens but not at Rome and on slave families at Rome without attempting equal treatment for Greek cases. The quantity and richness of our evidence has often determined such choices. And even in the cases for which we seem to have the best evidence, I’ll need to admit our ignorance regularly.

Despite this selectivity, this is not a short book. I begin with two introductory chapters: an overview of classical slavery within the context of Greek and Roman history and a chapter about the challenges historians face studying ancient slavery and the methods they use. The next three chapters (3–5) consider large-scale issues about the institution of slavery: the supply of slaves, the economics of slavery, and its political ramifications. The next three chapters (6–8) treat aspects of the lives of ancient slaves: their culture, sex and family lives; manumission from slavery and its consequences. Chapters 9 and 10 consider the antagonistic aspects of the relationships between slaves and masters: first slave resistance on an everyday and individual level and then open slave revolts. Two chapters (11 and 12) focus on the perspectives of slaveholders: how they represented slaves in literature and art and then the philosophical and legal justifications, critiques, and ameliorations of slavery. I conclude with a discussion of the decline of classical slavery and its legacy extending to the present.

In writing this book, I have benefitted greatly from the support of institutions, colleagues, friends, research assistants, editors, and family. I have been lucky to have such fine and supportive colleagues in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. I owe special thanks to Noel Lenski – now at Yale – and to John Gibert for their advice and conversation, and for sharing some of their work with me pre-publication – and to Cathy Cameron in the Department of Anthropology, who did the same. My treatment of Epictetus and slavery owes a great deal to an honors thesis that my student, Angela Funk, wrote on that topic. The University of Colorado has supported my research and my writing with a LEAP grant for associate professors, a sabbatical, a fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts, and a College Scholar Award. I am also most grateful for the hard work of several graduate research assistants: the meticulous efforts of Stephanie Krause and Wesley Wood contributed a great deal to tightening the manuscript up for publication; they also drafted the maps; David Kear’s long experience as an editor greatly improved the first half of the manuscript. John Nebel generously allowed me to use a photo of his own EID MAR denarius and arranged the permission from Gorny & Mosch for the image of the Manius Aquillius denarius.

I also owe thanks to several skillful and meticulous editors from Wiley-Blackwell: Haze Humbert first suggested the idea for this book and supervised the project over the years; Deirdre Ilkson edited early drafts of several chapters; and Louise Spencely edited the final manuscript. The two anonymous readers provided constructive criticism as well as many helpful suggestions and improved the manuscript greatly. Sara Forsdyke and David Lewis generously shared some of their forthcoming work with me; I am also indebted to them for valuable discussions of ancient slavery on several occasions. I am immensely grateful to Susan Treggiari for her astute comments and suggestions on several chapters; and to my wife, Mitzi Lee, who read over the material related to her field of expertise, ancient philosophy, and saved me from several missteps there. Of course, I alone am responsible for the mistakes that remain.

References to modern scholarship are by author and date – either in footnotes or parentheses – with the full citations in the References section.

I cite ancient authors, by line numbers in drama and poetry or by book, chapter, and subsections in most prose authors. You may be more used to page citations, but those are only correct for one particular edition or translation of an author, whereas the lines, books, chapters, and section are usually the same across all translations and editions – though some translations of plays and poetry do not follow the original line numbers. “Fr.” stands for “fragment” and I refer to the collection of fragments by author and date, which you can look up in the bibliography – except for the Fragmente der griechichen Historiker listed in the abbreviations below.

I have followed the naming and numbering conventions of the Loeb Classical Library whenever possible. I cite the “Attic orators” – Aeschines, Antiphon, Demosthenes, Isaeus, Isocrates, and Lysias – by Loeb speech number alone. As is customary, I cite certain speeches that are probably by Apollodorus as by Pseudo-Demosthenes, [Demosthenes], where the square brackets indicate that the speeches are spurious, that is, falsely ascribed to Demosthenes. I cite other spurious speeches of Demosthenes with square brackets as well as the Constitution of the Athenians, falsely ascribed to Xenophon, [Xenophon], and the Oeconomica, falsely ascribed to Aristotle, [Aristotle]. I refer to Didorus Siculus, Library of History, Herodotus, The Histories, Livy, History of Rome, and Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War by the author's name alone.

Especially in epigraphy and papyrology there are standard modern collections, typically abbreviated. I use the following in this book:

BGU: Berliner griechische Urkunden, 1895–

https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/119344

CIL: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 1853–

http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en/index_en.html

FGrH: Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 1923–

http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-s-new-jacoby IG

IG: Inscriptiones Graecae, 1860–

http://www.bbaw.de/en/research/ig

http://epigraphy.packhum.org/

P.Oxy.: Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1898–

http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/

SEG: Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, 1923–

http://www.brill.com/publications/online-resources/supplementum-epigraphicum- graecum-online

Some of these collections are complicated multi-volume collections with publication dates spanning a century and various publishers and editors. Online versions are sometimes available. There's no hiding the fact that these are not easy to use, especially for students getting started. Wikipedia has articles on each of these sources and is often a good place to start. I have also provided helpful web addresses either for online versions or for the current publisher.

For the sake of clarity and ease of use, I have otherwise avoided abbreviations.