De novis libris iudicia / K.

Vlassopoulos / Mnemosyne 65 (2012) 877-881 877

Bradley, K., Cartledge, P. 2011. The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume I, the
Ancient Mediterranean World. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. xi, 620 p.
Pr. £110. ISBN: 9780521840668.

Ever since the 50s the study of slavery has been a major research fijield in ancient
history. While the 60s, 70s and 80s witnessed major conceptual and interpretative
works and debates which still largely dominate discussion, there has been a nota-
ble lack of large-scale studies which cover the totality of ancient slavery as a his-
torical phenomenon, since Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman
Antiquity in 1955. This gap has been covered to some extent in the last decade in
German (Schumacher, L. 2001. Sklaverei in der Antike (München)) and French
(Andreau, J., Descat, R. 2006. Esclave en Grèce et à Rome (Paris)). Now, the long-
awaited publication of the fijirst volume of the Cambridge History of World Slavery
provides an impressive panorama of ancient slavery over the course of a millen-
nium. The editors and contributors are all eminent scholars in the Anglo-Saxon
scholarly tradition and the quality of the contributions is accordingly high.
Let me provide a summary of the 22 chapters, before discussing wider issues.
After a brief introduction by the editors, chapter 1 (Snell) provides an overview of
the various forms of slavery and dependence in the long-term history of the Ancient
Near East. Chapter 2 (Hunt) examines the portrayal of slaves and the uses of slav-
ery in the various genres of Greek literature, as well as the debates on slavery in
Greek thought. Chapter 3 (Rihll) explores the relationship between slavery and
Athenian society and politics, as well as the role of slavery in the various sectors of
the Athenian economy. Chapter 4 (Cartledge) revisits the recent debates on the
nature and development of Spartan helotage and largely defends the traditional
view of helotage as communal slavery. Chapter 5 (Kyrtatas) examines the role of
slavery in ancient Greek economies and provides an explanation of why Greek
thinkers reflected little on this topic. Chapter 6 (Braund) discusses the sources of
slave supply in classical Greece, stressing in particular the role of organised vio-
lence and colonisation as sources. Chapter 7 (Golden) examines the role of slaves
in Greek families, slave families and the creation of families out of slave-free inter-
course. Chapter 8 (McKeown) explores the various ways in which diffferent Greek
authors discuss forms of slave resistance and the extent to which modern histori-
ans can reconstruct slave resistance from these sources. Chapter 9 (Morris) assesses
the ways in which archaeology can be used to study Greek slavery, primarily
through a case-study of an Attic cemetery in the mining area which can be pre-
sumed to have a signifijicant number of slave burials. Chapter 10 (Thompson) dis-
cusses non-slave forms of dependence in the Hellenistic world and chattel slavery
in Hellenistic Egypt. Chapter 11 ( Joshel) uses the concept of the slave as fungible in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/1568525X-12341240

878 De novis libris iudicia / K. Vlassopoulos / Mnemosyne 65 (2012) 877-881

order to explore the variety of ways in which slaves and slavery are represented
and employed in Roman literary culture as metaphors for non-slaves and other
institutions. Chapter 12 (Bradley) examines slavery in Republican Rome and its
close links to Roman imperial expansion and internal political developments.
Chapter 13 (Morley) reassesses the role of slavery and the villa mode of production
during the Principate, including regional patterns in diffferent parts of the empire.
Chapter 14 (Scheidel) presents the evidence and the methodological problems in
understanding the Roman slave supply and discusses the relative weight of trade
and reproduction. Chapter 15 (Bodel) examines the Roman ideologies concerning
labour, the distribution of slave labour and the careers and training of slaves. Chap-
ter 16 (Edmondson) explores the position of slaves within the Roman family and
the function of slaves in the relationships between free members of the Roman
family as well as the family life of slaves. Chapter 17 (Bradley) presents the various
forms of slave resistance in Roman society, from outright rebellion to flight, pilfer-
ing, slow work and even suicide. Chapter 18 (George) explores the problems in
tracing slaves in Roman material culture, as well as the representation of slaves in
Roman art. Chapter 19 (Gardner) examines the way Roman law constructs slaves
as objects of property as well as human subjects who can enter into contracts or
form relationships with other slaves and freemen; it also examines the intrusion
of the Roman state into the relationship between masters and slaves through
Augustus’ manumission legislation and other laws about the treatment of slaves.
Chapter 20 (Heszer) explores Jewish slavery in the Roman period and its difffer-
ences and similarities to Roman slavery. Chapter 21 (Glancy) examines the rela-
tionship between Christianity and slavery in terms of the use of slavery as a
dominant metaphor in Christian thought, the role of slaveholders and slaves in
Christian communities, and Christian attitudes towards slaves and slavery. Finally,
chapter 22 (Grey) stresses continuity in his discussion of the role of slavery in late
antiquity and the connection between slavery, tenancy and the state.
The summary of the chapters shows the wealth of information and discussion
and the volume presents a healthy variety in terms of the chapters’ approaches and
emphases. While some chapters present an overview of existing scholarship and
an overall interpretation (4, 7, 17), others focus on the methodological problems of
interpreting the existing evidence (8, 9, 14). A particularly valuable aspect of this
volume is its format: the bulk of the volume consists of parallel chapters which
examine the same themes in Greek and Roman slavery, respectively: the role of
slaves in literary culture (chapters 2, 11), slavery and the economy (5, 15), slave sup-
ply (6, 14), slavery and the family (7, 16), slave resistance (8, 17) and slavery and
material culture (9, 18). This Plutarchean approach will certainly encourage com-
parisons, similarities and contrasts: one notices the contrasting interpretations of
Greek and Roman slave supplies, the lack of slave self-representation in Greek art,
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or the similarities and diffferences in using slavery as a metaphor in Greek and

Roman literatures. Equally valuable is the way in which the volume brings into
prominence fijields of research which are relatively novel: there has so far been little
comprehensive and systematic discussion of the relationship between slavery and
family or slavery and material culture, and the four relevant chapters constitute a
signifijicant advance, which will place future research on a new level.
At the same time, though, the volume’s panorama illustrates better than ever
the limits of the paradigm within which the study of ancient slavery has been oper-
ating in the last fijifty years. An essential assumption of this paradigm is the under-
standing of slavery as a relationship unilaterally formed from above, which
constitutes slaves as property and, in Patterson’s defijinition which is still popular
with the volume’s contributors (79, 234), as socially dead persons. Slaves are pre-
sented as either accommodating to or resisting a structure that was already given
(378-82): but they could not shape it or modify it through their agency. As a result
of this understanding, the study of ancient slavery considers change primarily at
the emergence of slave societies during the archaic period (and here it is rather
unfortunate that the volume moves straight from the Near East into classical
Athens) and their demise in late antiquity. Within this millennium of history,
ancient slavery is presented as fundamentally unchanging: the only serious ques-
tions of change concern numbers (and here the contributors adopt a rather nega-
tive answer, in stressing the low overall ratio of slaves even in the height of the
Roman Empire, and in circumscribing the importance of the villa system of gang
slavery), or whether during the Principate masters gradually treated slaves better
due to the influence of Stoic or Christian doctrines (and again contributors take a
clearly negative stance). We are asked to believe that slavery, this key institution of
ancient societies, remained unchanged for a millennium, while everything else
around it experienced profound change. Scholars have moved away from under-
standing the history of ancient religions through a crisis and decline approach, or
by positing an unmodifijied continuity. Even in economic history, we have started
to move beyond Finley’s unitary and static ‘ancient economy’ into exploring the
processes of economic change in antiquity. It is time to start thinking about the
historicity of ancient slaveries as well.
Scholars working on New World slaveries since the 70’s, like Ira Berlin and Peter
Kolchin, have shown how in the three centuries of its existence U.S. slavery expe-
rienced profound transformations alongside signifijicant continuities. New World
historians have moved from static approaches to slavery as a form of property or
social death towards an understanding of slavery as an asymmetrical negotiation,
modifijied and shaped by masters, slaves, free non-slaveholders, the state etc. They
have also discovered the importance of slave agency and slave community. Slaves
have continuously tried to transform slavery into something diffferent from what it
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is supposed to be. While the institution of slavery attempts to make slaves instru-
mental fungibles or socially dead, whose only purpose is to serve others and
enhance their prestige and power, slaves have tried to create identities, relation-
ships and a life beyond being mere slaves. They created families, developed inde-
pendent economic activities, established relationships of kin and support with
other slaves, freedmen and freemen, participated in cults and religious associa-
tions, maintained old or constructed new ethnic and cultural identities. Creating a
slave family transformed a slave from a socially dead person to somebody with
links of afffection, with kinship, with people to care about. Slave resistance and
rebellion were not the existential expression of the human spirit; historically, they
were based on the creation of networks of kin and support, from slave families to
religious associations. The very same thing, though, could be a weapon in the
hands of the masters: the threat to break the family or the unwillingness to aban-
don one’s family could stifle disobedience and obstruct flight. Slavery was a con-
tinuous process of asymmetrical negotiation, rather than a simplistic choice
between accommodation and resistance.
Recognising the historicity of slavery and slave agency and reconstructing the
world that ancient slaves tried to create within and beyond slavery are the great
desiderata of future research. We get glimpses of this world here and there in this
volume on e.g. slave families (143-6, 347-9), the presentation of slave professions in
inscriptions (318) or the self-representation of freedmen in funerary monuments
(408-11). One could mention signifijicant omissions (e.g. slaves and religious activi-
ties), but there is a wider point here. We also need to get beyond ‘Greek’ and
‘Roman’ slavery and focus more on the divergent regional articulations of slavery
in the ancient Mediterranean. Morley has interesting comments on regional diver-
gence in the Roman West (266-74), and the inclusion of a chapter on how Jewish
society within the Roman empire dealt with slavery was an excellent decision; but
the development of chattel slaveries in, for example, Hellenistic and Roman Greece
and Asia Minor remain almost completely outside purview, despite the existence
of very illuminating bodies of evidence (e.g. from Delphi, Bouthrotos, or Leukope-
tra). We must get beyond the equation of Greek slavery with classical Athens (and
Sparta) and Roman slavery with Rome and Italy. We also need to move beyond the
exclusive fijixation on the relationship between masters and slaves; slavery as a rela-
tionship and institution was influenced by the relationship of slaves and masters
to many other groups and the state. In this respect, Bradley’s call to reassess the
role of slaves in late republican politics (260-2) is undoubtedly in the right direc-
tion; Gardner might be right that Roman laws on slavery did not have humanitar-
ian intentions (436), but we need to reconstruct the wider context of communal
intervention in the theoretically unmediated relationship between masters and
slaves. Given that slaves were always less than 1/3 of the population, it is amazing
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how little space the volume devotes to studying interactions between slaves and
freemen of the lower classes.
In conclusion: this book is based on a distillation of what was best in fijifty years
of scholarship as well as presenting new areas of scholarly research to a wider audi-
ence. It will be an essential tool for students and scholars; but in presenting an
impressive panorama of a millennium of ancient slaveries, it also makes clearer
than ever the limits of the current paradigm and the need to search for a new one.

University of Nottingham, Dept. of Classics Kostas Vlassopoulos

Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom
Konstantinos.Vlassopoulos@nottingham.ac.uk