2011 was undoubtedly a prodigious year in the study of ancient slavery; it was marked by the publication of three very significant synthetic works, with major implications for the future study of slavery in antiquity. It is only fair to start this review with a detailed discussion of their findings and their significance. Prime of place goes to the long-awaited publication of the first volume of the Cambridge World History of Slavery, edited by Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, which provides an impressive panorama of ancient slavery over the course of a millennium; it is the first synthetic work on such a scale ever since the publication of Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity in 1955.1 Given the size of the volume (22 chapters), it is impossible to discuss every chapter in detail. I shall thus provide a brief summary, before discussing wider issues.

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 slavery 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 violence 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 intercourse. Chapter 8 (McKeown) explores the various ways in which different Greek authors discuss forms of slave resistance and the extent to which modern 1 K. Bradley and P. Cartledge (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume I, the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

historians 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 presumed to have a significant number of slave burials. Chapter 10 (Thompson) discusses 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 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 different 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. Chapter 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, pilfering, 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 discusses 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 differences and similarities to Roman slavery. Chapter 21 (Glancy)

examines the relationship 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.

This 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 supply (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 comparisons, similarities and contrasts: one notices the contrasting interpretations of Greek and Roman slave supplies, the lack of slave self-representation in Greek art, or the similarities and differences in using slavery as a metaphor in Greek and Roman literatures. Equally valuable is the way in which the volume brings into prominence fields 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 significant 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 operating in the last fifty years. An essential assumption of this paradigm is the understanding of slavery as a relationship unilaterally formed from above, which constitutes slaves as property and, in Patterson’s definition which is still popular with the

volume’s contributors (79, 234), as socially dead persons. Slaves are presented 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 questions of change concern numbers (and here the contributors adopt a rather negative 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 understanding the history of ancient religions through a crisis and decline approach, or by positing an unmodified 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 70s, like Ira Berlin and Peter Kolchin, have shown how in the three centuries of its existence U.S. slavery experienced profound transformations alongside significant 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, modified 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 different from what it is supposed to be. While the institution of slavery attempts to make slaves instrumental fungibles or socially dead, whose only purpose is to serve others and enhance their prestige and power, slaves have tried to create identities, relationships and a life beyond being mere slaves. They created families, developed independent economic activities, established relationships of kin and support with other slaves, freedmen and freemen, participated in cults and religious associations, 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 affection, with kinship, with people to care about it. 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 abandon one’s family could stifle disobedience and obstruct flight. Slavery was a continuous 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 significant omissions (e.g. slaves and religious activities), 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 divergence 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 Leukopetra). 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 fixation on the relationship between masters and slaves; slavery as a relationship 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 direction; Gardner might be right that Roman laws on slavery did not have humanitarian 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 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 fifty years of scholarship as well as presenting new areas of scholarly research to a wider audience. 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.

Our best current example of where to seek such an alternative paradigm is undoubtedly Kyle Harper’s magisterial study of slavery in the long fourth century (AD 275-425).2 Harper’s book should be required reading for anybody interested in ancient slavery, and not merely for those working on late antiquity. This work is important for three major reasons. The first concerns its attitude to sources. On the one hand, Harper persuasively argues that there is a vast wealth of sources that could be utilised for the study of ancient slavery, which have never entered the scholarly radar and it is high time to do so; this is not merely 2 K. Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World AD 275-425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2011).

true for late antiquity, but would apply to earlier periods as well, and this book offers a welcome urge to historians of ancient slavery to engage with this task. On the other hand, Harper is continuously alert to the difficult methodological problems created by the persistent gaps in our evidence, the areas on which the sources are systematically silent, and the consequences of the fact that we have different kinds of sources for different periods or for different aspects of ancient slavery.

The second concerns a drastic and salutary abandonment of the structuralist and essentialist understanding of slavery as a relationship of property or as a form of social death, which has long dominated the field. Slavery as property and as social death play of course a very important part in Harper’s analysis; but instead of treating them as results of the unilateral power of masters over slaves, Harper emphasises the diversity of relationships, strategies, agents and interests that affected slavery and pulled at so many different directions at the same time. The result is an analysis that explores both the complementarities and reinforcing tendencies, as well as the conflicts, contradictions and ambiguities. Finally, the third major achievement concerns its understanding of late Roman slavery not as a static entity, but as a historical process. While traditional accounts present ancient slavery as a static entity that lasted without major changes for a thousand years between the archaic period and late antiquity, Harper presents an alternative account that balances long-term continuities with the changes shaped by diverse historical processes.

Harper explores the impact on fourth-century slavery of three important factors, which effectively shape the division of the book in three sections. The first factor is the nexus of economic processes created by slave supply and demand, formal institutions and the dynamics of estate management. In order to understand the place and function of slavery in the Roman Empire we need to distinguish different categories of Roman slave-owners (33-66). Harper distinguishes on the one hand illustrious and elite slave-owners, roughly the wealthiest 1.5% of Roman society, and on the other the ‘bourgeois’ households of

merchants, artisans and professionals in the cities and the prosperous agricultural households in the countryside, which constituted roughly 10% of the Roman population. These slave-owners owned about five million slaves, close to 10% of the overall population, divided equally between illustrious and elite households on the one hand, and bourgeois and agricultural on the other. This means that Roman slavery was an agglomeration of two rather distinct forms of slave use: the large-scale use of slaves by illustrious and elite households for commercialised agriculture organised in complex hierarchies of urban households and rural plantations (144-200) and the small-scale employment of slaves for a variety of purposes by a wide and prosperous middling section of Roman society (100-43). By and large, Harper argues, the nexus of supply and demand, institutions, and estate management in the fourth century maintained the course it followed in the early empire; the drastic changes came only with the fifth century in the West.

The second part of the book is devoted to the entanglement between two different processes: on the one hand the long-term nexus of domination that linked slavery with mastery and honour and, on the other hand, the impact, in the context of the fourth century, of Christianity and the Church and their values on the Roman nexus of domination. Harper innovates here on a number of major counts. While most studies of slavery tend to perceive it as a relationship of domination and exploitation unilaterally defined by the masters, he correctly moves to a perception of slavery as an asymmetric negotiation of power in which masters, slaves and other groups and interests have had an effect. Starting from this perspective, he explores both the diverse aims of domination and the means through which masters achieved them. Harper presents a brilliant panorama of the constitutive role of slavery in the formation of Roman households (219-48), in the Roman reproductive patterns and sexual economy (281-325), and in the construction of identities based on honour and status (326-48). While little here is completely novel, the synthesis is truly captivating in its implications. Equally important though is the exploration of slave agency: of how

slaves, within the complex framework established by the aims and means of domination, tried to pursue their own aims, focusing on slave families and slave communities (249-80).

As if all this was not enough, Harper examines how this long-term nexus of domination was shaped in the context of the Christianisation of Roman society in the fourth century. While the Church took much for granted and was often timid or powerless in the face of tradition and structures of power, there is no doubt that there were important elements of Christian ideology that were in direct contrast with the Roman nexus of domination; the Christianisation of the empire forced the Christian leadership to pay attention to these issues and try to come up with answers and solutions. While status was the crucial parameter in the Roman sexual economy, turning the systemic exploitation of slave bodies into an unproblematic cornerstone of the system, the Christian ethics of sin made the sexual exploitation of slaves potentially problematic. Because of this difference, Christian sources provide a wonderful window to many aspects of slavery that remain largely invisible or opaque in classical sources; in this respect, Harper’s discussion of the Christian sources has very significant implications for those studying earlier periods. As regards the fourth century, his general impression that Christianisation was still embryonic in a society that continued to be shaped by the long-term patterns of earlier centuries and that the impact of the Church would loom larger in later centuries seems largely correct.

Finally, the third factor concerns the impact of the late Roman state on slaves and masters, by focusing on three major aspects: the enslavement of children through exposure and sale (391-423), the results of sexual encounters between free and slave (424-62), and the manumission of slaves and their relationship to former masters (463-93). Harper examines the complex consequences of the extension of Roman citizenship to practically all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire in AD 212 (367-90). The Roman Empire was always an amalgam of very diverse societies; but the extension of a single citizenship across the whole

Mediterranean, alongside changes in the form, function and ideology of the late Roman state, brought the Roman legislators face to face both with Mediterranean-wide diversity, as well as with the constant frictions between different strategies and interests that were inherent in slavery. Classical Roman law operated as a set of compromises between conflicting interests, by leaving a large part of the complex social reality of slavery outside regulation or open to ambiguity and gentlemen’s agreements. The late Roman laws defining the status of free children sold into slavery are not evidence of the increasing impoverishment of freemen in the late empire; neither are the laws defining marriage between free and slave evidence of the irrelevance of clear status distinctions in the new world of the fourth century. The late Roman legislation on slavery and manumission was not the adulteration of the clear lines of the Roman slave society of the early empire into the blurred lines of a fourth-century world in which slavery was no longer dominant; it was rather the open entrance of contradiction, conflict and complexity into the legal tradition as a result of the state’s decision to intervene in order to clarify the fuzzy edges that had long been left opaque or outside the law’s purview.

In terms of the historical situation of fourth-century slavery, Harper makes two equally persuasive arguments. He argues that we need to abandon the narrative of transition, in which late antique slavery is seen as a stage in the transition from ancient slavery to medieval serfdom. This narrative requires seeing fourth-century slavery either in terms of decline, or in terms of transformation. Decline is seen as the result of the drop in slave supply as a result of the gradual cessation of Roman expansion or of the profitability crisis of the slave mode of production; the colonate, the establishment of slaves as tenants, the blurring of statuses, the amelioration of slavery brought by Christianity have been seen as elements that drove the transformation of ancient slavery into ultimately medieval serfdom. As Harper shows, there is nothing in the evidence that requires or supports such a transition narrative.

Instead, he makes a persuasive case for seeing fourth-century slavery as part of the wider trajectory of the Mediterranean-wide system of Roman slavery in the first centuries AD: effectively, as the last phase in a long, Mediterranean-wide story of intensification and integration. The dividing line comes after the fifth century: the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and its accompanying economic retrenchment put an end to the nexus between slave supply and demand, institutions and the dynamics of estate management that had supported the long-term trajectory of Roman slavery. In other words, in the West change came from outside the system. On the contrary, in the East change came from the inside: the same nexus of Roman slavery was gradually dismantled due to the interlinking effects of democratic growth, the availability of wage labour and the fiscal system.

Seeing fourth-century slavery as part of a continuum with the first three centuries has serious implications, not just for late antique history, but for Roman history as a whole. The history of slavery in the republic and early empire needs to be rewritten from the point of view espoused by Harper in this book: the distinction between different kinds of slave-owners and the realisation that Roman slavery was an agglomeration of very different patterns of slaveholding; the breakdown of the abstract and static ‘slave society’ into the dynamic nexus between supply and demand, institutions and estate management; the impact of the political community and other institutions on the theoretically unmediated relationship between masters and slaves; the constitutive role of slavery in the formations of households and the sexual economy of the Roman world. But more than anything else, the realisation that the blurred and messy status lines revealed in late Roman legislation are not a novel phenomenon of the breakdown of Roman slave society in late antiquity, has very serious implications for earlier centuries: we have to trace the patterns revealed in fourth-century sources to earlier periods and draw the necessary conclusions.

Writing the history of fourth-century slavery as the continuation of the long-term trajectory of the first three centuries as affected by the

three factors of the management, investment and use of wealth, Christianisation and state change is undoubtedly a massive improvement on anything earlier. And it is at this point that one has to point out some major issues that emerge out of this impressive book. Harper makes no attempt to bring together the entangled threads of continuity, wealth use, Christianisation and the state. The book badly needed a long concluding chapter that would synthesise the distinctive patterns and processes that Harper has so carefully disentangled and delineated. But like the rest of us, Harper appears to have no way of synthesising a complex historical narrative of multiple processes with divergent trends at different durations of time and in multiple spaces. Even if it is still impossible to offer a synthetic narrative, this reader would have eagerly sought Harper’s reflections on the evidentiary and methodological problems of creating such a narrative.

The other major issue is to point out what is missing, even from a book as long as this. I would confine myself to three main comments. The first concerns Harper’s major point that the history of ancient slavery cannot be written without taking seriously the development of intensive forms of wealth investment and management, market production, commercialisation and urbanisation in the Mediterranean world of the first centuries AD and their abatement from the fifth century onwards. I can understand why Harper uses the term capital to describe these processes, but the term will ultimately not do. We cannot simply ignore Marx’s major point about the profound differences in the ways in which capital functions in the modern capitalist world-system of the last two centuries, a point which Harper himself at times recognises; but Harper is absolutely right that the Finleyan static ‘ancient economy’ is no solution either. Adopting a few unhistorical mantras from the bizarre concoction which is New Institutional Economics will not do the trick; the sooner ancient historians realise the urgent need to construct a historicised conceptual framework for understanding the processes mentioned above, the better our understanding of ancient slavery as a historical process will evolve.

The second point is that we need to add slave agency alongside wealth use, Christianisation and the state as one of the major factors that shaped the history of ancient slavery. Harper has made a great advance on earlier work by adopting the bottoms-up approach of New World slave studies commenced by Blassingame and Genovese. His attention to what slaves tried to create out of slavery is salutary, and his is effectively the first discussion of the slave community in the field of ancient slavery. But ultimately, not only is his discussion tentative and relatively brief, it is also unhistorical: slave agency is seen as the other side in the coin of domination, but not as a factor of large-scale historical change. The point is not obviously to resurrect an older model of class struggle without basis on the evidence; the point is rather to explore the long-term effects of slave agency in the asymmetrical negotiation of power that is slavery.

This brings me to my final point: notwithstanding its great breakthroughs, Harper’s book is still hostage to a scholarly tradition of studying slavery by focusing on the relationship between masters and slaves. Harper pays serious attention to the Church and the Roman state as important factors in the equation; but ultimately, what is missing is a study of the entangled world of the communities and networks of work, exchange, residence, cult and leisure in which slaves participated alongside various kinds of free, lower-class Romans and aliens. It is already telling that Harper devotes hardly any space to the world of slaves working and living independently; given the emphasis he places on the role of reproduction for Roman slave supply, he does not sufficiently consider the implications of a largely native slave population; while he notes mixed communities of cult, or the presence of slaves in wider social and political movements, his categories do not enable him to study this mixed world with the seriousness it requires. The more we realise that slaves constituted a mere 10% of the Roman population, while correctly maintaining that slavery played a fundamental role in Roman society even in such numbers, the more obvious it should be that without a study of this mixed world our understanding of ancient slavery and its history is seriously handicapped.

The third major synthesis appearing in 2011 is Henrik Mouritsen’s book on Roman freedmen in the late republic and early empire; it is accompanied in this review by two other important new books devoted to manumission and freedmen in the Roman world.3 Mouritsen’s main aim is to overthrow a traditional interpretation of Roman freedmen as a vulgar class of nouveaux riches, primarily exploiting the urban niche of crafts and trade despised by the Roman elite, who in the course of the late republic and early empire came to prominence and even supplanted older elites in local communities. Mouritsen’s alternative argues that we cannot understand Roman manumission and freedman if we do not appreciate the peculiar Roman way of conceptualising manumission, the ambiguities and contradictions that were inherent in it, and the ways in which the Romans negotiated, with greater or lesser success, those contradictions. The Romans made few attempts to justify slavery as a natural institution; on the contrary, they generally accepted that slavery was primarily the result of bad luck and affirmed the idea that freedom was a just reward for faithful service; most paradoxically of all, they were happy to make their ex-slaves not just freedmen, but Roman citizens. But this, Mouritsen argues, should not lead us to assume that the Romans did not perceive slavery as major stigma on freedmen. In an argument that deserves very wide attention, he argues that while Romans did not consider slavery as natural, they also thought that the servile experience was a form of degradation that stigmatised for ever the person who had lived through it (10-35).

This problem was negotiated by the Romans through a range of means (36-65). Manumission was conceptualised as a selective process that should apply only to deserving slaves that had proved themselves through loyal service to their masters. Nevertheless, freedmen carried the servile stigma, and would require continuous support and guidance to overcome this disability. This called for the essential role of the former master as patron of the freedman, to whom respect (obsequium) was

3 H. Mouritsen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

owed. This assimilation of the post-manumission relationship to clientage and patronage was also accompanied by the conceptualisation of the patron-freedman relationship as that of a pseudo-filial relationship that incorporated the freedman into the familia of the master. There was thus an inherent contradiction between the servile stigma that freedmen still carried on the one hand, and the close relationships between patrons and freedmen within the familia and the delicate positions and missions with which they were entrusted on the other.

Mouritsen goes on to explore the history of how the Roman political community negotiated the difficult issue of servile citizens in its ranks (66-119). He discusses the unique paradox in the world history of slavery of the Roman enfranchisement of manumitted slaves by showing that in the early republic the limited political significance of citizenship for the lower classes made the citizenship of freedmen relatively unproblematic. The growing significance of political rights from the middle republic onwards made the tribal registration of freedmen a contentious issue with many twists and turns; nevertheless, the recurrently reinforced decision to restrict the registration of freedmen to the four urban tribes is a very significant phenomenon. The collapse of the consensual exercise of power by the elite in the late republic created novel problems, since the freedmen of the republican potentates and the emperors emerged in positions of authority, which touched delicate nerves of Roman politics and society. The Augustan legislation on manumission and freedmen is often seen as a reaction to a freedman problem and the infiltration of the Roman plebs by foreign slaves; but Mouritsen persuasively shows that the legislative programme should be seen as an ideological and political statement and as an attempt to regulate the new form of imperial citizenship. By creating various tiers of possible citizenship for manumitted slaves, Augustus tried to connect the ideology of manumission as a reward to deserving slaves with the moral reordering of the community on the basis of a proper hierarchy.

This understanding of the Roman ideology of manumission has significant implications for the practice of manumission (120-205). Given

the importance of the rate of manumission, Mouritsen presents an extensive discussion of the existing evidence and the interpretative problems it creates. Freedmen dominate the epigraphic evidence from many parts of imperial Italy; furthermore, older slaves are largely absent from the epigraphic record, while older freedmen are relatively common. This pattern has led to the theory that manumission was almost universal among urban slaves, with slavery largely being a stage in a slave’s life and career. Mouritsen shows persuasively that the epigraphic evidence is unrepresentative of reality; not only was the practice of epigraphic commemoration largely restricted to freedmen, but the mention of age in epitaphs reflects cultural preferences instead of reality. Mouritsen argues that while manumission was deeply selective and open to a restricted part of the slave population, nevertheless the rate of manumission was exceptionally high compared to most other slave societies.

In order to explain this pattern, Mouritsen finds it essential to dispose the two traditional explanations of the high frequency of Roman manumission: that slaves bought their freedom through the profits generated by their peculium and that slaves were largely freed through testamentary manumission. The large number of young manumitted slaves, the fact that many freedmen had occupations within the familia that would not allow them to work independently and buy their freedom through saving, and the relative absence of references to slaves using their peculium to buy their freedom indicates that the number of slaves who bought their freedom must have been a minority. Equally, the existing evidence, once interpreted in its context, makes it highly implausible that more than a few slaves were manumitted through testaments. Instead, Mouritsen correctly argues that Roman manumission is a peculiar phenomenon in which most slaves must have been manumitted by their masters as a reward for free. This bizarre conclusion only makes sense, because of the nature of Roman manumission: while in other slave systems manumission largely ended the relationship between masters and slaves, unless it was circumscribed

by practices like paramone, in Rome the assimilation of manumission to patronage and the incorporation of freedmen within the familia enabled the continuation of a strong link between former masters and slaves. While manumission was open to only a minority of slaves, for those manumitted it was indeed a stage that continued an asymmetric relationship that had started in the form of slavery.

After examining the ideology and practice of manumission, Mouritsen focuses on the role of the freedman in the Roman economy (206-47) and public life (248-78). His aim is to undermine the widespread thesis that Roman freedmen constituted a ‘middle class’ of successful independent entrepreneurs, who gradually found their way into power in Italian communities by replacing an older elite. In its stead, he proposes a model in which it was the close links between freedmen and their former masters that can explain the significant role of freedmen in Roman economy and politics and account for the highly visible cases of wealthy and successful former slaves. From an economic point of view, it was the family nature of Roman business and the significance of relationships of trust and authority which can explain why wealthy Romans preferred employing their freedmen instead of freeborn Romans as agents, or in order to run businesses. Patrons could gain from a share in the profits created by the businesses run by freedmen with capital originally obtained from the masters, while the inheritance system meant that a significant part of the property of freedmen would return to their masters.

Mouritsen plausibly argues that the economic relationships between masters and their former slaves operated on a flexible scheme of practical negotiation, since in most cases freedmen continued to operate in the same positions that they occupied as slaves. The formal system of defined operae owed by freedmen to patrons was rather the exception, largely applying to cases like actors and doctors, who derived their income from fees and whose services would only be occasionally needed by their former masters. Finally, Mouritsen argues that it makes more sense to explain the smaller number of really wealthy freedmen as

a result of strong links with their former masters, which allowed them to benefit through networking, support and legacies, rather than as the achievement of independent freedmen who went on their own and found success. The wealthy and successful freedmen of late republican potentates and emperors, whose success depended precisely on the links with their masters, are a good reflection of the wider pattern, rather than an exception to the rule.

The same analysis is extended to the place of freedmen and their sons in Roman public life. His discussion focuses on the Augustales and the explanation for the rise of freedmen’s sons in the municipal elites of Italy. Many scholars have seen the Augustales as evidence for a scheme centrally orchestrated by Augustus in order to provide a place for a frustrated middle class of freedmen and bolster support for his regime; furthermore, the fact that in certain regions Augustales included both freeborn and freedmen, while in most they were largely dominated by freedmen, is seen as evidence that the middle class was overwhelmingly composed of freedmen. Mouritsen argues that the enormous variation in the appellation and organisation of Augustales in the various communities of Italy and their tenuous link with the imperial cult militates against seeing them as part of a centrally organised scheme. They are rather evidence of the interest of local communities to expand the boundaries of evergetism beyond the usual link between benefaction and political power, in order to tap levels of wealth that could be employed for public purposes, while according to these new benefactors honours without power; this would have been particularly attractive for freedmen, and, once freedmen came to dominate the Augustales in certain communities, the servile taint of the institution would have driven off the freeborn.

The success of freedmen’s sons in public life raises problems of a different nature. On the one hand, the servile stigma of the slave experience applied exclusively to freedmen, and was not inherited by their freeborn sons; on the other hand, in the same vein with his explanation of wealthy freedmen in the Roman economy, Mouritsen

stresses that the success of the sons of freedmen in public life is impossible to explain without assuming that they had the support and co-optation of their elite patrons. Their success is evidence for sponsored mobility, not of an ascending middle class of freedmen; it is once more evidence of the peculiar nature of Roman manumission and the incorporation of the freedmen in the familia of the elite household and its strategies.

A final short chapter (279-99) provides a reflection on the identity and experiences of former slaves. Mouritsen defends the necessity of dissociating our accounts from both the positive and the negative stereotypes of freedmen found in ancient sources. In what is largely a sceptical account, he stresses the great divergence in the slave status and experience and their subsequent lives as freedmen that militated against the construction of a freedman identity and community. Mouritsen is certainly right that an obsession with status is an unhelpful way of understanding freedmen’s identity and their practices. Freedmen could choose to give Latin names to their freeborn children in order to obliterate the servile connotations of their own Greek cognomina; but they could also opt to stress family links by giving their children names from the family onomastic tradition. And ultimately, we need to take into account the impact of the larger processes: the progressive abandonment of libertinisation by freedmen cannot be accounted solely by the urge to avoid the servile stigma once we realise that the abandonment of filiation is also found among the freeborn population in the same period. Nevertheless, the common experience of the passage from the inherently unpredictable life as a slave to the attainment of freedom and the greater control over one’s life is undoubtedly reflected in the freedmen’s proclivity to stress the success story of liberation from freedom and the creation of families and kinship. If there was in some sense a freedman community, it is primarily in the restriction of freedmen marriages to other freedmen and slaves that we should be looking for it.

Mouritsen’s volume is undoubtedly an impressive improvement to our understanding of Roman freedmen, but there are four main areas for

critical reflection: time and space, scale and agency. In line with most works on Roman slavery, Mouritsen’s volume is essentially restricted to Rome and Italy. What we badly need is an exploration of how the distinctive Roman ideology and practice of manumission found its way in the wider Roman Empire with its various traditions of slavery and manumission. It is only in such a way that we can better understand the generalities and peculiarities of Rome and Roman Italy within a Roman Empire that included a kaleidoscope of local communities and wider regions, over and with which Roman traditions of slaveholding came to interact in a number of ways. The peculiarity of Rome and areas of Italy like Campania, where the epigraphic record is largely dominated by freedmen and slaves, can only be properly understood when we compare it with how Roman masters and freedmen fare in the longer epigraphic traditions of areas like Greece and Asia Minor. In other words, we need the prehistory of the interpenetration between Roman and other traditions that Harper has so magnificently explored in the empire-wide context of the fourth century AD.

Mouritsen has decided to present his account in a synchronic format, explicitly arguing that he found little compelling evidence for major changes over the centuries of the republic and early empire. There is no doubt that the fundamental peculiarities of Roman manumission as presented by Mouritsen have a longue durée which justifies a synchronic treatment. But if we understand slavery as a dynamic historical process rather than a static essence, then we need to accompany the synchronic treatment based on the longue durée with a variety of subplots, conjunctures and even long-term changes. This is best achieved in the chapter on the reactions of the Roman political community to the role and place of servile citizens in its midst, which successfully shows the successive changes in problems and reactions. Other aspects appear that could have been treated in terms of a chronological trajectory of change, but are not: the changes in funerary commemoration from freedmen reliefs through columbaria to other forms of tombs (see below, concerning the volume edited by Bell and Ramsby) or the gradual

abandonment of filiation and pseudo-filiation in the course of the early empire. How to account for historical change and its various temporal durations and co-existing directions is a general problem in ancient history; for the history of ancient slavery, it is a problem requiring particular reflection.

The same applies to scale. While Mouritsen is not unaware of the complexities created in Roman manumission by issues of scale, his default model is that of the world of the large household of the Roman senatorial elite. While undoubtedly much of the evidence derives from this milieu, and it was clearly an important part of Roman society and economy, Harper’s delineation of different kinds of households and their distinctive patterns of slaveholding offer a significant improvement on the default model employed by Mouritsen. We need future studies that will take into account the plurality of Roman slaveholders and the varying patterns of manumission and kinds of freedmen that this resulted to. It is equally significant that Mouritsen allows far too little space to the various complications to the Roman ideology and practice of manumission that were created by the fact that many patrons would have been freedmen themselves.

The fourth issue is that of agency. Mouritsen’s analysis of the profound but personal stigma of the servile experience certainly requires very wide attention. Back in the 50s Stanley Elkins wrote a famous book about the degrading results of the servile experience on slaves. His image of slaves as infantilised objects was rightly contested by a generation of scholars that stressed slave agency and the ability of slaves to form communities and become active agents of history even under the worst conditions of domination and exploitation; but it is bizarre if scholars who describe slavery as an inhuman institution fail to take into account the effects of this barbaric experience on the slaves themselves. We need to take into account the dehumanising effects of the servile experience, the role of accommodating ideologies and practices like the peculiar form of Roman manumission, and slave agency as an independent factor that shaped in its own ways the asymmetrical

negotiation that is slavery. While Mouritsen provides an excellent analysis of how Roman manumission made sense from the point of view of the elite, and how the success of Roman freedmen in the economy and public life was deeply beholden to elite interests and strategies, he is far too timid in exploring slave agency as an independent parameter that shaped manumission and life after slavery. This is in particular evident in his almost exclusive focus on the field of freedmen’s life that revolved around the relationship between patrons and freedmen, and the neglect of those aspects that related to the interaction between freedmen, slaves and freeborn beyond the master’s familia; the world revealed by the inscriptions of collegia and other associations, or the participation of freedmen in the activities of the Roman plebs in republican and later times, needs ultimately to be fully incorporated in our accounts of Roman slavery and manumission.

A fifth issue, that of gender, is fortunately the subject of a highly stimulating book by Matthew Perry.4 He examines the role of gender in the process of manumission and the conflicted ways in which freedwomen negotiated their transition from chattels to respectable female citizens. Perry correctly observes that while sexuality and sexual honour were important in the construction of the identity of the free Roman citizen, in the case of women they were absolutely crucial; marriage, procreation and the protection of female sexual shame defined the path to respectability and honour for citizen women. This fact created a deeply ambivalent situation for Roman freedwomen (8-42). Taking his cue from Mouritsen’s analysis of the stigma of servile experience, the structural significance of the sexual exploitation of slaves (see Harper’s book above) for the Roman sexual economy meant that the sexual honour of female slaves was in principle non-existent; the sexual disgrace of the servile experience created a difficult hurdle for Roman freedwomen. Nevertheless, as Perry shows, the other side of the coin was that sexuality could be construed in a variety of ways that could be simultaneously disgraceful and respectful. There existed a spectrum, 4 M. J. Perry, Gender, Manumission and the Roman Freedwoman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

from the absolute disgrace of the slave prostitute that engaged in sexual acts with strangers outside the familia, through the slave that was available to the sexual desires of her masters and other people within the household, to the slave concubine that maintained a defined and relatively respectable relationship with her master. The existence of obligatory clauses that forbade the prostitution of slaves even when sold to a new owner underlines the Roman recognition that female slaves could possess some kind of sexual honour.

Gender also shaped crucially the forms of female servile labour, its perception in the eyes of the master class and the paths to and chances for manumission that female slaves had (43-68). Gender attitudes in Roman society associated males with productive labour, while tending to obliterate and or depreciate the labour performed by female slaves. Agronomical writers tend to focus on the labour of male slaves in the fields, while rendering invisible the presence and significance of female labour in Roman estates. It was rather in their role as caterers, sexual partners and mothers of the next generation of slaves that female slaves came into prominence in the eyes of the master class. Accordingly, gender distinctions shaped a particular female path to manumission as a result of close personal relationships with the masters (e.g. as nurses), as a result of long-term sexual relationships, or as a reward for giving birth to many new slaves. The Roman political community explicitly fostered this path to manumission for female slaves, by defining marriage to a master as a sufficient cause for rescinding manumission limits and production of three children as a means through which a female Junian Latin could achieve full citizenship. Marriage and procreation provided female slaves with a path to the respectability required of new female citizens.

Perry moves on to explore how the link between patrons and freedwomen is reflected in three different media and kinds of sources: the normative concerns of the Roman legal tradition, the constructions of identity as expressed through funerary inscriptions, and the images of freedwomen in literary texts. The need to balance the interests of patrons

with the respectability and honour required of manumitted female citizens was a main concern of Roman law (69-95). While law clearly recognised the continuing benefits that patrons could derive from their freedwomen in the form of obsequium and operae, it tried to ensure that these obligations would not degrade the honour and respectability of freedwomen. This intention took a variety of forms: on the one hand, it prohibited patrons from demanding sexual services, enforcing servile punishments, and stopping their freedwomen from marrying. On the other hand, the law tried to negotiate the difficult triangulation that resulted from the fact that married freedwomen had obligations to and were under the authority of both their patrons as well as their husbands.

A similar range of concerns is reflected in the choices that freedwomen made about how to present their identities and their various links to other people in the funerary monuments they constructed for themselves and others (96-128). Given the opacity of much of this material, Perry discusses in detail the ways in which we can interpret the freedwomen’s choice to present their status and their link to their patron in implicit or explicit forms; the ambivalent triangulation between freedwoman, patron and husband in Roman law is also reflected in the diverse decisions about the manner of presentation and the amount of emphasis given to partners and patrons in the epitaphs. Most intriguing of all are those cases where patron and husband were identical: whether to emphasise the one role or the other or both was a decision from which historians can learn a lot concerning the complex position of freedwomen between slavery and citizenship. Finally, Perry discusses the remarkable disjuncture between the image of freedwomen in legal and literary texts (129-54). While legal texts largely take for granted the respectability and honour of freedwomen and treat them as essentially similar to freeborn women, literary texts tend to present freedwomen as sexually available, promiscuous and without the honour of respectable women. This is another reflection of the contradiction between the sexual stigma of the servile experience of freedwomen and their newfound respectability and

honour as female citizens gained through marriage and assimilation to freeborn matrons.

Perry’s book is a subtle analysis that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of gender in the complex experience of slavery. Alongside Harper’s and Mouritsen’s contributions, it is a step in the right direction by moving beyond the unilateral and essentialist understandings of slavery towards an analysis that emphasises the co-existing contradictions and ambiguities that were inherent in it. Equally significant is the move beyond the exclusive focus on the relationship between masters and slaves and the emphasis on the role of the political community and its values and needs as an additional factor that shaped slavery in particular ways. It also shares with them the focus on the complex reality of slave sexuality and slave family as a decisive element both in the sexual economy of Roman slavery and in the slave strategies to turn slavery into something different from the instrumentalist and dehumanising relationship it was supposed to be. While it would be unfair to expect everything from such a relatively slim volume, the comments about change in terms of time, place and scale that were presented above in regards to the books by Harper and Mouritsen would provide equally useful ways of expanding Perry’s analysis in future work on the gendered experience of slavery.

A third book devoted to Roman freedmen is a volume edited by Sinclair Bell and Teresa Ramsby, which examines the impact of freed slaves on the Roman Empire.5 The editors present the aim of the collection as an exploration of Roman freedmen as active subjects in the historical process and not as mere objects of domination and exploitation; the editors’ introduction (1-23) is balanced by a very stimulating response chapter by Eleanor Winsor Leach, which brings together many of the main threads of the volume’s papers and provides a valuable commentary (196-210). Two contributions examine the two principal forms of the funerary representation of freedmen in the late 5 S. Bell and T. Ramsby (eds.), Free at Last! The Impact of Freed Slaves on the Roman Empire (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012).

republic and early empire. Barbara Borg re-examines the tomb reliefs for freedmen that date from the late first century BC to the early first century AD (25-49). On the one hand, Borg explores the combination of image and inscription, the range of persons represented and their clothing and apparel as a means of portraying a range of messages to the viewer in regards in particular to the significance of the family and social success for Roman freedmen. On the other hand, Borg discusses the messages conveyed by the facial features of those freedmen reliefs. Traditionally, these reliefs were situated within an approach that interpreted the veristic style of these portraits as a direct representation of the individuals portrayed. In light with more recent trends in the study of Roman art, Borg shows that the veristic style focuses on a certain range of facial features that intend to portray a series of messages about the individuals, rather than a direct likeness. She stresses the active role of the freedmen in constructing a form of artistic representation that selects a certain range of aspects from imperial and elite representations in order to construct an image of an individual and his family in conformity with norms and values that every good Roman citizen would ascribe to.

In a fascinating chapter Carlos Galvao-Sobrinho explores the agency of slaves and freedmen through a study of the Roman columbaria and the burial groups represented in them (130-76). Columbaria appeared suddenly towards the end of the Republic and start to peter out in the last decades AD. Galvao-Sobrinho argues persuasively that the decision of slaves and freedmen to start burying their dead in collective tombs organised on the basis of the familia is a very significant phenomenon, both in terms of the living communities that slaves and freedmen constructed, as well as in terms of explaining the emergence and decline of this form of collective burial. He is certainly correct to relativize the significance of functionalist explanations for the emergence of columbaria, such as the limited space for burials in the vast Roman metropolis. Instead, he proposes an explanation that places at the centre the agency of slaves and freedmen in a context not of their own choosing:

he argues that the various legislative measures of Augustus closed off a series of avenues for improving their lot that were available to freedmen during the Republic and forced them to depend to a greater extent on links with their patrons and their households. The collective burials of the familia in the columbaria reflects the decision of the living slaves and freedmen to invest time and effort in strengthening a community that had a realistic chance of providing help and support, material and moral. On the other hand, the decline of columbaria reflects the decision of slaves and freedmen to strengthen links beyond the familia, either as members of a more limited kinship group or in terms of wider associations based on profession etc. This attempt to place slave agency at the centre of our attention and to study it not as a static entity but as a historical process that changes in time and place is undoubtedly in the right direction; but it will also require more discussion of the extent to which the archaeological and epigraphic representation of slave and freedmen communities in the field of burial and its changing forms can be taken as a direct reflection of the changing history of the slave and freedmen communities themselves.

Pauline Ripat examines the role of freedmen in the system of political communication in the late republic (50-65). The chapter is a fascinating attempt to use social network theory in order to explore how the networks of freedmen could be mobilised by members of the Roman elite in order to gather information concerning political developments, spread rumours against their opponents, and gauge the level of popularity of politicians and other elite Romans. Exploring how the agency of former slaves played a role in the working of the Roman political system is undoubtedly a step in the right direction; unfortunately, the state of the evidence is such that Ripat’s discussion remains at the level of speculation with few concrete examples of freedmen in the actual roles postulated by the theory. More work from this particular perspective will likely reveal more evidence and more insights. Teresa Ramsby explores the world of freed slaves as depicted in the famous Cena Trimalchionis of Petronius’ Satyricon (66-87). While

there is little doubt that Petronius’ depiction clearly aims to satirise many aspects of a community of upstart and vulgar ex-slaves, Ramsby argues that there exists a sub-current in Petronius’ narrative that presents freedmen in a rather different manner. On the one hand, the correspondence between elements from the fictive freedmen’s self-presentation in Petronius and corresponding elements from real freedmen’s self-presentation as known from other literary texts or inscriptions shows that many of these elements could be seen in a positive light. On the other hand, the presentation of more ambiguous figures, like the stone-mason and sevir Habinnas, appears to reflect values with which most Roman citizens would gladly associate.

Koenraad Verboven’s chapter focuses on the freedman economy of Roman Italy (88-109). Verboven shows that, notwithstanding the great diversity in freedmen numbers among different regions of Italy, freedmen constituted about half the adult male population in places like coastal Campania and Ostia, and about 15% in the rest of Italy. Verboven argues in favour of thinking of Roman Italy not just as a slave economy, but also as a freedman economy. The reason for the existence of a freedman economy lay in the significant investment in human capital and its training: while other societies invest in human capital and its subsequent control through apprentice systems, Roman Italy used the nexus of slavery-manumission to achieve the same aims. The combination of developed systems of collegia and patronage ensured the avoidance of competition between patrons and freedmen and provided mutual, if of course deeply asymmetrical, benefits for both sides. This is a very important contribution, which requires further thinking in two directions. On the one hand, we need to think further about the entanglements and contradictions created by the co-existence of a slave and a freedman economy; on the other hand, Verboven is clearly wrong when he states ‘freedmanship was the inevitable result of an economy relying on slaves to perform care intensive tasks and to provide agency services’. There was nothing inevitable about it, and a comparative approach, in particular with the Greek case, would have much to offer.

Marc Kleijwegt’s chapter presents an agenda for the study of Roman freedwomen (110-29). Kleijwegt argues that we need to use the comparative evidence from other slave societies not in order to fill in the gaps of our existing Roman evidence, but in order to raise fruitful questions about issues and areas that remain at the margins of current research due to limited or unacknowledged ancient evidence. He focuses in particular on disputes about manumission promises, the importance of papers attesting an individual’s freedom, and the precarious role of freedwomen whose family remains enslaved. While Roman evidence for these issues might appear limited, Kleijwegt shows how comparative study can help us locate new evidence or ask new questions about evidence already known. Finally, Michelle Ronnick’s chapter examines the careers of white American classicists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that taught African Americans or participated in the struggle to improve the position of emancipated slaves and achieve race equality (177-95). The chapter is largely a survey catalogue of these scholars, and although highly stimulating for future research on the topic, it does not quite fit with the rest of the chapters in this volume.

Alongside the merits of individual chapters in this volume, its value lies primarily in discussing the methodological and interpretative problems in using in particular archaeological and epigraphic sources for studying Roman freedmen. The chapters provide very stimulating reflections concerning the problems of how to reconstruct freedman agency from the opaque, fragmentary and selective sources that we have. Equally useful is the attention to historical change: in particular the papers by Borg and Galvao-Sobrinho provide very illuminating comments on how to study the changing constructions of identity and community by Roman freedmen. It is only a pity that, as repeatedly commented above in regards to other works, this volume tends as well to restrict Roman slavery and freedmen to Rome and Italy.

Finally, two books explore the ideological manifestations of slavery in Greece and Rome. Kelly Wrenhaven’s book is devoted to the

image of the slave in ancient Greece.6 It examines the intellectual and visual discourses and means employed to represent slaves in Greek literature and art, primarily of the classical period: these images are seen as part of a Greek ideology of slavery. The book is divided in four chapters of unequal size. The first chapter (9-42) examines the language of slavery: the various terms employed to denote slaves, the speeches employed by barbarian slaves in Greek drama, the names given to slaves, and finally, the ways in which slaves addressed their masters and in which they were addressed. The second chapter (43-89) moves to the representation of the slave body in literature and art. Wrenhaven starts by discussing the wider discursive foundations on which Greeks interpreted the representation of the body and its interpretation: she focuses on the physiognomic works about reading a person’s character on the basis of his bodily features and on the theories about environmental determinism in the formation of human bodies and characters. Building on such theories, the Greeks constructed a polarised image of the slave body as the Other of the kalokagathia that represented the ideal Greek free male citizen. A similar pattern of polarised Otherness is explored in the case of Greek art, by examining the various ways in which artists attempted to depict slave bodies through smaller size, barbarian features or tattoos.

The third chapter (90-127) is devoted to the representation of the good slave, largely focusing on the depiction of wet-nurses and paedagogi in Athenian funeral monuments and Athenian drama. In her view, these representations of good slaves serve to justify slavery: in the case of the affective funerary monuments for wet-nurses, she interprets their purpose as the advertisement of the wealth and morality of their owners, while the tragic wet-nurses present the paradox that the closer they are to their masters, the more likely they are to be disloyal or offer bad advice. The final chapter (128-50) explores the image of the natural slave by focusing on two major thinkers, Euripides and Aristotle. While Euripides’ depiction of noble captives alongside ‘natural’ slaves can 6 K. Wrenhaven, Reconstructing the Slave: The Image of the Slave in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).

challenge the naturalness of the dichotomy between slave and free, Aristotle’s discussion of the natural slave builds on the wider Greek discourses examined in chapter two to defend an essentialist understanding of slavery.

Wrenhaven’s book is a useful collection of evidence, and is particularly laudable for its serious effort to accord to material and visual culture an equal place with the literary texts that normally dominate the discussion of the ancient ideologies of slavery. Its greatest strength is the discussion of the wider discourses about environment and physiognomy on which images of ancient slaves could be constructed. Nevertheless, the volume’s impact is limited by its adherence to a structuralist and functionalist approach. The book largely adopts the structuralist agenda of delineating the polarities through which the ancients constructed identities of Self and Other, as explored since the 80s by scholars like Francois Hartog, Edith Hall and Paul Cartledge. From this point of view, images of slaves have to present slaves as Others, seen from a variety of perspectives: as non-Greeks, as animal-like objects, as effeminates, ugly etc. When one finds images that cannot be readily reduced to the polarity of the Other, like that of good slaves, then the image must serve somehow the function of justifying the institution in some other way.

The problem with functionalism and structuralism is not that they are completely wrong in their assumptions: people do construct polarities, and ideologies do serve functions. The problem is rather that they focus on certain aspects that suit the approach, and leave aside everything that does not fit, because structuralism and functionalism have no way to account for the contradictions, ambiguities and conflicts which are inherent both in reality and in the ways in which human beings conceptualise it. It is true that the Greeks could use slave names that stressed the foreignness or servility of the slave; but an analysis of the full range of Athenian slave names shows that more than half of Athenian slaves bore names that were also born by Athenian citizens, thus making them onomastically indistinguishable. If we want to explore the use of language to construct an image of slaves, we cannot solely focus on those

names that advertise the slave’s alterity; we need to balance the ideological motivations behind such names with the motivations behind the rest of the slave names. Greek literary texts do present a number of slaves whose speech-use marks them as foreigners; but given that the overwhelming majority of slaves in literature appear indistinguishable in terms of language, we need to account for the totality of the representation.

It is true that Greeks had a polarised image of the barbarian Other, that could also be employed in relationship to their slaves; but Greeks had also many other images for the Barbarians, which also had a significant impact on the representation of slaves. How should we account for the epitaph of the miner Atotas from Laureion, who was either a slave or a freedman, but who presents himself as proud of his Paphlagonian ethnicity, his manual skill and his ancestry from Pylaimenes, the Paphlagonian king killed by Achilles (IG II² 10051)? The Greeks did have an image of the effeminate servile slave, as seen e.g. in Herodotus’ story about the Scythian slaves, or Euripides’ depiction of the Phrygian slave in Orestes, as analysed by Wrenhaven. But we also know of the many occasions where Greeks had to resort to the employment of slaves in warfare, like the battle of Arginusae, something that contradicted directly the image of the servile effeminate slave. Did Greeks put aside the image of the servile slave on such occasions? Were there alternative images of slaves that could be employed for such purposes? Or were Greeks forced to accept a reality that contradicted the image, and tacitly silenced the contradiction in their literary texts, as has been argued by Peter Hunt? A study of the discourses concerning Greek slavery can neither present a unidimensional ideology of Greek slavery, nor rest with a series of polarised images. Any discussion of the discourses of slavery that avoids accounting for contradiction, conflict and ambiguity will limit severely its usefulness; but it will also need to move beyond the images to explore the contexts of debate. Given the absence of abolitionism before the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as a Greek ideology of slavery, as there was no need for it. It is

rather the case that slavery was implicated in a range of moral, political, social and economic debates, and we need to reconstruct those debates, if we want to understand the various ways in which Greeks thought about slavery.

A second range of problems concerns something already commented on earlier, i.e. the restriction of Greek slavery to classical Athens. There is nothing wrong with focusing on the classical period, but the problem is that Wrenhaven’s selection of texts is unrepresentative: why do we not hear anything about the image of slaves in Menander, where we are presented e.g. in the Epitrepontes with a scene of two slaves who express their wish to become free in terms that should appear sympathetic to the ancient reader? How should we account for this image of slavery? What about the juxtaposed images of slaves employed in Herondas’ fifth mimiamb? But the wider problem is that we should not selectively employ later sources when it suits the argument: the ugly appearance of Aesop as described in the Life is employed when discussing the image of the slave body, but the fact that the reader is supposed to identify with the ugly slave ridiculing the Greek philosopher master remains unaccountable for. A long-term history of the Greek discourses concerning slavery is still a desideratum.

Myles Lavan explores the role of slavery in the language of Roman imperialism.7 Modern scholarship has correctly identified a series of phenomena which are associated with the Roman empire and its history: the adoption of Roman institutions, practices and material and intellectual culture by the subjects of the Roman Empire; the spread of Roman citizenship through grants and the co-optation of local elites; the idea of a Roman civilising mission to bring law and civilisation to its barbarian subjects. While all these phenomena were undoubtedly important, Lavan argues that modern scholars have failed to realise that the language of Roman imperialism does not necessarily map the integrative results of Roman imperial practice (1-24). While one can 7 M. Lavan, Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

certainly find references to the civilising mission and the integrative results, these relatively sparse references are largely overwhelmed by a range of alternative discourses that focuses on the asymmetrical distribution of power between the imperial community and its subject people. Given the complex structures of power in the Roman Empire, where Roman citizens lived in the provinces and provincial elites were invited to join the Roman army and the imperial elite, the language of the asymmetrical distribution of power could only work through a vocabulary that stressed the exclusivist character of the imperial community (25-72). Lavan explores how a series of terms (socii, provinciae, provinciales, gentes, peregrini) were used in order to construct a variety of imperial ‘we’, juxtaposed to equally diverse ways of constructing the nature of imperial subjects.

Lavan argues that the Roman language of imperialism largely employs two tropes: that of slavery in construing empire as analogous to the relationship between masters and slaves and that of patronage on the basis of the relationship between patron and client. The language of slavery appears as dominant in the discourse of Roman imperialism (73-123). While it is rather unsurprising that enemies of Rome described Roman rule as enslavement, Lavan documents extensively the extent to which the Roman elite presented themselves Roman power as a form of enslavement across a range of genres: the description of conquest as enslavement, the metaphor of the servile yoke to conceptualise imperial rule, the presentation of the Roman people as populus dominus, the commentary on the illusion of provincial freedom under the Roman Empire. This appears even more striking if it is true that the language of enslavement became more prominent in the course of the first centuries AD, precisely at the time that the incorporation of provincial elites in the army and state and the ‘Romanisation’ of material and intellectual culture became ever more widespread. Given the problematic survival of Latin non-fiction works from the later second and third centuries, this argument is based on the problematic evidence of Florus, Justin and Dio Cassius, but it is undoubtedly an intriguing argument. Equally striking is

the observation that notwithstanding the significance of manumission in the Roman ideology and practice of slavery, the manumission of worthy subjects is practically non-existent in the language of Roman imperialism.

Lavan argues that our modern sensitivities stand in the way of understanding Roman imperialism. Since we think of slavery as morally objectionable, we tend to interpret the use by Roman authors of the language of enslavement in order to describe Roman rule as paradoxical or problematizing; but in a world where slavery was taken for granted, the unconditional subjection of slaves to their masters provided a powerful metaphor for thinking about revolts and challenges to imperial rule. Nevertheless, it is significant to realise that the language of enslavement in the context of discussing Roman imperialism is always connected to a range of other issues, which need to be carefully considered. Lavan examines in detail three texts from Tacitus in which his discussion of slavery in the context of Roman imperialism is always connected to a discussion of Roman internal politics (124-55). Tacitus’ discussion of the Roman enslavement of Britain in the Agricola is a study in the psychology of enslavement and servility; linking with Mouritsen’s discussion of the stigma of the servile experience, Tacitus explores how the yoke of servitude creates servile subjects and how servility serves to maintain and reproduce subjection. In his discussion of the Batavian revolt in the Histories, Tacitus explores how the language of slavery and freedom is employed to challenge one form of rule in order to substitute it with another. Finally, his discussion of the Boudiccan revolt in the Annals presents the crimes of the imperial power over its free subjects and documents the fragility of the dividing line between slavery and freedom in the context of Roman imperial rule. Nevertheless, all three texts are part of a wider reflection on the nature of the Roman political system and the rule of the emperors: Agricola is a comment on the link between servility and domination, the Histories shows the impossibility of escaping domination, and the Annals document the fragility of the line separating freedom and slavery in a political world in which the emperors hold all cards in their hands.

The alternative to the language of slavery is that of patronage (156-242). Lavan explores a variety of ways in which Roman authors employ the language of patronage as an alternative to that of slavery. Sometimes it is used in order to distinguish the Roman Empire, based on the reciprocal relationship of benefaction linking rulers and ruled, with other imperial powers and their servile subjugation of their subjects; on other occasions, the languages of slavery and patronage are used in order to differentiate between different kinds of subjects within the Roman Empire. Equally interesting is also the exploration of imperial pronouncements to its subjects, which largely abandon the exclusivity of the dominus populus of the Romans and focuses on the relationship between the emperor and his subjects, presented either as members of their local political community or members of the human race.

This is a stimulating study that documents the significance of slavery for conceptualising various other forms of power, like the Roman imperial rule. Among the particular strengths of this study is that it does not work with a monolithic conception of slavery, but is alert to the variety of modalities in which slavery can be employed; equally significant is the author’s attention to the particular narrative focus of the literary representations of imperial rule as enslavement and the need to take into account the plurality of agendas that give meaning to these narratives. Nevertheless, this attention to the multiplicity of tropes and the distinctiveness of individual texts will need more attention in future discussion to the context of debate within which slavery is employed. A final comment concerns Lavan’s effort to tentatively assess the distinctiveness of the Roman language of imperialism as a form of enslavement of its subjects. In this respect, he argues that in contrast to Latin texts, where the language of enslavement is used not just by enemies of Rome, but by the Romans themselves, Greek authors tend to restrict this discourse to speeches attributed to the enemies of the imperial project. This is a rather problematic claim: a comparison with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia would have revealed how Cyrus and his

interlocutors debate the issue of voluntary servitude and described their conquest as enslavement of their subjects.8

8 This is the subject of a recent book by M. Tamiolaki, Liberté et esclavage chez les historiens grecs classiques (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010).