Overviews of Greek and/or ancient slavery have not exactly been in short supply in recent years. The book under review, however, is highly distinctive in a number of ways. Not the kind of introduction you would select for a course on ancient slavery at college level, Historicising Ancient Slavery is a combination between a manifesto or program for future research, and an interpretive exploration of the modern historiography of slavery. Embedded in the title, which may sound oddly bland, or even banal, is a radical claim: the study of slavery in the Greek and Roman world has hitherto remained largely un-historical, shot through by anachronisms and, more damagingly, essentially deprived of real historical depth. By and large, according to Kostas Vlassopoulos ancient slavery has been studied as if it were an unchanging aspect of the Graeco-Roman world, without a history of its own, as if it had remained basically the same across antiquity, an institutional package that could be extracted from the history of the ancient Mediterranean world and compared to other synchronic packages, most typically New World slavery. This approach is seen as partly a product of what Vlassopoulos calls an essentialist approach to ancient slavery that tries to define its trans-historical nature, ultimately for comparative purposes.
While Vlassopoulos has things to say about the modern study of ancient slavery from the Enlightenment onwards, in his view the paradigm that still dominates this field of study derives from the work of Moses Finley, which accordingly receives most of Vlassopoulos’s attention. The present reviewer finds this claim entirely convincing: while Finley’s take on the ancient economy has been criticized for decades and the present consensus on the subject is thoroughly different from Finley’s primitivist views, in the case of slavery no robust and comprehensive challenge to Finley’s key assumptions and views has hitherto emerged. This is not to say that no aspect of Finley’s work on slavery has been criticized, far from it, but while nowadays nobody would use The Ancient Economy as a work of reference on the subject, the same is definitely not true of slavery. On the other hand, the work of Henri Wallon might have deserved some special attention: while entirely different from Finley’s, one might say, in terms of political orientation, it displays striking resemblances when it comes to connecting very directly to current debates on slavery and abolition during the nineteenth century, making one wonder whether anachronism may not be an intrinsic component of the modern study of ancient slavery overall.
Sustained engagement with the work of predecessors is not exactly a standard feature of scholarship in ancient history, especially as produced in the Anglo-Saxon world. At a minimum, the present reviewer expects that readers will come away from Vlassopoulos’s book convinced of the fundamental importance of such an operation. They may also begin to think, as the present reviewer now certainly does, that the moral urgency that has driven the study of ancient slavery in a comparative direction has fundamentally hindered our understanding of the phenomenon itself and especially of its intrinsic diversity in space and time. While it is true that Finley’s notion of the spectrum of statuses between the complete freedom of the democratic citizen and the complete unfreedom of the chattel slave may seem to address this problem, in fact it does not, because it is an essentially synchronic notion and the way it is deployed blurs distinctions and similarities between different categories of unfree. These remarks however should not be taken to indicate that Vlassopoulos takes an isolationist view of the study of ancient slavery. On the contrary, the book includes several short discussions of work on systems of enslavement from other areas and ages. The antebellum South (inevitably?) takes pride of place, with some pages devoted to Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York 1974), pointed to ancient historians as a paradigm of a view of slavery that does not unilaterally take the viewpoint of the enslavers, but explores the several social relations in which any system of enslavement is inevitably embedded. More recent work on early medieval unfreedom on the other hand is brought in to criticize essentialist definitions of slavery, that Vlassopoulos considers typical for scholarship on antiquity. Here, it is the recent book by Alice Rio, Slavery After Rome (Cambridge 2017) that is presented as providing evidence for conditions of subordination where the legal distinction between free and unfree appears blurred and what seems to matter are specific local circumstances and negotiations between masters and their subordinates, which may result in conditions that approach more or less the stereotypical scholarly expectations associated to slavery or serfdom.
The methodological core of the book is represented by chapters 3-6. Here, Vlassopoulos introduces the concepts and categories that, in his opinion, would make it possible to move from the current de-historicized consensus to a truly historical study of enslavement in the Greek and Roman world. Inevitably, Vlassopoulos (Chapter 3) opts for a composite definition of slavery, pointing to the ways it belongs to, and is defined by, different conceptual systems. This move allows Vlassopoulos to sidestep the debate around property that has recently opposed Orlando Patterson to David Lewis.[1] In fact, Vlassopoulos has no doubt that slavery can be categorized as a form of ownership, in the ancient world and beyond, but he also thinks that other conceptual systems should be considered in order to come to a comprehensive definition of slavery. In a few somewhat compressed pages, Vlassopoulos brings up what he calls the prototypical images of enslaved people that are met in most slaveholding societies. This is an important point: what is at stake is the social perception of the predicament of enslaved people, and the dominant notions of disadvantage that obtain in any given culture—exclusion from kinship groups, or exclusion from political rights, degrading tasks, lack of control over bodily integrity and so forth. Vlassopoulos then goes on to illustrate slavery as a radial category that provides elements to other categories—some would speak of the use of slavery as a figure of speech, mostly a metaphor, for instance when it is used in opposition to political freedom. Vlassopoulos’s resistance to a univocal definition of slavery is highly persuasive. The terminology he introduces, as he strives to achieve logical consistency, is however somewhat contrived, and the present reviewer doubts that many will employ Vlassopoulos’s terms quite in the way he envisions. Time will tell.
Chapter 4 opens with a typology of slaving strategies, that is, of the purposes for which enslaved people were exploited, from the direct extraction of labor to prestige and personal gratification. The coexistence of different strategies and their respective importance go a long way in explaining the differences between historical systems of enslavement. Vlassopoulos’s typology offers a promising analytical tool. Reversing the perspective, the chapter continues by looking at the different contexts in which systems of enslavement have historically been embedded, separating levels from the household to the wider world. Specific aspects of these social and political contexts had an impact in the way enslaved persons were involved in webs of social relations. The several historical combinations of strategies and contexts across history combined in specific systems of slave-making, from reproduction to slave-trade. If the present overview may give the impression of a very Aristotelian taxonomy, the constant presence of historical examples for each category offers much food for thought and generally enlivens the text.
The discussion of the identities of enslaved persons, as perceived and articulated by themselves and by society at large, occupies less space than one might have expected. Vlassopoulos builds on several developments in sociology and philosophy, recent and less recent, seeking to provide templates for future studies. Brubaker and Cooper’s criticism of the concept of identity takes pride of place, and Vlassopoulos makes sure to present it in a way that his readers will be able to understand (sic, see p.98 n. 24).[2] Examples and comparisons are markedly less frequent than elsewhere, in part because some of the concepts had already been introduced, but if there is a part of the book where a reader may perceive some fatigue, the present reviewer suspects it might be this. The brisk pace that generally characterizes the book picks up again in the following chapter, devoted—again in a somewhat Aristotelian-Marxian way—to the dialectical (sic) relationships that characterize the predicament of enslaved persons. The conceptual ground is mapped in a confident way, and the reader immediately sees the implications of Vlassopoulos’s approach to the study of ancient slave systems.
In contrast to the block constituted by chapters 3-6, the following two chapters read more like add-ons—or perhaps assemblages of left-overs. This is not to say that they fail to offer thought-provoking insights. Chapter 7 largely builds on Vlassopoulos’s 2018 article on hopes of the enslaved,[3] while chapter 8 may be seen as providing the outlines of the historicized view of ancient slave systems, with some examples of what might be some of the contours of such a view. In the process, further nails are hammered into the coffin of Finley’s distinction between slave societies and societies with slaves, making it increasingly clear that such a distinction belongs to the intellectual history of the 20th century, not to the history of slave systems. David Lewis’ very productive concept of the epichoric slave systems is adopted and generalized, pointing to the importance of taking full account of the synchronic difference between different areas and regions of the Greek and Roman world (and beyond).
All in all, the present reader is convinced that Historicising Ancient Slavery will become a must-read for this subject. It is neither a synthesis nor an introduction, but it presents an intellectual challenge—or perhaps better, a system of intellectual challenges—that future research will pick up at its own profit. This is very clearly what Vlassopoulos would wish for: in the book, expressions such as ‘future research will need to do this or that’ or ‘clearly more research is needed on this or that’ are endemic, and some readers might even find them a bit vexing. But Vlassopoulos’s diagnosis regarding the circularity (not Vlassopoulos’s word) that Finley’s approach has bequeathed to the study of ancient slavery strikes the present reader as correct: the underlying comparison with the social and economic structures of New World slavery has created a straitjacket that too many scholars have been incapable of recognizing, let alone breaking free of. Readers who have themselves worked on ancient slavery or are otherwise familiar with the relevant evidence will inevitably find themselves wondering to what extent it will really be possible to address Vlassopoulos’s many desiderata. On the other hand, a historiography that raised only those questions it knows it can answer would be a rather sterile activity, at least in the humble opinion of the present reader.
Notes
[1] See their contributions in J. Bodel & W. Scheidel (eds), On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (Oxford 2017).
[2] R. Brubaker & F. Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29 (2000) 1-47.
[3] ‘Hope and Slavery’, in D. Spatharas & G. Kazantzidis (eds), Hope in Ancient Literature, History and Art (Berlin & Boston 2018) 239-62.