Overview

Informed by the global history of slavery, Kostas Vlassopoulos avoids traditional approaches to slavery as a static institution and instead explores the diverse strategies and various contexts in which it was employed. In doing so he offers a new historicist approach to the study of slave identity and the various networks and communities that slaves created or participated in. Instead of seeing slaves merely as passive objects of exploitation and domination, his focus is on slave agency and the various ways in which they played an active role in the history of ancient societies. Vlassopoulos examines slavery not only as an economic and social phenomenon, but also in its political, religious and cultural ramifications. A comparative framework emerges as he examines Greek and Roman slaveries alongside other slaving systems in the Near East, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

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9781474487221

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"""Treating slavery as a single thing was politically vital to abolitionism, but has become an impediment to scholarly understanding. Vlassopoulos shows how vital it is to stop considering slaves and slavery to be one thing if we are to understand Greek and Roman slavery. His rich and compelling picture of ancient slavery is the first step towards an honest mapping of the dynamics of power and domination across ancient societies that does not hide behind the classifications that they and we have found it politically convenient to adopt."" -Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge"

Author Information

Kostas Vlassopoulos is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Crete. He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2012) for his contribution to the field of Classics. He is the author of Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (2007), Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010), Greeks and Barbarians (2013) and co-author of My Whole Life: Stories from the Everyday Life of Ancient Slaves (2020). He is co-editor of Slavery, Citizenship and the State (2009), Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World (2015), Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World (2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries (2016).

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