Introduction and Brief History of the Issue
This book presents a case for radically reassessing our picture of ancient Greek slavery in its contemporary Mediterranean context. The standard view in classical scholarship holds that Greece (by which Athens is usually meant) and Rome were the only 'genuine slave societies' of the ancient world. Failing to attain to this dubious honour, other ancient slave systems (often labelled 'societies with slaves') thus recede into the background, with twofold consequences: first, a stark, black-and-white picture emerges, with Greece and Rome as apparently stand-alone exempla of slavery practised on a large scale in antiquity; second, this picture provides historians with a ready-made excuse to ignore what went on among the neighbouring 'societies with slaves'. Greece and Rome are presented as historical rarities, ranking among only a handful of societies in which slaves made up a noticeable proportion of the overall population and whose labour underpinned the dominant position of elites. Such rarities, of course, are usually more interesting to the historian than the comparatively prosaic 'societies with slaves': the former require models of development and elaborate theories to explain why they evolved so differently from the norm, whereas the latter, as historically commonplace, require no explanation at all. Greece and Rome can thus be conceptually detached and studied in isolation from their broader historical contexts. The basic parameters of this approach owe much to the highly influential work of M. I. Finley, who wrote that:
The pre-Greek world-the world of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Assyrians; and I cannot refrain from adding the Myceneans-was, in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense which the west has come to understand the concept. It was equally a world in which chattel slavery played no role of any consequence. That, too, was a Greek discovery. 1 Finley here drew a sharp line in geographical and chronological terms. Geographically, a clear divide in terms of economic practices separates the classical world from that of the ancient orient. The Greeks (and then Romans)
1 Finley (1981): 114-15.
incorporated slavery into economic life to a high degree; Near Eastern societies, according to Finley, failed to do the same. Chronologically, these eastern societies are seen-even if only tacitly-in terms of an earlier stage of development, one that was superseded by the more advanced societies of the classical world. They are pigeonholed as the 'pre-Greek world'. That Finley can do so implies the presupposition of a high degree of historical continuityeven stagnation-in his view of the Near Eastern world, an assumption that the Assyrians were little different in Homer's day from what they had been a thousand years before, or that the Babylonian contemporaries of Pericles were still stranded in an earlier stage of economic organization from which the Greeks had since progressed. 2
In recent years, a growing number of classical scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with claims of this sort. For example, in the field of economic history the notion that the classical world and Near East were hermetically sealed zones characterized by completely different economic practices has been rejected (which is not to downplay the fact that some significant differences did exist). 3 The sweeping language of 'modes of production' has been all but abandoned, and today's scholars are far more interested in documenting and explaining regional economies in all their complexity (including connections with surrounding regions) than branding vast swathes of territory as characterized by this or that mode of production. 4 Furthermore, a plethora of studies has been devoted to the cultural cross-pollination between the Greek world and the Near East: scholars now readily admit that myth, literature, science, and art in Greece all drew on Near Eastern materials and ideas. 5 Other studies have shown that many of the institutional features of the Greek world that were once thought distinctive-such as city-state culture or democratic government-have Near Eastern antecedents. 6
Yet the field of ancient slavery has remained relatively impermeable to these developments, with recent studies working within the same basic horizons as those of scholars fifty years ago. The recent Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume I: The Ancient Mediterranean World is a fitting testament
2 Cf. Dalley {2013): 55:
Their [i.e. Vere Gordon Childe and M. I. Finley] persuasive prose suggested that there was no need to look for inventors or inventions, because pre-Greek civilisation in the Near East was static. They envisaged a society where the prestige of the elite was the sole motivation for great works and the accumulation of wealth, so that efficiency and productivity were alien concepts. Agriculture and irrigation occupied the efforts of the workforce, which had no incentive for improving technical skills, leading to a stagnant society in which financial credit had not yet evolved.
3 Davies (2001): 13-14; Morris, Saller, and Scheidel (2007): 8-9; Descat {2011): 207; Manning and Oliver (2017); cf. Bresson (2016): xxv for key differences.
' Cf. Harper {201 la}: 29; 147.
5 These developments are usefully reviewed in Vlassopoulos (2013): 1-31.
6 See Fleming (2004); Hansen (2006a): 7-23; Vlassopoulos (2007a).
to the degree to which Finley's views have set the agenda for scholarship up to the present day. 7 Although its constituent studies are, on the whole, of a very fine standard, the scope of the book is shackled to an old-fashioned paradigm that places Greece (especially Athens) and Rome at the centre of inquiry and relegates other societies to the sidelines, often not treating them at all. 8 Even if, as a matter of fairness, we leave aside those regions of the Near East that did not adjoin the Mediterranean Sea, the focus on Greece and Rome when compared to other regions remains seriously lopsided. Of its 509 substantive pages of text, only two are devoted to Iron Age Israel (as we shall see in Chapter 9, there is rather more to say about the subject than that). Egypt receives a page and a half for its earlier periods, but somewhat more attention for the periods in which it fell under Ptolemaic and Roman rule; most remarkably, Carthage's large slave system receives only a single footnote in the entire volume. 9 This is not simply a function of the uneven distribution of evidence in relation to different parts of the ancient world. It represents a specific set of interests (although probably not an overt agenda) shaped by over a century of scholarship that has, in essence, become fossilized. This set of traditional interests takes centre stage, whilst other topics (for which there is often much evidence and excellent scholarly literature) receive mere bit parts. Norman Davies has highlighted a similar problem in early modem European historiography, whose practitioners have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the histories of those polities that have remained in existence to the present day, often paying scant attention to the histories of those that have died out; against this historiographical trend, his Vanished Kingdoms provides a much-needed antidote. Regarding this trend in modem historiography, he writes:
Our mental maps are inevitably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and by accepted wisdom. If we continue to neglect other areas of the past, the blank spaces in our minds are
7 Bradley and Cartledge (2011). In 1987 Momigliano wrote that 'one is led to believe that at least in the near future the debate will continue on the lines indicated by Finley' (Momigliano 1987: 5). As is often the case, Momigliano was correct. Of Finley's three main areas of study (archaic Greece, the ancient economy, and slavery), the first two have seen extensive revision: see, e.g., van Wees (1992) and Bresson (2016) for a sense of how scholars have engaged with and moved beyond Finley's work. But there has simply not been any major, book-length revisionist engagement with Finley's ideas on Greek slavery. This volume aims in part to fill that gap; and my focus on Finley is due above all to an appreciation of the enormous influence of his work. One cannot simply declare that, thirty years on, we have moved past Finley's ideas: we owe it to him, should we wish to construct a different view, to engage critically with his work.
8 For a judicious assessment of this volume, see Vlassopoulos (2012a). As he rightly notes (2012a: 879) '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'.
9 Bradley and Cartledge {2011): 14 n. 57. The volume does include a short chapter on the Near East by D. C. Snell, but the amount of material Snell had to cover in so small a space allowed for only superficial coverage.
reinforced, and we pile more and more knowledge into those compartments of which we are already aware. Partial knowledge becomes ever more partial, and ignorance becomes self-perpetuating. 10
The time is now ripe for a change of perspective. Whilst much important work has been written on Greek slavery, this work has, like that which Davies criticizes in early modern European history, tended to enrich certain compartmentalized fields without affecting the overall shape of the paradigm. One aim of this book is simply to present a great deal of the evidence and scholarship relating to non-Greek forms of ancient slavery, in an effort to stimulate the kind of data circulation to which Davies refers. 11
The present book is not, however, intended as a comprehensive comparative study of every aspect of slavery in the Greek world and the ancient Near East, nor is it designed as a wholesale substitution for the traditional view sketched above. (Much of that work that I would define as 'traditional' is admirable and valuable, and it is for the most part not its content that requires replacement, so much as the larger framework within which it is conceptualized.) As for comparison between Greece and the Near East, there is much more work to be done on this issue than can be achieved in one volume, and what is presented here is merely aimed at addressing several of what I take to be the most pressing issues, as well as presenting an alternative view that stands outside the dominant paradigm. For example, I have chosen not to cover every last region conceivable, but to focus on specific case studies that are particularly illuminating from a comparative viewpoint. I ask the reader to take this selection of case studies more in the spirit of exploratory test pits than a comprehensive excavation. Likewise, the differing length of the chapters at times reflects the amount of available material; but the space devoted to different problems more generally reflects the state of these questions in current research: where good treatments by other scholars are available, I have aimed at being succinct. Where they are not, I have devoted somewhat more space to specific problems. So whilst there is sufficient evidence to write several books on the role of slavery in the economy of classical Attica, I have chosen to focus on two key areas: the use of slave labour by the elite, and the debate over slavery in sub-elite farming. I hope that the reader will forgive any unevenness.
Another choice I have made was not to extend the chronological sweep of the book backwards beyond 1000 BC, partially because of reasons of space, and partially because I wish to focus on societies that are roughly contemporary with Greek societies of the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods. 12 My analysis also focuses largely on what we might call the 'private sector',
10 Davies (2011): 4. 11 Cf. Harper (2011a): 18-19.
12 There is certainly much of interest in this earlier period: see, e.g., Tenney (2011); Seri (2013).
especially the elite (thus ignoring royal and institutional slaveholdings). I have made this choice in part because of the need for brevity, but mainly because the traditional view of classical scholarship from the past fifty years has based so much of its case for Graeco-Roman exceptionalism on the importance of slavery to elites. This view can and should be shown to be erroneous on its own terms. So, whilst there remains much to do, I offer this volume as a first step towards a more integrated approach to ancient slavery. I divide the book into four parts.
Part I (Prolegomena) sets out the tools required for the comparative work undertaken in Parts II and III. To embark on an economic comparison of the sort pursued in the subsequent two parts of the book, we must first establish that we are comparing the same basic phenomenon, though embedded in different socio-economic milieux: in other words, we must be sure that when we speak of slavery in this or that ancient society, we refer to fundamentally the same institution. Much work published over the past half century has, however, made such a comparison exceedingly (and perhaps unnecessarily) complicated. First, an influential strand of sociological research has attacked the legal dimension of slavery and questioned its centrality to the institution; but much of this has been based on a flawed understanding of the nature of the problem, especially in terms of a basic misunderstanding of what the terms 'property' and 'ownership' mean in a concrete and comparative sense. Second, cultural differences between Greece and the Near East relative to the value of 'freedom' have (rightly) been noted and much commented on, but the exact nature of the differences concerned and the practical consequences they entail have been seriously misconstrued. Part I, then, is dedicated to a more precise articulation of (i) the legal similarities and differences relative to slave status in Greek and Near Eastern law; (ii) the cultural, social, and economic consequences of differing conceptions of 'freedom' between the two regions; and (iii) the issue of status distinctions viewed in comparative perspective.
The principal focus of this book lies in studying the economic role of slave labour in ancient Greek societies. Problems with the existing orthodox views fall in two areas: first, the role and evolution of slave labour within the societies of the Greek world and, second, the alleged uniqueness of Greek systems of slave labour when viewed in the broader context of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern world (these problems are treated consecutively in Parts II and III of this book).
Part II focuses on the Greek world. In terms of the evolution of slavery in ancient Greece, most scholars hold that the progress (if we can call it that) from 'societies with slaves' to fully fledged 'slave societies' occurred in the sixth century BC. Whilst a variety of scenarios have been proposed to explain this change, few scholars have questioned the view championed by Eduard Meyer {and later by Finley) that slavery played a relatively unimportant role in the economy of the Homeric period. As we shall see in Chapter 5, there are
compelling reasons to abandon this view and to propose an alternative picture of the development of Greek slavery between the early archaic period and the fifth century BC. As for the role of slave labour in classical Greece, many scholars still cling to the belief that slavery barely existed in regions such as Sparta and Crete, where dependent labour is commonly described in terms of serfdom. This taxonomic choice has meant that in some general studies of Greek slavery, Sparta, Crete, Thessaly, and certain other regions are ignored altogether. As Chapters 6 and 7 will show, there are cogent reasons to reject this view: whilst dependent labour was structured in a very different manner in these regions from that of their Athenian counterparts (whose slave system is analysed in Chapter 8), Sparta's helots and Crete's dependent populations were comprised of privately owned slaves, and it is Sparta, not Athens, that should be seen as the most extreme example of a 'slave society' in classical Greece. 13
Part III of the book sets these Greek regional studies in a broader geographical context and seeks to question the validity of Finley's view (quoted above, and central to the basic research paradigm that has informed the past halfcentury of investigation) that the slaveholding practices of the Greeks were wholly different from those of their eastern neighbours. It treats a series of case studies in what I have (rather loosely) termed the 'Eastern Mediterranean world,. Chapter 9 studies one of the most methodologically challenging ancient Mediterranean societies, Israel during the Iron Age II period (that is, the period of the monarchies in Israel and Judah). Here, I argue that the legal understanding of slavery in ancient Israel was substantively similar to that of the Greeks and Romans, and that the famous 'slave laws, of the Torah do not adumbrate a special Israelite slave status, but rather aim to create a form of indentured labour prescribed for Israelites that was designed to prevent vulnerable members of the ethnic Israelite community from becoming slaves. I also present a case for viewing slavery as an important source of wealth for elites in Israel and Judah during the monarchical period.
Chapters 10 and 11 turn towards Mesopotamia and engage with recent research on slavery during the first millennium BC. The former chapter examines slavery in the archival sources of eighth-seventh century Assyria and shows that Assyrian elites were heavily involved in slaveholding on a scale that was on a par with, if not greater than, many Greeks of the classical era. The latter examines the role of slaves in the economy of Babylonia during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, and shows the contribution of slaves to
u I should have liked to include a further chapter on the Thessalian penestai, but that would have required expanding the scope of the book too far. On this topic, Ducat (1994) presents a characteristically detailed study with close attention to textual matters. More remains to be said, however, on the origins and economic praxis of the system (to which one might apply the approaches of Luraghi 2002 and Hodkinson 2008 respectively), as well as integrating it with other aspects of the socio-economic and political history of Thessaly.
the activities of Babylonian entrepreneurial families, whose diversified economic activities relied heavily on slave agents in the brokering of business deals and the organization of commercial activities. In both Assyria and Babylonia, however, slavery did not develop so far that we might call them 'slave societies'; and this lesser economic importance of slavery requires explanation, a task that is treated in part in these chapters and in part in Chapter 14.
Chapter 12 analyses several of the far-scattered regions of the Persian Empire in which slave labour is visible as an economically significant venture: Anatolia (as described in several classical sources), Egypt (where the letters of the fifth-century Satrap Arsama provide important evidence for slavery on elite estates), and Fars, the Persian heartland, where the numerous Persepolis Fortification Tablets-along with several key classical texts-attest to a large population of forced labourers, a mixed workforce whose statuses (as we shall see) comprised a combination of enslaved war captives and corvee labourers.
Chapter 13 is an exception to the other societies studied in Part III of this book insofar as it studies a slave system located in the western Mediterranean, that of Carthage; but this civilization was firmly eastern in its origins and culture, and its system of slave labour was organized on a massive scale.
Part IV contains a concluding chapter that draws together the numerous strands spun in Parts II and III, and attempts to make some progress towards a general framework for understanding why slavery became a significant economic force in some ancient Mediterranean regional economies and not others. Finally, I include an appendix on the word oiketes in classical Greek, for two reasons: first, it is routinely mistranslated by Hellenists, most of a far finer calibre than myself, because of basic errors made in the entries to our standard lexicons; and second, its correct translation affects two important debates on slavery in classical Attica, one on farming, the other on demography, with wideranging implications for how we understand the fabric of Athenian society.
REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES
I owe the term 'slave system' used in this book to Westermann (1955), though he did not define quite what he meant by the designation. The term is specifically defined in the introduction to a valuable recent volume edited by C. Katsari and E. Dal Lago, but it seems to me that their definition is essentially a variant of the term 'slave society' with some minor alterations, a cosmetic rebranding of a well-worn category. 14 The term as I employ it here has a different sense and a different purpose. It is not used as an index of the
14 See Dai Lago and Katsari {2008a): 3-5.
importance of slavery to a given society economically, culturally, or otherwise; it covers what Finley would have called 'slaveholding societies' as well as 'slave societies'. My usage is regional and essentially legal in orientation.
Recent scholarship has vindicated the utility of utilizing regional units of analysis in the study of ancient societies. 15 In the case of slavery, we must remember that the classical Greek world comprised over a thousand poleis, and these polities each created their own laws tailored to their own needs, relating inter alia to the institution of slavery. The legal contours of slavery in the societies of the Greek world, though similar in some fundamental respects, differ in their details from polis to polis and from region to region; these differences in detail can often be explained in terms of local variables and concerns. When we compare Attic slavery to slavery in Sparta or Crete, a keen understanding of local conditions in these individual regions helps to explain what otherwise might be seen as peculiarities or eccentricities in their slave laws. As this study will show, in most cases these 'eccentricities' are nothing of the sort, but pragmatic responses to local, region-specific imperatives. As a comparative unit of analysis, then, the notion of 'slave system' allows us to treat as a single unit the legal manifestation of slavery in a given politicaljuridical region. It has the heuristic virtue of allowing us to explain slave law and the organization of slave labour in terms of local concerns, and the resulting picture can easily be held up next to other slave systems in order for the reader to discern similarities and differences in practice. In Part II of this book especially, I aim to work towards a view of Greek slavery as a patchwork of epichoric slave systems, viewing our evidence for slavery as embedded in distinctive regional contexts, rather than settling for the standard 'serfdom' versus 'chattel slavery' dichotomy common in many studies.
Above all, this category helps us to move beyond crude generalizations such as 'Greek society' or 'Near Eastern society'. Of course, I make no claim for external reality for this category; it is just as much a modern tool of analysis as 'slave society': it is nomos, not physis; and an etic, not emic, tool at that. Nor do I seek to supplant the category of 'slave society' with my own one: both are heuristic tools designed for different tasks, both can be used profitably, and neither can reveal the full picture in and of itself.
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
This book does not utilize several common scholarly terms employed in many studies of slavery, and this departure from the norm requires justification.
15 e.g. Harden and Purcell (2000); Vlassopoulos (2011b).
Perhaps the most notable omission is 'chattel slavery'. In the context of the Greek world, this term is normally restricted to the commercialized slave systems of the Aegean, such as those of Corinth, Chios, Aegina, and (especially) Athens. These systems relied upon extensive trade networks to import non-Greek slaves in great numbers, particularly from Thrace, the Black Sea, Anatolia, and Syria. The term 'chattel slavery' is generally denied to the slave systems of Sparta, Thessaly, and Crete, and only sometimes applied to the Homeric world. But this usage is quite misleading. In Continental scholarship, more appropriate terms are employed to describe slavery on the Attic model: the French equivalent of 'chattel slavery' is esclavage marchandise, the German equivalent (though somewhat less common) Kaufsklaverei. As these terms rightly imply, the distinctive attribute of such systems lies in the fact that they drew upon commerce for their supply of slaves. Yet the term 'chattel slavery' represents something quite different: 'chattel' is a common law term for movable property, and is used to make a distinction between movable and real property, roughly along the same lines as that between res mobiles and res immobiles in Roman law. The term then means something like 'property slavery'.
Two basic problems with the term 'chattel slavery' thus emerge. First, like some other popular academic expressions (e.g. 'lived experience'), it is a pleonasm. Slaves are by their very definition property, and there is no need to add a modifier to hammer the point home. Second, slaves in those Greek slave systems usually denied the label 'chattel slavery' were (as we shall see in Chapters 6 and 7) property just as much as Athenian slaves, though they were obtained via different means and governed by different laws. It makes no sense to deny them a term that simply means 'property' when most scholars only use the term to mean 'commercially sourced'. One could try to coin a neologistic term closer to the French or German equivalents-for example, 'commercial slavery'-but this raises problems of its own. As Jean Allain and Kevin Bales have pointed out in relation to the term 'debt slavery', the qualifying term 'debt' does not denote a qualitatively different sort of slavery, but merely the manner by which the enslaved person gained his or her status. 16 A distinction must be made, therefore, between the routes into slavery and the condition itself. I rather doubt the utility of extending this principle to other supply strategies, and clogging up academic discourse with terms like 'birth slavery', 'judicial slavery', 'piracy slavery', and so on. It is much more useful to stick to the term 'slavery' pure and simple.
16 Allain and Bales (2012): 6: 'put simply, it is illogical to name the mechanism of acquisition of a person as an essential component in defining whether a person is in slavery. Slavery is a status or condition, not the means by which a person is removed into that state or condition of control.'
The 'debt slavery' example highlights another common problem, and that is the conflation of debt bondage with enslavement for debt. The two conditions are qualitatively quite different. The first term describes a form of indentured service in which the bondsman works to pay off an obligation. His or her labour continues only until the debt has been repaid, and the master is not their owner. 17 Enslavement for debt, however, transforms the debtor into a slave, who can be bought, sold, inherited, and so on; and the creditor who enslaves him upon default becomes his owner. 18 As we shall see in Chapter 9, the 'slave laws' of the Torah in the Hebrew Bible begin with a standard scenario of enslavement due to debt or poverty, and then proceed to alter that person's condition radically, limiting it to temporary indentured service. Therefore, I have also avoided the term 'manumission' when describing the rules on release from this condition of indentured service, though most biblical scholars do use the term. My difference from them lies not in disagreement over the substance of the condition but on the appropriate vocabulary to describe it. Since the phenomenon of enslavement for debt and debt bondage is not limited to the Near East, but also appears in an important set of laws from Gortyn on Crete as well as in several texts from or concerning Athens, the need to find suitable terminology in common requires an adjustment of the vocabulary used in narrower scholarly fields. In other words, when engaging in comparative research, a cross-cultural lingua franca in terms of etic descriptors is indispensable.
A third omission is the term 'unfree', deriving from the abstract noun Unfreiheit in German. The adjective 'unfree' is usually employed to describe a broader set of dependent relationships than slavery sensu stricto, but its usage implies a concrete meaning of freedom that its users seldom, if ever, define. I do not find it 'admirably vague', and prefer the term 'dependent labour' as the genus of which slavery is a species. 19 (It is perhaps more legitimate in studies of medieval slavery, where the semantic range of the terminology of freedom shifted from its antique usage.) As we will see in Chapter 2, a great deal of (unnecessary) confusion has been created by scholars failing to be specific about what exactly it is that they mean when they employ terms such as 'free' and 'freedom', and it is all too common that vagueness in understanding or evasiveness of expression is passed off as nuance.
17 Cf. Dandamaev (1984): 80, rightly noting that although many scholars use the term 'debt slavery' when talking about debt bondage, 'the debtor, who only worked temporarily for the creditor, can hardly be considered a slave'.
18 That is, at least, the legal distinction; I do not wish to deny that in practice, sometimes debt bondsmen were treated as slaves in regions where the legal institutions that prescribed debt bondage were inadequate to enforce their rules. For the formal distinction between the two conditions, see Harris (2002a).
19 I borrow this description from Finley (1968): 308: 'Slavery is a species of dependent labor and not the genus.'
Finally, readers will notice that I have avoided using the term 'serfdom' to describe helotage and other comparable forms of slavery. Even though some aspects of helot life did approximate to the social condition of serfs, from a legal perspective this terminology is misleading. It engenders the belief that these individuals were 'bound to the soil' and possessed legal rights, a view that has little evidentiary basis; furthermore, scholars who use this terminology routinely ignore or attempt to explain away good evidence that these persons could be sold. Often scholars fudge together the economic and the legal, concluding that because this or that enslaved group lived in family groups in the countryside, they must have been serfs, not slaves. This is to ignore the institutional, legal basis of different varieties of forced labour. Slaves are not distinct from other forced labourers because they work in some 'plantation mode of production', but because a society's laws grant their masters the rights of ownership over them. From a legal point of view, a plantation slave is no more or less a slave than one who works in a bank or a mine. 20 I will attempt to justify my obstinacy in avoiding the term 'serfdom' in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ISSUE
We noted above that Finley's views have played an important role in shaping the contours of modern inquiry into ancient Greek slavery. But Finley did not develop these views in a vacuum, and it will, I hope, prove useful to take a brief look at scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This will help us to understand why the standard view of the problem that exists today has taken the particular shape that it has. (Here, I focus on the core question of the 'uniqueness' of Greek slavery, and not on some of the subjects explored in Part II. 21 )
One could begin an overview of this subject earlier, but for present purposes it will suffice to begin with Henri Wallon, whose three-volume Histoire de l'esclavage dans l'antiquite (1847; second edition 1879) stands as an important early landmark in the field. 22 This work included a sixty-one-page chapter on
20 That said, I should state that I have no objection to the idea of serfdom as a cross-cultural category, as argued for by de Ste. Croix (1981) and, more recently, Hunt (2016); my difference of viewpoint from these scholars arises from a different interpretation of the evidence for helot status, rather than any schism over theory.
21 I can provide only a very cursory review of this issue here, and what follows is very far from being anything like a detailed intellectual history (though such a history would be well worth writing).
22 This was not the first work on ancient slavery; see Finley (1980): 11-40 for a survey of earlier studies. However, it represents a good starting point for tracing the shape of the field as it developed into and during the twentieth century.
slavery in the ancient Orient that prefaced his subsequent chapters on Greece and Rome. We should recall that cuneiform script was still at this time poorly understood, so Wallon's focus fell mainly on the Hebrew Scriptures. It is also important to emphasize the moral and political aims of Wallon's study, formulated at a time when the abolition of slavery in the French colonies remained a key political issue. 23 A deeply religious individual, Wallon aimed to show the incompatibility of slavery with Christian values; and to Wallon's mind, the Hebrew Bible contained a kernel of abolitionist sentiment: in particular, we may note those laws of the Torah that enjoined good Hebrews to treat their Hebrew slaves well and release them after a brief spell of service. 24 This apparently protoabolitionist attitude stood in contrast with the brutal pagan slave systems of Greece and Rome. For Wallon, then, the contrast between Hebrew and GraecoRoman slavery lay chiefly in the moral esprit suffusing each.
For the articulation of a proper economic comparison of Greek and Near Eastern slavery we must turn to the work of the German ancient historian Eduard Meyer. Meyer's famous lecture on slavery (later published as 'Die Sklaverei im Altertum') was delivered in Dresden on 15 January 1898. 25 One of his chief points in this lecture lay in emphasizing the cyclical nature of history: as the leading proponent of the nascent 'modernist' school on the ancient economy, Meyer heavily criticized the 'primitivist' view of Karl Bucher and the National Economists that history comprised a series of stages, each leading progressively to modernity, in which antiquity was understood as more economically undeveloped than the medieval period. 26 Instead of a simple progressive march from the self-sufficient household economy (Hauswirtschaft) of antiquity to the bourgeois capitalist economy of the nineteenth century, Meyer emphasized rather the ebbs, flows, and cycles of history. In his view, different societies entered different stages of development at certain points in the past, and comparable economic structures might resurface at a later point in time. History thus knew regression as well as progress. According to Meyer, the Homeric period was directly comparable to the European Middle Ages, whereas the heyday of antiquity ('die Blutezeit des Altertums'), that is, classical
23 See Wallon (1879): v-clxiv.
24 We will examine the Hebrew material in much greater detail in Chapter 9. Wallon rightly noticed that the laws of the Torah prescribed kindly treatment and release for Israelites alone, and thus not foreigners; but he conceived an ingenious (if wrongheaded) argument to extend this treatment to gentiles as well: since the law at Gen. 17: 12-13 required all male members of an Israelite household (including slaves) to be circumcised, this must have made any slave held by an Israelite, whether a fellow countryman or foreigner, qualify for the social justice legislation described in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. See Wallon (1879): 11-12. It is perhaps a sign of the times that Wallon failed to notice that his argument would not work for foreign female slaves, as female circumcision is unknown in this culture.
25 See Meyer (1910): 171-212.
26 On the Bucher-Meyer debate, see Badian (1981): 52-3; Davies (1998): 233-5; Bresson {2016): 2-5.
Greece and Late Republican/Early Imperial Rome, corresponded to modernity (i.e. the Early Modern period). 27 As was the case for W allon, the fledgling state of research into cuneiform sources restricted much of Meyer's view of the east to the Hebrew Scriptures and classical texts. He asserted that ancient Israel was comparable in terms of socio-economic structure to Homeric Greece and archaic Rome: in all three societies, slavery played no real role of importance; a system of feudal serfdom (Horigkeit), rather than a system of slavery, underpinned the economy. 28 Furthermore, it is indicative of the strength of the idea that, despite his conservative politics, Meyer held basically the same view as Marx on the alleged historical stagnancy of the Orient, a view that was instrumental to Marx's theory of the so-called 'Asiatic Mode of Production' (which we will discuss in greater detail in the last section of this Introduction, pp. 15-17). 29 Meyer's essay remained influential in twentieth-century Germany, and it was praised by no less than Joseph Vogt, the doyen of post-WWII German scholarship on classical slavery.Jo Its influence also lived on in the AngloAmerican sphere: the American historian W. L. Westermann, who penned the supplement on slavery (published in 1935) for the Pauly-Wissowa Real Encyclopiidie, wrote that Meyer's essay laid the foundations of the contemporary understanding of Greek and Roman slavery.J 1 Westermann's study was later published in English, with (to the chagrin of his student M. I. Finley) few changes from the earlier German encyclopedia supplement, as The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (1955). 32 Some of the main tenets of the current orthodox view of the 'uniqueness' of Greece and Rome in the history of slavery were articulated in Westermann's study. One key point was the idea that a sharp distinction between free men and slaves only existed in Greece and Rome, not in the Near East:
In sharp contrast to this clarity of differentiation between those completely free and those who were enslaved, with a special term for 'freedman' (a.1rEAEv0Epos-)
27 Meyer (1910): 188:
Die erste Epoche des Altertums, die homerische Zeit und ihre Parallelen, steht mit der ersten Epoche der christlich-germanischen Volker auf derselben Linie und verdient wie diese als Mittelalter bezeichnet zu werden; die Bliitezeit des Altertums entspricht der Neuzeit, sie is wie diese nach jeder Richtung eine modern Zeit, in der die Anschauungen herrschen, die wir als modern bezeichen miissen.
28 For this comparison, see Meyer (1910): 180. For his view that slavery was economically unimportant in the orient, see Meyer (1910): 190-2. For Meyer's view of slavery in the Homeric period, see Finley (1980): 46-7; Harris (2012): 346-8
., Meyer (1910): 189-90. At p. 190 he made the remarkable claim that 'Damaskus, Aleppo, Hamat und die GroBstadte Agyptens und Babyloniens haben im Jahre 1000 v. Chr. nicht wesentlich anders ausgesehen, als heutzutage.'
30 Vogt (1974): 179. See Harris (2012): 348 for further discussion.
31 Westermann (1935): 894: 'Der Grund zu unserem gegenwartigen Wissen iiber Sklaverei in der griechischen und romischen Geschichte wurde von Eduard Meyer in Seinem Vortrag gelegt.'
32 See Finley (1980): 55.
and regulations which provided the freedman group with legal directives, stands the blurring and overlapping of these social classifications in the Egyptian and the Semitic languages the cuneiform signs for 'slave' meant, literally, a 'man from the mountains', that is, a captive from an alien land. The same indefiniteness prevailed in the early development of the Egyptian language in the use of the term b'k, to the point that the Egyptologists still disagree as to the exact status of the persons thus designated. The Hebrew word 'ebed suffers from the same vagueness, its application ranging through 'slave' or 'servant of the Lord' in the phrase 'ebed Jahwe, to the titular epithet describing a high military or civil official as 'ebed el malek, 'servant of the king'. 33
Westermann thus pointed out an apparent qualitative difference between classical and Near Eastern forms of slavery, one that was later to be adopted by Finley. But he did not insist on a huge quantitative divide in economic terms between the classical and non-classical worlds: for one thing, he tended to play down the economic role of slavery in Greece and Rome where possible; for another, several paragraphs in his book are devoted to the enormous slave population of Carthage during the Hellenistic period, the size of which he made no effort to deny or explain away. 34 In a section entitled 'Basic differences between pre-Greek and Greek slavery' Westermann had much to say on rational Hellenic improvements that apparently brought conceptual clarity into the distinction between slaves and free men, and he also had things to say about differences in the treatment of slaves; but he had nothing to say at all on whether the Greeks and Romans made greater economic use of slaves than other ancient civilizations. 35
A starker divide between the two worlds was more fully set out by M. I. Finley. Although generally critical of his teacher, Finley adopted Westermann's view of the qualitative differences between the allegedly sharp free-slave divide in the classical civilizations and the allegedly blurred state of affairs that prevailed in the Near East. 36 Indeed, he pushed this view further by claiming that the Greeks invented the idea of freedom and situated that development in particular historical circumstances (namely the aftermath of Salon's reforms of 594/3 BC). Although describing Meyer's essay on slavery as 'a succession of ex cathedra assertions' and 'as close to nonsense as anything I can remember written by a historian of such eminence', Finley essentially repeated Meyer's view that slavery was unimportant in the Homeric period. 37 It was the economic transformations of the sixth century that, according to Finley, sparked the 'rise' of slavery in the
33 Westermann (1955): 42-3. 34 Westermann (1955): 58.
35 Westermann (1955): 39-46.
36 Finley (1980): 52-5. For his adoption ofWestermann's stance on the qualitative divide, see Finley (1964): 238 = (1981): 120-1, quoted verbatim in Chapter 3, p. 81 of this volume.
37 Finley (1980): 47-8. For a more balanced assessment of Meyer's contribution, see Badian (1981): 52-3. On the closeness between Finley and Meyer's views on early Greek slavery, see the important study of Harris (2012): 346-51.
Greek world, and this was the direct cause of the development of a sharp distinction between free men and slaves. In essence, before slavery became economically prominent, all ancient societies lived in a world where statuses were blurred together in a continuum of dependency. 38 It was the Greeks who pioneered the large-scale exploitation of slave labour, spurring the invention of the concept of freedom, a cultural value that they bequeathed to the Romans (also large-scale exploiters of slave labour). Other ancient societies, according to Finley, failed to make this key leap. Finley's deterministic causal link between the economic development of slavery and the development of the cultural value 'freedom' caused him to deny or ignore the role of slavery in non-classical cultures and forefront the importance of Greece and Rome to the history of slavery. 39
At this point, something needs to be said on Marx and his influence on the historiography of ancient slavery. Marx was well acquainted with the ancient world, having written his doctoral dissertation on the Democritean and Epicurean philosophies of nature at the University of Jena (accepted in 1841). In his later political and economic works he sometimes drew on classical texts to illustrate the proto-history of modern bourgeois capitalism, but this was never systematically approached or developed into a rigid theory of human societal evolution. The programmatic division of history into a series of epochs marked by different modes of production (primitive communism; the slave mode of production of antiquity; medieval feudalism; modern bourgeois capitalism; socialism) is more a relic of the twentieth century, more specifically, of Stalinism (in the USSR) and 'Vulgar Marxism' (elsewhere).
At any rate, Marx did analyse different historical forms of property, and in the course of his inquiries formulated some conclusions about historical conditions in Asia. Like most of his contemporaries, Marx tended to view Asia as essentially uniform and unchanging. 40 His theory of a so-called 'Asiatic
,. Finley (1981): 132.
19 One must be fair to Finley by situating his work in its historical context. He can be excused in part, insofar as research into slavery in the Near East at that time (exemplified by Mendelsohn 1949) largely supported his position. But this only explains so much, and it is at times difficult to justify Finley's view of a stark contrast between the classical and non-classical worlds. For instance, Mendelsohn (1949): 110-11 mentioned that slavery was economically significant in agriculture during the Neo-Assyrian period, but I can find no reference to this inconvenient position in Finley's works, nor can I find any discussion of de Vaux (1961), who argued that slavery was an important labour source on elite lands in Iron Age Israel. (On Finley's avoidance of Jewish subject matter in general, see the remarks of Momigliano 1987: 2-3.) More glaring is Finley's avoidance of Carthaginian slavery: having reviewed Westermann's Real Encyclopiidie supplement (see Finley 1936), he surely knew of at least some of the key evidence for this topic, much deriving from classical sources that he was more than capable of reading in the original. On Finley's intellectual background and oeuvre, much has recently appeared in print: see inter alia the books ofNafissi (2005); W. V. Harris (2013); Naiden and Talbert (2014); Jew, Osborne, and Scott (2016), and the essays ofE. M. Harris (2013d); Tompkins (2014a; 2014b); Lenski (2018b).
' 0 The ubiquity of these views in Europe during the eighteenth-twentieth centuries is extensively documented in Said (1978), though not always in a balanced manner. For criticisms of Said's assessment, see Irwin (2006).
Mode of Production' (AMP) stood outside the historical development of Europe. In its most basic terms, the model worked as follows: in an Asiatic state, the surplus production of the proletariat was appropriated by an administration and delivered to the absolute monarch, who owned all the land in his kingdom. As a result, the monarch became fabulously rich, but the working population lingered on at subsistence level. This system rendered any sense of dynamism or creativity stillborn, and explained the apparent sluggishness of Asiatic societies to European eyes. 41
As with many of Marx's ideas, this was simply provisional and tentative. But his writings on the topic exercised an important influence on scholarship on slavery during the twentieth century, nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union. 42 Eastern Bloc scholars working on ancient slavery had to contend with two aspects of Marxist thought that under the political circumstances of the time could be simplified and turned into dogma by hardliners. First, there was the issue of the AMP. Second, there was stage theory, which became enshrined as dogma in Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938). Daniel Tompkins has shown that scholars in the Eastern Bloc were far from a brainwashed mass dedicated to providing empirical proof of party dogma: there was much variation among scholars regarding the degree to which they toed the party line; and the enforcement of dogma fluctuated considerably during the history of the Soviet Union. 43
At any rate, China's adoption of Communism made little sense if one were to apply mechanically the AMP theory (as an Asiatic country, after all, it should have remained historically stagnant, rather than leapfrogging the intermediate stages leading to socialism), and there was naturally some debate over whether, where, and when it might be applied to historical societies. 44 Some Soviet scholars, on the other hand, sought to apply the idea of an antique slave mode of production across the whole of the ancient world without positing an East/West divide, as Stalinist stage theory prescribed. Notable in this respect were the efforts of Vasily Struve. Since it is patently clear that slavery sensu stricto was not the sole productive base for any ancient society, Struve had to modify the definition of slavery to make Marx's concept of an antique 'slave mode of production' fit the evidence. He thus defined slavery not in traditional legal terms but in terms of workers deprived of the means of production, a rather broad and vague definition that has not stood the test of time. 45
41 On the AMP, see Thorner (1966}; Anderson (1974): 462-549.
42 Pecirka (1964). One should note that Marx's influence on ancient history before 1917 was fairly negligible; and the Grundrisse remained unpublished until 1939.
0 Tompkins (2014a}.
44 This is well documented in Garlan (1988): 8-11.
45 See Chapter 1, p. 27 below. Cf. Heinen (2001): 488, quoting (and translating) the Russian historian E. D. Frolov:
So paradox das auch klingen mag, so wurde <loch die Akademie-Reihe 'Forschungen zur Geschichte der Sklaverei in der antiken Welt' [viz. a Russian research programme]
Soviet scholarship had a limited impact on research into ancient slavery in the Anglo-American world, apart from producing disdain in several quarters. Some historians went to special pains to keep abreast of developments in Soviet scholarship,46 but it would be an exaggeration to say that this work set the agenda for research on slavery in the West. However, Marxism exerted an influence well beyond the USSR, and two fine and influential Marxist works by European scholars are particularly worthy of mention: Yvon Garlan's Les Esclaves en Grece ancienne (1982; English translation by J. Lloyd 1988) and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix's The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981). Both scholars considered the place of Greek slavery in a broader geographical context. Garlan, more attached to the theory of the AMP than de Ste. Croix, simply ignores the Near East as a world apart. 47 De Ste. Croix, on the other hand, rejected the AMP wholesale, and indeed argued that Marx himself had abandoned the idea by the end of his life. 48 In de Ste. Croix's view, elites of the ancient Near East relied on forms of serfdom and debt bondage for their surplus production. 49 His treatment of one episode that we shall analyse in greater detail in Chapter 12 is telling: Xenophon (Anab. 7.8.7-22) describes the slave-worked estate of a wealthy Persian in Asia Minor, but de Ste. Croix claimed (based on his prior assumptions on serfdom and debt bondage in the Near East) that this grandee was simply copying the economic practices of his Greek neighbours. 50
Beyond the efforts of individual scholars, three international research groups on ancient slavery require our consideration. The first is the Mainz
gewissennaBen zum Grabstein der marxistischen Konzeption von der antiken Sklavenhaltergesellschaft. Sowohl diese Forschungen selber als auch die sich parallel entwickelnde Polemik mit der westlichen Wissenschaft fiihrten letztendlich die russischen Gelehrten zu der Dberzeugung, dass die marxistische Vorstellung von der grundlegenden Bedeutung der Sklaverei fur das klassische Altertum keine unbedingte Giiltigkeit besaB, jedenfalls nicht fiir alle Epochen und alle Gebiete der antiken Geschichte.
46 Germany proved to be the main conduit through which Soviet scholarship came to be known in Europe and America; in particular, the Mainz Academy commissioned translations of key Russian works into German, e.g. Lencman (1966), Blavatskaja, Golubcova, and Pavlovskaja (1972); and H. Heinen published regular summaries of Soviet research on slavery in Historia: Zeitschrift fur alte Geschichte throughout the 1970s. Cf. Heinen (2010) for a retrospective view, and Heinen (2001) for an overview of (mainly Russian) work on Black Sea slavery. There were also summaries of Soviet work published in French: see Petit (1970); Pavlovskaja (1979). Y. Garlan, fortuitously married to a Russian speaker (see Garlan 1988: x), is exceptionally familiar with Russian work on slavery among European ancient Greek historians, as a glance at the footnotes of Garlan (1988) conveys. Mrs Garlan also provided translations of Russian works to M. I. Finley: see Finley (1999): 9.
47 Garlan (1988): 5-10. Another notable believer in the AMP was Keith Hopkins: see Hopkins (1978): 99 n. 2.
48 De Ste. Croix (1981): 155-7.
49 De Ste. Croix (1981): 170-2. Like Finley and Westermann, de Ste. Croix relied on Mendelsohn (1949) for his view of slavery in the Near East: see de Ste. Croix (1981): 573 n. 76. so De Ste. Croix (1981): 569 n. 42a.
Academy's research programme on ancient slavery, initiated by Joseph Vogt in 1950. Unfairly dismissed (along with its founder) by Finley as narrowly concerned with justifying ancient slavery as a price worth paying for the cultural legacies of Greece and Rome, the Forschungen have greatly contributed to our knowledge of Greek (and to a slightly greater extent, Roman) slavery. 51 But although the programme was entitled Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei, its purview has essentially been limited to Graeco-Roman material. Rather than viewing Greece in comparative perspective with non-classical cultures, members of the project working on the Greek side have tended to focus on discrete topics, such as the slave miners of Laurion, slaves in Greek religion and warfare, the papyrological evidence for slavery in the Ptolemaic period, and so on. 52 One notable exception to this trend, though, is Gundlach's monograph on forced population movements in Middle Kingdom Egypt; 53 one could also point to Heinen's work on slavery in peripheral regions such as the Black Sea and Egypt as going beyond the traditional core Graeco-Roman focus. 54
The second research group of note is the Groupe International de Recherche sur l'Esclavage dans l'Antiquite (GIREA), whose conferences have occurred every year or two since 1970, with conference proceedings appearing in print shortly afterwards. The group began in Besarn;:on, though its meetings have been held in a number of other locations; the proceedings in general amount to an eclectic mixture of articles of varying length. For the most part, they focus on Graeco-Roman matters. To its credit, the group has long been open to examinations of slavery in other cultures, both ancient and modern; 55 in recent years in particular, contributions to the proceedings have covered other
51 Finley (1980): 55-66. C£ Wiedemann (2000) on Finley's 'grotesque misinterpretation of the aims, methods and achievements of the Mainz research group' (p. 157) and the judicious comments ofMcKeown (2007): 30-41, who was a postgraduate student in Cambridge during the 1980s. Finley's relationship with the Mainz Academy and its founder Joseph Vogt form part of a current research project on Vogt undertaken by the Edinburgh-based historian of ancient slavery Ulrike Roth. See also Tompkins (2014a).
52 Greek topics in the Forschungen include slaves in medical literature (Kudlien 1968); slaves in warfare (Welwei 1974; 1977); slave-master relations, as well as economic and political writings on slaves (Klees 1975); Greek terminology for slavery (Gschnitzer 1963; 1976); slave miners at Laurion (Lauffer 1979); slavery and religion (Bomer 1990); Homeric and Mycenaean slavery (Lencman 1966; Wickert-Micknat 1983); mass enslavements in warfare {Volkmann 1990); slave life (Klees 1998); Ptolemaic texts concerning slaves (Scholl 1990). For an overview of the Mainz group, see Wiedemann (2000).
53 Gundlach (1994).
54 Heinen (1978); {2001). I should also draw attention to I. Weiler's (2004) study. A Mitarbeiter of the programme, Weiler draws several parallels between Homeric Greece and the Near East in terms of manumission, flight, ransom, and the idea of the slave as a 'half-man'.
55 Ancient examples include contributions on the Black Sea region (Nadel 1976); Babylonia (Dandamaev 1979); lllyria (Arciniega 1989); Thrace (Taceva 1996); Spain (Wagner 2000). Modern examples include, inter alia, volumes incorporating essays on the Far East (Yuge and Doi 1988) and the New World (Gonzales 2008).
ancient societies, especially Egypt. 56 This diversity is most welcome, but unlike the Mainz group, which has taken a more coordinated approach and led to the publication of numerous monographs, the GIREA has lacked a concerted agenda and programme. As a result, its contributions have remained rather atomized and lacking in overall coherence.
The third research group is the much more recently founded Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS), established by Thomas Wiedemann in 1998 and based at the University of Nottingham. To date, this programme has produced four edited volumes, which have brought together scholars working on a range of historical societies to study specific issues in relation to slave history. 57 Like the Mainz Forschungen, the ISOS publications are well organized and based around carefully chosen themes. The Institute's emphasis on comparative history and its work on engendering dialogue between scholars of GraecoRoman antiquity and scholars of post-antique historical cultures represents an important step towards a better integration of ancient slavery into broader global studies of slavery; but its programme has not yet explored the comparative study of slave systems within the ancient world beyond Greece and Rome.
In sum, then, slavery in the non-classical civilizations of the ancient world has not been wholly ignored by classical scholars; but it has never been systematically examined alongside Greek and Roman forms of slavery. Nothing better characterizes the limited horizons of modem research than the syntheses and introductions to the topic published since the millennium. A recent French introduction of note, J. Andreau and R Descat's Esclave en Grece et a Rome (2006), has little to say on how Greek and Roman slavery compares to forms of slavery among their neighbours. Furthermore, the Greek portions of this book entirely sidestep regions such as Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly by characterizing their systems of dependent labour in terms of serfdom. 58 L. Schumacher's Sklaverei in der Antike (2001) treats 'Antike' as commensurate with Greece and Rome, and suffers from the same drawbacks as Andreau and Descat's synthesis in relation to helotage and comparable systems of dependent labour. And we have already noted K. Bradley and P. Cartledge's hefty Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume I (2011), purporting to cover the ancient Mediterranean world, but overwhelmingly focused on Graeco-Roman subject matter. 59 Does this state of affairs owe in part to stagnation in research on slavery among scholars of the ancient Near East? In fact, a great deal has occurred in this field since the mid-twentieth century. The main textbook on the topic used by most of the scholars we have noted above is Isaac Mendelsohn's
56 See Campagno, Gallego, and Mac Gaw (2013).
57 Wiedemann and Gardner (2002); Kleiwegt (2006); Geary and Vlassopoulos (2009); Hodkinson and Geary (2012).
58 Andreau and Descat (2006): 11-12.
59 One recent step towards a more inclusive approach is Zurbach (2015), a collection of essays on agrarian labour covering a wide range of archaic Mediterranean societies.
Slavery in the Ancient Near East (1949), excellent on legal matters, but tending to downplay the economic importance of slavery mainly on the grounds of minimal contribution to overall production. (As we shall see in Chapter 4, classical historians had abandoned this index of the importance of slavery by the 1960s, but it is still employed by some scholars of the ancient Near East.) Of chief importance is the work of the late M. A. Dandamaev, who drew attention to some of the key evidence for slavery in the Persian Empire in articles published during the 1960s and 1970s60 and whose remarkable book Slavery in Babylonia, from Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great, 626-331 BC was translated into English and published in 1984. One reviewer, R. J. van der Spek, suggested that Finley's views on slavery would need to be seriously reworked in light of Dandamaev's book, but his challenge to produce a revisionist study has not been taken up in the quarter-century that has since elapsed. 61
Other studies of note include Roland de Vaux' s work on slavery in Iron Age Israel (now supplemented by Hezser's useful monograph, particularly good on the later periods, as well as a useful recent essay by A. Lemaire62), the work of E. Matilla Vicente and J. G. Fevrier on slavery at Carthage,63 the recent work of K. Radner, G. Galil, and H. Baker on Assyria64 and C. Wunsch and R. Magdalene on Babylonia during the first millennium nc,65 not to mention the work of scholars like P. Briant and G. G. Aperghis on Persia. 66 (And that is to note merely a few prominent names working on slavery and forced labour; one could add many others whose efforts have revolutionized our broader understanding of these regional economies.) Whilst in most cases these studies do not suggest that we need to alter our picture in terms of the contribution of slavery to overall production in any given Eastern society, they all provide much important discussion on elite exploitation of slave labour that has major implications for our broader view of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.
Let us sum up. Several trends have combined to produce the current view of Graeco-Roman exceptionalism: (i) a traditional tendency in the Classics to treat Greece and Rome as fundamentally different from their neighbours, only recently subject to extensive re-examination, and which has not yet affected the field of slavery studies; (ii) limited engagement with recent work on the economic history of the ancient Near East; (iii) the effects of Vulgar Marxism and Orientalism, which have tended to 'other' the economic structures of the Near East to an exaggerated degree; and (iv) the profound influence exerted
60 See Dandamaev (1963; 1975). 61 Van der Spek (1990): 248.
62 De Vaux (1961): 80-90; Hezser (2005); Lemaire (2015).
63 Matilla Vicente (1977); Fevrier (1951-2; 1961).
64 Radner (1997): 219-48; Galli (2007); Baker (2016a).
65 Wunsch and Magdalene (2012; 2014).
66 e.g. Briant (2002): 422-48; Aperghis (2000).
