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Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
Investigates how slavery functioned in the Greek and Roman civilizations and analyzes the reactions of modern historians to the concept
202 pages, Hardcover
First published February 24, 1983
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449 people want to read
About the author
Moses I. Finley
93 books66 followersSir Moses I. Finley was an American and English classical scholar. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy (1973), where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.
He was born in 1912 in New York City as Moses Israel Finkelstein to Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzenellenbogen; died in 1986 as a British subject. He was educated at Syracuse University and Columbia University. Although his M.A. was in public law, most of his published work was in the field of ancient history, especially the social and economic aspects of the classical world.
He taught at Columbia University and City College of New York, where he was influenced by members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, during the Red Scare, Finley was fired from his teaching job at Rutgers University; in 1954, he was summoned by the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party USA. He invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer.
Unable subsequently to find work in the United States, Finley moved to England, where he taught classical studies for many years at Cambridge University, first as a Reader in Ancient Social and Economic History at Jesus College (1964–1970), then as Professor of Ancient History (1970–1979) and eventually as Master of Darwin College (1976–1982). He broadened the scope of classical studies from philology to culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1971, and was knighted in 1979.
Among his works, The World of Odysseus (1954) proved seminal. In it, he applied the findings of ethnologists and anthropologists like Marcel Mauss to illuminate Homer, a radical approach that was thought by his publishers to require a reassuring introduction by an established classicist, Maurice Bowra. Paul Cartledge asserted in 1995, "... in retrospect Finley's little masterpiece can be seen as the seed of the present flowering of anthropologically-related studies of ancient Greek culture and society".[1] Finley's most influential work remains The Ancient Economy (1973), based on his Sather Lectures at Berkeley the year before. In The Ancient Economy, Finley launched an all-out attack on the modernist tradition within the discipline of ancient economic history. Following the example of Karl Polanyi, Finley argued that the ancient economy should not be analysed using the concepts of modern economic science, because ancient man had no notion of the economy as a separate sphere of society, and because economic actions in antiquity were determined not primarily by economic, but by social concerns.
He was born in 1912 in New York City as Moses Israel Finkelstein to Nathan Finkelstein and Anna Katzenellenbogen; died in 1986 as a British subject. He was educated at Syracuse University and Columbia University. Although his M.A. was in public law, most of his published work was in the field of ancient history, especially the social and economic aspects of the classical world.
He taught at Columbia University and City College of New York, where he was influenced by members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America. In 1952, during the Red Scare, Finley was fired from his teaching job at Rutgers University; in 1954, he was summoned by the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and asked whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party USA. He invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer.
Unable subsequently to find work in the United States, Finley moved to England, where he taught classical studies for many years at Cambridge University, first as a Reader in Ancient Social and Economic History at Jesus College (1964–1970), then as Professor of Ancient History (1970–1979) and eventually as Master of Darwin College (1976–1982). He broadened the scope of classical studies from philology to culture, economics, and society. He became a British subject in 1962 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1971, and was knighted in 1979.
Among his works, The World of Odysseus (1954) proved seminal. In it, he applied the findings of ethnologists and anthropologists like Marcel Mauss to illuminate Homer, a radical approach that was thought by his publishers to require a reassuring introduction by an established classicist, Maurice Bowra. Paul Cartledge asserted in 1995, "... in retrospect Finley's little masterpiece can be seen as the seed of the present flowering of anthropologically-related studies of ancient Greek culture and society".[1] Finley's most influential work remains The Ancient Economy (1973), based on his Sather Lectures at Berkeley the year before. In The Ancient Economy, Finley launched an all-out attack on the modernist tradition within the discipline of ancient economic history. Following the example of Karl Polanyi, Finley argued that the ancient economy should not be analysed using the concepts of modern economic science, because ancient man had no notion of the economy as a separate sphere of society, and because economic actions in antiquity were determined not primarily by economic, but by social concerns.
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July 17, 2009
Ancient Slavery might well be the most enduring of Finley’s books. In a generation that has struggled to get beyond the “New Orthodoxy” that Finley established fifty years ago, this study remains a landmark text. Rarely does a work so clearly display the inadequacy of every analytic model that preceded it.
The title essay surveys of the history of slavery scholarship in classical studies, from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Previous schools of interpretation, Finley claims, have either misinterpreted the evidence and drawn false conclusions about the nature of slavery [as did the 19th century abolitionists and 20th century Marxists:] or else ignored the subject almost entirely [as did the 19th century philologists and the 20th century humanist-revivalists:]. The latter omission is especially troubling, considering that slaves by modern estimates accounted for twenty to thirty percent of the population of the classical world.
Finley suggests three necessary conditions for the emergence of a true slave society. First, the society must be agrarian and have private ownership of land; second, the economy must have a sufficiently developed commodity market. The third condition is a negative one: there must be an inadequate supply of internal labor, resulting in the need to regularly import slaves in large numbers from outside the community. And it is this third condition which Finley emphasizes as being unique to Athens and later, by imitation, to classical culture generally.
Finley rejects the idea of a purely economic source for this terrible innovation, turning instead to sociology. The culture of the polis, he claims, had as one of its core principles that no citizen should be the servant of another, a corollary of the notion of the equality of citizens. As more peasants gained Athenian citizenship, this principle had the effect of shrinking the Athenian labor pool. In such a context, Finley says, a slave economy developed in Athens, for the first time in recorded history, because “[t:]here was no realistic alternative.”
Central to Finley’s analysis, though he does not directly address the subject here, is his long-standing criticism of paleoeconomic modernism, a method which was pioneered by Edward Gibbon and which claims that ancient markets can be effectively studied using the empirical techniques of Adam Smith’s classical economics. Finley opposes to this doctrine the idea that the Market itself is not a universal feature of social behavior, but rather is sociologically determined to such an extent that, in some cultures [classical Greece and Rome among them:] the Market cannot be shown to exist at all as an economic pattern. While physical market places did, of course, exist in Athens and Rome, rates of exchange in those market places cannot, in Finley’s view, be shown to have determined the value of the goods exchanged there. Rather, the value of an object in the ancient economy was, according to Finley, determined by the amount of social prestige to be gained by being publicly seen in possession of that object. If this is the case, then the comparisons made by modernists of the already very sparse accounting information that survives from classical antiquity are obviously rendered almost completely useless, as is any attempt at a purely economic explanation of the Athenians’ development of the slave economy.
This theory, known as “primitivism” or “substantivism,” remains one of the most radical notions in all of classical historiography. Indeed, when one considers the use that Gibbon made of market-analysis in liberating Roman studies from the purview of moral science and church propaganda, Finley’s criticism might even seem to undermine classical scholarship at its very foundation. However, the effectiveness of his description of slavery as a institution – a description which eluded Gibbon, Mommsen, Rostovtzeff and even Marx – strongly argues in Finley’s defense, even for those who [like the present writer:] remain uncertain about some of his theoretical premises.
The title essay surveys of the history of slavery scholarship in classical studies, from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Previous schools of interpretation, Finley claims, have either misinterpreted the evidence and drawn false conclusions about the nature of slavery [as did the 19th century abolitionists and 20th century Marxists:] or else ignored the subject almost entirely [as did the 19th century philologists and the 20th century humanist-revivalists:]. The latter omission is especially troubling, considering that slaves by modern estimates accounted for twenty to thirty percent of the population of the classical world.
Finley suggests three necessary conditions for the emergence of a true slave society. First, the society must be agrarian and have private ownership of land; second, the economy must have a sufficiently developed commodity market. The third condition is a negative one: there must be an inadequate supply of internal labor, resulting in the need to regularly import slaves in large numbers from outside the community. And it is this third condition which Finley emphasizes as being unique to Athens and later, by imitation, to classical culture generally.
Finley rejects the idea of a purely economic source for this terrible innovation, turning instead to sociology. The culture of the polis, he claims, had as one of its core principles that no citizen should be the servant of another, a corollary of the notion of the equality of citizens. As more peasants gained Athenian citizenship, this principle had the effect of shrinking the Athenian labor pool. In such a context, Finley says, a slave economy developed in Athens, for the first time in recorded history, because “[t:]here was no realistic alternative.”
Central to Finley’s analysis, though he does not directly address the subject here, is his long-standing criticism of paleoeconomic modernism, a method which was pioneered by Edward Gibbon and which claims that ancient markets can be effectively studied using the empirical techniques of Adam Smith’s classical economics. Finley opposes to this doctrine the idea that the Market itself is not a universal feature of social behavior, but rather is sociologically determined to such an extent that, in some cultures [classical Greece and Rome among them:] the Market cannot be shown to exist at all as an economic pattern. While physical market places did, of course, exist in Athens and Rome, rates of exchange in those market places cannot, in Finley’s view, be shown to have determined the value of the goods exchanged there. Rather, the value of an object in the ancient economy was, according to Finley, determined by the amount of social prestige to be gained by being publicly seen in possession of that object. If this is the case, then the comparisons made by modernists of the already very sparse accounting information that survives from classical antiquity are obviously rendered almost completely useless, as is any attempt at a purely economic explanation of the Athenians’ development of the slave economy.
This theory, known as “primitivism” or “substantivism,” remains one of the most radical notions in all of classical historiography. Indeed, when one considers the use that Gibbon made of market-analysis in liberating Roman studies from the purview of moral science and church propaganda, Finley’s criticism might even seem to undermine classical scholarship at its very foundation. However, the effectiveness of his description of slavery as a institution – a description which eluded Gibbon, Mommsen, Rostovtzeff and even Marx – strongly argues in Finley’s defense, even for those who [like the present writer:] remain uncertain about some of his theoretical premises.
December 9, 2018
This book is a classic introduction to the topic of slavery in the ancient world. Finley was a minimalist historian who eschewed the antiquarian historian (those historians content with merely assembling historical "material" without drawing conclusions). I use "minimalist" in the best possible light: one who assembles the data and draws valid conclusions, but thankfully refuses to make learned - and usually invalid, not to say insipid - guesses based on the data. The book is strongly academic rather than a popular take on the subject.
March 5, 2024
I would not read this work as an introduction to slavery but an introduction to THE STUDY of slavery. While this work is now quite dated, here Finley laid out better than anyone the way ideologies influence historians of ancient slavery. The influence of not only his research but also his approach to slavery reverberates through all the major works on classical slavery, including those by Hopkins, Patterson, and Bradley. For those interested in ancient moralist (i.e., Stoic) and Christian treatments of slavery (and the ways modern readers use them), this work has been particularly influential, and for good reason.
July 12, 2011
08/05/2006
And the difference between Ancient and Modern Slavery is...
This is an important topic given the embarrassing fact of the modern return of Slavery in the midst of the European Enlightenment. Indeed, even the United States, the first nation produced by the Enlightenment, was a home to modern slavery. What was this 'enlightened' slavery, and how did it differ from the ancient variety? Hmmm... So, how do we go about distinguishing between ancient and modern slavery? Ancient slaveholders originally were masters and knew they were masters because they excelled at violence. They had won a war; the slaves had lost. When questioned more deeply about their amazing string of victories, the Romans would generally point to their pietas, which is a religious notion. Now, is this the difference between ancient and modern slave societies? That in modern times we try to give a 'scientific explanation' of events?
President Jefferson, a man renowned for his love of freedom, in the midst of a terrifyingly 'scientistic' discussion of "the real distinction that nature has made" informs us that blacks are "in reason much inferior" to whites, and "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous." Mercifully, the man we remember every Fourth of July had the grace to concede the possibility, even the necessity, that "further observation will or will not verify the conjecture, that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head", because "where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them" we must indeed be cautious!
The Romans, of course, never dreamed of denying the humanity of their slaves. Obviously, this is cold comfort to those unfortunate enough to lose a war to Rome! Modern slaveholders, in contrast, would try to ground their slaveholding in science, not violence; in fact, not force. And it is this penchant for science that is both the difference between ancient and modern slavery, and, ironically, the beginning of modern racism. Now, this difference has consequences and causes.
To find one of the causes let's look at the practice of manumission, the freeing of slaves. Finley tells us that a freed Roman slave became "transformed from an object to a subject of rights, the most complete metamorphous one can imagine." How? How was it possible for people whose families had been slaves for generations to become free? Or rather, why, in 'enlightened' Virginia, did it not happen? Again Finley, "Freedmen in the New World carried an external sign of their slave origin in their skin color, even after many generations, with negative economic, social, political and psychological consequences of the gravest magnitude. Ancient freedman simply melted into the total population within one or at the most two generations."
Were ancient plebeians aware of this? - That former slaves worked, lived and (Gasp!) intermarried among them? Finley reminds us of stories in Tacitus and Pliny of plebeians rioting when local slaves were killed en masse, as Roman law required, for the assassination of a master. Not only does it appear the plebeians knew, but they also approved and identified with the slaves! The contrast with modern American slavery - the poor whites quasi-mystical belief in their 'superiority' to black slaves, and the certainty that this aligned them with the masters - is too obvious, and too depressing, to mention.
So, ancient slaves, upon manumission, were able to melt into the lowest Roman classes, while freed Blacks could never simply become part of society, however poor. What of it? Is this enough to explain the differences of modern and ancient slavery? No, of course not. To explain why ancient slavery never developed a crackpot ideology like racism to both justify and defend itself, and, on top of that, to create a horrid cultural pseudo-immortality for itself, we have to look elsewhere.
But first, what did our ancient slaves do, by and large, with their new found freedom? Finley shows us that, in the long run, being freed in the early empire was no great favor. He tells a depressing story of ever increasing taxes and barbarian invasions combining to force citizens to seek some sort of relief in service to either the empire or a great lord. "From the time of Augustus on, everything changed, [...] the state no longer permitted the peasant to vote or needed his fighting power, [however] it continued to need his money, in increasing quantities [...] by Justinian's reign the state took between one fourth and one third of the gross yield of the land". And elsewhere he mentions "the extent of the financial and material damage inflicted by [...] continuous civil war in the third century and by the persistent assaults thereafter of Germans, of Persians in the east..."
These combined to force the peasants and the urban poor into some form of debt service. In late antiquity one's poor cousins were always in danger of losing their freedom, whether selling it for protection to some lord or losing it in court for unpaid taxes. That is why the ancients, in the long run, could never base slavery or servitude on some pseudo-biological theory, the next slave could be a relative or, and this is really the heart of the matter, themselves. Slavery in antiquity could happen to almost anyone, while that was really never the case in eighteenth or nineteenth century America. That was the fundamental difference between ancient and modern slavery.
The consequences of this difference are revealed with terrifying clarity in the twentieth century. Modern 'scientific' racism, whether encountered in President Jefferson or Comte de Gobineau, comes to its ultimate fruition in Hitler, who is the cause of so many of our century's horrors. Among the consequences of the Enlightenment, many of which are indisputably good, is the notion that everything can, should and will eventually be explained by science. History is reeling under the weight of bigots and quacks who were able to 'justify' their manias 'scientifically'. When you have proven that your enemy is not fully human, by supposedly scientific means, all you have shown is that you no longer believe you have to behave humanely toward him. Some of the consequences of this pseudo-scientific ranting include the Holocaust and Bosnian ethnic cleansing.
Tocqueville, who was a friend of Gobineau, somewhere remarked to him, "I believe your theories are wrong, I know they are dangerous." Precisely. What gave poor Roman citizens the ability to accept freed slaves as their own, or allowed the Roman aristocracy the latitude to have their children educated by slaves is simply this: they never denied the humanity of their slaves. They had yet to come under the sway of modern 'enlightened' ideology. This is why, pace Messieurs Gobineau and Jefferson, ancient slaves (whether from Europe, Asia, or Africa) could teach the children of their masters or excel in the various sciences and arts. - No one had thought of a 'reason' to deny that they could.
And the difference between Ancient and Modern Slavery is...
This is an important topic given the embarrassing fact of the modern return of Slavery in the midst of the European Enlightenment. Indeed, even the United States, the first nation produced by the Enlightenment, was a home to modern slavery. What was this 'enlightened' slavery, and how did it differ from the ancient variety? Hmmm... So, how do we go about distinguishing between ancient and modern slavery? Ancient slaveholders originally were masters and knew they were masters because they excelled at violence. They had won a war; the slaves had lost. When questioned more deeply about their amazing string of victories, the Romans would generally point to their pietas, which is a religious notion. Now, is this the difference between ancient and modern slave societies? That in modern times we try to give a 'scientific explanation' of events?
President Jefferson, a man renowned for his love of freedom, in the midst of a terrifyingly 'scientistic' discussion of "the real distinction that nature has made" informs us that blacks are "in reason much inferior" to whites, and "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous." Mercifully, the man we remember every Fourth of July had the grace to concede the possibility, even the necessity, that "further observation will or will not verify the conjecture, that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head", because "where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them" we must indeed be cautious!
The Romans, of course, never dreamed of denying the humanity of their slaves. Obviously, this is cold comfort to those unfortunate enough to lose a war to Rome! Modern slaveholders, in contrast, would try to ground their slaveholding in science, not violence; in fact, not force. And it is this penchant for science that is both the difference between ancient and modern slavery, and, ironically, the beginning of modern racism. Now, this difference has consequences and causes.
To find one of the causes let's look at the practice of manumission, the freeing of slaves. Finley tells us that a freed Roman slave became "transformed from an object to a subject of rights, the most complete metamorphous one can imagine." How? How was it possible for people whose families had been slaves for generations to become free? Or rather, why, in 'enlightened' Virginia, did it not happen? Again Finley, "Freedmen in the New World carried an external sign of their slave origin in their skin color, even after many generations, with negative economic, social, political and psychological consequences of the gravest magnitude. Ancient freedman simply melted into the total population within one or at the most two generations."
Were ancient plebeians aware of this? - That former slaves worked, lived and (Gasp!) intermarried among them? Finley reminds us of stories in Tacitus and Pliny of plebeians rioting when local slaves were killed en masse, as Roman law required, for the assassination of a master. Not only does it appear the plebeians knew, but they also approved and identified with the slaves! The contrast with modern American slavery - the poor whites quasi-mystical belief in their 'superiority' to black slaves, and the certainty that this aligned them with the masters - is too obvious, and too depressing, to mention.
So, ancient slaves, upon manumission, were able to melt into the lowest Roman classes, while freed Blacks could never simply become part of society, however poor. What of it? Is this enough to explain the differences of modern and ancient slavery? No, of course not. To explain why ancient slavery never developed a crackpot ideology like racism to both justify and defend itself, and, on top of that, to create a horrid cultural pseudo-immortality for itself, we have to look elsewhere.
But first, what did our ancient slaves do, by and large, with their new found freedom? Finley shows us that, in the long run, being freed in the early empire was no great favor. He tells a depressing story of ever increasing taxes and barbarian invasions combining to force citizens to seek some sort of relief in service to either the empire or a great lord. "From the time of Augustus on, everything changed, [...] the state no longer permitted the peasant to vote or needed his fighting power, [however] it continued to need his money, in increasing quantities [...] by Justinian's reign the state took between one fourth and one third of the gross yield of the land". And elsewhere he mentions "the extent of the financial and material damage inflicted by [...] continuous civil war in the third century and by the persistent assaults thereafter of Germans, of Persians in the east..."
These combined to force the peasants and the urban poor into some form of debt service. In late antiquity one's poor cousins were always in danger of losing their freedom, whether selling it for protection to some lord or losing it in court for unpaid taxes. That is why the ancients, in the long run, could never base slavery or servitude on some pseudo-biological theory, the next slave could be a relative or, and this is really the heart of the matter, themselves. Slavery in antiquity could happen to almost anyone, while that was really never the case in eighteenth or nineteenth century America. That was the fundamental difference between ancient and modern slavery.
The consequences of this difference are revealed with terrifying clarity in the twentieth century. Modern 'scientific' racism, whether encountered in President Jefferson or Comte de Gobineau, comes to its ultimate fruition in Hitler, who is the cause of so many of our century's horrors. Among the consequences of the Enlightenment, many of which are indisputably good, is the notion that everything can, should and will eventually be explained by science. History is reeling under the weight of bigots and quacks who were able to 'justify' their manias 'scientifically'. When you have proven that your enemy is not fully human, by supposedly scientific means, all you have shown is that you no longer believe you have to behave humanely toward him. Some of the consequences of this pseudo-scientific ranting include the Holocaust and Bosnian ethnic cleansing.
Tocqueville, who was a friend of Gobineau, somewhere remarked to him, "I believe your theories are wrong, I know they are dangerous." Precisely. What gave poor Roman citizens the ability to accept freed slaves as their own, or allowed the Roman aristocracy the latitude to have their children educated by slaves is simply this: they never denied the humanity of their slaves. They had yet to come under the sway of modern 'enlightened' ideology. This is why, pace Messieurs Gobineau and Jefferson, ancient slaves (whether from Europe, Asia, or Africa) could teach the children of their masters or excel in the various sciences and arts. - No one had thought of a 'reason' to deny that they could.
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December 28, 2010Off this review: http://thebrowser.com/interviews/mary...
I think I’ve chosen these books because all of them made a big difference to me. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them. With Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology by Moses Finley it’s all about politics.
One of the things that people often imagine about studying something as remote as the ancient world is that it’s not engaged with the big issues that we face. Finley was a Marxist refugee from McCarthy who left the US before he was pushed and came to the UK. I was actually one of his students. But, before that, when I read his books it was the first time I realized that there could be, and ought to be, an explicit connection between a modern political stance and the ancient history that I was studying.
Slavery is a classic case for thinking about those connections. Greece and Rome were one of the few mass slave-owning societies that there have ever been. What Finley was interested in doing was looking hard at ancient slavery and thinking about how it was the same or different from modern slavery. One key difference that comes out is that modern slavery is tinged by racism, whereas ancient slavery wasn’t. He was the first person I had read who looked ancient slavery in the eye and said it was something really terrible. All the stuff that I had read before had been slightly embarrassed about ancient slavery and saw it as a blot on the landscape. They said: “The Greeks were so wonderful and slavery was a bit of a problem but you shouldn’t think about it. It was more like domestic service really!” And Finley says you can’t let the ancient world off the hook. You have to have a moral stance on this one.
As you would with modern-day slavery.
Yes, and we need to think about the way people’s freedom can be taken away from them across the periods.
I think I’ve chosen these books because all of them made a big difference to me. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them. With Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology by Moses Finley it’s all about politics.
One of the things that people often imagine about studying something as remote as the ancient world is that it’s not engaged with the big issues that we face. Finley was a Marxist refugee from McCarthy who left the US before he was pushed and came to the UK. I was actually one of his students. But, before that, when I read his books it was the first time I realized that there could be, and ought to be, an explicit connection between a modern political stance and the ancient history that I was studying.
Slavery is a classic case for thinking about those connections. Greece and Rome were one of the few mass slave-owning societies that there have ever been. What Finley was interested in doing was looking hard at ancient slavery and thinking about how it was the same or different from modern slavery. One key difference that comes out is that modern slavery is tinged by racism, whereas ancient slavery wasn’t. He was the first person I had read who looked ancient slavery in the eye and said it was something really terrible. All the stuff that I had read before had been slightly embarrassed about ancient slavery and saw it as a blot on the landscape. They said: “The Greeks were so wonderful and slavery was a bit of a problem but you shouldn’t think about it. It was more like domestic service really!” And Finley says you can’t let the ancient world off the hook. You have to have a moral stance on this one.
As you would with modern-day slavery.
Yes, and we need to think about the way people’s freedom can be taken away from them across the periods.
April 28, 2020
While this book does contain a lot of information about both ancient slavery and modern ideology, it regrettably contains more information than one would want about the latter and not as much as one would want about the former. As a student of the history of slavery, there is a lot to appreciate here. But in order to appreciate what it has to say about slavery in the ancient world and its parallels and relevance to the modern world, one has to address the problem of modern ideology and the heavy influence of socialism in the author's thinking and in the writing that exists in academic history about slavery. And so this book is a mixed bag, some of it deeply interesting but some of it also deadly dull and quite pointless if one is interested in understanding ancient history rather than the ways that people have sought to use ancient history to support their own dubious leftist agendas. Unlike some books, though, this one has a core of interesting information as well as as perspective that is worth considering, so if you want to find out more about ancient slavery and how it is viewed in contemporary historiography, there is something of worth here.
This work is about 150 pages long and it is divided into four chapters. The book begins with a preface and then discusses in considerable detail the questions of modern ideology, especially relating to questions of socialism. There is a certain way in which forms of slavery have been conflated and which non-slavery has been viewed anachronistically as serfdom (1). After that the author discusses somewhat briefly the way that slave societies develop, pointing out that they require certain conditions to develop in the first place (2). After that the author discusses slavery and humanity, something that is clearly problematic given the status of slaves as property has long caused problems for slaves themselves and their lack of dignity in the eyes of the law of slave societies (3). After that the author discusses the decline of ancient slavery (4) and the way it was that slave societies themselves fell into decline. How is it that the conditions which allowed for slavery to exist in Greece and Rome failed to hold on into the middle ages? After that, of course, the book ends with notes, a bibliography, and an index to provide further information to the reader.
For me, as a reader, what I was most interested in was the way that the author dealt with a few of the interesting mysteries of slavery in the ancient world. To what extent did the law of slaves get passed into later societies, including the Byzantine laws and the laws of the Western European realms during the Middle Ages down to the slave codes of the United States and Caribbean? This is a worthwhile question to ponder and the book deals with it. To what extent is the absence of kin for slaves related to the dehumanizing process that has led slaves to be exploited sexually as well as to lose a sense of identity even after leaving slavery? To what extent was ancient slavery less harmful than modern slavery when it came to the freedom and ability that freed slaves had to blend into ancient societies as respected people? These are worthwhile questions too and I found the subject dealt with rather intelligently here. I would like to see more of these matters dealt with as they are here, and that is something that I hope to find in the course of future reading.
This work is about 150 pages long and it is divided into four chapters. The book begins with a preface and then discusses in considerable detail the questions of modern ideology, especially relating to questions of socialism. There is a certain way in which forms of slavery have been conflated and which non-slavery has been viewed anachronistically as serfdom (1). After that the author discusses somewhat briefly the way that slave societies develop, pointing out that they require certain conditions to develop in the first place (2). After that the author discusses slavery and humanity, something that is clearly problematic given the status of slaves as property has long caused problems for slaves themselves and their lack of dignity in the eyes of the law of slave societies (3). After that the author discusses the decline of ancient slavery (4) and the way it was that slave societies themselves fell into decline. How is it that the conditions which allowed for slavery to exist in Greece and Rome failed to hold on into the middle ages? After that, of course, the book ends with notes, a bibliography, and an index to provide further information to the reader.
For me, as a reader, what I was most interested in was the way that the author dealt with a few of the interesting mysteries of slavery in the ancient world. To what extent did the law of slaves get passed into later societies, including the Byzantine laws and the laws of the Western European realms during the Middle Ages down to the slave codes of the United States and Caribbean? This is a worthwhile question to ponder and the book deals with it. To what extent is the absence of kin for slaves related to the dehumanizing process that has led slaves to be exploited sexually as well as to lose a sense of identity even after leaving slavery? To what extent was ancient slavery less harmful than modern slavery when it came to the freedom and ability that freed slaves had to blend into ancient societies as respected people? These are worthwhile questions too and I found the subject dealt with rather intelligently here. I would like to see more of these matters dealt with as they are here, and that is something that I hope to find in the course of future reading.
July 1, 2025
"...I am unable to fit late antiquity into any neat series of stages. Although rudiments of manorial (or seigneurial) system have been detected on the imperial estates of North Africa and in one or two other places, that system and its feudal superstructure were not to emerge before the time of Charlemagne, as Marc Bloch correctly insisted. Slave society did not immediately give way to feudal society." (Finley, pg. 149)
Starting with an introductory chapter entitled "Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology," M.I. Finley's "Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology" is a fine start for anyone consumed with the academic debates concerning the nature of slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds. Indeed, however, the start of the book is rather slow going, with an introduction to the treatment of the subject of this type of slavery in the academic literature of the past three hundred years. (This material seems to be only of interest to 'experts' in the field, or rigorous adherents of academic trends or developments.) But the book soon 'takes off,' so to speak, with consecutive chapters with titles like "The Emergence of a Slave Society," "Slavery and Humanity," and "The Decline of Ancient Slavery." The reading of these brief but fact-infused chapters has the effect of delineating the issues involved in the understanding of the institution of slavery in the far-off world of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and, in turn, offering up an supportable, defendable thesis as to the nature of slavery at the time and how it declined. The main obstacle to a more clearer understanding of the issues, according to Mr. Finley? The paucity of documentary material available concerning the economy of the ancient world and the attitudes towards slavery found among the denizens of that departed ancient world. To one who is unfamiliar with the intellectual 'terrain' of this whole field, like myself, Mr. Finley seems to have complete mastery of the past work done in the field, and criticisms and critiques of his own to buttress his own theories concerning this intriguing question. (The obvious connection of the nature of the 'slave societies' of the ancient world and their analogous connection to the early modern world of race-based slavery in the New World of Brazil, the West Indies, and the United States stands like a haunting sentinel over all this discussion, raising the stakes concerning the conclusions of this essential debate.) Too short to offer a comprehensive portrait of the issue, this book is still to be recommended as a brief foray into an intriguing area of history, a history that has deep implications for our view of Western culture as a whole.
Starting with an introductory chapter entitled "Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology," M.I. Finley's "Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology" is a fine start for anyone consumed with the academic debates concerning the nature of slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds. Indeed, however, the start of the book is rather slow going, with an introduction to the treatment of the subject of this type of slavery in the academic literature of the past three hundred years. (This material seems to be only of interest to 'experts' in the field, or rigorous adherents of academic trends or developments.) But the book soon 'takes off,' so to speak, with consecutive chapters with titles like "The Emergence of a Slave Society," "Slavery and Humanity," and "The Decline of Ancient Slavery." The reading of these brief but fact-infused chapters has the effect of delineating the issues involved in the understanding of the institution of slavery in the far-off world of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and, in turn, offering up an supportable, defendable thesis as to the nature of slavery at the time and how it declined. The main obstacle to a more clearer understanding of the issues, according to Mr. Finley? The paucity of documentary material available concerning the economy of the ancient world and the attitudes towards slavery found among the denizens of that departed ancient world. To one who is unfamiliar with the intellectual 'terrain' of this whole field, like myself, Mr. Finley seems to have complete mastery of the past work done in the field, and criticisms and critiques of his own to buttress his own theories concerning this intriguing question. (The obvious connection of the nature of the 'slave societies' of the ancient world and their analogous connection to the early modern world of race-based slavery in the New World of Brazil, the West Indies, and the United States stands like a haunting sentinel over all this discussion, raising the stakes concerning the conclusions of this essential debate.) Too short to offer a comprehensive portrait of the issue, this book is still to be recommended as a brief foray into an intriguing area of history, a history that has deep implications for our view of Western culture as a whole.
April 26, 2023
This work offers an analysis of the historical concept of slavery. Where this book completely fails is in completely ignoring slavery outside of the Western world.
Slavery was a HUGE factor in most Islamic regimes, particularly the Ottoman Empire. In Islam, slavery usually had nothing to do with agriculture (that's where this book is again totally wrong); there were "slave soldiers."
Slavery was widespread in the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties in China (that's about a 1000-year period. The Ming dynasty ostensibly banned slavery, but it continued nevertheless.
Slavery was also widely practiced in Africa itself (e.g., the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Mali empire) and by the Zulus. And then there's the Pacific Islanders: the Maoris had plenty of slaves.
How could anyone write a book on ancient slavery and ignore all of this?
Slavery was a HUGE factor in most Islamic regimes, particularly the Ottoman Empire. In Islam, slavery usually had nothing to do with agriculture (that's where this book is again totally wrong); there were "slave soldiers."
Slavery was widespread in the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties in China (that's about a 1000-year period. The Ming dynasty ostensibly banned slavery, but it continued nevertheless.
Slavery was also widely practiced in Africa itself (e.g., the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Mali empire) and by the Zulus. And then there's the Pacific Islanders: the Maoris had plenty of slaves.
How could anyone write a book on ancient slavery and ignore all of this?
February 19, 2017
Let's begin at the beginning: this book starts off with an out-of-date survey of the state of research into ancient slavery. (That's not an insult; the book was written in 1979, and a lot of work has been done since then.) It discusses a lot of other authors' work, without really summarizing most of it. If you aren't already up on the work of Eduard Meyer and Joseph Vogt, you might find this confusing. I certainly did. Stick with it, however. After that long first chapter, Finley gets into what we were hoping this book was going to be.
Finley's thesis is that a slave society (as opposed to a society that includes slavery, which it seems the vast majority of past societies did) requires three elements: private property, a big market for commodities, and a lack of an internal labor supply. He then outlines the emergence of the ancient slave societies of Greece and Rome, discusses debates over their relative humanity, and goes through their declines. Along the way he talks about how the spectre of more modern slave societies (specifically North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil) colors scholars' discussion of the past. (He also talks about how his thesis can apply to those modern societies.)
Overall, an interesting introduction to the topic. There's an awful lot of acknowledgement of the flaws and gaps in the ancient literature, which is occasionally frustrating to the reader (as they probably were to the author). But overall worthwhile.
Finley's thesis is that a slave society (as opposed to a society that includes slavery, which it seems the vast majority of past societies did) requires three elements: private property, a big market for commodities, and a lack of an internal labor supply. He then outlines the emergence of the ancient slave societies of Greece and Rome, discusses debates over their relative humanity, and goes through their declines. Along the way he talks about how the spectre of more modern slave societies (specifically North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil) colors scholars' discussion of the past. (He also talks about how his thesis can apply to those modern societies.)
Overall, an interesting introduction to the topic. There's an awful lot of acknowledgement of the flaws and gaps in the ancient literature, which is occasionally frustrating to the reader (as they probably were to the author). But overall worthwhile.
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