First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

Americans, and especially Southerners, were fond of noting that both the Greeks and Romans embraced systems of slavery. But in leaning on classical justifications, they neglected the fact that their system of slavery tended to be harsher than ancient forms. A particularly malign aspect of this was the racial justification for American slavery. The Greeks and Romans held that being enslaved was a matter of misfortune. The people they owned had a variety of colors and nationalities. “Roman slavery was a nonracist and fluid system where the places from which slaves came varied considerably from one period to another,” concludes one historian.42 Roman slavery could be very cruel, but generally, states legal historian David Bederman, it was “not as harsh and exploitative as its modern analogues.”