Historicising Ancient Slavery
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A new framework for studying slaves and slavery in ancient societies
Offers a new theoretical framework for the study of ancient slavery
Employs a global historical perspective
Focuses on the agency of ancient slaves
Explores the link between slavery and historical change in antiquity
Examines the multiple contradictions within slave systems
Examines slavery from an economic, social, political and cultural perspective
Informed by the global history of slavery, Kostas Vlassopoulos avoids traditional approaches to slavery as a static institution and instead explores the diverse strategies and various contexts in which it was employed. In doing so he offers a new historicist approach to the study of slave identity and the various networks and communities that slaves created or participated in.
Instead of seeing slaves merely as passive objects of exploitation and domination, his focus is on slave agency and the various ways in which they played an active role in the history of ancient societies. Vlassopoulos examines slavery not only as an economic and social phenomenon, but also in its political, religious and cultural ramifications. A comparative framework emerges as he examines Greek and Roman slaveries alongside other slaving systems in the Near East, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Kostas Vlassopoulos is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Crete. He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2012) for his contribution to the field of Classics. He is the author of Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (2007), Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010), Greeks and Barbarians (2013) and co-author of My Whole Life: Stories from the Everyday Life of Ancient Slaves (2020). He is co-editor of Slavery, Citizenship and the State (2009), Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World (2015), Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World (2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries (2016).