10 Outstanding Books about Roman Slavery for You Now
Book ListsWas Rome a slave society? How important was slavery in sustaining and building an empire? Check out our curation of 10 of the best books on Roman Slavery.
Links to purchase or find a copy in your library are available for each book listing. (Note: books are listed in reverse-chronological order).
For more Roman book lists, check out our book list on Ancient Rome and the Roman Emperor, or see our other book lists.
1. Schermaier, Martin Josef, ed. The Position of Roman Slaves: Social Realities and Legal Differences. De Gruyter, 2023. (Note: Available Open Access)
(Note: this book is available open access for free download through the publisher)
Publisher Description
Open Access
Slaves were property of their dominus, objects rather than persons, without rights: These are some components of our basic knowledge about Roman slavery. But Roman slavery was more diverse than we might assume from the standard wording about servile legal status. Numerous inscriptions as well as literary and legal sources reveal clear differences in the social structure of Roman slavery. There were numerous groups and professions who shared the status of being unfree while inhabiting very different worlds.
The papers in this volume pose the question of whether and how legal texts reflected such social differences within the Roman servile community. Did the legal system reinscribe social differences, and if so, in what shape? Were exceptions created only in individual cases, or did the legal system generate privileges for particular groups of slaves? Did it reinforce and even promote social differentiation? All papers probe neuralgic points that are apt to challenge the homogeneous image of Roman slave law. They show that this law was a good deal more colourful than historical research has so far assumed. The authors’ primary concern is to make this legal diversity accessible to historical scholarship.
Editor
Martin Schermaier, University of Bonn, Germany.
Links
2. Cohen, Edward E. Roman Inequality: Affluent Slaves, Businesswomen, Legal Fictions. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Publisher Description
Roman Inequality explores how in Rome in the first and second centuries CE a number of male and female slaves, and some free women, prospered in business amidst a population of generally impoverished free inhabitants and of impecunious enslaved residents. Edward E. Cohen focuses on two anomalies to which only minimal academic attention has been previously directed: (1) the paradox of a Roman economy dependent on enslaved entrepreneurs who functioned, and often achieved considerable personal affluence, within a legal system that supposedly deprived unfree persons of all legal capacity and human rights; (2) the incongruity of the importance and accomplishments of Roman businesswomen, both free and slave, successfully operating under legal rules that in many aspects discriminated against women, but in commercial matters were in principle gender-blind and in practice generated egalitarian juridical conditions that often trumped gender-discriminatory customs. This book also examines the casuistry through which Roman jurists created “legal fictions” facilitating a commercial reality utterly incompatible with the fundamental precepts–inherently discriminatory against women and slaves—that Roman legal experts (“jurisprudents”) continued explicitly to insist upon. Moreover, slaves’ acquisition of wealth was actually aided by a surprising preferential orientation of the legal system: Roman law–to modern Western eyes counter-intuitively–in reality privileged servile enterprise, to the detriment of free enterprise.
Beyond its anticipated audience of economic historians and students and scholars of classical antiquity, especially of Roman history and law, Roman Inequality will appeal to all persons working on or interested in gender and liberation issues.
Author
Edward E. Cohen is Professor of Classics and Ancient History (Adjunct) at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the economic and legal history of ancient Greece and Rome, and is the author of many books and articles on this subject, including Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex (also Oxford University Press).
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3. Bathrellou, Eftychia, and Kostas Vlassopoulos. Greek and Roman Slaveries. Wiley Blackwell, 2022. (Note: Sourcebook)
Publisher Description
Slavery was foundational to Greek and Roman societies, affecting nearly all of their economic, social, political, and cultural practices. Greek and Roman Slaveries offers a rich collection of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources, including many unfamiliar ones. This sourcebook ranges chronologically from the archaic period to late antiquity, covering the whole of the Mediterranean, the Near East, and temperate Europe.
Readers will find an interactive and user-friendly engagement with past scholarship and new research agendas that focuses particularly on the agency of ancient slaves, the processes in which slavery was inscribed, the changing history of slavery in antiquity, and the comparative study of ancient slaveries.
Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses on ancient slavery, as well as courses on slavery more generally, this sourcebook’s questions, cross-references, and bibliographies encourage an analytical and interactive approach to the various economic, social, and political processes and contexts in which slavery was employed while acknowledging the agency of enslaved persons.
Editors
Eftychia Bathrellou is Researcher at the Centre for Classical Studies at the University of Lisbon (CEC-FLUL). She is the author of articles on Greek comedy, particularly the Athenian poet Menander, and on representations of slaves and slavery in Greek drama.
Kostas Vlassopoulos is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Crete. His research is focused on the study of ancient slavery, ancient globalization, intercultural relations, political thought, historiography, and comparative history.
Links
4. Harper, Kyle. Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425: An Economic, Social, and Institutional Study. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Publisher Description
Capitalizing on the rich historical record of late antiquity, and employing sophisticated methodologies from social and economic history, this book reinterprets the end of Roman slavery. Kyle Harper challenges traditional interpretations of a transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, arguing instead that a deep divide runs through ‘late antiquity’, separating the Roman slave system from its early medieval successors. In the process, he covers the economic, social and institutional dimensions of ancient slavery and presents the most comprehensive analytical treatment of a pre-modern slave system now available. By scouring the late antique record, he has uncovered a wealth of new material, providing fresh insights into the ancient slave system, including slavery’s role in agriculture and textile production, its relation to sexual exploitation, and the dynamics of social honor. By demonstrating the vitality of slavery into the fourth century, the author shows that Christianity triumphed amidst a genuine slave society.
Author
Kyle Harper is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches a range of courses on Greek and Roman civilization and the rise of Christianity. He has published articles on social and institutional aspects of later Roman history in the Journal of Roman Studies, Classical Quarterly and Historia.
Links
5. Mouritsen, Henrik. The Freedman in the Roman World. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Publisher Description
Freedmen occupied a place in Roman society between slaves on the one hand and full citizens on the other. Playing an extremely important role in the economic life of the Roman world, they were also a key instrument for replenishing and even increasing the size of the citizen body; but their position between slave and citizen was of course not unproblematic. Henrik Mouritsen presents an original synthesis of Roman manumission, for the first time covering both Republic and Empire in a single volume. While providing up-to-date discussions of most significant aspects of the phenomenon, the book also offers a new understanding of the practice itself, its role in the organisation of slave labour and the Roman economy, as well as the deep-seated ideological concerns to which it gave rise. It locates the freedman in a broader social and economic context, explaining the remarkable popularity of manumission in the Roman world.
Author
Henrik Mouritsen is Professor of Roman History at King’s College London. He has published widely on Roman history, including local politics, Pompeii and Ostia, freedmen, Latin epigraphy, Roman Italy, and Republican politics. His other books include Elections, Magistrates and Municipal Elite: Studies in Pompeian Epigraphy (1988), Italian Unification: A Study in Ancient and Modern Historiography (1998), and Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (2001).
Links
6. Joshel, Sandra R., and Lauren Hackworth Petersen. The Material Life of Roman Slaves. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Publisher Description
The Material Life of Roman Slaves is a major contribution to scholarly debates on the archaeology of Roman slavery. Rather than regarding slaves as irretrievable in archaeological remains, the book takes the archaeological record as a key form of evidence for reconstructing slaves’ lives and experiences. Interweaving literature, law, and material evidence, the book searches for ways to see slaves in the various contexts – to make them visible where evidence tells us they were in fact present. Part of this project involves understanding how slaves seem irretrievable in the archaeological record and how they are often actively, if unwittingly, left out of guidebooks and scholarly literature. Individual chapters explore the dichotomy between visibility and invisibility and between appearance and disappearance in four physical and social locations – urban houses, city streets and neighborhoods, workshops, and villas.
Authors
Sandra R. Joshel is Professor of History at the University of Washington. A scholar of Roman slavery, women, and gender, she is the author of Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions, and editor of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (with Sheila Murnaghan) and Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (with Margaret Malamud and Donald T. McGuire).
Lauren Hackworth Petersen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. A scholar of Roman art and archaeology, she is the author of The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History and editor of Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome (with Patricia Salzman-Mitchell). She has received an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
Links
7. Joshel, Sandra R. Slavery in the Roman World. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Publisher Description
Rome was a slave society. Beyond the thousands of slaves who worked and lived in the heartland of the Roman Empire, slavery fundamentally shaped Roman society and culture. In this book, Sandra Joshel offers a comprehensive overview of Roman slavery. Using a variety of sources, including literature, law, and material culture, she examines the legal condition of Roman slaves, traces the stages of the sale of slaves, analyzes the relations between slaves and slaveholders, and details the social and family lives of slaves. Richly illustrated with images of slaves, captives, and the material conditions of slaves, this book also considers food, clothing, and housing of slaves, thereby locating slaves in their physical surroundings – the cook in the kitchen, the maid in her owner’s bedroom, the smith in a workshop, and the farm laborer in a vineyard. Based on rigorous scholarship, Slavery in the Roman World serves as a lively, accessible account to introductory-level students of the ancient Mediterranean world.
Author
Sandra Joshel is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. A scholar of Roman slavery, women, and gender, she is the author of Work, Identity and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions and editor (with Sheila Murnaghan) of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations and (with Margaret Malamud and Donald T. McGuire) Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture.
Links
8. Bradley, Keith, and Paul Cartledge. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Volume 1, The Ancient Mediterranean World. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Publisher Description
Volume 1 in the new Cambridge World History of Slavery surveys the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. Although chapters are devoted to the ancient Near East and the Jews, its principal concern is with the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. These are often considered as the first examples in world history of genuine slave societies because of the widespread prevalence of chattel slavery, which is argued to have been a cultural manifestation of the ubiquitous violence in societies typified by incessant warfare. There was never any sustained opposition to slavery, and the new religion of Christianity probably reinforced rather than challenged its existence. In twenty-two chapters, leading scholars explore the centrality of slavery in ancient Mediterranean life using a wide range of textual and material evidence. Non-specialist readers in particular will find the volume an accessible account of the early history of this crucial phenomenon.
Editors
Keith Bradley is Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Professor of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and held a Killam Research Fellowship in Canada during 1996–1998. He is also the author of Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History (1991) and Slavery and Society at Rome (1994).
Paul Cartledge is A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Clare College. He has published extensively on Greek history over several decades, including The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1997, new edition 2002), Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (2004, revised edition 2005), and most recently Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (Cambridge, 2009).
Links
9. Buckland, W. W. The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian. Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Originally published in 1908)
(Note: the Cambridge University Press 2010 reprint is identical to printings of the 1908 edition available for much cheaper)
Publisher Description
W. W. Buckland’s highly regarded magisterial work of 1908 is a scholarly and thorough description of the principles of the Roman law with regard to slavery. Chapters systematically address, in Buckland’s words, ‘the most characteristic part of the most characteristic intellectual product of Rome’. In minute detail, Buckland surveys slaves and the complexity of the position of the slave in Roman law, describing how slaves are treated both as animals and as free men. He begins by outlining the definition of ‘slave’, their characteristics and conditions, giving examples of particular cases and describing for the reader the sorts of work a Roman slave might do. Carefully and comprehensively referenced throughout, this is a general survey of an important aspect of Roman law by a renowned Cambridge academic, which retains its status as an enduring classic
Author
William Warwick Buckland
Links
10. Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Publisher Description
This book is about the life of the slave in classical Roman society and the importance of the institution of slavery in Roman civilization generally. Its main purpose is to communicate, particularly to an undergraduate audience, the harshness of the institution, and to convey what the experience of being a slave at Rome was like from a slave’s point of view. The book’s importance lies in the fact that it deals with a subject of great interest and is the only comprehensive treatment of Roman slavery currently available.
Author
Links
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