{"title":"Legal Evidence","authors":"J. Gardner","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.12","url":null,"abstract":"Roman law is documented in greater detail than that of any ancient Greek state, principally through an enormous corpus of legal writings. The four most important are the so-called Twelve Tables, the Institutes of Gaius, the Codex of Justinian, and Justinian’s Digest. Legal writings can shed important light on slavery in Roman life, especially when combined with the evidence of inscriptions; but much of their content is anecdotal, sometimes hypothetical. Frequency of mention of a given situation in juristic writings does not necessarily correspond to its frequency in litigation, let alone in everyday life. Moreover, little in Roman law is directly or exclusively concerned with slaves—there is, arguably, no Roman law of slavery.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124924340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The End of Enslavement, ‘Greek style’","authors":"K. Vlassopoulos","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.39","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the processes through which slaves in ancient Greek communities exited slavery, as well as their status and condition as freed people. It examines the nature of the existing evidence for manumission and freed people and its implications for studying the topic; it explores the forms of manumission and the processes through which slaves managed to gain their freedom; finally, it discusses the meanings that freedom had for freed people in the various conditions in which they found themselves after exiting slavery. The chapter places particular attention on the significance of the master–slave, free–slave, and community formation dialectics for manumission and for life after slavery. It also engages with fruitful comparisons between different areas and communities of the Greek world, as well as between Greek and Roman manumission and freed people.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122928599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Classical and Near Eastern Slavery in the First Millennium bce","authors":"D. Lewis","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199575251.013.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199575251.013.42","url":null,"abstract":"Twentieth-century scholarship, guided in particular by the views of M. I. Finley, saw Greece and Rome as the only true ‘slave societies’ of antiquity: slavery in the Near East was of minor economic significance. Finley also believed that the lack of a concept of ‘freedom’ in the Near East made slavery difficult to distinguish from other shades of ‘unfreedom’. This chapter shows that in the Near East the legal status of slaves and the ability to make clear status distinctions were substantively similar to the Greco-Roman situation. Through a survey of the economic contribution of slave labour to the wealth and position of elites in Israel, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and Carthage, it is shown that the difference between the ‘classical’ and ‘non-classical’ worlds was not as pronounced as Finley thought, and that at least some of these societies (certainly Carthage) should also be considered ‘slave societies’.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126810382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Slaves as Active Subjects","authors":"Niall J Mckeown","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199575251.013.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199575251.013.25","url":null,"abstract":"Ancient slave owners often wanted to see slaves merely as extensions of their own social persona. Modern historians, however, have given increasing attention to ancient slaves as active social actors, and not just in exceptional circumstances such as rebellion. Slaves could have family lives and sometimes had a social existence with ties beyond that of their masters’ households. Our evidence (chiefly from Athens and from the Roman Empire) comes with considerable caveats. It is nonetheless clear that slave families, interaction between slaves of different households, and interaction between slave, freed, and free in wider society may have been greater than previously assumed, especially in Rome. It may even match what could be seen, for example, in the later slave societies of the urban USA and Brazil.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128787513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to Tell a Slave","authors":"Page Dubois","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.6","url":null,"abstract":"After pointing out the significant differences between ancient slavery and modern racialized slavery, this chapter considers the manifold difficulties entailed in distinguishing between enslaved and free persons in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. It stresses the social, economic, and legal importance of maintaining these distinctions even as it acknowledges their elusive nature. It goes on to describe the ways in which behaviours, bodies—often scarred or tattooed, sometimes tortured—dress, disguise, names, and language, revealed or disguised the status of enslaved persons. It ends with a brief discussion of a dramatic text that stages the complexities of policing the boundaries between enslaved and free persons.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121312523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chattel Slaveries in Classical Greece","authors":"T. Figueira, S. R. Jensen","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.9","url":null,"abstract":"Greek chattel or commercial slavery developed from general growth and sophistication of economic activity in emerging city-state culture. At Athens and elsewhere, non-commercial forms of slavery evanesced. As the supply of Greek slaves lessened for economic and ideological reasons, Greeks began to acquire slaves almost exclusively from non-Greek peoples. Slaves were considered private property but, as Aristotle argued, they were also considered ‘animate tools’, a category marking distinction from other animal property. Athenian slaves could enjoy a measure of behavioural latitude, some protection from arbitrary violence, and in some ways participated in the wider polis. However, exploitation was normal (sometimes with abuse) and constituted the essence of the slave system. Slave labour was prominent in the classical Greek economy, as slaves were numerous. Finally, although manumission was possible and perhaps frequent, complete integration into wider society was limited at Athens.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"286 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124557952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Literary Evidence","authors":"Theresa Urbainczyk","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.37","url":null,"abstract":"Information about slaveries in Greek and Roman antiquity appears in almost all genres of non-fiction: histories, biographies, political and philosophical treatises, speeches, letters, agricultural manuals, and works on estate management. The amount of surviving evidence, however, is comparatively small and unrepresentative, produced by slave owners with typically little interest in slaves for their own sake. There are no surviving non-fiction literary accounts by slaves. Even when slavery is discussed, it is often only ancillary to other issues. The evidence therefore leaves serious gaps in our knowledge. Ancient accounts also often fail to mention slaves who were almost certainly present, or mention them only in passing. One compensation is that non-fiction works do shed light on how writers view slaves in contexts in which they are not trying to prove anything, in contrast to accounts in which slavery and slaves form the direct focus, accounts probably subject to more distortion.","PeriodicalId":390313,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries","volume":"113 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134402639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}