Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
Moses Finley’s essays on ancient slavery and on the modern scholarship about it. Greece and Rome were among the very few genuine slave societies in history, and Finley examines what that meant for their economies and their idea of freedom. He is equally interested in why modern historians wrote about it as they did, and in the difference race makes between ancient slavery and the Atlantic trade.
Recommended by 1 Person
Mary Beard
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.
Interview · October 2009
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