Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology

by Moses I. Finley

Book Overview

The author compares slave societies with the ir relatively modern counterparts in the New World to show a new perspective on the history of slavery. He sheds light o n the complex ways in which... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140225005
• ISBN13: 9780140225006
• Release Date: February 1983
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 202 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.

Customer Reviews

And the difference between Ancient and Modern Slavery is...

This is an important topic given the embarrassing fact of the modern return of Slavery in the midst of the European Enlightenment. Indeed, even the United States, the first nation produced by the Enlightenment, was a home to modern slavery. What was this 'enlightened' slavery, and how did it differ from the ancient variety? Hmmm... So, how do we go about distinguishing between ancient and modern slavery? Ancient slaveholders originally were masters and knew they were masters because they excelled at violence. They had won a war; the slaves had lost. When questioned more deeply about their amazing string of victories, the Romans would generally point to their pietas, which is a religious notion. Now, is this the difference between ancient and modern slave societies? That in modern times we try to give a 'scientific explanation' of events? President Jefferson, a man renowned for his love of freedom, in the midst of a terrifyingly 'scientistic' discussion of "the real distinction that nature has made" informs us that blacks are "in reason much inferior" to whites, and "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous." Mercifully, the man we remember every Fourth of July had the grace to concede the possibility, even the necessity, that "further observation will or will not verify the conjecture, that nature has been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head", because "where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them" we must indeed be cautious! The Romans, of course, never dreamed of denying the humanity of their slaves. Obviously, this is cold comfort to those unfortunate enough to lose a war to Rome! Modern slaveholders, in contrast, would try to ground their slaveholding in science, not violence; in fact, not force. And it is this penchant for science that is both the difference between ancient and modern slavery, and, ironically, the beginning of modern racism. Now, this difference has consequences and causes. To find one of the causes let's look at the practice of manumission, the freeing of slaves. Finley tells us that a freed Roman slave became "transformed from an object to a subject of rights, the most complete metamorphous one can imagine." How? How was it possible for people whose families had been slaves for generations to become free? Or rather, why, in 'enlightened' Virginia, did it not happen? Again Finley, "Freedmen in the New World carried an external sign of their slave origin in their skin color, even after many generations, with negative economic, social, political and psychological consequences of the gravest magnitude. Ancient freedman simply melted into the total population within one or at the most two generations." Were ancient plebeians aware of this? - That former slaves worked, lived and (Gasp!) intermarried among them? Finley reminds us of stories in Tacitus and Pliny of plebeians rioting wh