Review of "Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture" by Indra Kagis McEwen (original) (raw)
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This volume emerged from a conference held at Royal Holloway and the British Library in 2007 to celebrate the bicentenary of the Abolition of the slave trade. The conference considered the nature and legacy of Classical slavery; the papers were divided between those which looked at the direct influence of knowledge of ancient slavery on debates on Black emancipation in the Abolition period and later,1 and the papers on ancient slavery and its ideologies, which are collected in this volume. Yet the unity of theme within the original conference crossed the divide between these two volumes, in part since there is both an obvious integration of the understanding of slavery in modernity with the institutions of ancient slavery, and in part because the intellectual and moral location of our authors in a post-Abolition world largely determines their approaches. The historical experience of Atlantic slavery has hung over all studies of ancient slavery.2 That tradition has tended to generate an often implicit but frequently explicit comparative agenda unusual in ancient historical studies.3 This comparative agenda reflects to a greater or lesser extent the urge of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century theorists to categorise societies and thus the issue of a 'slave society' has been to the fore in debates. Recently the academic focus has shifted towards representation (part of the 'cultural turn' in critical thinking), and our volume furthers this trend. This collection looks at representations of slavery in the ancient world from Homer to the second century CE, focusing mainly on literary material, but with some discussion of pictorial representations. Many of the representations studied are fictional and this, in part, reflects the fact the most antique representations of slavery are within fictional narratives.4 In moving away from the traditional foci of social historians on juridico-philosophical material to 'soft' historical sources (ones in which the normative or factual value of the source is not easily established), our collection encounters methodological problems as to the 'truth value' of these fictional discourses and whether these sources are in any way normative, as well as broader issues of how we understand the ancient world. The sharp distinction between 'factual' and 'fictional' sources for social history, inbuilt into the traditional boundaries of the Classical sub-disciplines of 'literature', 'history', and 'philosophy', remains conspicuous in the narrow range of genres to which de Ste Croix limited his discussion of the
Modes of Enslavement and Enslaved Labor: A Comparative Reflection on Ancient Greek Slavery
L.A.B. Independent Publishing , 2024
This paper will demonstrate that the mode of enslavement was unique in Ancient Greece because of the society’s primary reliance on enslaved persons originating from beyond the Greek world. While West African societies utilized the wartime enslavement of neighboring states as their preferred mode, and Ancient Roman peoples sourced their enslaved from regions within their own territories, the Greeks trusted that their long-standing slave markets generated constant demand to meet a foreign supply.
Dilemma, Obsession: Issues with Defining Slavery in the Ancient World
L.A.B. Independent Publishing , 2024
The variations of slavery and the considerable lack of sources relating to ancient societies, should lead us to critically re-examine the words that we choose according to the context in which slavery is unfolding. It would be hard for us to identify social dislocation from the ‘dry business’ dealings reported on ancient court documents or royal inscriptions. Harder still would it be for us to flat-out restrict the impact that cultural survival had on enslaved individuals and their ideas of belonging. Should we endeavor to find a definition of slavery? The contextualization of slavery according to the society examined seems being more crucial for purposes of comparative analysis than attempting to find a clear-cut, ‘fits-all’ definition.
This book is part of a series, in four volumes, that aims to draw a broad picture of the development of slavery from Antiquity to AD 2000. Comprising 22 chapters, written by leading scholars in their field, it is devoted to the societies of the ancient Near East, classical Greece, the Hellenistic world and Rome. Not only literary texts but also epigraphic and archaeological records are taken into account, and each chapter is followed by a bibliographic essay.