Review Article: Knowledge, Ideology, and Skepticism in Ancient Slave Studies

This recent harvest of books on ancient slavery shows that, thirty years after Moses Finley's Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, the central themes of that seminal study remain lively topics in classical studies. The nature of slavery and the long-term dynamics of ancient slave systems are still vigorously contested. Above all, these newer works reflect an abiding and shared sense of epistemological limits: even as our understanding of ancient slavery grows (and it does), the extent of our ignorance and the decisive role of our starting assumptions come into clearer focus.

Niall McKeown's The Invention of Ancient Slavery? most clearly exemplifies this tone of pervasive skepticism. Published in the Duckworth Classical Essays series, it is a short and insightful survey of the historiography of ancient slavery. Each of the book's seven chapters is a case study of a historian or historical school. McKeown writes "in the shadow of the postmodern challenge" (8), and his project throughout is principally deconstructive. Chapter 1 begins by exposing the contemporary preoccupations which underwrote the view of slavery proposed by Tenney Frank, for instance, in his notorious 1916 account of "race mixture" in the Roman empire. The chapter juxtaposes more recent studies based on epigraphic evidence, especially Joshel's important study on labor and identity. The virtue of The Invention of Ancient Slavery? is its constant skepticism, but consequently all arguments about ancient slavery are presented as the result of prior convictions: "The way we choose to interpret ancient slavery has much to do with the way we want to interpret it" (28-29).

The second chapter considers the Mainz Academy's Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei and the French tradition of research centered in Besançon. McKeown describes the deep division between Anglophone scholars and their German counterparts, inspired not least by Finley's blistering critique of Joseph Vogt. McKeown identifies the genesis of his own book in the surprise he experienced upon discovering that his "liberal Anglophone" outlook was simply the "reverse image" of the Mainz Academy's broadly shared assumptions (31). McKeown is trying to unsettle the "lazy orthodoxies" (41) of the British/American tradition, but the problem with any basically empiricist model (such as the study of Kudlien which McKeown highlights) is precisely that it fails to overcome the blind spots of ancient and modern ideology alike. McKeown contrasts Kudlien's study with the work of Garrido-Hory; she reaches more pessimistic conclusions about ancient slavery, so McKeown argues, not because the evidence demands it, but because she is prepared by her starting premises to find such conclusions.

Chapter 3 examines Marxist approaches to ancient slavery. As McKeown notes, Marxism can mean many different things. Shtaerman and Trofimova, for instance, described the long-term history of slavery in rather orthodox terms of continuous class struggle. McKeown suggests that Shtaerman and Trofimova's work is "perhaps the most sophisticated and wide-ranging argument ever produced on ancient slavery" (54-55), but this view will not be shared by all. Their work is by far the best of a large body of Soviet scholarship on ancient slavery, and it was produced under considerable analytical constraints, but McKeown's chapter is a devastating critique. In the space of about sixteen inspired pages, McKeown manages to undermine the foundations of the orthodox Marxist metanarrative of ancient slavery. One wishes, however, for some consideration of the Italian neo-Marxist scholarship emanating from the Istituto Gramsci; this is easily the most important tradition not submitted to McKeown's acute critical gaze.

Keith Bradley, whose work is placed in its context as a polemic...