The Invention of Ancient Slavery? By NIALL MCKEOWN. Duckworth Classical 
Essays. London: Duckworth Publishers, 2007. Pp. 174. Paper, $22.00. ISBN 
978–0–7156–3185–0.

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CJ Online Exclusive: 2008.12.03

The task of the modern historian working on the ancient world is never an 
easy one, as practitioners of the art know well: for civilizations as prone 
to writing about themselves as the Greeks and Romans were, there 
nevertheless exist gaps (and in some instances actual chasms) in the 
record, making the occasional use of conjecture and even imagination 
necessary. This is true even for analyses of persons, places, things and 
events that the ancients themselves thought significant enough to merit 
inclusion in the histories they composed. It is all the more the case for 
aspects of Classical society that receive little mention in the historical 
record, forcing those who wish to describe such aspects to make more 
extensive use of sources beyond those that referred to themselves as 
histories; it likewise makes such contemporary work more reliant on 
speculation and creativity. Slavery is just such an area. Full-fledged 
historians from the past had comparatively little to say about slavery, 
slaves and the slave experience; their focus is typically on what they 
would consider greater things, and since slaves were rarely the primary 
actors in these scenes, their role is usually that of scenery, and slavery 
itself becomes something of an abstraction. Indeed, even when slaves are 
actors, their deeds are seen through the filter of aristocratic bias under 
which all composers of history in the classical world operated.

For this reason, modern historians of slavery have grown increasingly 
dissatisfied with what can be gleaned from the ancient narratives. Many 
have turned to archaeology, epigraphy, laws, works of philosophy, plays, 
poems and novels to gain an additional perspective. In this way they 
“fill in the gaps” and often create new narratives entirely. This 
process, which Niall McKeown (M.) refers to as the “invention of ancient 
slavery,” is the subject of this book. More specifically, what concerns 
M. is the way modern historians select, edit and interpret sources to 
produce works on ancient slavery, and the extent to which this method is 
shaped by the particular cultural, social, sexual, economic and political 
ideologies held by contemporary scholars. Very often, M. notes, modern 
scholars run the risk of reading the history they wish to compose into the 
sources, rather than drawing this history from them. He therefore takes 
upon himself the task of illustrating how the mindset of the modern author 
shapes the history he or she “invents,” and how one “invention” is 
often discarded by later scholars who proffer an invention of their own.

As a graphic illustration of this procedure, M. takes note in his first 
chapter of the way the origins of slaves in the late Roman Empire and the 
influence of freedmen of eastern backgrounds were discussed in the 1930s. 
Using data such as the names preserved in funerary inscriptions and other 
mentions of freedmen in various literary sources, scholars such as Tenney 
Frank and Mary Gordon tested the claim (frequently asserted by authors 
writing during the Late Empire) that slaves and freedmen brought from the 
east had an enervating effect on the Romans through “race-mixing.” M. 
notes that this was a regular feature of the depiction of slavery and its 
effects in works written before 1939, and while the conclusions drawn may 
be repugnant to contemporary sensibilities, that repugnance is not 
necessarily due to the fact that this is bad history; the use of epigraphy 
and the literary historical sources underlying such claims is solid. Modern 
work on freedmen and their influence does not proceed under the hypothesis 
that there was any such deleterious influence of “race-mixing” and 
tends to reject claims made by the ancients to that effect as revolting. 
This can lead—and indeed has led—scholars to dismiss out of hand the 
work of those like Gordon and Frank, who are more willing to accept the 
assertions made by Romans of the time (and to conduct analysis on it). M. 
observes that while this tendency is understandable (one to which he admits 
he himself is prone), it must be recognized that it exists more because 
scholars today find the initial premise unsettling and less because works 
written under such premises used epigraphical and narrative evidence 
poorly.

It is not just the passage of time (and the changes in perception that have 
accompanied it) that has led to the invention and reinvention of slavery. 
M. also argues that there is a divergence produced by what he terms 
“geography.” What M. seems to mean by this is a tendency among 
Anglophone scholars in particular to look at slavery in a way different 
from that which informed the opinions of their counterparts in Germany and 
the former Soviet Union. In Germany, and in particular at Mainz, 
scholarship has raised the possibility that slavery was not as dire an evil 
as is sometimes thought. [[1]] (M. entitles this section “Every cloud has 
a silver lining”). Evidence for this interpretation can be found in 
oracular questions, which can be mined to show bonds of affection and 
loyalty between masters and slaves. But such an invention must also ignore 
the many bits of contrary evidence in these selfsame oracular responses: 
some do show what appears to be affection between slave and master, but 
many others display the opposite (questions involving fugitive slaves, for 
example). This introduces a theme to which M. returns again and again: 
almost none of the sources used to support one view of slavery conclusively 
rules out others.

Thus, in contrast to the Mainz school, the Anglophone tradition [[2]] 
(which stresses the dreadful lot of slaves, the resistance they offered and 
the anxiety slaveholding created in masters, a tradition discussed 
extensively in Chapters 2 and 4) draws upon depictions of slaves and 
slavery in literary sources including philosophy, poetry, plays and novels. 
For practically every passage, however, that shows how brutal masters can 
be in the absence of laws to restrain them, others show that excesses of 
cruelty drew sharp condemnation and opprobrium that was likely as effective 
as any law. In Chapter 3, M. also discusses Marxist scholarship, [[3]] 
which attempts to portray the end of slavery as the result of slave 
resistance and of legislation that gradually made slavery too difficult and 
converted sharecroppers (coloni) into a more feasible and attractive 
option. As in the case of the Anglophone tradition, M. shows how the body 
of evidence the Marxists used to reach their conclusions is not impervious 
to being put to service to support entirely different hypotheses. Thus, use 
of Columella’s call for increased oversight (de rust. 1.8.11, 1.9.4–8) 
ignores the possibility that Columella may have found such oversight 
desirable for its own sake (Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, which Columella cites 
at 11.1.5, does the same thing), while laws designed to restrict slave 
behavior may simply have been occasioned by an increased legislative 
impulse in the late Empire. In this chapter and throughout this book, M. 
shows just how susceptible an invention may be to the use of the same 
evidence that created it to produce a reinvention that argues something 
completely different.

As M. notes from the beginning, The Invention of Ancient Slavery? is not 
itself a history of slavery. Rather, its purpose is to show how works 
written to be histories of slavery are influenced by the opinions and 
prejudices of their authors. Indeed, M. himself not infrequently adds his 
own opinions, although usually as asides which, he is careful to state, 
should not be taken as a commentary on the scholarship he is investigating; 
no matter how much M. may like or dislike the conclusions drawn by the 
authors whose work he samples, his own preferences have nothing to do with 
how well or poorly such conclusions are reached. The Invention of Ancient 
Slavery? is not particularly informative about slavery (which is not its 
purpose), but it is fairly thought-provoking (which is its goal), and the 
analysis is greatly aided by the easy style the author adopts. All in all, 
this is a very interesting and very fast read, the sort of work that might 
be useful for a Methodology class for undergraduates or first-year graduate 
students. Indeed, M. suggests in his conclusion that the book may have been 
composed to provide precisely such a text, and if that is the case, he has 
been quite successful.

SETH L. KENDALL
Georgia Gwinnett College


[[1]] Specifically, McKeown analyses Fridolf Kudlien’s 
Sklaven-Mentalität im Spiegel antiker Warsagerei (Stuttgart: Steiner, 
1991).

[[2]] Whose chief representative is Keith Bradley, an analysis of whose 
work primarily occurs in Chapter 4.

[[3]] Represented by E. Shtaerman and M. Trofimova, whose work is the 
principal focus of Chapter 3.


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