The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity

Front Cover
American Philosophical Society, 1955 - History - 180 pages
This comprehensive study developed from a synthesis of the history of Greco-Roman enslavement that author W.L. Westermann wrote for the "Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft" (1935). The first four chapters (Ch. I-IV) of this new synthesis cover the history of enslavement practice in the period of the free Greek polities. The four chapters on slave labor and the treatment of slaves as these presented themselves in the eastern Mediterranean area after the conquest of Egypt and southwestern Asia by Alexander of Macedon (Ch. V-VIII) are quite fully recast and rewritten. In them Westermann has tried to approach the problems of slave legislation and employment as displaying, in their own way, in an age conspicuously marked by cosmopolitanism and syncretism, the results of acceptances and rejections in the field of slave-labor economy. The account of slavery in the lands of the western Mediterranean during the period of the rise of the Roman republic will be found in Ch. IX-XII. The discussion of the slave systems of the Roman imperial world of the first thee centuries after Christ appears in Ch. XIII-XIX. The final chapters, XIX-XXIV, dealing with slavery in a world of aggressive and ultimately dominant Christianity are entirely new as contrasted with the brief statement made in the Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll treatment.
 

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 162 - The great transitions are due to a coincidence of forces derived from both sides of the world, its physical and its spiritual natures.
Page 150 - But when the fulness of time came God sent his Son, born of a woman...
Page 5 - ... it sometimes appears singly with the meaning of "slave" in the loose usage of classical authors.
Page 23 - ... course, did not mean a complete absence of negative evaluations of black people. Slaves, Slavery, and Prejudice Commenting on the institution of slavery in the Greek city-states, William L. Westermann, a distinguished classicist, makes an observation of some importance to students of race relations: Granting that slave status in general was an unenviable condition, there are many indications that deeper racial and class antipathies, such as those based upon differences of skin coloring, were...
Page 43 - If an obligation came due against a seignior and he sold the services of his wife, his son, or his daughter, or he has been bound over to service, they shall work in the house of their purchaser or obligee for three years, with their freedom reestablished in the fourth year.
Page 96 - Ephesi singulos servos, nonnunquam alius declinat nomen ab eo qui vendit, Artemidorus, atque Artemam appellat, alius a regione quod ibi emit, ab lonia lona, alius quod Ephesi, Ephesium, sie alius ab alia aliqua re, ut visum cst.
Page 3 - London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. ; New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Page 167 - The Myth of Salvation in Ancient Slave Society," Science and Society 15 (1951): 57-60. For a review of slavery in Christian thought see Davis, The Problem of Slavery, esp. chaps. 3 and 4. 140. JG Davies, "Christianity: The Early Church," in RC Zaehner, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Living Faiths (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p.