To browse Academia. This volume, emerging from a conference commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, explores the legacy and representation of Classical slavery. It brings together papers that analyze ancient notions of slavery and their influence on modern debates regarding emancipation.
The book emphasizes a cultural approach to ancient texts, highlighting fictional narratives and pictorial representations, while confronts the methodological challenges of interpreting these sources within their historical context. This volume emerged from a conference held at Royal Holloway and the British Library in 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. 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. 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. 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.
