The sheer quantity of academic work since the war concerning itself with slavery in the Greek and Roman world reflects the subject’s continuing fascination. It makes it impossible for any single person to be aware of all the particular trends in research around the world at the moment, and it makes it necessary for this survey to be very selective in its references to recent studies of particular aspects of the subject.

Many scholars have considered slavery the key to an understanding of what life in the ancient world was like. Needless to say, they have approached it from the standpoint of their own most fundamental preconceptions and value-judgements; and since these basic ‘ideological’ concerns differ from scholar to scholar, their application to as major a social institution as slavery has made this more controversial a subject than any other in the study of ancient literature and society.

Attempts to find statements reflecting the attitudes and experiences of slaves have met with no more success than the search for those of women. The most likely possibilities are the fables and moral sententiae ascribed to known slaves or freedmen, such as Aesop and Phaedrus. But even here things are not as straightforward as they have seemed to some. Fables universalize the human experience; they may use the slave situation to illustrate that experience, but it does not follow that they are expressing any real slave’s point of view. In any case, the literary form of the fable makes it authoritarian – one can only accept or reject the moral of a fable, not argue rationally against it. In fact it encapsulates the advice which older adults give to children: if the genre was originally intended for children, then the reason why it was ascribed to the slave Aesop may well have been that the children of the Greek elite were brought up by slave nurses and paedagogi (childminders rather than ‘tutors’).

Whatever our view of the compatibility of Marx’s theories with Weber’s, ancient slavery can be better understood if it is approached primarily as a social category rather than as an economic class. It is the slave’s total rightlessness against his master which makes slavery a ‘peculiar institution’ compared with other forms of dependence. The slave was someone who had lost, or never had, any rights to share in society, and therefore to have access to food, clothing, and the other necessities of physical survival. Typically this was because a slave had been on the defeated side in a war. Roman jurists derived the word servus from servatus. The victors could have killed him: he had no moral claims on them to allow him the means to survive. But the victors had chosen to let him live. Consequently the enslaved captive ‘belonged’ to the individual who had refrained from killing him, or to his community, which generally sold him off to an individual. The fact that he was alive at all was something that the slave owed to his captor, and the fact that he was subsequently kept alive was something he owed to the master who deigned to maintain him as a member of his household. The emotions he was expected to feel towards that master were loyalty and gratitude. Any children the slave might have would inherit this dependence: they would only be alive at all because the head of the household chose to bring them up, feed, clothe, house, and train them, rather than let them die (of course he had a similar right to let his own newborn children live or die).

To see slavery primarily as a social institution does not imply that no important economic consequences flowed from it. Slavery extends the slave-owner’s capacity to do by means of his slave anything that he chooses to do; depending on the values and priorities of owners, slaves may be made to perform all sorts of functions, including economic ones, but it is only where the profit motive takes precedence over all other values, as in Western capitalism, that slaves will be treated primarily as a ‘working class’. Much of the scholarship concerning itself with Greek and Roman slavery has assumed that the primary function of the institution was economic, a means of providing cheap labour as in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. But the economic role of slaves in the ancient world should be seen in the context of the history of the ancient economy in general. While slavery was not the ‘cause’ of any distinctive developments, it made it possible for slave-owners to react much more quickly to changes in the economy than they would have been able to if they had had to rely on autonomous or ‘free’ labour which would have had to be persuaded of the need for any changes.

The use of slaves, persons on the margins of society, in public service by both the Greeks and the Romans is at first sight a puzzle. There is no problem about an oriental monarch using ‘slaves’ to carry out his orders; the Persian kings treated their ministers as members of their household, and referred to them officially as their ‘slaves’. That ordinary Persians should have to take orders from such ‘slaves’ was, in Greek eyes, a disgrace, and an essential feature of despotism. The use of slaves and freedmen by the Roman emperors, and of eunuch slaves - the extreme case of degradation – by the late imperial court, seemed to indicate Rome’s decline from freedom to tyranny: for some modern writers, it was evidence that the Roman empire had turned into a typically oriental despotism. But this analysis only makes the use of slaves by Greek states, including Athens at its most democratic, and by the Roman republic, even more paradoxical.

For most of the nineteenth century and up until recently, the slave rebellion has been one of the most important components of the educated public’s image of life in the Greek and Roman world. Since the 1960’s, academic scholars have come to see that there is little historical evidence to justify the traditional picture of slave societies as ‘police states’ constantly at the brink of violent rebellion, and that the frequency and scale of uprisings had been greatly overemphasized.

One reason for this overemphasis was the romantic nationalism that spread first with, and then in opposition to, the French Revolution; and its characteristic symbol has been the figure of Spartacus. The ancient accounts of the Spartacus war assisted the process, since alongside the expected hostile attitude towards him (to be found in Cicero and the Livian tradition), another group of sources treats him much more respectfully as Horace’s ‘Spartacus acer’. Spartacus was thus sufficiently noble to qualify as a subject for eighteenth-century French tragedy. The plot of Bernard-Joseph Saurin’s drama Spartacus of 1760 revolves around Crassus’ daughter falling in love with him. Then – partly in reaction against Saurin’s frivolous treatment – Spartacus was chosen by the dramatists Lessing (1727–81) and Grillparzer (1791-1872) to symbolize resistance against tyranny. Freemasons saw him as an Enlightenment hero in the struggle against ‘Roman’ Catholicism; and early nineteenth-century nationalism made Spartacus the liberator, not so much of slaves as a social class, as of the national groups enslaved by Rome.