This chapter focuses on funerary portraits from Roman Athens that depict women dressed as Isis as a method of self-fashioning: a process of using the body to embed oneself in existing categories, groups, and narratives. Using literary and artistic evidence, it argues that these women are probably initiates, and that the monuments promoted Greek viewers’ identification with the cult. Setting these images in a provincial context, it also suggests that the portraits make claims on both cult-specific Athenian, and more general Mediterranean-wide, forms of status.

Thus begins one of the most unusual and intriguing documents of late antiquity, the Confession of St Patrick, describing the circumstances in which a Romano-British teenager was taken from his home and sold into slavery in barbarian Ireland. The Confessio is Patrick’s defence against criticisms by certain members of the British church hierarchy who were attacking his past and his missionary efforts in Ireland. It was written sometime in the second half of the fifth century, but is plagued by chronological vagueness, references to unknown places, and a Latin that has suggested to some it was not his native tongue. Nevertheless, the Confessio is still the closest thing we have to a slave narrative from antiquity. It is one of only two authentic writings of St Patrick, the other being the earlier Epistola ad milites Corotici (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus), addressed to the soldiers of a British warlord who had attacked and enslaved newly baptized Irish converts.

The issues of slavery in classical Islamic law and thought as well as the social reality of slaves and ex-slaves (clients) in the medieval Near East have been gaining increased attention in recent decades. Much remains to be done, however. For instance, I am not aware of any specific study (book or article) focusing on slavery and slaves in the Quran or Quranic environment. I will begin this chapter by briefly discussing the Quranic passages that have a bearing on slavery in the late antique Arabian context before moving on to deal in detail with one specific verse, Quran 52:24, which seems to suggest that, in fact, there might be slaves in the afterlife serving the believers. The crux of the matter is the interpretation of the expression ghilmān lahum, which could be understood as ‘slave boys belonging to them’, ‘young servants of theirs’, or simply ‘children of theirs’.

The title of this chapter plays with the problem of understanding the role of slavery in late ancient Egypt. Scholars tend to agree that Egyptians, with a large tenant farmer population, relied far less heavily on enslaved labour than their counterparts elsewhere in the Empire. These smaller numbers mean that enslavement is harder to trace as a phenomenon. Thus, to discern how slavery functioned and who the enslaved were requires a certain amount of ‘divining’ or well-informed guesswork. Luckily, a wealth of extant documentary evidence and literary, largely monastic, texts are available for such an endeavour. To do such imaginative work responsibly requires careful attention to brief references to the enslaved, to the larger world in which they moved, and to how scriptural appropriation of slave imagery among monks masks the presence of actual enslaved individuals within the community.

The question of Visigothic slavery has generally been treated in the context of larger studies on the Visigoths or of the Mediterranean economy rather than studies devoted to slavery. Even when it has been examined as a thing unto itself, it has tended to get folded into larger narratives of the development of social relations in the early Middle Ages. Marxist historians, such as Abilio Barbero, Marcelo Vigil, and Chris Wickham, have attempted to fit the evidence into a historical materialist narrative that posits a decline of slavery and slaveholding in the post-Roman world as states contracted and serfs or peasants replaced slaves as the primary agricultural producers. This narrative has been countered by French social historians, especially Georges Duby and Pierre Bonnassie, who argued that slavery continued to predominate in the early medieval West, giving way to serfdom only in the tenth century.

In this way, the fourth-century philosopher Bishop Synesius of Cyrene argued that every Roman household, even the most modest, had Gothic slaves. In this chapter, I examine how late antique writers, Synesius among them, dealt with the enslavement of foreigners. Foreigners here refer to non-Roman and non-Greek people outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire, conventionally called ‘barbarians’. War on the frontiers stimulated commerce in humans – namely, slave trade – and vice versa: the activities of slave merchants at least partly motivated warfare in the frontier regions. Non-Roman groups took captives, Romans among them, and made a profit selling them as slaves or returning them for ransom. For their part, Romans took captives and sold them into slavery. We also have several attestations of kidnappers who abducted people during peacetime and even within the Roman Empire. Late antique bishops complained about the slave trade of Roman citizens. Augustine, for example, condemned the business of so-called ‘Galatian’ slave traders.

Greek papyrological evidence from the Palestine area is scarce; thus, the main source material for the sixth century ce consists of only two papyrus dossiers: one from Petra and the other from Nessana. The recent publication of the Petra papyri provides some long-awaited data on the onomastics of slaves and their existence in households of the elite and in the Christian community of Petra. The more abundant papyrological corpus from Egypt does not give a clear image of slaves this late in time. This article provides the first detailed and contextualized study on the evidence for slaveholding in the Greek documentary papyrological material of the Palestine area in the sixth century. In the first section, I give a brief overview of both the Nessana and Petra dossiers. In the second part, I review the attestations in the papyrus texts from these dossiers as well as the terms used for possible slaves in each case.

For the past few decades, studies on slavery in late antiquity have been primarily concerned with the question of whether slavery was, in fact, present during the period, or whether late antique slavery slowly declined and transformed into so-called medieval serfdom. For many years the latter proposition enjoyed favour among historians. Now, the picture is quite different. The majority of recent studies on late antique slavery confirm that slavery was alive and well during the period. Foundational studies such as Chris Wickham’s monumental analysis of the medieval period, followed more recently by Alice Rio’s focused study of early medieval slavery, Youval Rotman’s reconstruction of Byzantine slavery, and finally Kyle Harper’s extensive survey of late ancient slavery come to similar conclusions: the model or paradigm of ‘transition’, with its roots in nineteenth-century Marxist economic theory (especially from Marx and Engels), has outlived its usefulness for understanding labour and modes of production in the late antique world.

The ancient Mediterranean was home to a youthful population. Demographic dynamics favoured a relatively high proportion of children and adolescents who were visibly present in their multitudes in the cities, towns, and villages; a significant proportion of these young people were of slave status, some having been enslaved or, as is more likely, born into slavery. The presence and lives of enslaved persons are documented plentifully in textual, material, and literary evidence from across the Greco-Roman world, though almost all of this material reflects the concerns and attitudes of the slave-owning echelons of society, and we have no extant narrative testimony from any enslaved person from Roman Antiquity. Further, though the existence of children and young people is mentioned in key sources on, and studies of, Roman slavery, a specifically youth-focused perspective is meagre.

While slavery was entrenched in the high Roman Empire, it continued well into late antiquity. The aim of this article is to evaluate the overall state of the evidence and to discuss the epigraphic and material culture of late Roman slavery, focusing on inscriptional sources for slaves in the later Roman Empire. I contend that the comprehensive overview of this type of evidence enables one to reintegrate the textual, visual, and physical aspects of artefacts of the period and to move the discussion about slavery and material culture forwards, by employing the intersectional approach. To be sure, late Roman slaves were not ‘class for itself’, while ‘class in itself’ they certainly were. They left a visible footprint in archaeological sites, and the epigraphic record that survives from the later Empire holds anthropological information about Roman slave culture: social interactions and a hierarchy of statuses, values, and beliefs.