At the heart of Christianity lies an imperative to change. Following Jesus, becoming part of the movement, is about transformation: changing oneself, changing communities, indeed, changing the world. But then, we are all also subject to the imperative to survive: to accept, to adopt and adapt, to conform and to continue, to compromise, and to let be. Nothing reveals this paradoxical nature of the early church more clearly than the history of early Christianity and slavery.

Jennifer Glancy points out that scholars of early Christianity tend to have two distinct perspectives on slavery, the church, and society. While not contradictory, the two views, in essence, depict different trajectories of which one can be characterised as of descent and the other of ascent. According to one view, the Christian movement in the earliest years was a golden age for relations between women and men, slaves and slaveholders.

Located somewhere between ancient fiction and Christian hagiography, the story of Euphemia and the Goth recounts the tale of a young girl from Edessa, Euphemia, whose widowed mother, Sophia, is deceived and manipulated into letting an unnamed Gothic soldier marry her daughter. Later, as the story develops, events take a turn for the worse, and the pregnant Euphemia is taken away to the Goth’s homeland, only to find that he is already married. She is then given as a slave to the Goth’s wife, and suffers terrible abuse before being miraculously rescued.

The story is set in ca. 395 ce Edessa, in the context of the invasion of Mesopotamia by the Huns, although possibly composed decades later in the fifth century. As in some other cases from Syriac literature, Euphemia and the Goth reads in many ways like a tale from the genre of the Greek novel.

Just like other late antique societies, Jewish society in late antique Palestine was a slaveholding society in which slavery was a common phenomenon of daily life. Even though the proportional numbers of slaves within the population would not have reached the extent of Roman mass slavery, many similarities existed between Jewish and Roman slave practices and attitudes towards slaves. At the same time, we must ask whether Jews, who were subjugated to Roman and Byzantine Christian imperial rule and considered the Torah their most authoritative moral guide, developed different perspectives on slavery and treated slaves differently than non-Jewish Romans, whether pagan or Christian, in late antiquity. Was there something specifically Jewish about Jewish slaveholding practices in late antiquity? Did Jews, who commemorated the Exodus from Egyptian slavery in the annual Passover holiday and who were seen as a ‘servile’ people by Roman rulers, develop alternative approaches to slavery?

At some point in the fifth century ce, a series of honorific statues were erected in Stratonikeia, a major city in Caria, Asia Minor. The statues were set up to commemorate the benefactions that one Maximos did for the local community, primarily for the sake of the dispossessed (ἀκτέανοι). While the majority of the inscribed praises that accompanied the statues heaped conventionally generic praise on Maximos for his euergetism, one of the inscriptions gave a rather precise reason for the high esteem that the benefactor enjoyed in the city. When the poor (τῶν πενήτων) of Stratonikeia were hard-pressed to pay the tax of chrysargyron, Maximos stepped in three times and paid the tax on their behalf from his own resources.

The social dynamics reflected in these inscriptions seem emblematic of late antique economic and power relationships between the destitute and their benefactors, as well as the Christian ideology of patronage, earthly and divine, that I discuss below.

Philosophical asceticism played an important role in the opposition to social injustice, oppression, and slavery across religious traditions in imperial and late antiquity in the Mediterranean world. A connection emerges from recent research between asceticism (or at least a strand thereof), the rejection of slavery as an institution, and the embrace of social justice in ancient philosophy, Jewish Hellenism, and especially Christianity in antiquity and late antiquity. When Christian ascetics chose poverty and low status in service to Christ, they were often also concerned for those who were victims of social injustice and oppression. Since at least some Christian – and Jewish, and ‘pagan’ – philosophical ascetics spoke explicitly of ‘justice’ in this connection, we can surmise that at least a part of them embraced asceticism also for the sake of justice.

Historians must tread carefully when they deal with both modern and ancient slavery, for every time they brand the practice as an archaic form of domination, it reappears adapted to new ages. Although most of the modern world, since the nineteenth century, has strived to make the ownership of one human being by another illegal, slavery keeps returning in the most insidious ways. At the turn of the century, when modern societies claimed to have finally gotten rid of it, slavery began to resurface, masquerading as free labour all across the globe (and not just in the Global South), bringing the need to discuss and to enforce policies against ‘practices similar to slavery’ back to international forums. It is striking that while this notion of an ‘insidious return’ has recently appeared in studies on rural slavery in the ancient world, it seems not to have influenced ones focused on late Roman Gaul.

This chapter is concerned with Alexander in Egypt in both life and legend. Subjects discussed include his foundation of Alexandria, which became a new capital for Egypt on the Mediterranean coast, his expedition through the Libyan desert to Siwah, where the oracle’s recognition of the conqueror as son of Zeus-Ammon resonated in both Greek and Egyptian cultic terms, his acceptance as the pharaoh of Egypt, and finally, after his death in Babylon, his return for burial to Egypt, where his embalmed corpse and tomb in Alexandria became the centre of Ptolemaic ruler cult, a focal point for later visits of Roman emperors, and where the question of its actual location remains a source of continuing fascination and debate. In the accounts of classical historians, Alexander in Egypt is already variously presented; the historiography is as important as the history. From the start some specifically local legendary elements may be seen and over time the Romance or Legend of Alexander in its many different forms overshadows and surpasses any strictly historical account.

This chapter explores Alexander’s legacy in early Christian literature, arguing that the Christians appropriated his figure by means of subtle alterations to existing tales or comparisons of his deeds with Christian content. It focuses on the common ground between Christians and non-Christians, and looks at first, the classicising ‘pagans’ (Celsus, Porphyry, Julian); secondly, the Greek-writing Jewish authors (Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus); and, thirdly, authors of the Christian comparative material. In each case, I show how Christian authors use either established or innovative strategies in deploying Alexander as a rhetorical device to enhance the effect of their argument. I offer several close readings of important if neglected passages to highlight how different the Christians’ presentations of Alexander actually are from the material they are adapting. The chapter suggests the ‘Christianisation’ of Alexander lies primarily in the Christians’ interpretation of his legacy and in their use of comparative material rather than in their development of a wholly new image for Alexander himself.

The Alexander Romance was translated from different languages into Slavonic and within the Slavic realm enjoyed a long-lasting life from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Translations circulated between different kingdoms and Alexander’s deeds were the matter of the first literary work composed in Old Czech. From various traditions and at different times, Alexander of Macedon was mainly known as a fully Christianised prince, a model to follow, either for having enclosed the Impure Peoples, or for having been able to listen and learn from Aristotle, or even ascend into the heavens. We have more than one Slavic Alexander, and not only due to the source language used. We have as many Alexanders as the political and propagandistic needs of the time required, until the printing press arrived and the Alexander as an explorer became clearly the most popular.