INTRODUCTION

By the end of the fifteenth century, when medieval manuscripts containing works of Greek and Roman writers began to be rediscovered and read, their study led to comparisons between past and present, sometimes with a clear and positive preference for the former. In the European Renaissance, Greco-Roman culture was taken as an example of perfection, an idea that would endure unshaken until at least the eighteenth century. For example, in modern political theory, historians such as Sallust, Tacitus, and Livy, and philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, were mentioned as sources of precepts for political action and for the analysis of state systems. In the making of modern economic thought, a similar process took place. The Latin agronomists – Cato, Varro, and Columella – were read as if their works formed a single unit, a model of agricultural writing in western Europe and in its colonial universe. The same could be said about the other surviving treatises on household management: the Oeconomicus of Xenophon and the Oeconomica of Pseudo-Aristotle.

Historians of the colonial world have already pointed out the presence of Greco-Roman ideas of slavery in the ideology of the master classes in the Americas. There are also studies on the influence of Roman legal sources on slave colonial legislation. However, it is not simply a matter of showing that the ancient culture supplied an intellectual framework for the understanding of modern slavery. The subject is more complex than is conventionally presumed.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, scholarly debate has focused increasingly on the usefulness of comparative history and on the appropriate methods to practise it. Key works written by comparative historians have shown the possibility and advantage of using the comparative approach as a means to shed light on a variety of different issues. For the most part, such works deal with a particular case-study placing it in a broader context of historical comparison. As Peter Kolchin has recently argued in A Sphinx on the American Land (2003), this can be characterized as the ‘soft’ approach to comparative history, since it enables scholars to ‘combine attention to two important historical components: specificity and context’. Instead, what Kolchin calls ‘rigorous’ approach to comparative history, one adopted by works that ‘compare and contrast’ two cases giving equal weight to both, is still rare. Arguably, the most active advocates of this approach have been experts of the ante-bellum American South. Works such as George Fredrickson's White Supremacy (1981), Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labour (1987), and Shearer Davis Bowman's Masters and Lords (1993) have been hailed as models of specific and rigorous comparison. The method that all the above studies employ in their ‘rigorous’ approach to comparison can be described as ‘contrast of contexts’, according to the definition given by sociologists Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers in an important article published in the 1980 issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Historians of western antiquity have increasingly come to rely on the comparative method in their attempts to gain a better understanding of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean. There are good reasons for this. Slavery was widespread in western antiquity and rose to great importance in the two ancient societies we know most about – Athens and Rome – but there is a tantalizing shortage of data on the subject. Clio has been especially cruel to classical historians, giving them just enough information to confirm that slavery was important in many ancient states but not enough to go beyond informed guesses.

In situations such as this, the comparative method is the only recourse after having exhausted what we can learn from the available evidence. By comparing what we know about ancient slavery with other kinds of slaveholding societies, we might be able to situate both the institution and its social context within broader classificatory frameworks that might shed light on the ancient cases. In many ways, this is no different from what archaeologists do. Indeed, given the importance and long acceptance of archaeology – an inherent comparative discipline – in the study of the ancient world, it is puzzling that it took so long for social and economic historians of antiquity to turn to the comparative approach as a method of supplementing and helping to make sense of their subject.