What is striking when reading the ancient texts is that their writers considered the damage of slave revolts to be much greater than scholars do with hindsight. In their analyses of the fall of the Republic, the great slave wars were integral to the story. This is not the case in modern books, and indeed the difference between the ancient and modern viewpoints seems to be becoming even more marked. Yet it appeals to common sense that slaves were potentially an enormous threat to the authorities in both Greece and Rome.

Finley observes: “I should say that there was no action or belief or institution in the Graeco-Roman antiquity that was not one way or other affected by the possibility that someone involved might be a slave”. The first sentence of the section on slave resistance in The Slavery Reader is: “The history of slave resistance is the story of slavery itself”. Taken together, one can see that if these two propositions have some truth, then the topic of slave revolts is a vital aspect of the study of antiquity. Yet although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery, the same cannot be said for slave resistance in this period. One reasonable response might be that our sources are inadequate, but this difficulty has been, if not overcome, then courageously addressed by armies of scholars in respect of other aspects of slavery.