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.

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.

This study demonstrates how the macrocosm of slavery, along with its violent measures of discipline and punishment, was assimilated into and reproduced by Christian ascetic culture of late antique Syria, in both urban and rural spaces. After investigating the nature of slaveholding practices in the cities and outlying villages of the region, the study asks how the type of slavery that was characteristic of Syria may have affected the ascetic practices of fourth- and fifth-century monks who lived on the fringes of cities and villages. Finally, in order to understand the ascetic afterlife of slavery in Christian Syria and Mesopotamia, the study also explores the nature and ascetic function of slavery in some later sources of the sixth and even seventh centuries. This exploration into the later centuries gauges the potency of discourses and practices of slavery. It also serves to make us aware of just how powerful, pervasive, and persistent doulological discourse and discursive shifts were in late antiquity.

The concept of asceticism is notoriously difficult to define, and we still cannot say that there is one ‘accepted’ definition. What we have are varying representations and propositions from ancient authors of the ascetic project, each with different emphases and goals in mind.1 Rather than straightjacketing an ancient author or literary work within a preconceived notion of asceticism, it should rather be asked how the author understands and utilises ascetic discourse and practice, and how this particular utilisation intersects with other related religious, cultural and political concepts and phenomena. One phenomenon with which asceticism has been shown to interact is that of violence. But the relationship between violence and ascetic discourse and practice has been shown to be quite complex.2 The notion that asceticism and acts of violence are not necessarily mutually exclusive has gained much ground in scholarly circles, and rightfully so.