Slavery and Manumission Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law David Lewis (The University of Nottingham)
Slavery and Manumission Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law David Lewis (The University of Nottingham) Abstract This chapter explores the legal position of slaves in the Greek world from Homeric times down to the Roman conquest, including Gortyn, Athens, Sparta and Ptolemaic Egypt, introducing key scholarly debates; it also provides an overview of manumission in the Greek world. Keywords Slavery, property, ownership, law, manumission, freedmen, Gortyn, Athens, Sparta. From the earliest periods of Greek history, slavery played a prominent role in social and economic life (Van Wees 1992: 49-53; Thalmann 1998: 50; Harris 2012). It should come as no surprise, then, that the regulation of slavery by law was an early development, and one that continued to be a concern over many centuries. The scattered nature of the Greek world - displaying variation from region to region in terms of local resources and economic organisation, and fragmented into over 1,000 city-states with their individual laws and institutions - created a patchwork of epichoric slave systems in which local imperatives influenced the shape that slave law assumed. Of this vast array of local arrangements, only a handful of Greek slave systems can today be analysed as detailed case studies. In this chapter, we will proceed on a regional basis, focusing upon these concentrations of evidence. This approach has advantages and disadvantages: on the one hand, it allows us to treat side-by-side those areas from which our evidence survives in the greatest quantities, tracking continuities and changes through time, similarities and differences from place to place, and to discern trends about the ‘unity’ of Greek law; but it also forces us to overlook some of the scattered evidence from more sparsely attested parts of the Greek world.
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