a book
Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
Moses Finley · 1980 · 202 pages
In this study of slavery in Ancient Greece and Italy, Sir Moses Finley discuses how slave societies came into being and considers the moral, social and economic underpinings that allowed them to prosper. His comparision of ancient slave societies with their relatively modern counterparts in the new world opens a new perspective on the history of slavery, and the inquiry shows how ideological interests affect historical interpretation.
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Mary Beard
“When I read his books it was the first time I realized that there could be, and ought to be, an explicit connection between a modern political stance and the ancient history that I was studying. Greece and Rome were one of the few mass slave-owning societies that there have ever been. What Finley was interested in doing was looking hard at ancient slavery and thinking about how it was the same or different from modern slavery… He was the first person I had read who looked ancient slavery in the eye and said it was something really terrible.”↗