Slave Revolts in Antiquity

Theresa Urbainczyk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315478791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery, slave resistance has typically been dismissed as historically insignificant and those revolts that are documented are portrayed as wholly exceptional and resulting from peculiar historical circumstances that had little to do with the intrinsic views or organizational capabilities of the slaves themselves.In this book Theresa Urbainczyk challenges the current orthodoxy and argues that there were many more slave revolts than is usually assumed and they were far from insignificant historically. She carefully dissects ancient and modern interpretations to show that there was every reason for the writers who recorded and re-recorded the slave rebellions and wars to repress or to reconfigure any larger-scale slave resistance as something other than what it was. Further, she shows that we often have the accounts that we do because of the happenstance of certain ancient authors having been particularly interested in creating accounts of them for their own interests. Urbainczyk argues that we need to look beyond the canonical sources and episodes to see a bigger history of long-term resistance of slaves to their enslavement.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• The ancient Mediterranean
• 1 The significance of slave revolts
• 2 Preparing for revolt
• 3 Maintaining resistance
• 4 The role of the leader
• 5 The ideology of the slaves
• 6 Sympathy for the slaves: Diodorus Siculus
• 7 The secret of the success of the Spartan helots
• 8 Slave revolts in the ancient historiography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index