Okay, let's see if I can do a /quick/ read of _Slavery: Antiquity & Its Legacy_ by Page duBois before I head home today.

It opens with a quote from "Christine, a sex slave born in in the state of Minnesota in the United States, in 1968" that comes from a collection of accounts of people in slavery in the modern world.

Then? An Athenian court case arguing over joint possession of a slave woman.

"We cannot hear [the Athenian slave woman's] voice, yet register her presence through the symptomatic speech of one of her owners, even her attempt, perhaps, to avoid torture and win freedom by manipulating these two men, finding one more sympathetic than the other."

This book focuses much more on modern slavery than I do, for obvious reasons; but it's also quite pointed about the ways in which ancient texts are used as justification for modern slavery, and not merely in the '19th century' sense of 'modern'.

--oo, really useful comparison about how cultures with slavery develop justifications for it that vary by culture, but still work in the same way for oppression, just like cultures have varied reasons/explanations for sexism that end up oppressing similarly.

"Some societies imagine women as so innately lustful that they must be locked up, others see them as so fragile and innocent that they must be cloistered. These are familiar stories, and they have their counterparts in the worldwide practice of slavery."

Slavery has varied by time and place: "this book is about...Western civilization and of the Greek beginnings of such a narrative in the West, that branch descended from Athens rather than Jerusalem, though of course Jerusalem had slaves as well, and its own stories [for why]."

"If I began this book's first chapter with the voices of living slaves, it is because it is so easy to forget the human suffering of slaves now dead, especially those as far in the past as the ancient world of Greek and Roman civilization."

Some useful caution about extrapolating too far from modern slavery accounts to the experience of enslaved people in ancient times; the historical/cultural context is very different.

She notes that autobiography wasn't a /thing/ in most of classical antiquity, until the latest stages, which is one of the (multiple) reasons we don't have slave autobiographies from that period; and those of the 19th century have different assumptions from ours in the 21st.

This book is quite good, but I am (for once) actually skimming the bits not directly relevant to my current paper, so I'll only share bits when I don't think I'm risking flattening the complexity too much by making it a sound bite. (Tweet snack?)

We've reached a discussion of slavery in the United States and--wow, you know Jefferson was racist, but sometimes you're reminded just HOW racist, y'know?

They're debating slavery in the new nation, and Jefferson is all "Sure, there were some brilliant slaves in Greece and Rome, but those were /white/ slaves, so it doesn't count; slavery is even better now that it's based on race."

Author's dry note on the reported examples that Jefferson gave, Epictetus and Terence: "This is an assertion impossible to prove of Terence, for example, who was African, like the sainted Augustine."

A book by James C. Scott on resistance among slaves has... oh man these are great examples of resistance, particularly involving theft and sabotage, and I should in fact get this book, _Domination and the Arts of Resistance_. For the dissertation! Not NOW.

I remember reading the memoir of Harriet Jacobs, way back in my first semester of undergrad, but not most of the horrifying details.

I do generally recall, though, how thoroughly Christianity was used to support slavery.

Ah, we've reached continuity of slavery after the Civil War, with sharecropping and otherwise.

Brief but pointed mention of Nazi slave camps & death camps, and South African apartheid, as other examples of racialized slavery enduring in the 20th century.

Chapter 3 opens: "The owners of serfs in Russia asserted that the bones of their serfs were black. In this chapter, I will consider the ancient ideologies that the slave owners of modern societies used to justify their practices of slavery."

Passing over the analysis of Hebrew scriptural discussions of slavery done here, I land on the discussion of Herodotus, and how he (like other Greek historians) particularly tends to portray non-Greek peoples as "conditioned" to slavery by their cruel rulers.

Stories of autocratic Persian/etc. rulers practicing dramatic acts of cruelty against even nobility, who are like slaves to them, justify enslaving those people, who are enslaved by their rulers anyway, so it's /natural/, right?

Oh hey quotes from/about Plato, in case you were wondering if we'd dragged him lately. (It had been a while, but we're back!) In Plato's perfect society, you don't punish slaves harshly--though more so than you would free men!--because it's bad for a free man's soul, to be cruel.

In Euripides' play on Iphigenia, when the teen girl discovers she's not getting married, but sacrificed by her father, she consoles herself that at least this will help her people; "It is / A right thing that Greeks rule barbarians, / Not barbarians Greeks."

Aristotle cites that speech, in turn, "to support his argument that Greeks should own barbarians, that foreigners...are 'natural' slaves."

Aristotle "argues that the basic unit of human society is the household, and that 'the household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen.' (Politics 1253b)"

Aristotle argues that someone who is a slave is naturally a slave, because to submit to enslavement shows acceptance to the lower place in the natural order of ruler and ruled.

(Compare that to the letter by Seneca on suicide, where he gives examples of people who commit suicide when enslaved to argue that you can't complain about the position you find in life, because if you /really/ thought it was bad, you could always leave that way.)

Aristotle deals with the arguments (from other people, we often don't know who, but apparently they existed even in classical Greece!) against slavery by saying, okay, /some/ types of slavery are wrong, but that just means we should always enslave barbarians instead.

*stares pointedly at Thomas Jefferson some more*

And apparently Aristotle is the last philosopher to deal with slavery seriously like this for a /long time/; everyone goes "Well, he's the expert" and moves on to philosophical versions where's all about your soul, man, so your social circumstances are irrelevant.

"...some of the Roman Stoics...considered slavery to be a trivial aspect of the real world, unrelated to the true freedom of the soul," and here are a bunch of Cicero quotes, DRINK.

Cicero, like Seneca, loved to moralize about how the /real/ slavery is if you're in bondage to, say, your desire for good food or money, not the physical kind where someone can rape, torture, and sell you. Never mind the latter, it's irrelevant next to matters of /self-control/.

Have been reading the section about the context the New Testament books were written in, and connections to slavery, and staring into the distance a lot. Sigh. I... just...

Well, I can talk about personal stuff some other thread.

I will say that I agree with the frustration on the book of Philemon, written by Paul (I think? Is this one of the doubtful ones?, well, traditionally it's said to be Paul) about a runaway slave, to the man's former master.

"What [Paul] asks of Philemon is not entirely clear; the book was used by pro-slavery and anti-slavery polemics alike in the modern period, especially with regards to the Fugitive Slave Act."

Slave owners in North America "appealed to the antiquity of the practice of slavery" in justifying themselves; if it was ancient, it must be natural.

They especially cited the "most noble societies" of antiquity, saying that slavery in Jerusalem, Rome, and Athens "guaranteed the liberty of the free and allowed the development of highest degree of civilization."