This study, unique of its kind, asks how slavery was viewed by the leading spokesmen of Greece and Rome. There was no movement for abolition in these societies, nor a vigorous debate, such as occurred in antebellum America, but this does not imply that slavery was accepted without question. Dr Garnsey draws on a wide range of sources, pagan, Jewish and Christian, over ten centuries, to challenge the common assumption of passive acquiescence in slavery, and the associated view that, Aristotle (...) apart, there was no systematic thought on slavery. The work contains both a typology of attitudes to slavery ranging from critiques to justifications, and paired case-studies of leading theorists of slavery, Aristotle and the Stoics, Philo and Paul, Ambrose and Augustine. A final chapter considers the use of slavery as a metaphor in the Church Fathers. (shrink)

This book explores ancient 'foundational' texts relating to property and their reception by later thinkers in their various contexts up to the early nineteenth century. The texts include Plato's vision of an ideal polity in the Republic, Jesus' teachings on renunciation and poverty, and Golden Age narratives and other evolutionary accounts of the transition of mankind from primeval communality to regimes of ownership. The issue of the legitimacy of private ownership exercises the minds of the major political thinkers as well (...) as theologians and jurists throughout the ages. The book gives full consideration to the historical development of Rights Theory, with special reference to the right to property. It ends with a comparative study of the Declarations of Rights in the American and French Revolutions and seeks to explain, with reference to contemporary documents, why the French recognised an inalienable, human right to property whereas the Americans did not. (shrink)

John Anthony Crook, a Fellow of the British Academy, was a distinguished ancient historian with a special interest in Roman history and law. Among historians, his knowledge and understanding of Roman law was unequalled. Crook's academic career was spent for the most part in the University of Cambridge, and at St John's College. He entered the college as an undergraduate in 1939, and served as a Fellow from 1951 until his death on September 7, 2007. Within the Faculty of Classics (...) he rose to be Professor of ancient history in 1979. Crook was born in Balham, London, the only child of a bandsman in the Grenadier Guards. In his book Law and Life of Rome, he gave a brilliant demonstration of how legal sources might be made accessible and used constructively for social history. In the late 1970s, Crook joined forces with J. G. Wolf to produce an edition of the Murecine Tablets, to which they had been drawn independently. (shrink)