Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine.

By Peter Gamsey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv plus 269pp. $59.95).

This meticulously organized book is a "revised and extended version" of the W. B. Stamford Lectures given by Profesor Garnsey at Trinity College Dublin, in 1995, though little of the lecture format or flavor persists in these pages. The author's chief aim, and one most successfully and even masterfully achieved, is to lay out "ideas" about slavery in the Classical and Early Christian thoughtworlds in two large divisions: Attitudes to slavery, and Theories concerning the institution. Naturally there will be some overlap or repetition in terms of the sources (authors) cited, even within the large categories; for example, under Attitudes Garnsey details the dimensions of ancient slavery accepted, justified, criticized, and eased, as well as separating out the occasional criticism of slave systems (separated from "slavery") and what he calls "fair words," which seems to be an attempt to find some "progressive" opinions on the nature of servitude. Someone like Seneca may fall under several headings, as he put forth the arguments of the Late Stoa: slavery, to the Stoic, was accepted but at base irrelevant, that is, "legal" slavery was irrelevant to the wise or good man, though "moral" slavery was evil and destructive. And so far as a criticism of slavery is to be found in the ancient world (other than locating and quoting those who regarded slave-owning as a damned nuisance) we are reduced to taking certain hints from Aristotle, who speaks obliquely (Pol. 1253b20-23) of "those who regard the control of slaves by a master as contrary to nature" - though we don't know who these anonymi may have been. The only unequivocal statement the author can find attacking the institution is contained in a homily by Gregory of Nyssa (late 4th c. AD) who, not unexpectedly, is the final hero of Garnsey's narrative. Why Gregory of Nyssa stands in such noble isolation (and how Garnsey reacts to this) is a matter for further attention.

Again, the second (theoretical, philosophical) part of the book, sensibly divided into categories concentrating on the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophers, the Early Theologians (a neat pairing of Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish intellectual, and Paul, the Christian convert and theologian), and the Church Fathers (Ambrose and Augustine specifically), will repeat some of the attitudinal material from the first part. The section on the ancient philosophers, however, emerges as a confrontation between Aristotle and the Stoics (which can be oversimplified as a divison between Aristotle's hard-line doctrine of "natural slavery" and various - certainly "softer," and occasionally self-contradictory - Stoic approaches) and, as usual when dealing with the Stoa, we have the problem of fragmentary sources for the early thinkers of this influential philosophical school and even for the so-called Middle Stoa: a citation from Diogenes Laertius, for example, reads "the Stoics say" (that the wise man is free, but bad men are slaves) and this is all too typical in its nonspecificity. Gamsey does the best he can with this ancient problem, and his best is very good indeed. The same can be said for his section on the early Christian approach to the slave, and especially his analysis of the Pauline insistence on the unity of mankind under God, with its foreshadowing of the doctrine of Grace (and divine omnipotence) that so fascinated, or obsessed, Augustine.

Garnsey's usual approach is to introduce his argument, or one part of it (justifications of slavery, for example), to group and cite his sources, and then to lay out an exegetical section, often brilliantly and always effectively drawn, dissecting the tenor and meaning of each. His language is forceful and pellucid, his translations without visible error, and in technical terms his approach and its results cannot be faulted. What he has managed to do is what he set out to do: to put or weave together a panoptic view of the idea of slavery - the "thinking on the subject," as it were - stretching over a span of almost eight hundred years. Is this, then, what ancient slavery actually was: caught in its essentiality or quiddity? There are two possible responses to this question: one has to do with the limitations set by the author's theoretical approach, the other has to do with his own reaction to this theoretical approach - and I will take this last reaction first.

No one undertakes the discipline of studying the institutions and the esse of the ancient world without being, first, fascinated by this world (our root, and for good or ill the nourishing culture of our civilization) and later to be inevitably drawn into a deeper respect, a sympathetic understanding of that world; the way it perceived and organized experience, the way it thought. Yet, for Garnsey, the great, creative, lively intellects of the ancient world eventually, essentially, betray him: almost without exception they accept, excuse, even glorify the subjection of other human beings. "In life slavery was the most despicable and shameful conditions that humans could experience" (19) but for "people with a positive view of human nature and its potential" not to damn slavery root and branch is "deeply troubling" (ibid.). Would that Athens had not reached its glory supported on the bent backs of chattel slaves; would that Roman law did not demand the mass execution of slaves, one of whom had killed their master; would that Augustine of Hippo - St. Augustine - did not accept that a slave was God-created property. Would that Gregory of Nyssa did not stand alone in his condemnation of slavery. But, of course, the reality was there, and Garnsey, to do him full credit as a thinking and feeling human being, finds this reality abhorrent.

Such is certainly his privilege and, possibly, his duty, but his announced repugnance may not help him to fully understand the phenomenon he is pursuing. The problem is that slavery is not simply an idea, a cognitive entity; it appears to rest on deep and, unfortunately for us, perduring emotional and psychological energies and mechanisms, potent forces that allow or even insist on the separation of Us from Them. Behind slavery in all its permutations is the final, the last judgment: we are fully human, they are not, or not quite. One may observe that our own century has seen the most terrible consequences of the potential for dehumanizing other human beings; this does not make chattel slavery and the other past forms of involuntary servitude right because "we do it too" if in another way, but this certainly is a black fact about humanity that needs always to be remembered.

Garnsey does not venture into this territory; instead he finds, resuscitates, organizes and presents a complex and fascinating intellectual pattern; his is a valuable and necessary contribution to the study of slavery, and I have no wish to question the value or the necessity. The essential human puzzle remains: the "why" is left for us to contemplate, and one of Garnsey's singular achievements is that the directive and reactive thought behind or concerning the dreadful reality is so clearly elucidated in this relatively short book.

Dean A. Miller University of Rochester