The Classical Reviewhttp://journals.cambridge.org/CAR

Additional services for The Classical Review:

Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click here

(R.) Zelnick­Abramovitz  Not Wholly Free. The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World. (Mnemosyne Supplementum 266.) Pp. viii + 385. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005. Cased, €112, US$160. ISBN: 978­90­04­14585­6.

KEITH BRADLEY

The Classical Review / Volume 57 / Issue 02 / October 2007, pp 444 ­ 446DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X07000893, Published online: 03 September 2007

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009840X07000893

How to cite this article:KEITH BRADLEY (2007). The Classical Review,57, pp 444­446 doi:10.1017/S0009840X07000893

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAR, IP address: 128.143.23.241 on 23 Aug 2012

negotiates the scholarly debates and complex ancient material. One could hand outsimilar plaudits to Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski and John Davies for their respectiveintroductions to aspects of Hellenistic family law and the law-code of Gortyn.

The real beneμciary of this volume, however, is Athenian law. Thirteen chapters aredevoted to the topic. It is these chapters which fulμl the claim made by Cohen in hisintroduction that ‘new questions are being asked, neglected sources used, andcomparative and theoretical perspectives brought to bear on Greek legal institutions’.Robert Wallace – assisted in no small part by Adele Scafuro’s Forensic Stage (1997), adebt he happily acknowledges – shows the wealth that can be gleaned from the richesof Attic comedy. Allen explores the dialogue that exists between legal and tragicdiscourse. Not only is the Athenian legal system the subject of tragic contemplation,but A. demonstrates the way in which tragedy engages with the same underlyingprinciples that motivate so much of Athenian legal thinking. Law and tragedy aredeeply implicated, perhaps more deeply than any other two genres. Another of thetrends that is manifested in the scholarship is the way in which our ‘procedural eye’has developed. As Lanni and Rubinstein make clear in their chapters, we need to payclose attention to the type of action and its legal and social context before we makegeneralisations about procedure, relevance or rhetorical strategies. For this social andlegal context, Stephen Todd’s chapter is as good a place as any in which to make astart.

While affairs seem healthy in the study of Athenian law, the same cannot be saidfor the study of Greek jurisprudence. This is an area that is still insu¸ciently studiedor explored. For these reasons, the chapters by Josiah Ober and A.A. Long take onadded importance. Both demonstrate the richness of the μeld and the importance offurther investigation. O.’s discussion of political theory reminds us amongst otherthings that the sources for such study are not limited to traditional philosophic texts.Through a reading of Attic oratory, he demonstrates the way in which political theorywas developed and discussed in the law court just as much as in the academy and thestoa. Of course, one would be foolish to neglect such sources. Long’s chapter demon-strates just how long-lasting, full and important those philosophic discussions are.Taking as his topic the relationship between nature (physis) and law (nomos), Longtraces the development of natural law theories from Hesiod to the Roman period viaHeraclitus, Thucydides, Seneca and Lucretius. It is an account in which politicalhistory mixes with the history of ideas, and one senses the author’s reluctance inhaving to gloss so much. Both O. and L.’s chapters should enthuse us about thepotential for this area of study.

The University of Sydney ALASTAIR J.L. BLANSHARDalastair.blanshard@arts.usyd.edu.au

GREEK MANUMISSION

Zelnick -Abramovitz (R.) Not Wholly Free. The Concept ofManumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient GreekWorld. (Mnemosyne Supplementum 266.) Pp. viii + 385. Leiden andBoston: Brill, 2005. Cased, €112, US$160. ISBN: 978-90-04-14585-6.doi:10.1017/S0009840X07000893

The history of slavery from antiquity to the present is a history of endlessinhumanity offering to my mind unimpeachable evidence of human tendencies

The Classical Review vol. 57 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2007; all rights reserved

444 the classical review

universal in character. George Orwell noted more than once that the modernabolition of slavery was a sign of human progress. But it was a sign late in coming.In antiquity, across a vast expanse of time, the notion of abolition was neverseriously entertained, and it is one of the greater ironies of history that the classicalAthenian democracy so admired in the western cultural and intellectual tradition·ourished in a slave-owning community. Not of course that the Athenians wereunique. Greeks everywhere owned slaves. Some of them were sometimes set free, andthis is the subject of Zelnick-Abramovitz’s informative and useful book. Butmanumission, far from challenging slavery as an institution, allowed slave-owners toreplenish and sustain their systems of slave-owning. The beneμts that accrued toindividual slaves were largely incidental.

The main point Z.-A. wishes to establish is that manumitted slaves were never fullyfree because after manumission they remained tied to their former owners inasymmetrical relationships of dependence that were little different from themaster–slave relationships that preceded their liberation. The conceptual basis for thisview is that, contrary to common opinion, the relationship between master and slavewas primarily a social relationship and only secondarily an economic relationshipconcerned with property. It was moreover one that can be construed in terms of philia– ‘a social bond involving exchange of services and loyalty’ (p. 37) – and the widersocial relations philia governed. Proof is found μrst in the convention of conditionalmanumission, which shows that in return for their freedom manumitted slaves wereoften obliged to work for their former owners or to provide services in the way thatthey had earlier done as slaves, and secondly in the fact that former slaves werepermitted no civic or political rights. They were therefore not fully free, only ‘half-waybetween slavery and freedom’ (p. 337).

Manumission took different forms in different times and places. (The evidence,sporadic and patchy, extends from the archaic period to the Roman imperial era.)None the less Z.-A. believes that certain principles were always operative and workedto the disadvantage of those who were set free. First, that manumission, a transactionbetween two unequal parties, was costly to the slave not only in μnancial terms; andsecondly that freed slaves were conceptualised in their communities as distinct statusgroups whose members, lacking the privileges of free citizens (and at Athens of meticsas well), were always socially depressed, after they had discharged their obligations totheir former owners no less than before. Thus the freed had to contend with the threatof re-enslavement, which despite the protection afforded by a prostatês was at timeslegally enforceable through the procedure of dikê apostasiou and, perhaps, that ofdikê aphaireseos as well. And the contributions some individuals made to thewell-being of their communities and the prominence achieved by others did noteliminate the vulnerability of the group at large. Rather in every Greek communitythere was considerable tension between fully free citizens and inferior non-citizenfreed slaves that arose from the state of dependence in which the former constantlykept the latter.

The main point is surely right, not least for the reason that, as M.I. Finleyfrequently insisted, full freedom has never existed anywhere. The notion moreoverthat the master–slave relationship should be understood essentially as a socialrelationship is one for which I have much sympathy. Z.-A.’s presentation of evidenceand argument is thorough, and despite disputes that will inevitably arise on matters ofdetail the contribution the book makes is considerable. Historians of slavery will μndit valuable as a comprehensive repository of sources for the modes and mechanics ofGreek manumission and as a compendium of modern academic views on the subject.

the classical review 445

But they will also be reminded that manumission scarcely affected the fundamentalinhumanity of Greek slavery. I recommend Adam Hochschild’s inspirational accountof the British abolitionist movement, Bury the Chains (2005), as a comfort and acause, perhaps, for optimism. The potential of manumission to act as a means ofeliminating disaffection and revolt among Greek slaves might have been worthattention, and comparison with Roman conditional manumission (it did exist) wouldhave been rewarding.

University of Notre Dame KEITH BRADLEYkbradle1@nd.edu

FOOD

W ilkins (J.M.) , H ill (S.) Food in the Ancient World. Pp. xvi +300, ills, map. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,2006. Cased, £55, US$79.95 (Paper, £17.99, US$29.95). ISBN:978-0-631-23550-7 (978-0-631-23551-4 pbk).doi:10.1017/S0009840X0700090X

The book is largely written by Wilkins; Hill contributes recipes (but only three) andbrief introductions to each chapter. The chapters are ‘1. An overview of food inantiquity’; ‘2. The social context of eating’; ‘3. Food and ancient religion’; ‘4. Staplefoods: cereals and pulses’; ‘5. Meat and μsh’; ‘6. Wine and drinking’; ‘7. Food inancient thought’; ‘8. Medical approaches to food’; ‘9. Food in literature’. NumerousGreek and Latin sources are quoted, always in good English translations. There arereferences throughout to research and syntheses by other scholars; the bibliography isfull and useful. The book can be given to students with the μrm instruction to keepreading till all becomes clear; they will learn a great deal, and may well be seducedinto enthusiastic engagement, matching W.’s own, with less-read authors such asGalen, Athenaeus and (why not?) Musonius Rufus.

Like many a symposium, Food in the Ancient World improves as the eveningwears on. I found early chapters somewhat desultory, and often too allusive for atext that is (I think) mainly intended for relatively new classicists. Sentences are fullof meaning and take readers in unexpected directions, and there’s nothing wrongwith that, but some of those readers may get lost en route. There are overlaps, too,as is exempliμed by the fact that we are told four times (pp. 54, 120, 148, 216) ofGalen’s report (On the Powers of Foods 2.38) of a famine in which peasants, whowould normally have fed their pigs on beech mast through the winter and bred upnew litters in the spring, instead had to kill and eat the pigs and eventually the masttoo. Still, it is a good story.

It is in Chapter 3 that W. gets into his stride. There has been plenty of work onfood aspects of Greek sacriμce and festival, but it needs pulling together for thenovice; that he sets out to do. He begins, typically, with a description of a Christianfestival in 2003 in the wooded gorge of St Antony of Patsos in Crete; throughoutthe book, perceptive links are made with modern customs which help the reader toapproach ancient evidence. In this case the μrst source explored is Menander’sDyskolos, whose depiction of a family sacriμce (turning into a betrothal, but that’sNew Comedy) has still not been fully tapped for its information on classical

The Classical Review vol. 57 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2007; all rights reserved

446 the classical review