| Summary: | "Slavery was a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon of Greek and Roman societies. Slaves constituted a substantial proportion of the population of ancient communities; they worked in practically all sectors of ancient economies, as agricultural workers, artisans, traders, servants, performers, managers and even civil servants; their exploitation allowed their masters to live as they wished; the domination of slaves shaped the formation of households, relations of gender, constructions of identity and cultural practices; slavery was used as a powerful tool to think about hierarchy, power, religion, and the good life. There is hardly any aspect of ancient history, literature or archaeology that does not involve, in one way or another, slaves and slavery. Consequently, a sourcebook on ancient slavery has immense value for those interested in the study of Classics, ancient history and archaeology. The volume at hand is not the first slavery sourcebook. There exist two older sourcebooks on ancient slavery; one in English, by Thomas Wiedemann, which covers both Greek and Roman slavery, and one in German, by Werner Eck and Johannes Heinrichs, which focuses on the Roman imperial period. Both are still valuable works, and we have tried as far as possible to avoid duplicating their contributions and their selection of texts. Instead, our sourcebook tries to present different texts and new topics, and uses an alternative, interactive, format. We have tried to design a sourcebook which is both user-friendly and at the same time an introduction to the sources and scholarship on Greek and Roman slaveries. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction, which lays out the wider issues examined in the chapter. Each source is accompanied by a small introduction, setting the context and providing necessary information, references to relevant scholarly literature, and a series of questions, which aim to help readers to analyse and debate each source. In order to help the readers to focus on how a source illuminates the issues under examination, we have limited the information we offer to the absolutely necessary. We have tried to ensure that each source and question can be studied productively solely on the basis of the evidence provided in the sourcebook. At the same time, by offering bibliographical suggestions we have tried to make each source a window to the wider scholarship and an opportunity to explore further the issues that each source raises"--
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