Slave Revolts in Antiquity

Although much has been written on Greek and Roman slavery in antiquity, the same cannot be said for slave resistance in this period. Slave revolts have typically been dismissed as historically insignificant or exceptional events resulting from peculiar historical circumstances. In the first in-depth work on this topic to be published in two decades, Theresa Urbainczyk challenges much current thinking by looking beyond the canonical sources to reveal a longer and far more significant history of slave resistance. Her engaging, up-to-date account considers the circumstances of these revolts, looks at slave leaders and how they are recorded in history, explores the aims of slaves, examines attitudes toward freedom and slavery, and more.Dissecting both ancient and modern sources, she finds that the writers who recorded and rerecorded these slave rebellions and wars had every reason to repress large-scale resistance or to reconfigure it as something other than what it was. Slave Revolts in Antiquity also addresses one of the most important issues of our own time: the meaning of freedom itself.