Slavery and Class Analysis in the Ancient World. A Review Article

Abstract

Ste. Croix's monumental study of class oppression in the ancient Greek world is a great book and deserves a place on the shelf of everyone interested in the social history of antiquity. Not just on the shelf: it is a book to be read slowly, a book to spend a month or more with, and to return to often. For the patient reader, who will mull over the innumerable details and citations of the evidence that Ste. Croix's vast learning places at his disposal, The Class Struggle can provide an entire education in the social relations of ancient Greek (and Roman) civilization. Ste. Croix's book has a leisurely pace, and a loose structure, that leaves room for digressions on topics dear to the author, or for arguments on matters controversial among scholars that may seem to earn disproportionate attention. But the digressions are always interesting (at least to this reader), and the arguments, even those relegated to footnotes, have the fascination peculiar to meticulous reasoning. What is more, a moral fervor or, rather, a moral outrage informs the argument and elevates the book to a document of human sympathy, in which facts speak the misery of ruthlessly oppressed and exploited populations and give courage to those who would defamiliarize cruelty and inequality in any age, not least our own, so that the violence of human history may again seem strange and horrible. This is strong praise, and deserved. It is not meant to forestall criticism of Ste. Croix's book, only to situate that criticism properly. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World-or, to use Ste. Croix's own, very practical system of reference, CSAGW-tells a story we may wish to forget or ignore, whose events are scattered in fragments, concealed in mutilated stones and pages that have been gathered and interpreted by Ste. Croix in a lifetime of dedicated and erudite labor. The result is a book on the scale of Rostovzeff's, or of Ste. Croix's own mentor, A. H. M. Jones, and if it lacks the clear narrative order of those works, this is not from every point of view a blemish. The constant cross-references, the juxtaposition of sociological analysis and narrative history, convey both the process of discovery and the disjointed nature of the story itself, which would be falsified, I suspect, by too dramatic a rendering.