The significance of slave revolts

Abstract

Slaves rebelled in various ways in the ancient world. Sometimes, when they had the opportunity, they ran away. Sometimes they took up arms and fought their masters. Spartacus is a name familiar to many but he was only one of tens of thousands of slaves from antiquity who formed armies to fight for their freedom. We do not have as much information as we should like about these events from the ancient world, but there is more than might be assumed from a quick glance at modern histories. One of the aims of this book is to remind readers that slaves did rebel in antiquity; another is to discover why the material that remains has been, to a large extent, ignored or dismissed as historically insignificant. One might reasonably suppose that this attitude simply reflects the ancient texts, and yet one of the results of this re-examination has been the gradual realization that ancient sources accorded far more importance to the actions of the slaves than have modern writers. While one might expect modern commentators to be more sympathetic toward slaves than their ancient counterparts, the reason for a relative lack of interest in slave rebellion is perhaps not hard to find: slave armies might defeat those of their former masters for a while, even for years, but in the end slavery persisted. There was no abolitionist movement among free people, nor even any text calling for the abolition of slavery.