Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
by Moses Finley
This book’s all about politics. It was the first time I realized that there could be and ought to be an explicit connection between a modern political stance and the ancient history that I was studying. Slavery is a classic case for thinking about those connections. Finley was the first person I had read who looked ancient slavery in the eye and said it was something that was really terrible.
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“One of the things that people often imagine about studying something as remote as the ancient world is that it’s not engaged with the big issues that we face. Finley was a Marxist refugee from McCarthy who left the US before he was pushed and came to the UK. I was actually one of his students. But, before that, when I read his books it was the first time I realized that there could be, and ought to be, an explicit connection between a modern political stance and the ancient history that I was studying.” Read more...
The best books on Ancient History in Modern Life
Mary Beard, Classicist
