Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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.
Your next book sounds altogether more sober.
Oh very sober, very sober! I think I’ve chosen these books because all of them made a big difference to me. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them. With Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology by Moses Finley it’s all about politics.
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.
Slavery is a classic case for thinking about those connections. Greece and Rome were one of the few mass slave-owning societies that there have ever been. What Finley was interested in doing was looking hard at ancient slavery and thinking about how it was the same or different from modern slavery. One key difference that comes out is that modern slavery is tinged by racism, whereas ancient slavery wasn’t. He was the first person I had read who looked ancient slavery in the eye and said it was something really terrible. All the stuff that I had read before had been slightly embarrassed about ancient slavery and saw it as a blot on the landscape. They said: “The Greeks were so wonderful and slavery was a bit of a problem but you shouldn’t think about it. It was more like domestic service really!” And Finley says you can’t let the ancient world off the hook. You have to have a moral stance on this one.
As you would with modern-day slavery.
Yes, and we need to think about the way people’s freedom can be taken away from them across the periods.
Read full interview
Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog, A Don’s Life, which appears in The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as “Britain’s best-known classicist”.
