Ancient Slavery and Abolition From Hobbes to Hollywood

by Hall, Edith; Alston, Richard; McConnell, Justine

• ISBN13: 9780199574674
• ISBN10: 0199574677
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

A pathbreaking study of the role played by ancient Greek and Roman sources and voices in the struggle to abolish transatlantic slavery and in representations of that struggle in the twentieth century. Thirteen essays by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from three continents, led by the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway University of London, ask how both critics and defenders of slavery in media ranging from parliamentary speeches to poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema have summoned the ghosts of the ancient Spartans, Homer, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Pliny, Spartacus, and Prometheus to support their arguments.

Author Biography

Edith Hall is Research Professor, Royal Holloway University of London.

Richard Alston is Professor of Roman History, Royal Holloway University of London.

Edith Hall is Research Professor, Royal Holloway University of London

Justine McConnell is Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. xi
List of Illustrations	p. xv
Introduction:'A Valuable Lesson Edith Hall	p. 1
The Good Master: Pliny, Hobbes, and the Nature of Freedom	p. 41
Appropriations of Spartan Helotage in British Anti-Slavery Debates of the 1790s	p. 65
The Influence of Classical Ideas on the Anti-Slavery Debate at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (1795-1834)	p. 103
A Stronger Muse: Classical Influences on Eighteenth-Century Abolitionist Poetry	p. 125
The Politics of Classicism in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley	p. 153
Between Victimhood and Agency: Nydia the Slave in Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii	p. 181
The Problem with Prometheus: Myth, Abolition, and Radicalism	p. 209
Recollecting Aristotle: Pro-Slavery Thought in Antebellum America and the Argument of Politics Book I	p. 247
The Auctoritas of Antiquity: Debating Slavery through Classical Exempla in the Antebellum USA	p. 279
Yankee She-Men and Octoroon Electra: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve on Slavery, Race, and Abolition	p. 319
Universal Slave Revolts: C. L. R. James's Use of Classical Literature in The Black Jacobins	p. 353
Eumaeus and Eurycleia in the Deep South: Odyssean Slavery in Sommersby	p. 385
Postscript: Slavery, Abolition, Modernity, and the Past	p. 409
Consolidated Bibliography	p. 425
Index	p. 467
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