Intro to Ancient History Week 8: Authority & Acknowledgement

Spot the difference (and its significance) Slaves were generally regarded in antiquity as inferior and not fully human. Slaves were generally regarded in antiquity as inferior and not fully human (Finley 1980: ). Finley argued that slaves were generally regarded as inferior and not fully human (1980: ). Finley argued, on the basis that Aristotle s Politics offers a representative account of ancient attitudes, that slaves were regarded in antiquity as inferior and not fully human (1980: ). It is often argued that slaves were generally regarded as not fully human (e.g. Finley 1980: ).

The purpose of footnotes Show the working ; provide evidence Support arguments with authorities Show familiarity with scholarship Show awareness of debates Acknowledge debts, avoid plagiarism Shorthand; no need to go into detail Rhetoric; show you re a proper scholar

Garnsey (1996: 99) on Melania the Younger They were probably for the most part labourers on her extensive estates, most of which she sold. It usually goes unremarked that, according to her biographer and contemporary Palladius, she sold to her brother some others who did not want to be freed, and retained a number of attendants, slave and free, whom (to be sure) she treated in a democratic spirit that recalls Gregory of Nyssa s sister Macrina The stuff of hagiography, we might feel. The point is that such behaviour conformed to an ideal, and that in itself is revealing. See Palladius, Hist. Laus , and for full refs. PLRE 1, p.593. Palladius reports that at the time of writing (c. AD 420) Melania and her mother are now dwelling in the country, sometimes in Sicily, again in Campania, with fifteen eunuchs and sixty maidens, both freewomen and slaves.

Finley (1985: 102) on Melania the Younger One domain near Rome included 62 hamlets, each said to have 400 slaves engaged in agriculture, a total of 24, I would not want to insist on the details: hagiographies are not noted for being moderate or scrupulous. But I would insist on the verisimilitude (except for the size of the slave force), since there is too much contemporary evidence along the same lines, both documentary and archaeological, to be dismissed The data have to be assembled from the Greek and Latin lives of Melania and from Palladius, Lausiac History. There is a good modern edition of the Greek life by D.Gorce (Paris 1962). 20 See e.g. S.Applebaum in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. I ii, ed. H.P.R.Finberg (Cambridge, 1972) pp.230-1; G.Fouet, La villa gallo-romaine de Montmaurin (Haute-Garonne) [Gallia supp. 20 (1969)] pp

What to footnote? Direct quotes – but should be used sparingly Evidence – and your source for it Specific ideas and formulations which are the intellectual property of a particular historian Key points of debate which you don t plan to discuss in detail Background information (but not necessarily every point)

How to footnote Consistency: pick a system and stick with it. Accuracy: quotes and page references Economy: applies both to choice of system and style of referencing Don t use it as a way round word limits; if it s essential it should be in the text, and if it s not essential it shouldn t be there at all.

Wage rates in antiquity generally remained remarkably stable and undifferentiated. We may believe that the free men were thus being kept down by the slaves, both in the competition for employment and in the rates of pay. But they never argued that; as I said before, the complaints about slaves and slavery that have come down to us are moral, not economic. The one major exception drives the point home: the growth of the large slave- worked estates in Italy during the late Republic brought serious protests – Tiberius Gracchus made a public issue of the masses of slaves in the countryside – but they were on behalf of the dispossessed small landowners, the peasantry, not on behalf of free labour, agricultural or urban. The dispossessed wanted their land back, not employment on the large estates. Strictly speaking, they had no interest in the slaves. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England, Arthur Young wrote, Every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious. The Graeco-Roman poor, the citizen poor, were kept free instead during the classical period, and available for military and naval service.