The video of our webinar is now available in our video archive.


The lecture is made possible by the Langford Family Eminent Scholar Chair Endowment of the Department of Classics at FSU,
with generous support from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. 

 

About the Webinar: 

Harris’s lecture will offer a new approach to the study of ancient Greek slavery. It starts from a letter, written on lead, discovered during excavations in the Athenian Agora in 1972. The letter was written by a young slave to his mother and describes how he was chained up, whipped and humiliated. This is the only source from Classical Athens that describes the institution of slavery from the point of view of the slave; even though slaves and slavery are often mentioned in the sources, these sources always approach the institution from the perspective of the masters. This lecture will discuss how we can better understand the history of slavery in Ancient Greece from the slave’s perspective by reading "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." It thus fills in what is missing in the ancient sources and helps us to imagine a way of studying Greek History that is more balanced and inclusive.

 

About the Speaker:

Edward Harris, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History (Durham University), has published extensively on Athenian political history and institutions, Greek law and the economy of Ancient Greece. He has published Aeschines and Athenian Politics (New York and Oxford 1995),  Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens (Cambridge and New York 2006) and The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens (Oxford and New York 2013). He has co-edited ) with Lene Rubinstein, The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece (London 2004), with Edmund Stewart and David Lewis, The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States (Cambridge and New York 2016), and with Edmund Stewart and David Lewis, Skilled Labor and Professionalism in Ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge and New York 2020).  He has also translated Demosthenes 20-23 and Demosthenes 20-26 for the series The Oratory of Classical Greece (Texas 2008 and 2018). He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and NEH Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.