From crisica@idt.net Mon Sep 4 01:46:53 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id BAA151442 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 01:46:52 -0700 Received: from u3.farm.idt.net (root@u3.farm.idt.net [169.132.8.12]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id BAA16448 for ; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 01:46:52 -0700 Received: from 18spd (ppp-6.ts-1-bay.nyc.idt.net [169.132.216.6]) by u3.farm.idt.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id EAA25251; Mon, 4 Sep 2000 04:46:49 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: From: "Christopher Robbins" To: "Classics List" Subject: Chattel slavery & the Western Empire Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 04:46:48 -0400 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 It has long been a part of my perception that chattel slavery imposed an ultimate economic constraint on the ancient world, one whose effect was most particularly felt in the expanding imperium of Rome. Even Marcuse (of all people) touched on this matter (_Reason and Revolution_, Oxford, 1955). But the locus of my perception lay with the more literal aspects of productivity and labor motivation. Now the Italian scholar, Aldo Schiavone, has proffered an expanded conceptualization of this constraint, one which touches on the intellectual and cultural effect among Roman elites. I am not sure that I am in full subscription to the notion that war was the "founding virtue" of the Roman republic (notwithstanding the "vir" etymology). But I thought Classics-L members might be interested to see the brief review of Schiavone's work (by Paul Mattick) as it appeared in Sunday's _New York Times_ "Book Review", a copy of which is found just beyond my signature block next below. Christopher Robbins New York City crisica@idt.net ************************************************************ THE END OF THE PAST Ancient Rome and the Modern West. By Aldo Schiavone. Harvard University, $45. Modern history begins with the Renaissance, a period that thought of itself as bringing back to life the classical culture nearly extinguished during the Dark and Middle Ages. But why this near-death experience of a civilization that by the second century A.D. had established over a wide swath of Europe, Africa and Asia a hitherto unknown degree of political organization and economic integration? Why did the Roman Empire decline and fall instead of developing into some version of the world as we know it? This is the question Aldo Schiavone, a professor of Roman law at the University of Florence, asks, and answers, in this fascinating book. War, the founding virtue of the Roman Republic, became the engine of imperial wealth. While most people lived in rural poverty, military conquest supplied the urban elite with tribute, land and millions of slaves. Trade, a seemingly modern element, rested on slave labor, incompatible with a generalized market economy. The association of work with slavery transformed the aristocratic disdain for labor into an inability even to think about improving productivity. The system could therefore grow only until its expenses overwhelmed the flow of booty. The result, Schiavone argues in prose both readable and learned (smoothly translated from the Italian by Margery J. Schneider), was an institutional and intellectual gulf between the ancient and modern worlds so deep tbatittook a catastrophe - the fall of Rome - to pass from one to the other. .