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Abstract

This dissertation compares how proslavery authors in ancient Greece, Rome, and the 17th-19th-century Americas and Caribbean depicted enslaved characters and their management. The comparison shows that ancients and moderns handled and thought about enslaved people in dramatically different ways. The fiction of proslavery Greeks and Romans represented enslaved and free people as equally human, possessing the same desires for material goods, autonomy and authority at work, and freedom. Ancient slaveholders portrayed enslaved characters in this way to justify a comparatively open system of slavery, one in which they were free to manage the enslaved by offering the objects of those desires as incentives for loyalty and diligence. Ancient slaveholders embraced a humanist ideology to prolong this open social system. Proslavery fiction in the modern Atlantic represented the exclusively black enslaved population as inferiorly human, as needing and wanting enslavement to white men, because their health and happiness were contingent on it. English and Portuguese authors portrayed enslaved characters in this way to justify more closed social systems, ones which tightly constrained black people’s access to material privileges, civil rights, and freedom itself. Modern slaveholders adopted an ideology of white supremacy to prop up a racial slavery. I argue that this difference between ancient and modern societal structures and ideologies rules out applying racism to Greek and Roman slavery. The first chapter of the dissertation outlines the comparative historical methodology with which I study slavery and racism. I adopt the framework put forth by black radical historians and critical race theorists who follow the model of W. E. B. Du Bois. I trace the history of that framework from David Walker in the early 19th-century to the present, and I explain why that framework has tended to be passed over in recent Classics scholarship. The following chapters use this black radical framework to perform close readings of ancient and modern proslavery fiction. I demonstrate that their authors resolve plots involving enslaved characters such that the routines propagandize in favour of the specific idiosyncrasies of the authors’ respective slave systems.