The Physics and Metaphysics of Late Ancient Slavery

Around AD 380 the Christian bishop Gregory of Nyssa delivered a sermon that included a series of pungent reflections on the empty arrogance of men who claimed ownership of other men. His denunciation was at once moral, philosophical, and theological, and it had no detectible effect on the ideology or practice of slavery in the later Roman empire. As the only sustained argument against the institution of slavery to have survived from classical or late antiquity, however, Gregory’s sermon deserves attention not just as the exception that proves a grim rule, or as part of the bishop’s own intellectual oeuvre, but also as an important witness for the broad-based anthropological assumptions that undergirded ancient slavery itself. Building on the recent work of Harper (2007), which demonstrates not merely that Roman slavery flourished well into and past the fourth century AD (much longer than previously assumed) but also that scholars have largely ignored, at their peril, the manifestly physical context of slavery as domination, this paper examines the basic anthropological assumptions about unfree persons against which Gregory’s arguments stand out in such remarkable relief. In a finely graded spiritual and physical world where moral and personal worth could be measured by the degree to which one had transcended or transformed the limits of one’s visible body, slaves were conceived almost exclusively as bodies, rather than rational souls (as Gregory argued) with the potential for intellectual or spiritual attainment. “Do not be afflicted by the death of slaves or four-footed beasts”—along with the inverse evidence provided by a solitary sermon, this commonplace observation from the philosopher Iamblichus suggests that the material disadvantages of late ancient slaves extended beyond beatings and shackles to a comprehensive denial of the subtle physics of soul and spirit, the literal stuff of the late Roman self.