Highlighting Agency and Resistance in Teaching Ancient Enslavement from the Hebrew Bible to Saint Patrick of Ireland

Simple questions can be the hardest to answer, when teaching topics like the history of ancient enslavement. “Why didn’t more slave revolts break out? How did enslavers keep enslaved people from running away? Why did it take so long for a true abolition movement to arise in world history?” This paper addresses these questions directly, largely by engaging and evaluating texts which are too often neglected in teaching enslavement. I argue that in addition to asking new questions of old standbys like the Bible and Aristotle on natural slavery, we should start assigning texts that feature slave agency more. This is not always easy, as unpacking issues like flight and rebellion requires difficult contextualization and gathering disparate snippets from very different sorts of primary sources. (I am currently working with the History for the 21^st Century project on a related module and reading set, which will be freely available to all instructors next year.)

We will start with Aristotle and the biblical material. The usual focus is their apparent justifications of enslavement, but a closer look shows they also envision a world where servitude is minimized or even absent. We will note the slave/free dichotomy that dominated Roman thinking through comparing legal texts to documentary and fictional sources, and Romans’ careful efforts to counter flight and anything else that blurred that dichotomy. Finally, we turn to late-ancient, first-person testimony of two men who were kidnapped, enslaved, and trafficked over international borders at opposite ends of the Roman Empire. Particularly useful are the two legitimate works of St. Patrick, the famous missionary and the inspiration for the silly March holiday; his Confession details his enslavement and escape therefrom, while his Epistle rails against human traffickers enslaving Irish people. These texts are lively, engaging, and short enough to be assigned in class.