The sheer quantity of academic work since the war concerning itself with slavery in the Greek and Roman world reflects the subject’s continuing fascination. It makes it impossible for any single person to be aware of all the particular trends in research around the world at the moment, and it makes it necessary for this survey to be very selective in its references to recent studies of particular aspects of the subject.

Many scholars have considered slavery the key to an understanding of what life in the ancient world was like. Needless to say, they have approached it from the standpoint of their own most fundamental preconceptions and value-judgements; and since these basic ‘ideological’ concerns differ from scholar to scholar, their application to as major a social institution as slavery has made this more controversial a subject than any other in the study of ancient literature and society.