The authority of Moses Finley is still pervasive in studies about ancient slavery, and this almost 40 years since the publication of his Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980). If, on the one hand, Finley significantly contributed to our understanding of the rise of slave societies in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, on the other hand, his same ideas precluded a more global approach to the phenomenon of slavery in the ancient world. Recent publications, both on Finley's impact on ancient history and on studies of ancient and modern slavery, have drawn attention to the need to re-evaluate Finley's legacy (see, e.g., D. Jew, R. Osborne, M. Scott [edd.], M. I. Finley: an Ancient Historian and his Impact [2016], with the contribution of K. Vlassopoulos about slavery in Finley's work, and N. Lenski, C.M. Cameron [edd.], What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective [2018]). L.’s book, therefore, comes at a good time, and it opens a new path to analyse Greek slavery.

For L., a proper understanding of Greek slavery relies upon its insertion into a broader context, which includes slavery in the Ancient Near East (Iron Age II Israel, Assyria between the eighth and seventh centuries bc, Babylonia during the seventh and sixth centuries bc and the Persian Empire) as well as in Punic Carthage. He also offers a stimulating comparative analysis of slavery in classical Attica, the archaic Greek world, classical Crete and Sparta. In order to make such a comparison, L. recovers the notion of ‘slave system’, taken from W. Westermann (The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity [1955]), to adopt a regional and legal approach to the study of slavery. This methodological choice could also be taken as a counterpoint to Finley, who strongly criticised what he described as an antiquarian approach to ancient slavery by Westermann. This negative view of Westermann's work influenced subsequent scholarship, which repeated the same mantra and contributed to prevent a closer examination of Westermann's book in the light of the debates on the comparative history of slavery that took place in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century.

For this regional and legal approach, the notions of property and ownership, as central to the definition of slave status, becomes fundamental – and here L. stands against O. Patterson (Slavery and Social Death [1982]), for whom those notions are irrelevant to understanding slavery – to draw similarities and differences between slave systems. The argument is that regional variations of slavery have been based upon different ways of conceiving private property and ownership of slaves, in view of specific local needs and the historical development of each society. Therefore, L. puts into question the recurrent oppositions between the Greek and Near Eastern world (so dear to historians of slavery in antiquity), which presuppose that only in the former the status of free and slave was actually distinguishable, while in the latter a blurring of status has predominated, and even the idea of freedom was absent. For L., in both Greek and Oriental societies, the status of slaves and that of free people were clearly differentiated from each other, and a legal definition of slavery was pragmatically taken for granted in everyday life. L. goes even further by denying that a slave society emerged only in classical Athens. There were other slave societies, with differing character, scale and organisation, in the archaic Greek world (as illustrated by the ‘Homeric world’), and in Sparta, where helotage should not be considered a kind of serfdom, as is usually held, but slavery. In L.’s words, Sparta was ‘the most extreme example of slave society anywhere in the ancient world, perhaps even world history’ (p. 143).

So, the book does not completely discard the notion of a slave society, as formulated by Finley, but criticises its applicability only to Athens and Rome. L. maintains the focus on the economic role of slavery for the elites of Greek and Near Eastern societies, and argues that it would be more pertinent to speak of a spectrum of slave societies in the ancient world rather than of only two exceptional cases, better known to us due to the available amount of Athenian and Roman evidence. Thus L. provides a more integrated view of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean by highlighting the regional diversity of the institution. Broadly speaking, his book aligns itself to the current debates on how to write a history in/of the Mediterranean, as stimulated by The Corrupting Sea (2000) of P. Horden and N. Purcell; a theoretical framework that aims to take into account all the regional diversity and respective processes of integration and connectivity in the Mediterranean, but that, at the same time, does not consider so much politics and social relations as well as clear definitions of the boundaries of a regional unity. And this facet has some impact upon L.’s book. First, the concern to maintain a dialogue with Finley's conception of ‘slave society’ ends up in a little theorisation of what would properly be a ‘slave system’ in regional terms, beyond its political-juridical meaning. This problem is recognised by L., for instance when he comes to the analysis of the Persian Empire (and even of the archaic Greek world), which cannot be treated as a single regional unit (p. 247), so that it may be wondered whether the other slave systems could be really taken as single units or comprised other regional units based, for instance, on economic criteria. Second, perhaps due to a commitment to New Institutional Economics, what L. points out as the ideal environment for the development of slavery does not directly address the issue of social conflict within the citizen body of the systems studied as a meaningful factor for structuring slavery. Obviously, it is not the case of assigning it all the causality as in Finley's model, in which the choice for slavery becomes mainly a result of political disputes within the city state related to the strengthening of the citizenship of the poor. However, for L., this choice is otherwise essentially an economic one, because it involves above all the transaction costs for bringing slaves from slaving zones to the final buyer. It should be recognised that L. cites, among other variables, the role of ‘strong state institutions guaranteeing citizen rights, law and order, and market infrastructure’ (p. 287) and that he mentions that ‘the institutions of many of the city states both strengthened the legal protections from enslavement for their own citizens and facilitated those trade networks that provided easy access to these nearby reservoirs of slave labour’ (p. 286). But even so, the citizen body is presented, from a political point of view, as very homogeneous and without any internal tensions that could impact the same state institutions and thus the development of slavery. The political, economic and social frontiers of a slave system were continuously negotiated and disputed by masters and slaves, citizens and non-citizens. Without addressing such tensions, one fails to perceive more precisely how slave systems developed and transformed themselves over time.

This is not to disagree with L. that the Finleyan understanding of the history of Greek slavery must be completely revised. His book will certainly become a necessary landmark in the scholarship on ancient slavery, and it is difficult to summarise its merits in a short space. It not only enlarges our knowledge of Greek and Near Eastern slaveries, but it also traces guidelines for future research about the Roman slave system, in the long term, in its Mediterranean context and in all its regional diversity.