This magisterial history of slavery in the ‘long fourth century’ deserves to be read by anyone interested in Mediterranean slavery. Its incisive analysis of the many ramifications of the slave system for Roman society and culture has much to offer students of the Roman economy, Roman sexuality and Roman honour – to mention only a few of the topics which it illuminates. It should certainly not be left to historians of Late Antiquity, since H. convincingly demonstrates the essential continuity of the Roman slave system from the High Empire into his period.

H. is resolutely opposed to traditional narratives which see the fourth century as a period of transition from the slave society of the High Empire to the serfdom of the Middle Ages. Just as the economic ‘efflorescence’ of the first three centuries c.e. extended into the fourth, he argues, so too did the slave system remain intact. Indeed he makes a compelling case for the long fourth century being the high point of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean as a whole. Change comes later, and it is a ‘deep rupture’ or ‘sudden collapse’, not a gradual transition. Rather than a narrative of decline or evolution, H. offers a synoptic analysis of the slave system as it functioned in this period. The book has grown out of a project of compiling the extensive and largely untapped evidence for practices of slavery in fourth-century texts. The resulting rich compilation of new source material combines with lucid and penetrating analysis (not to mention effortless command of the scholarship on Mediterranean slavery throughout the first millennium) to produce an authoritative, multi-dimensional analysis of Roman slavery.

Part 1 sets the Roman slave system firmly within its economic context with an analysis of the supply and demand for slaves. Chapter 1 offers a model of slave ownership in which 600 ‘Illustrious’ households (the cream of the senatorial order) each own hundreds of slaves, the majority deployed in market-oriented agriculture; some 170,000 ‘Elite’ households (other senators, equestrians and the curial class) own from a half-dozen to two dozen slaves each; and a further 1¼ million households of ‘middling’ wealth, approximately two-thirds of them rural, have an average of two slaves each. The model suggests a total of around 5 million slaves or c. 10% of the population of the empire, all owned by the wealthiest 10% of the population, with half of all slaves being owned by the wealthiest 1–2%. This model of the distribution of slavery between large and small households and between domestic and agricultural activity underlies much of the subsequent analysis.

Chapter 2 moves to the supply of slaves and concludes that natural reproduction was the main engine of the slave supply, while also noting the importance of self-sale, the exposure and sale of children, and slaving both within and outside the frontiers of the empire. Chapter 3 considers the demand for slaves, mapping the use of slaves in urban and small rural households and highlighting the role of female slaves in textile production. Chapter 4 focusses on the deployment of slaves on the estates of ‘Elite’ and especially ‘Illustrious’ households. The first half of the chapter explains the use of slave labour in particular regions and periods as a function of the interaction of demand for commodities (which gave the elite the incentive to invest in intensive agriculture), techniques of estate management (which determined the relative efficacy of free and slave labour) and local labour markets (affecting the cost and availability of free labour), concluding that we should expect to find slaves in regions with ‘Elite’ or ‘Illustrious’ ownership, access to markets and a thin labour market. The second half of the chapter marshals the evidence for the widespread use of slaves in agriculture by wealthy land owners in both the East and the West.

Part 2 turns from the economic to the human dimensions of slavery, exploring the experience of masters and slaves and the role of the slave system in social reproduction. Chapter 5 reviews the array of instruments of domination available to masters (including violence and intimidation, granting and withholding food, allowing slaves to form families and offering the prospect of manumission) and argues that the repertoire used in any particular case will have depended on the type of labour involved, the location and the gender of the slaves in question. Chapter 6 attempts to recuperate some of the ‘range of motion that was left to the slave’. It reviews the evidence for resistance (from shirking and stealing to violence and flight), for the possibility of developing family relations (noting the particular fragility of father–child relations) and for the formation of broader communities.

Chapter 7 argues that sexual exploitation was a systemic feature of Roman slavery. H. argues compellingly that slavery should be central to any understanding of Roman sexuality or Roman honour. He shows that a society that practised late male marriage and jealously policed the honour of high-status women deliberately made the bodies of dishonoured females – domestic slaves, prostitutes and concubines – the safe outlet of male sexuality. Chapter 8 continues the focus on honour by exploring how the honour of Roman men and women was bound up with their practice as slave owners, discussing inter alia the codes of proper conduct for masters and slaves and the supposed threat male slaves posed to female honour.

Part 3 turns to the law of slavery, arguing that the many fourth-century imperial pronouncements on matters concerning slavery should not be seen as a sign of crisis or decline, but rather as the continuation of ongoing efforts to manage particular points of tension in the Roman slave system. H. does see an intensification of these tensions in the aftermath of Caracalla's citizenship grant, as Roman civil law was extended to many societies where slavery had hitherto been regulated by local laws and customs, some of which clashed with the principles of Roman law. He also sees Constantine as the most important innovator since Augustus, seeking to dilute some of the rigour of the classical law of slavery with pragmatic concessions to social realities, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean – though many of his innovations were unpicked in subsequent centuries. Chapter 9 illustrates the vigour with which the state regulated legal disputes arising from the slave system in the aftermath of Caracalla's grant, through a discussion of the Diocletianic rescripts in the Justinianic Code and an inscription which reveals the involvement of the provincial governor in a dispute over manumission in a small Macedonian village. Chapter 10 highlights the deep contradiction between Roman law's protection of the free status of those born free and the Roman slave supply's dependence on child exposure and child sale, a contradiction that became all the more intense after Caracalla's grant extended the protection of Roman law to most of the free population of the empire. H. traces attempts by the late Roman state to manage this contradiction, from the rigorous assertion of classical principles by Diocletian to the pragmatic innovations of Constantine (who in his later years recognised the enslavement of exposed infants and granted some rights to masters who purchased infants as slaves) and on through various modifications of these Constantinian reforms to the time of Justinian. Chapter 11 traces the trajectory of late-antique law on two other flashpoints of the slave system, unions between free women and slaves and the status of the offspring of concubinage with low-status women. H. shows that despite the tweaking of the rules by Constantine and other emperors, the regulation of sexuality continued to be dominated by the Augustan rules of adulterium and stuprum. Chapter 12 turns to the regulation of manumission, discussing inter alia Constantine's concession to Christian clerics of the authority to manumit (previously monopolised by Roman magistrates) and his unprecedented ruling that aggrieved patrons had a right to seek the re-enslavement of delinquent freedmen.

The book ends with a brief sketch of the trajectory of Mediterranean slavery after the fourth century. H. points to a collapse of slavery in the West, which he sees as a direct result of the collapse of demand for commodities and hence for controllable labour, and a more gradual ‘recession’ of the slave system in the East. This is a clear and incisive exposition of the late Roman slave system in all its economic, social and legal complexity. It is sure to establish itself as an authority in the history of Roman slavery.