Scholars continue to debate whether advocates of the abolition of slavery in North America, the Caribbean and elsewhere were genuinely concerned with the rights of enslaved people. A degree of cynicism has crept into many discussions of anti-slavery discourse. Were opponents too gradualist? Were they not gradualist enough? Were they more concerned with highlighting their own moral status than with the actual institutional mechanisms that were necessary to end forced servitude? Did abolitionists with European ancestry usurp or take credit from the efforts of enslaved Africans and African-Americans themselves, demonstrating an ironic new twist on the rhetoric of paternalism? Was abolitionism a convenient means for the bien pensant to demonstrate their higher moral education and the erudition of their learning – without any attendant risk to their own status? In dealing with the ‘reception’ of classical thought in abolitionist identity from the early modern to the post-modern era, this volume attends to many of these questions, particularly those that relate to the ambiguous association between classical erudition and anti-slavery discourse.

The volume collects papers from a conference held at the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2007, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in the British colonies. Interestingly, it often seeks to examine the reception of the idea of ancient slavery in non-academic circles; among those who might have considered themselves as educated, but who engaged in vocations outside the academy.

H.'s introduction nicely encapsulates the importance of the ‘continuity’ of Greco-Roman images of slavery and rebellion between classical and later eras: Prometheus chained to his rock, oppressed helots, Spartacus' uprising and ‘Pliny's paternalist slave-owner’ (p. 36). We are reminded that Thomas Clarkson, the acclaimed British abolitionist, employed a ‘progressive’ (p. 5) discussion of ancient literature and Latin composition in his essay On the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1785). Originally entered in a University of Cambridge Latin dissertation competition, the essay drew on Homer, Cicero and Tacitus for ‘categories of ancient slaves’; Thucydides to elucidate the role of piracy; the relationship between Odysseus and Eumaeus in the Odyssey; other classical sources including Herodotus, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Sextus Empiricus, Aristophanes' Plutus, Aristotle, Plutarch and Plautus; and also classical authors who were themselves enslaved. Noting the distinction between Clarkson's dissertation and more overtly religious abolitionist polemics, H. sets up a central theme of the volume: with varying degrees of success, the reception of classical slavery after the seventeenth century offered new ways to oppose the institution in contemporary life, discrete from purely religious arguments against the immorality of slavery, and certainly as a departure from earlier humanistic scholarship in which the classics were referenced in order to demonstrate the necessary association between ancient achievement and institutionalised slavery. H.'s discussion precedes eleven chapters that provide various cultural histories of the reception of Greco-Roman motifs in anti-slavery debates in Britain, colonial America and the later United States, and in southern Africa.

A. defines the early modern discussion of slavery in England as a ‘Hobbesian problem’. Opponents and proponents of forced servitude each grappled with the role of emerging legal norms that came to be attached to the boundaries of particular states (such as England). If it were necessary for all individuals to give up their freedom to a state's ruling mechanism – or its singular ruler – then how could slavery be distinguished from the natural and seemingly universal state of subjectivity? By the eighteenth century, according to A., an abstract question became far more real, as chattel slavery expanded in and beyond the British Atlantic world. By the nineteenth century, classical ideas were used by American abolitionists in order to question the Hobbesian diminishment of individual authority. A. provides the example of a series of articles that were published in South Carolina in 1833, and written under the pseudonym ‘Pliny’. Here readers were presented with a classical vision of paternalistic and educated slave-ownership that was deliberately designed to clash with current ‘capitalistic’ developments in American society. ‘Pliny’ was a useful pseudonym in tracts that sought to undermine the polite and educated defence of slavery. ‘Pliny’ yearned for ordered human association because he believed that stratification was natural and even benevolent. But in light of the commercialism that the system of slavery had ironically engendered, individual agency came to trump earlier ‘social and intellectual fortifications’ (p. 59). The very same classical motif provided by Pliny the Younger was able to support abolitionist arguments, rather than provide an ‘ontological’ justification for slavery.

In other chapters, the ambiguity of classical reception continues to be emphasised. S. Hodkinson and H. examine late-eighteenth century British parliamentary motions for the abolition of the slave trade and recover the conflicted meaning of Spartan helotage, as defined by Plutarch's Lycurgus. The ‘licence’ (p. 90) that ancient Spartans had to kill helots, we are shown, was even used in Irish Republican critiques that compared West Indian slavery to the treatment of Irish men and women by British forces. Yet in both these examples, helotage assumed a broad short-hand meaning, rather than allowing the ‘reception’ and analysis of its classical example in any greater detail. As S.S. Monoson, M. Malamud, D. Lupher and E. Vandiver's chapters all show, when antebellum American pro-slavery or abolitionist advocates endeavoured to examine classical examples, they too eschewed detail and ‘true’ reception. Hodkinson and H. similarly demonstrate that classical examples were received teleologically, at times preventing their accurate appraisal. An interesting exception, here, is offered as a postscript in the essay by Hodkinson and H.: a son of an enslaved African-American, David Walker, published an 1839 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World that addressed the case of the helots in uncharacteristically scholarly detail.

In a discussion of abolitionist debates in South Africa between 1795 and 1834, J. Hilton shows that classical examples were employed as a result of a clash between Roman-Dutch and English common law perspectives on enslaved labour. The classical allusions used in British abolitionism, as emphasised by Hodkinson and H., seem to have been eschewed in the South African context, as Roman jurists and emperors were deemed to be the most pertinent examples in order to attack prevailing paternalistic assumptions among Dutch settlers. Once again, a holistic account of ancient slavery was less important than the specific representation of useful motifs.

Several other chapters demonstrate that it was not merely the contents of classical accounts that were (selectively) used in abolitionist rhetoric. The form of classical literature – particularly poetry – was also adopted. As B. Carey shows, Africa was often cast as a site for tragic epic, with stylistic devices matching such an illusion. E. Greenwood assesses the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved African who lived in revolutionary-era Boston. Unlike the ironic use of ‘Pliny’ in antebellum abolitionist writing, Wheatley assumed the role of a classical author in order to highlight the morality of her vision, rather than to distinguish her account from contemporary ethical concerns. In her chapter L. Hunnings suggests that The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), a novel by Edward Bulwer, characterised Nydia, a blind slave, using classical reference. Here, the slave's death, defined in classical terms, is ‘tragic’ because it demonstrates an inability to escape external agencies. L. Langerwerf highlights the instance of classical reception in L.R. James' portrait of Toussaint L'Ouverture: two slave rebels appear, named after those portrayed by Pausanias, and Drimakos, whose narrative appears in Athenaeus. Turning to the more recent reception of the classics, McC. attends to the association between Homer's Odyssey and the 1993 film Sommersby, which depicted slavery and abolition in the American South. A. Kahane's postscript concludes the volume, which is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of classical reception in the early modern and modern eras.