Ancient Slavery and Abolition

In general, by its range of topics and insightful analysis of different sources, the book will surely give new impetus to reception studies.

• 1. Introduction: 'A Valuable Lesson' ; 2. The Good Master: Pliny, Hobbes, and the Nature of Freedom ; 3. Appropriations of Spartan Helotage in British Antislavery Debates of the 1790s ; 4. The Influence of Classical Ideas on the Anti-Slavery Debate at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (1795-1834) ; 5. A Stronger Muse: Classical Influences on Eighteenth-Century Abolitionist Poetry ; 6. The Politics of Classicism in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley ; 7. Between Victimhood and Agency: Nydia the Slave in Bulwer's 'The Last Days of Pompeii' ; 8. The Problem with Prometheus: Myth, Abolition, and Radicalism ; 9. Recollecting Aristotle: Proslavery Thought in Antebellum America and the Argument of Politics Book I ; 10. The Auctoritas of Antiquity: Debating Slavery through Classical Exempla in the Antebellum USA ; 11. Yankee She-Men and Octoroon Electra: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve on Slavery, Race, and Abolition ; 12. Universal Slave Revolts: C.L.R. James' use of Classical Literature in 'The Black Jacobins' ; 13. Eumaeus and Eurycleia in the Deep South: Odyssean Slavery in 'Sommersby' ; Postscript: Slavery, Abolition, Modernity, and the Past