This is a post I wrote on the Economics, Psychology, Policy blog, which I got involved with via rather tangential links with the UCD Geary Institute – Liam Delaney, who I got to know then, was then Prof of Behavioural Economics in Stirling University and the blog seems now to be part of the Stirling course – but now it seems Liam is back in UCD!
I have a weakness for sword’n’sandal type historical fiction set in Ancient Rome. One author I particularly enjoy is Steven Saylor who writes detective novels set in Ancient Rome, which manage to combine a modern sensibility – with the archetypal cynical, Sam Spadeish detective hero – with a real immersion into the foreign world of the classical past. The most recent book of his I’ve read, Arms of Nemesis, really brought home how horrific it must have been to be a slave. And it got me thinking – millions of people, possibly the majority in the classical world (as far as I recall, the number of Athenian citizens, who were of course all free males, was a tenth of the number of Athenian slaves) lived in this state of permanent insecurity, literally dehumanised and debased.
This, to say the least, can’t help but have had some profound psychological effects. And considering that, presumably, of people alive at the present moment, a good proportion have slavery somewhere, perhaps very deep, in their ancestry, perhaps this underlies many of the enduring psychological difficulties we call personality disorders. After all, we are still only beginning to realise the intergenerational effects of traumas such as the post World War II exodus and expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe Martin’s post on the enduring health effects of 9/11 rekindled this train of thought.
Obviously in the U.S. there’s an ongoing controversy about reparations for slavery, the assets of companies who profited even indirectly during the Holocaust, and other such issues. Perhaps we should all try and lobby the Italian government for reparations from the slave holding of the Ancient Romans!
A Medical Education 
Reblogged this on seamussweeney and commented:
I have just (re) discovered a slew of posts I made, and largely forgot, at the Economics Psychology Policy blog. Having just posted a quote from Rosemary Sutcliff’s “The Mark of the Horse Lord” on slavery, I recalled I had written something somewhere about how contemporary authors writing Ancient Rome-set fiction handle what is – to our sensibilities -the repellent topic of slavery. I don’t think this is the piece I meant, but interesting nevertheless.
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