Thinking with slavery

The title of this chapter requires some explanation. Our subject is not thinking about slavery—that is, abstract intellectual reflection on the matter. By ‘thinking with slavery’, we mean the much more widespread use of slavery as an analogy or metaphor to think about other relationships or conditions. This chapter explores the use of slavery as an analogy or metaphor to think about other kinds of relationship or condition in Greco-Roman culture, ranging from archaic Greece to the Christian Roman empire. The examples we consider range from formal analogy and simile, where the comparison to slavery is made explicit, through compound metaphors based on a complex of related terms, to less obvious metaphors that might consist of a single word. Throughout we emphasize the diversity and complexity of these metaphors.