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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8493829" data-attributes="member: 18">Finley, AFAIK, is just an example of the problem I discussed above. We only have upper-class and elite opinions on slavery and is itself rather outdated, given it's from before I was born and I'm old. Sources, translations, and archaeology have changed a lot since then.Claiming to know what Spartacus was after in detail is pretty silly. It's been in the interest of elites to cast Spartacus as selfishly motivated for a very long time, and indeed during the cold war, failing to do so lead to suspicions of Communist sympathies, because a great number of Communist organisations used Spartacus's name and invoked him. So you see this hilarious spike in "Spartacus was just trying to flee!" stuff from the 60s through the 80s. Interpretations will always be coloured by the time and the pretense that was less true in 1978 than now, say, would be very foolish. Indeed, evidence and methodology improve.That said, I agree there was absolutely no evidence for an abolition movement in Rome. Anyone trying to help slaves escape was brutally dealt with. Anyone expressing any significant sympathy for slaves in the pre-Christian era was seen as a churl and a fool at best. From the evidence we have, however, we can certainly say that the relationship that the middle and working classes had with slaves and slavery was rather different to the elites, even by the accounts of those elites and that they appear to have had a great deal more sympathy for slaves (and why wouldn't they - people they knew would have been enslaved). Indeed there's also some "these slaves are taking our jobs!" at times, and I don't believe the masses would have been so dim as to blame the slaves.Re Spartacus hard claims either way are not at all supported by the limited evidence. He certainly did not flee when he could have, indeed he turned around, but equally we don't have any proof that he wanted to free everyone and our only sources are hideously biased. We only know what he actually did, which was to free slaves and kill slave-owners. Certainly of interest though is that the Romans don't suggest he was a hypocrite, taking slaves himself, and do seem to suggest he freed all the slaves in a region, not just those militarily useful to him.But it's all speculation unless another source or some amazing archaeology emerges.</blockquote>

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