The question of Visigothic slavery has generally been treated in the context of larger studies on the Visigoths or of the Mediterranean economy rather than studies devoted to slavery. Even when it has been examined as a thing unto itself, it has tended to get folded into larger narratives of the development of social relations in the early Middle Ages. Marxist historians, such as Abilio Barbero, Marcelo Vigil, and Chris Wickham, have attempted to fit the evidence into a historical materialist narrative that posits a decline of slavery and slaveholding in the post-Roman world as states contracted and serfs or peasants replaced slaves as the primary agricultural producers. This narrative has been countered by French social historians, especially Georges Duby and Pierre Bonnassie, who argued that slavery continued to predominate in the early medieval West, giving way to serfdom only in the tenth century.

In this way, the fourth-century philosopher Bishop Synesius of Cyrene argued that every Roman household, even the most modest, had Gothic slaves. In this chapter, I examine how late antique writers, Synesius among them, dealt with the enslavement of foreigners. Foreigners here refer to non-Roman and non-Greek people outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire, conventionally called ‘barbarians’. War on the frontiers stimulated commerce in humans – namely, slave trade – and vice versa: the activities of slave merchants at least partly motivated warfare in the frontier regions. Non-Roman groups took captives, Romans among them, and made a profit selling them as slaves or returning them for ransom. For their part, Romans took captives and sold them into slavery. We also have several attestations of kidnappers who abducted people during peacetime and even within the Roman Empire. Late antique bishops complained about the slave trade of Roman citizens. Augustine, for example, condemned the business of so-called ‘Galatian’ slave traders.

Just like other late antique societies, Jewish society in late antique Palestine was a slaveholding society in which slavery was a common phenomenon of daily life. Even though the proportional numbers of slaves within the population would not have reached the extent of Roman mass slavery, many similarities existed between Jewish and Roman slave practices and attitudes towards slaves. At the same time, we must ask whether Jews, who were subjugated to Roman and Byzantine Christian imperial rule and considered the Torah their most authoritative moral guide, developed different perspectives on slavery and treated slaves differently than non-Jewish Romans, whether pagan or Christian, in late antiquity. Was there something specifically Jewish about Jewish slaveholding practices in late antiquity? Did Jews, who commemorated the Exodus from Egyptian slavery in the annual Passover holiday and who were seen as a ‘servile’ people by Roman rulers, develop alternative approaches to slavery?