Although the importance of slavery to Greek society has long been recognised,
most studies have primarily drawn upon representations of slaves as sources of
evidence for the historical institution, while there has been little
consideration of what the representations can tell us about how the Greeks
perceived slaves and why. Although historical reality clearly played a part in
the way slaves were represented, "Reconstructing the Slave "stresses that this
was not the primary purpose of these images, which reveal more about how
slave-owners perceived or wanted to perceive slaves than the reality of slavery.
Through an examination of lexical, visual and literary representations of
slaves, the book considers