About our staff

A bit like the Roman historian Livy, my turn to the study of things ancient was motivated by a desire to escape things present – then the running of my own restaurant, on the beautiful coast of West Sussex. To this end, I chose to set out on a PhD, at the University of Nottingham, on the role of enslaved women in Roman agriculture, arguing against the then standard androcentric reading of our sources for rural slavery in Roman Italy - which I completed in 2004. Later that year, I joined the University of Edinburgh, following a short-term appointment as Tutor in Ancient History at the University of Wales, Swansea, which followed in turn my very first lecturing adventures at King’s College London. Having taken up the post of Lecturer in Ancient History at Edinburgh in 2004, I was subsequently promoted to a Senior Lectureship in 2012, and a Readership in 2018.

My chief research interest lies in the study of ancient slavery. At present, I work especially on child slavery in the Roman world, part of which has been funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2017-2020). I have also recently directed the first phase of a larger project on ‘The Roman Slave Community', supported by the University CAHSS Challenge Investment Fund, and have joined forces with Prof. Pedro López Barja (USC) and Prof. Carla Masa Doria (Naples, Federico II) on a collaborative study of Junian Latinity, including the publication of multi-disciplinary work arising from the project: Junian Latinity in the Roman Empire. Beyond research into slavery, I am particularly interested in how ancient historians (like Livy) constructed the past, as well as how those not given a history can be excavated from the rubble of the past – be that the various peoples of ancient Italy, Roman Italy’s rural population, or the bulk of ancient society, i.e. women and children.

In the classroom, I focus on diverse topics in ancient, especially Roman (social) history, including the complexities of ancient slaving. But whatever the topic, I seek to challenge our students to reflect on the modern world through the lens of antiquity and the full range of the surviving evidence. Teaching apart, from early on in my career I have held diverse academic management roles (such as, at Edinburgh, the headship of Classics, 2011-2015, and as REF2014 co-ordinator for Classics), as well as honorary offices (including the office of Honorary Secretary of the British Epigraphy Society, 2010-2022, and as Statistics Officer for the Council of University Classical Departments, 2009-2015).

• Member, AHRC Peer Review College, 2020-2023

• Series Editor, Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Slavery (ESAS)

• Honorary Secretary, The British Epigraphy Society, 2010-2022

• Expert étranger, Prix SoPHAU (Société des professeurs d'histoire ancienne de l'université, France), 2016

• Standing Committee Member, and Statistics Officer, Council of University Classical Departments, 2009-2015

• Panel Member, Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) Gender Equality Charter Mark Trial, 2014

Dr Roth on BBC Radio 4 - In our Time on 'Roman Slavery' with Melvyn Bragg

Summary of research interests

• Europe
• Mediterranean

• Culture
• Gender
• Ideas
• Labour
• Society

• Antiquity
• Medieval

Beside my love for ancient (and modern) Italy, my research interests lie in the study of slavery, primarily Roman, both rural and urban. In particular, I seek to understand the ways in which slavery helped satisfy Roman society's labour requirements as well as how slavery was conceptualised. But my interest in the study of slavery arises from a much wider concern with social organisation – and slavery, as a system based on force, offers an often much more accentuated picture of the roles that different folk have been allocated in a given society. What I seek to grasp is how such role-giving works, what (if any) levels of negotiation exist, and why individuals accept or break away from the roles given to them – then as now.

On the broader historical plane, my work engages with slavery’s role in the evolution of European social, economic and cultural practices, and especially those concerning class and gender relations. My working hypothesis is that the Roman ‘invention’ of slavery established a distinctive organisation of labour ‘at work’ that has in essence been maintained by European society up to and beyond the abolition of slavery: slavery made possible a division of labour based on the regular exploitation of significant numbers of labourers working typically for someone other than themselves, entailing crucial gender and status distinctions. ‘Made at Rome’, this system of labour organisation was passed on to post-classical society: slavery is the means by which a major shift in social organisation became embedded in European society, and an essential field of inquiry for understanding Western culture.

A critical dimension in my thinking about the role of slavery in this early phase of European history is the vexed question of the ‘nature’ of slavery. I reject the notion that the enslaved in the Roman world, unlike medieval serfs, lacked familial and kinship relations, and that the unfree became embedded in such relations in the course of the Roman imperial period only, moving slowly towards a serfdom-model. This transition model hinges on a distorted view of Roman slavery that I seek to revise through my work on enslaved families, women and children at Rome.

To challenge the standard view of the transition from Roman to medieval times, I have concentrated in past and current research activities on demonstrating that the central texts documenting Roman agricultural slavery from the middle Republic to the early Empire – c. 150 BC to AD 50 – show already the widespread exploitation of enslaved women in rural contexts and, hence, the typical existence of enslaved families in the countryside of Roman Italy (esp. Thinking Tools (2007); see also PBSR 2011; Index 2008; JRA 2005; PBSR 2004).

To demolish in its entirety the false notion that Roman slavery was not characterised by work and life in family units, it is essential to document in a separate argument the role of enslaved children, in both Republic and Empire – which is the focus of my current work, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship: Enslaved Childhoods: Redefining Roman Slavery. Once it is established that child slavery was quantitatively and qualitatively a distinctive element of Roman slaving through the ages, my argument can move on to deal with the labour conditions of the enslaved, i.e. the economic relationships between slaver and enslaved, to show their great variety besides their similarities with the economic relationships between medieval lord and serf.

This step of my work also includes detailed analysis of the representation of freedom in key texts of the Roman imperial period to expose a substantially ‘messier’ approach to slavery and freedom than widely accepted. I question the notion that the Roman elite shared an essentially uniform approach and attitude to slavery and the enslaved, arguing that Rome’s elite was affected by severe disagreements concerning the relative value of self-advancement and political service, the individual and the community, freedom and slavery. (For details see ‘Research Projects’, below). I also plan to work on medieval evidence to document the continuity of exploitation structures known to be typical of the Roman world into the Middle Ages. In this, as well as in current work on late antique and early medieval topics, my focus is on the role of the Christian Church in the continued exploitation of men, women and children as enslaved and dependent labourers, exploring the hypothesis that the Church – following the Pauline model (e.g. ZNW 2014) – was the key enabler of slavery’s transmission from the Roman to the medieval world (e.g. Antiquité Tardive 2016).

Apart from my work on Roman child slavery, ongoing projects include analyses of several texts of the Roman imperial era that conceptualise and explore different notions of Roman libertas.

First, I am working on Petronius' Trimalchio, and the construction of social death, arguing inter alia that the Satyricon is a response to the writings of (e.g.) Pliny the Younger, and also to Tacitus – thus also dating the text to the second century (CQ 2016). The book-length re-reading of Trimalchio's 'Life' is advancing in tandem with smaller studies of individual (technical) aspects (e.g. CQ 2014; Revue de Philologie 2009).

Second, in a 'parallel' project, I explore in a book-length study the senate meeting in the first book of Tacitus’ Annals – provisionally titled Tacitus and the Limits of Empire. From Paratext to Intellectual History – which offers at base a new reading of one of the most baffling sentences in ‘Augustus’ testament’, i.e. the recommendation to keep the empire within its bounds: … Augustus addideratque consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii, incertum metu an per invidiam (Ann. 1.11.4). The book explores a creative misreading of the passage to reveal a hitherto unrecognised dimension of the Tacitean approach to imperial government – and a much more complex attitude to libertas at Rome.

Finally, I have made the mistake to have got excited about Livy, and his attempt to ‘save’ the Romans from a Gallic take-over, thereby preserving Roman libertas, in Book 5. I argue in a longer study and several shorter pieces (e.g. Mnemosyne 2018; CQ 2020) that Livy knew a historiographic thread that saw Rome taken in its entirety – but that he evidently chose to offer an alternative (hi)story, thereby ‘saving Rome’ from (the shame of) slavery.

All three projects – Livy, Tacitus, Petronius – add to my argument that ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ were concepts (and realities) that were heavily debated by the Romans of the (early) imperial period, muddying the waters between a seemingly clear-cut Roman world of slavery and a more complex medieval world of serfdom.

There have never been more people subject to enslavement and forced labour than in today’s world. Slavery is, sadly, not restricted to the long gone past, but an acute issue that requires direct engagement. I hold that the historical study of slavery must inform our approach to slaving in all its forms, and that such historical study forms part of the fight against modern-day slavery. To do so engenders the question of how we study past slaveries, and how we approach the evidence – in short: whose story we choose to tell. As researchers we face the tricky challenge of often one-sided, partial and fragmentary evidence. For the ancient world, this evidence typically foregrounds the perspectives of those in socially, economically, culturally and politically dominant roles, marginalising individuals and groups subjected to slavery. It is therefore of utmost importance to explore approaches that confront the gaps in our evidence, and that bridge those gaps.

In my work on enslaved children in the ancient Roman world, for example, I seek to foreground what I call ‘the enslaved voice’, to move our perspective away from that of those who exercised the powers of ownership over these children. Doing so requires a focus on the seemingly nugatory evidence that documents those children’s lives without being buried under excessive layers of mediation at the hands of those who held these children in slavery – such as the many tombstones of enslaved boys and girls set up by their parents. But it also requires a preparedness to interpret evidence widely held to illustrate only the views of those in often excessive power over others against the grain – such as the many ancient literary texts that deal with slavery and the enslaved: these, too, contain relics of much more complex views than often acknowledged, and some can even be made to reveal a quite different, questioning take on the seemingly unproblematised Roman embrace of slavery.

This kind of shift in perspective and approach is also a quintessential requirement today in the cultural milieus that foster the enslavement of individuals, even in societies in which the legal framework denies enslavement of any human being, and in which the dominant socio-political attitude is thoroughly against any form of slavery. It follows that historians have a responsibility to bring to life again the voices of those who cannot do so any longer – and in particular those voices that others sought to silence: in this way historians join the community of action that rejects enslavement and slaving today, by giving the topic centre-stage, shifting perspectives, and providing scope for the views of those not easily heard.

I thoroughly enjoy teaching at undergraduate level – be it in the large first-year lecture theatre and covering the history of Rome from its beginnings to Empire, the more advanced second-year historiography and methodology courses, or in the thematically focused Honours classes - such as those listed below.

Honours:

• Ancient Greek Slavery (option)
• Roman Slavery (option)
• Society and Epigraphy in Roman Italy (option)
• Life and Labour in the Ancient World (option)
• Law and Life at Rome (option)
• Roman Imperialism (option)

Sub-Honours:

• Ancient History 2a: Past and Present in the Ancient World
• Ancient History 2b: Themes and Theories in Ancient History
• Classics: Roman World 1a

My postgraduate teaching arises from my research – primarily into (Roman) slavery, but also into the history of what is often called ‘pre-Roman’ Italy. I very much enjoy the focused, small-group seminar atmosphere of our MSc courses – and normally teach one of the following thematic courses each year. I also contribute to our skills and methodology training in Classics at postgraduate level.

Thematic ('Option') Courses:

• Agricultural Slavery in the Graeco-Roman World
• Slavery, Society and Law at Rome
• The Making of Roman Italy

Dr Roth welcomes inquiries from prospective doctoral students who wish to work in the areas of her research expertise, esp. the study of ancient Italy, Roman historiography and, foremost, ancient slavery.