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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

It's poorly written, and the subject matter is interesting, but it's only worth reading if you can also trust it.

Take a look at the screenshot https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YoT5zTT4p9Y/XuGVBfGPpaI/AAAAAAAAP... the author describes as

> According to this widely used textbook for learning ancient Greek, published by Oxford University Press, slavery was benign, and enslaved people were ‘lively and cheeky characters’. (Balme and Lawall, Athenaze, 3rd edition 2016, ch. 2)

Do you think this is anything even remotely close to a reasonable paraphrase, or rather, brazenly lying to the reader? As I am not a classicist, that means I can't trust anything else he says either. (At least HN now lets me retract my upvotes for articles.)

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I think the Cambridge Latin Course just updated their textbooks and one of the changes was to change the treatment of slaves to make them less objectified, so this bit seems plausible to me.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-cambridge-latin-cour...

> Enslaved characters were, in earlier editions, sometimes depicted in simplistic terms: as “happy”, “hard-working” or “lazy”. In the new edition, slavery is now depicted through the eyes of its victims, focusing on their anxieties and gruelling lives.

The citation is exactly the edition from 2016, presumably it is or isn't the updated one. From looking at your link, the update was 2022.

I agree that the author's style is not the best, but I think that what you describe as a paraphrase was meant more as a polemic. That is why the author quotes the whole textbook passage. I do not think he meant to imply that the textbook was making a specifically false statement, but that by its general approach it illustrates a tendency to portray slavery as not as bad as it actually was. Whether this is broadly the case with such textbooks would, of course, need to be demonstrated in much greater detail. However, the author links a more detailed critique above the quoted textbook passage.

Slaves didn't have time to write books.

Typically true, but we know of a few prominent freedmen from the ancient world that wrote books: Aesop and his translator Phadrus, Epictetus, Phaedo of Elis and Marcus Tullius Tiro, the secretary of Cicero.

AIUI, Epictetus also discusses the matter quite directly and is under no illusion about his relative "downtrodden" status, so the contrary remark found in the textbook looks like naïve, groundless speculation. Slaves may have been personally "lively" and had complex stories - Epictetus certainly did - but this is a different matter altogether.

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