Eash. Don't do that.

My pedagogy on this point isn't by any means perfect, but my method has been to focus on the experience of slavery for the enslaved people - use the sources to talk about varying conditions, norms, etc.

I treat 'slavery is bad' as a self-evident premise.
Of course we also talk about ancient attitudes towards slavery, how it was generally treated as normal and even how it was justified - but from the premise that we, possessed of greater understanding, know that slavery is, in fact, bad.
Which, to be honest, if you take an enslaved-person-centric approach to ancient slavery and just give the students sources (e.g. amazon.com/Greek-Slavery-…), the premise really is self-evident, given how awful a lot of the treatment is.
Instead of asking students to 'justify' slavery, I ask them to *describe* it using the evidence they read.

In my experience it does not require much or indeed any teaching intervention for them to draw their own conclusions (typically some form of horrified 'oh s***').

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More from @BretDevereaux

13 Jan
Alright, going to pick up again live-tweeting my reactions to the next few videos in Steven Pressfield's 'The Warrior Archteype series.' I looked at the first five videos last time here:
The short summary of the first five videos is that they presented a utopian Sparta, almost entirely from Plutarch, read very uncritically & thus fell prey to the Myths of Spartan Equality and Spartan Military Excellence, which I have already exploded here: acoup.blog/2019/08/16/col…
Now I want to change up my tone a little bit because in the first posts I was rather flip and dismissive and I want to offer a bit more intellectual charity here.

Now on to 'Episode Six' which is...oh good heavens...which is "Come and Take Them." Because of course it is.
Read 38 tweets
11 Jan
Alright, I think it's time to get more ancient stuff on this twitter, so I'm going to start sharing some of my favorite ancient artifacts.

Let's start with BM 2001,0501.1: The Braganza Brooch: britishmuseum.org/collection/obj… 1/12 Image
The brooch was part of the collection of the House of Braganza (the kings of Portugal). How it got there, I don't believe we know, but based on the piece itself, it was likely manufactured in the third century BCE. 2/12
It has a warrior on it, equipped in La Tene Material culture (read: Gallic) style. The artist has taken care to render the kit very accurately: the odd Gallic scabbard suspension is recreated correctly (despite not being shared by the Romans or Greeks)... 3/12 Image
Read 13 tweets
10 Jan
Thucydides (3.82.7) has a line about civil strife, "revenge was held better than avoiding harm in the first place and oaths of reconciliation, being offered only to meet a current setback, held good only while there was no other weapon to hand."

Lot of that going around now.
When Marco Rubio thought he was winning, he was all, "We Love What They Did" about violence and intimidation (miami.cbslocal.com/2020/11/03/flo…), now that he's losing and has "no other weapon to hand" he's all about forgiveness and 'unity.'
You know who didn't do that?➡️Joe freakin' Biden⬅️. @JoeBiden was for the same program of justice, accountability and unity today as he was during the general election.

He was for the law when the rioters were supposedly on 'his side' and when they were on 'the other side.'
Read 4 tweets
7 Jan
So I'm seeing the same set of reactions to the line "this isn't what America is" which is to respond with the obvious truth that...well, yes it is.

The United States has been lots of things, good and bad and this sad moment is one of them.

But I think that misses the point. 1/
I was struck, in reading Andrew Wolpert's Remembering Defeat (2001), in how central the act of communal redefinition was to restoring the Athenian democracy in the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants. 2/
In speech after speech, inscription after inscription, that same formula - 'that is/isn't what we are' - recurs. The 'real Athens,' speakers insisted, was the one that had lived in exile, the one that had remained committed to the democracy. Not the Thirty. 3/
Read 8 tweets
6 Jan
Since y'all wanted me to write about the silly idea of the 'universal warrior' and warrior vs. soldier dichotomy, and it came up in the context of Steven Pressfield's silly video...I am now watching his video series.

Y'all do not know the pains I go through to educate the public
Seriously, he opens by treating Plutarch's Sayings of Spartan Women entirely uncritically as a representation of Spartan culture pre-490.

That is the very first thing he does and it causes me physical pain.
Also, he's calling Sparta a warrior culture, which...I hate Sparta. A lot. I am on record on this point.

But even I would contend that the Spartans were soldiers, not warriors.
Read 39 tweets
4 Jan
This thing!

Sanctions have their uses (mostly actually as a diplomatic tool for bloc-building, I'd argue), but as a means of suasion, they really only work on issues an adversary considers relatively unimportant.
That said, I think there is a tendency to confuse sanctions-as-suasion vs. sanctions-as-economic-warfare (not being made by @EmmaMAshford here, to be clear), because we often pretend we're doing the former when we're really doing the later.
"We are going to intentionally crater the economy of X so they have less resources to do Y" is a fairly reasonable strategic maneuver, but not a very politic one given that
1) the pain falls on regular people and
2) admitting the goal is essentially admitting to hostilities.
Read 4 tweets

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