Part II - ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters’

Summary

Part II considers how Christian authors addressed the issue of slavery. In the late Roman world, slavery functioned as a fundamental socio-economic framework around which contemporaries organised their lives, conceptually and practically.¹ Just as Jonathan Tallon’s chapter in Part I shows how slavery within the household found acceptance, albeit sometimes grudgingly, in the writings of John Chrysostom, so the following chapters demonstrate how slavery was woven into the fabric of Christian society in later antiquity. Christian writers and preachers used metaphors of slavery in order to communicate with their audiences, while slaves were ever-present, if not always recorded, in Christian communities.