Afterword

Abstract This afterword reflects on what is gained from revisiting the archive of Roman Mediterranean slavery from the perspectives of the book as a historical tool or technology. The study of the book, first, intervenes in attempts at the “rememory” of the archive of slavery in the Roman Mediterranean world, a way of revisiting the past that Toni Morrison offers as pertinent to both to a familial and popular imagination. A second move is to reflect on slavery as an “untimely” phenomenon, Friedrich Nietzsche’s “famous phrase” that directly identifies the trickiness of the comparative framework evident in a juxtaposition of Frederick Douglass to Seneca in the afterword’s opening, a comparative framework and style of juxtaposition that runs throughout the volume. Building on the untimeliness of slavery as a survival, the afterword moves ultimately to the question of morality and ethics, which are seen as some of the implications of these returns to the archive.