A Cultural History of Incarceration and the Prison in Greece and Rome

FAIN: FEL-267657-20

Marcus Folch
Columbia University (New York, NY 10027-7922)

Research and writing leading to a book on the social and political history of prisons in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

The first comprehensive study in English of the development of prisons in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Combining archaeological, historiographical, legal, and literary evidence, this book offers a systematic examination of the earliest evidence for the emergence of prisons in Archaic Greece. It examines forms of incarceration, such as debt bondage and slavery, which predated, coexisted alongside, and supplied conceptual, legal, and linguistic frameworks within which early prisons were understood. It presents historical analysis of the state prison in Athens and the Classical Athenian prisoner population. And it examines the uses of incarceration in Roman law and the proliferation of prisons as an instrument of imperial administration in the Roman Empire, showing that these prisons served as the site of complex negotiations of authority among the imperial center located in Rome, provincial governors who oversaw the administration of prisons, and local populations.