ABSTRACT
Moses Finley's interest in slavery was a strong component of his interest in the ancient world: it had been fostered both by his teachers at Columbia and by his collaboration with the Frankfurt School in its New York version of Institute of Social Research. The passion, the acumen and the realism of Finley were concentrated on the clarification of the situation of the slaves within the different societies of the classical world. He had been familiar with Karl Marx from his beginnings, before the Grundrisse gave new food for Marxist thought on slavery. His concentration on pre-capitalistic societies rather than on capitalism was not simply a question of historical specialization. Applied to the problem of slavery, the difference between Greece and Rome meant that in Greece Finley examined the relations between servile conditions and political life, whereas in the Roman Empire he observed social stratification with little curiosity for the politics of the Roman rulers.
