Wow! eBook
Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Author(s): Matthew D.C. Larsen (Author), Mark Letteney (Author)
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication Date: August 12, 2025
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 258 pages
- ISBN-10: 0520422600
- ISBN-13: 9780520422605
Book Description
This book examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies.
Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
“Larsen and Letteney’s work—centrally concerned with rendering the lived experience of ancient incarceration—both uncovers a hidden past and provides a roadmap for historians, criminologists, and practical reformers alike to find, listen to, and recenter too-often silenced voices.”—Keramet Reiter, author of
23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Longterm Solitary Confinement“Drawing on an array of documentary and archaeological sources to argue that incarceration, broadly defined, was an essential instrument of coercion in the ancient Mediterranean world, Larsen and Letteney have given us nothing less than a disturbing new framework for understanding the pervasiveness of institutional violence and social control in classical antiquity.”—Carlos F. Noreña, author of
Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power
