Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry.
What do we talk about, when we talk about progress?
Do democratic citizens have equal right to rule? Is it enough that they have equal standing before the law, or must there also be economic and social equality? Aldo Schiavone traces these questions and their diverse answers from the ancient world to the present and urges a new course to rescue democracies now suffering from excesses of inequality.
The slave and gladiator Spartacus has been the subject of myth-making in his own time and of movie-making in ours. Aldo Schiavone brings him squarely into the arena of serious history. Spartacus emerges here as the commander of an army, whose aim was to incite Italy to revolt against Rome and to strike at the very heart of the imperial system.
A world-renowned classicist presents a thrilling revisionist biography of the Bible's most controversial figure.