AGATE

The research project, founded in 1950 by Joseph Vogt, aims to investigate ancient slavery in all its manifestations from as many perspectives as possible and with all possible methods. The monographic form of the publication was chosen to realize this comprehensive concept. Since 1990 there has also been a series of supplements in which certain groups of sources are presented with translation and commentary: Currently, the extensive corpus of Roman sources of law on slavery is being published. A dictionary of ancient slavery is currently in the planning stage, which should make the increase in knowledge achieved by the project accessible to a wider audience. The amount of material (lists of lemmata) collected and digitally recorded is considerable. A new edition of the Bibliographie zur antiken Sklaverei (1983) is also nearing completion. The titles are stored in a database, which will be maintained. Since international research on slavery has long required a preoccupation with Marxism, the most important Russian book publications have been presented in a separate series (translations of foreign works on ancient slavery) since 1966 to overcome the language barrier. The staff of the project meets every two years in Mainz for interdisciplinary discussions and to coordinate further planning.