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This book examines the spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean world, covering the period 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 the long history of carceral practices, considering the ways in which the prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism for over two millennia. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the incarcerated, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for new historical consciousness to arise around contemporary practices of incarceration.

Matthew D. C. Larsen is Professor of New Testament at the University of Copenhagen.

Mark Letteney is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Washington.
 

“An instant classic and an astonishing resource that will forever change how we think about the history of incarceration.”—Candida Moss, author of God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible

"Larsen and Letteny’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