Covering late antique Egypt into the period of Arab rule, this chapter introduces documents and literary texts translated from Greek, Coptic, and Arabic. In the countryside, coloni joined slaves and dependents at work on the great estates of Byzantine Egypt, while in the cities slavery continued as before. Coptic literature from the same period introduces servitude within Christian monasteries. The writings of Shenoute and Gnostic texts regularly employ the vocabulary of slavery in a negative sense. The trade, employment, and emancipation of slaves continued. Conscripted labour is also documented. Children and adults donated to monasteries represent a new form of sacred servitude. With the Arab conquest of Egypt, war and raiding resurface as important sources of slaves. Nubia and the Near East were again key areas for their acquisition, and slaves are illustrated as active in most areas of life and integrated into the religious life of their owners’ households.

The title of this chapter plays with the problem of understanding the role of slavery in late ancient Egypt. Scholars tend to agree that Egyptians, with a large tenant farmer population, relied far less heavily on enslaved labour than their counterparts elsewhere in the Empire. These smaller numbers mean that enslavement is harder to trace as a phenomenon. Thus, to discern how slavery functioned and who the enslaved were requires a certain amount of ‘divining’ or well-informed guesswork. Luckily, a wealth of extant documentary evidence and literary, largely monastic, texts are available for such an endeavour. To do such imaginative work responsibly requires careful attention to brief references to the enslaved, to the larger world in which they moved, and to how scriptural appropriation of slave imagery among monks masks the presence of actual enslaved individuals within the community.

Monastic sources warn of the distractions and even dangers of maintaining familial attachments once in the monastery. Affective bonds between children and parents prove to be some of the most contested relationships in the communities. These bonds are further complicated by being intertwined with economic ties and social bonds. Regulating emotions was an important element of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery (led by Shenoute and then Besa), Jerome's and Paula's monasteries, and Cassian's monastery.These authors and ascetic leaders urged monks male and female to discipline their emotions toward their relatives and redirect their affect in what they deemed to be more appropriate direction, such as positive affect for their monastic family and reverence for God. They also used these familial bonds as points of leverage, appealing to emotions between family members to manipulate and influence others. Thisdiscourse is gendered, with ideal emotional states reflecting ideals of masculinity and femininity held by the authors. Additionally, these emotional ideals are influenced by classical philosophy (especially Stoicism) and shaped through biblical interpretation.

Late antique monasticism both participated in and disrupted familial networks of power in the Mediterranean world. The book concludes by arguing that Christian monasticism as an institution positioned itself as both rival and heir to the classical tradition of familia, challenging the ancient household’s position as the cornerstone of society’s political and economic apparatuses. Monasticism asceticized a key component of this institution – fatherhood –while maintaining that this anomaly – the celibate, ascetic father – was no innovation; the monastic father was but one node in a chain of fathers and sons stretching back into the biblical era and forward into eternity. Monasticism transformed traditions of paternity, inheritance, and genealogy. Focusing on the monastic federation of Shenoute in upper Egypt and the monastery of Cassian in Gaul, this chapter demonstrates how the coenobiumpositioned itself as a “house” or domus in late antique culture – an ancient institution that included home, household, property, and family, and required the financial, religious, disciplinary, and educational management of all of those moving parts.

Children in early Egyptian monasteries were simultaneously a special, protected class and one of the most vulnerable populations – in some ways protected from the realities of the poverty-stricken world outside the monastic walls and the rigors of asceticism within, in other ways still vulnerable to the whims, desires, and ambitions of the adult monks around them. A status above the enslaved, but well below free adult men, children even in the monastery found their standing and status subject to negotiation. Children were in many ways a gift; caring for them was regarded as a sacred duty commanded directly by God. Their many needs and challenges, however, remained secondary to those of their adult caregivers. This chapter examines the education of children, their discipline (including corporal punishment), and their preparation for future lives as monastics.