About

Joshua D. Sosin is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University, where he has been a faculty member since 2006. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of law, economics, and religion in the ancient world, with particular attention to documentary sources such as inscriptions, papyri, and coins. Sosin has written extensively on topics including currency standards, charitable foundations, festival funding, grain supply, land leasing, taxation, diplomacy, and personal status under Athenian law, especially as preserved in lexicographic, encyclopedic, and scholiastic traditions. He is actively involved in the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3), which develops projects related to papyrological and epigraphic texts, geo-spatial data, prosopographical information, and image recognition technologies. Sosin also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Classical Studies and the Faculty Director of the Nationally Competitive Scholarships at Duke. His research interests reflect a broad curiosity about the ancient world, and he emphasizes the importance of diverse sources and methodologies in classical scholarship.

Research topics

• History
• Law
• Political science
• Philosophy
• Computer science

Selected publications

• Ransom at Athens ([Dem.] 53.11)

  Historia · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  “The laws even command that he who is ransomed belongs to the one who ransomed him from the enemy, if he does not pay the ransom” ([Dem] 53.11). This is widely regarded as an exception to Solon’s law against enslavement for debt. Harris has made a strong case that the law cited by Apollodoros’ opponent did not concern debt-slavery. This paper suggests, furthermore, that the law did not apply to him and his situation at all; that we have misunderstood what this law “commands;” that ransom was a more varied process than scholars have allowed; and that the law on ransom, so often thought to have been an exception to the ban on debt-slavery, may in fact have been essential to the broader objective of which the ban was part.

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• A Metic was a Metic

  Historia · 2016-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In Classical Athens, an immigrant who stayed longer than about a month was required to register a citizen as prostates and to commence paying the metoikion. So were freed slaves. A recent study treats these freeborn and freedman metics as distinct legal types of resident alien. Athenian law did not.

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• Death on a Road (Dem. 23.53)

  Historia · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Scholarly consensus holds that a law quoted in Demosthenes (23.53) permitted one to kill a highway robber who had lain in ambush and attacked one on a road. But the relevant phrase (ἐν ὁδῷ καθελών) says nothing explicit about ambush. Modern interpretation derives from Harpocration and other ancient authorities. It is argued here that they were mistaken and that the phrase ‘ἐν ὁδῷ καθελών’ referred to those who inadvertently killed a fellow traveler while ‘overtaking on a road.’ The new interpretation may offer another way to think about the encounter between Oedipus and Laius.

  PublisherDOI

• Integrating Digital Epigraphies (or, if you think the 19th century was bad, try living in the 20th)

  Balisage series on markup technologies · 2015-08-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  IDEs aims to provide core infrastructure for the field of Greek epigraphy (the study of texts carved on stone), by supporting annotation across an array of disparate digital resources. Epigraphy was born in the early to mid 19th century and has been productive ever since. Perhaps a million Latin and Greek inscriptions are known today. These objects are often badly preserved, physically removed from their original context or even lost; many are repeatedly re-published, emended, joined to other fragments, re-dated, re-provenanced, and not only do they lack a single unambiguous identification system, but many thousands are known by multiple, competing and badly controlled bibliographic shorthands. They are unstable in many senses. Print publication of inscriptions in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th is marked by a considerable and fulsome descriptive rigor. In the generation straddling the 20th and 21st centuries, scholars developed a rich variety digital epigraphy tools. But in all cases these were descendants of previous print resources and entailed significant suppression of the semantic richness that was the (albeit loosely controlled) norm in print publication. In a way, then, much of our effort is devoted to creating a framework for allowing users to re-infuse a suite of late 20th-century tools with the 19th-century scholarly sensibility (and even the very data!) that long informed print epigraphy.

  PublisherDOI

• “Those who Live Apart” were Mercenaries

  Historia · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Since antiquity, scholars have thought that the phrase τοὺς χωρὶς οἰκοῦντας (Dem. 4.36) indicated a special class of slaves, or freedmen, or an unspecified form of free alien. The argument advanced in Dem. 4, this paper suggests, shows that the individuals who lived apart were mercenaries.

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• Manumission with Paramone : Conditional Freedom?

  TAPA · 2015-09-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A common view holds that slaves freed on condition of paramone were juridical halfings, legally half-free, half-slave.This paper argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek sources, mainly epigraphic; that the intermediate or hybrid juridical state of conditional freedom is a modern invention; that the evidence for manumission in the Greek world suggests overwhelmingly that polities constructed liberty and slavery as a binary pair, rather than poles on a spectrum."Next to paganism, the institution of slavery is probably the most difficult feature of ancient life for a modern student to understand." 1 Manumission with it.From Delphi alone, some 1000 inscriptions attest to over 1200 manumissions (ca.200BC-ca.100AD). 2 Inscriptions from Boiotia, Phokis, Thessaly, Macedonia, Bouthrotos, Kalymna, Lemnos, and elsewhere offer hundreds more.Scholarly attention has fallen heavily on Delphi, where manumission is held to have worked roughly as follows.A slave somehow acquired enough money to purchase freedom.But since the slave was legally incapable of contracting the purchase, it, its owner, and the god engaged in a sham sale wherein the slave entrusted the sale (and funds) to Apollo, who bought the slave.This 'sale' in effect freed the slave.In roughly a third of known cases, the former slave was subject to paramone.This obliged her to 'remain' in service to her manumittor, in semi-slavery, free to go and yet required to remain in a state of conditional or partial freedom.Service was usually to conclude upon the former master's death, at which point the freedperson left this state of semi-slavery and became properly free.Westermann and Finley "used this intermediate stage of conditional release to create the concept of a spectrum of statuses between slave and free.This idea seems now," Hopkins could write in 1981, "to have won general acceptance among ancient historians and has undermined the old, strict dichotomy, slave-free." 3 A generation later, acceptance is widespread.A valuable monograph articulates a graded spectrum of statuses in Classical Athens. 4 A rich, comprehensive study of Greek manumission concludes uncontroversially that: Manumission inscriptions that include paramone clauses and other conditions reflect the ambiguous status of manumitted slaves.The freed persons remained with their manumittors, served them as slaves, and were liable to corporal punishment and to revocation of their manumission should they fail to do as ordered.On the other hand, they 1 Welles 1956: 316.

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• Tax Exemption and Athenian Imperial Politics: The Case of Chalkis

  Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) · 2014-09-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  summary: This paper argues that the clause at IG I 3 40.52–57, which refers to taxation of aliens at Chalkis and has long puzzled scholars, stipulated that any non-Chalkidian who had been granted immunity from Athenian tele , conditional on residence at Athens or not, should enjoy the same immunity from Chalkidian tele at Chalkis; that the inscription belongs to 424/3 b.c.e , when Athenian law and honorific practice were much concerned with taxation and immunities. Though long seen as fiscal punishment by a newly imperial Athens, the action was connected to later debates about local honors and domestic taxation, and was rather mild.

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• Athenian Road Kill (Dem. 23.53)

  DukeSpace (Duke University) · 2014-09-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Endowed Eponymous Festivals on Delos

  Kernos · 2014-01-01 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Au iie siècle avant notre ère, Délos a vu se créer près de vingt-cinq fonds, par des hommes et des femmes, Déliens et étrangers, et, un cran plus haut dans la célébrité, par des rois hellénistiques ou leurs agents. Les chercheurs s’accordent à penser que ces fonds permettaient d’organiser des fêtes (surtout éponymes : Antigoneia, Eutycheia, Philonideia, Ptolemaieia, Stesileia, etc.), et se sont concentrés sur la motivation politique, sur les objectifs et les effets de la douzaine de cas royaux. Cet article fait l’hypothèse que le grec des comptes déliens a été mal interprété ; les fonds ne finançaient pas des fêtes éponymes en soi, mais la récurrence modeste de rituels qui étaient établis à l’occasion d’événements familiaux importants, comme les mariages et les décès ; ce phénomène délien particulier a davantage à dire sur la véritable piété que sur la grande politique, et il offre davantage de points communs avec le culte familial hellénistique qu’avec la culture des fêtes.

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• Endowments and Taxation in the Hellenistic World

  DukeSpace (Duke University) · 2014-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper suggests that a number of well known Hellenistic endowments were crafted in such a way that, in addition to the pious purposes that they served, they also allowed founders and elite peers to limit tax-liability by sheltering real estate from the possibility of assessment for taxation.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Terry G. Wilfong

  2 shared

• Sarah Clackson

  2 shared

• K.A. Worp

  2 shared

• John F. Oates

  City University of New York

  2 shared

• Roger S. Bagnall

  2 shared

• J.F. Oates

  2 shared

• Deborah Anderson

  University of Alabama

  1 shared

• Hugh Cayless

  Duke University

  1 shared