The following remarks were delivered at a book review panel on November 22, 2025, at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Boston. This session was organized by Agnes Choi (Pacific Lutheran University) and Tony Keddie (University of Texas at Austin) on behalf of the Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy and Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament program units. The focus of the discussion was Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, 2025), a timely, engaging, and accessible new book by the Roman historian, Sarah E. Bond (University of Iowa), well-known to students and scholars of global antiquity for her prolific and stimulating public-facing scholarship for outlets such as Hyperallergic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. This forum presents the reviews by Laura Salah Nasrallah (Yale University), Jennifer Quigley (Emory University), and Richard Last (Trent University).
A Response to Sarah Bond's Strike!
In 1982, artist Jenny Holzer’s truisms were broadcast in NYC in the pixelated message that read in white letters across the black background of an electric billboard in Times Square. Picture it: on a massive screen on a street corner, you read, in sans serif font and all capital letters: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.
Ancient Associations and Collective Labor Action in Sarah Bond’s Strike
by Richard Last
With this fascinating new book, Sarah Bond provides a new model for understanding the relationship between ancient associations and labor in Rome, Italy, and the western provinces primarily, but also in the Greek East.
Ancient Associations and Collective Labor Action in Sarah Bond’s Strike
by Richard Last
With this fascinating new book, Sarah Bond provides a new model for understanding the relationship between ancient associations and labor in Rome, Italy, and the western provinces primarily, but also in the Greek East. The book analyzes the better-known instances of collective labor action in antiquity, of course (e.g., IEph 215 [Ephesus; II CE]; CIL 3.14165.8 [Arles, late II/early III CE]; Acts 19.23-41). Whereas these episodes have been seen usually as unreflective of the activities and function of occupational associations in antiquity, Bond demonstrates that they were actually mere illustrations of an ongoing, often silenced, broader history of collective bargaining, striking, and other violent and non-violent collective action behind the transformation of Roman society throughout the Republican and Imperial eras.
In my master’s program, as I was just beginning to sort out that I wanted to get a doctoral degree and that maybe biblical studies was the field for me, I worked part-time at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, at Boston University. HGARC, as it’s called, holds a large collection of materials from Martin Luther King, Jr., an alumnus of the school, and I got the chance to spend ten to fifteen hours a week with boxes of materials shared by King with the university. I walked through that solid steel, secured door that first day on the job with visions in my head; as I entered a small room with neat blue boxes, I imagined them full to the brim of speech drafts, sermon notes, handwritten correspondence, all coming from the pen of King himself. After all, I had seen King’s leather briefcase perched in place of honor on the top shelf the day I interviewed. And there were a few pieces like that.