In Ryan George’s wonderful “Pitch Meeting” series, on YouTube, the excitable producer character, relishing the eager screenwriter character’s ability to load a conflict with life-or-death consequences, always enunciates “stakes!” with shivering excitement. Similarly, when we read non-narrative scholarly books, what we want in exchange for all the minutiae is a sense that something significant, something we might call stakesy, is on the line. When scholars debate the dating of the Gospels, the time difference may seem small, but the stakes are obvious: Were these texts written by contemporaries of Jesus or not? Another book, say, on eighteenth-century musket design, may take many pages before it reveals that nothing less than the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is in play.

Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney’s “Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration” (California) is a dense, sometimes exhaustingly detailed work, but its stakes turn out to be as high as can be: the origins and meaning of incarceration itself. The central question is whether incarceration is a special affliction of the post-Enlightenment world, as Michel Foucault argued in his epoch- marking 1977 book, “Discipline and Punish”—a position that by the late twentieth century had become, well, almost gospel. What if the history of incarceration is, in fact, remarkably continuous across time, place, and circumstance? Foucault’s enveloping project was to recast Western history as a series of closed “epistemes,” or governing structures of thought, each redefining conventional terms like “reason” and “humanity” according to the brute dictates of power. If the central plank of this hugely influential model is rotten, then the whole might be shakier than it looks.

Much of today’s prison-reform and abolitionist literature rests on the Foucauldian view of incarceration as a distinctly modern cruelty. Foucault’s thesis, advanced as much by oracular assertion as by sustained scholarly argument, was that, before modernity, punishment was almost always physical and absolute. Those designated as criminals, he contended, were torn apart, hanged, or thrown to wild beasts, but rarely locked away alone for decades in institutions designed for the purpose. Temporary confinement in a dungeon might precede crucifixion or a trip to the lions, but the notion of serving a fixed sentence in a cell was, to Foucault, a historically recent development. Instead, punishment was more likely to take the form of fines or of exile—the fate that befell the poet Ovid.

For Foucault, the defining image of pre-modern punishment was the almost unimaginably brutal execution of the would-be royal assassin Robert-François Damiens, in the Paris of Fontenelle and Voltaire. Despite having done little actual harm to Louis XV, Damiens was tortured to death before a crowd—his hands and feet burned, his flesh torn apart by horses. Such punishments, Foucault argued, were aimed at the body: to banish it or to destroy it. The Enlightenment, by contrast, privileged the mind, so the point of punishment shifted to “reform”—to the improvement of a mis-set mind by locking its owner away for years, presumably to give him time to educate it.

Foucault, for his part, did not necessarily see the shift from spectacular violence to confinement as an advance in decency or compassion. To be locked away for decades was not, in his eyes, more humane than being torn apart in a public square—though Damiens himself might have had a different opinion. Only when the mind, rather than the body or the soul, was seen as the true locus of danger did confinement become the preferred solution. In Foucault’s account, the prison cell is not a monument to humanity but a cage for errant consciousness.

Against the idea that modern incarceration is a wholly novel phenomenon, the evidence from antiquity proves to be both abundant and conclusive. Throughout the Mediterranean world—during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine eras—there were prisons, not just temporary holding cells for the condemned en route to execution but purpose-built structures designed to house people for extended periods. As Larsen and Letteney note, it is curious that anyone ever doubted this, given that Vitruvius, the great Roman architectural theorist, explicitly listed a prison alongside a treasury and a meeting house as standard features of a proper city center, or forum. An ancient prison, the Tullian, still sits in the heart of Rome, preserved in part because a Christian church was built atop it to honor the tradition that Peter and Paul were held there before their executions. The Tullian, a dark, wet, cold underground chamber, was used for so many centuries that it was twice renovated and became a model for other prisons throughout the Empire. At least four “civic prisons”—distinct from those attached to military camps or slave-labor mines—have been identified, all following a similar architectural plan.

Hard labor and prison farms were as much a feature of the ancient world as they are of our own. In recent decades, archeologists have uncovered a major Roman prison complex at Simitthus, in present-day Tunisia—a facility capable of holding more than a thousand prisoners in conditions that were, for the time, reasonably sanitary. Built beside a marble mine, it housed slaves and prisoners sentenced to short and long terms as laborers. Larsen and Letteney draw a direct comparison between Simitthus and the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, built in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, one of Foucault’s emblematic Enlightenment prisons. Simitthus, too, was designed for surveillance, discipline, and punishment—a place where the metaphysical machinery of incarceration was already in operation.

Tales of ancient incarceration, which might once have seemed the stuff of legend, turn out, again and again, to have an archeological foundation. Plutarch, the first-century Greek historian, described the misery of a prisoner in the Greek town of Messene; modern excavations have confirmed his account down to the details. A story by the Greco-Roman satirist Lucian, meanwhile, assumes the existence of established protocols for seeing prisoners, including fixed visiting hours—assumptions that make sense only if such routines were part of civic life. The rules of Roman sentencing may have been imprecise, but life sentences certainly existed, and the prisons were genuinely residential, not merely meant for holding people before execution.

People knew about incarceration. Seneca, the Roman philosopher and dramatist (and court counsellor), argued that punishment should be proportionate to the crime, and resisted the notion that every offense required execution. Some crimes, he claimed, called for little more than “a private rebuke followed by public disgrace”; others warranted exile, chains, and imprisonment. In an inscription from the third century C.E., a prisoner named Theodorus thanks the gods after having served a term of twenty-two months in a civic prison—proof that “doing time” was not an invention of the modern era. Graduated, reform-minded incarceration, Larsen and Letteney insist, was present more than a millennium before the Foucauldian model says it was born.

Indeed, some of the most enduring myths of antiquity—often retold, even more often depicted—make sense only against the backdrop of long-term imprisonment. The tale of Pero and Cimon, for instance, is as potent as it is oddly Freudian: Pero, a young woman, visits her starving father, Cimon, in a prison and sustains him with her own breast milk. The scene appears in Roman frescoes, including a surviving example in Pompeii, and after the Renaissance it became a staple of Western art—Rubens, naturally, offered his own disturbingly fleshy version. The story continued to be cited and pictured as an exemplar of Roman charity, but the fable couldn’t have taken root if the idea of Cimon’s long sentence hadn’t resonated with an ancient audience. (The famous Gospel episode featuring Barabbas—the prisoner whom Pilate offers to exchange for Jesus—depends on the plausibility, for a second-century audience, of prolonged imprisonment with the possibility of parole.)

Ancient prisons, of course, had their own distinctive character. Most were underground, like the Tullian in Rome—buried chambers with little light or air, and only the most rudimentary latrines. (One imagines a Foucauldian history of sewage and sanitation, which might prove more pivotal in the shaping of civilization than law or punishment.) Certainly, the stench of antique prisons is the dominant note in the ancient reporting. And, although the microbial mechanisms of disease were unknown, it was obvious that these circumstances were insalubrious in the extreme; a set sentence could easily become a death sentence.

“No. Have you tried across the street?”

Cartoon by Edward Steed

Even that condition, though, is familiar from the debtors’ prisons in Dickens, depicted in the midst of Victorian prosperity. The atmosphere of ancient prisons recalls the ones in “Little Dorrit” and “The Pickwick Papers”: situated in the middle of the city, with a relatively transparent membrane between the streets and the cells, allowing affluent letter writers and provisioners easy access to those inside. There was a kind of constant civic bargaining between guards and prisoners, depending on social status or, more to the point, the money that one had for bribes and favors.

In the end, Larsen and Letteney make their polemical point unambiguously plain. “The modern prison,” they write, “is not a new construction but an old and haunted house.” For all the differences between ancient and modern practice, they conclude, “some aspects of incarceration have appeared in every Mediterranean society for which we have historical data.” Turning decisively against Foucault, they write that incarceration may be “a facet of every hierarchical, complex society.” In other words, it’s always been with us.

What’s at stake in this study is more than the truth or falsity of Foucault’s account of modern incarceration. It is our picture of history itself, and of how incommensurable one period truly is with another. Under the influence of Foucault and his contemporaries, many scholars treat the so-called dialogue of the dead—the imagined passage back and forth between eras—as a kind of pious fiction. Where the third Annales school spoke of mentalités, a shared cast of mind or sensibility, Foucault proposed a more radical concept: the episteme, a matter not of shared psychology but of the governing rules and structures that determine what can be thought or said at any given moment. We are as closed off from the ancients’ mind-set as firmly as they are from ours; their assumptions and tacit expectations about the order of things are lost to us.

It seems possible that prisons existed almost as an afterthought to Roman theories of law. In Andrew M. Riggsby’s “Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome,” for instance, we are given detailed studies of some of Cicero’s surviving legal arguments in defense of Romans accused usually of high crimes, like extortion and conspiracy. There seems enormous and striking contemporaneity in the kind of reasoning Cicero uses—sometimes appealing to the letter of the law, sometimes to a larger framework of social good, so that an accused who can be shown to have done much good in the past ought to be acquitted of a presented misdeed. But there are few references to what will happen to the accused after they are convicted or acquitted. The supple flexibility of Cicero’s arguments is immensely impressive, and so is the sense that the jury—albeit a selective one, of high-ranking Romans—will really listen to the arguments as arguments, and that the still animating republican idea of the rule of law, rather than the diktat of the emperor, genuinely matters to the outcome. But the aftermath is blurred. Capital crimes entail execution or exile, presumably, but the notion of state retribution seems absent from the discourse of individual defense. (Cicero himself, of course, eventually ended up executed, headless and handless, a victim of the new imperial ideal of justice.)

For all the resemblances between the ancient incarceration system and our own, the differences are real. Though we still see the same disparity between the noble public architecture of courts and the degraded architecture of prisons, there was nothing in antiquity close to our bureaucratic machinery for portioning out time behind bars, with its elaborate accessories—parole boards, probation hearings, sentencing guidelines. Foucault’s point was, in retrospect, more illustrative than strictly argumentative: the modern prison was a Black Mass parody of other institutions of modernity—the factory, the office, the psychiatric hospital—where people are processed and sent on their way, reduced to abstract entries in a ledger. That some partial precedent for this practice might be found, if one looks hard enough, doesn’t invalidate the general truth of the view—any more than the existence of medieval European inns offering food for money disproves the fact that the modern restaurant is specifically an invention of post-revolutionary France. Nothing under the sun is ever wholly new—but not everything is as old as time, either.

And yet the odd effect of Larsen and Letteney’s study is to make the continuities more vivid to us than the breaks. The empathetic likeness is greater than the epistemic difference. The sum effect of their book is not so much argumentative as it is piteous. We are left with an image of countless forgotten souls, locked away in dark, underground chambers: some condemned to wait for years without hope of release, others all too aware that they might one day be thrown to the lions or leopards. (Roman mosaics still survive that show leopards leaping at prisoners’ faces—scenes at once horrifying and, by the strange logic of history, the remote source of a contemporary political meme.) Some prisoners were doubtless guilty of some offense; others were simply unlucky in birth or circumstance. What persists is a quiet, bitter awareness of lives long ago consigned to suffering and despair. The feeling, inescapably, is not so different from what we experience today, seeing the images from El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison: rows of men, heads shaved, stripped of identity, packed into cells in a choreography of human pain which has scarcely changed across the millennia.

Suffering and cruelty, after all, are constants—remarkably consistent in their distribution throughout time. It is a familiar mistake to read Foucault through a Marxist lens, as if mass incarceration could be explained by capitalism. Doing so misses his deeper, Nietzschean point: if it isn’t capitalism, it will be something else. For Foucault, cruelty is the substrate of reality, the sediment that lies beneath every system we devise.

Even against that darker kind of universalism, however, some light manages to break through. What lingers with us after reading this book is not so much the sense of an abstract argument won or lost as a helpless awareness of the endless, needless suffering of humanity. Although the ancient world had little resembling a modern prison-reform movement, it was not without moments of indignation which still have the power to move us. Christians, perhaps because they often came from the lower strata most at risk, formed support societies for the imprisoned. Among educated pagans, there were regular, if often ineffectual, appeals to humanitas in the treatment of the oppressed.

Humanitas, as Latinists remind us, is a complex and now contested word: it refers both to a chosen curriculum and to an imperative toward compassion—to artistic cultivation as well as to altruism. Seneca’s and Cicero’s invocations of humanitas were as double-edged as our own talk of the humanities, pointing at once to a body of knowledge and to a moral choice that learning might inspire. The practice of cruelty was all too real, yet so was the idea that humanity entailed a genuine feeling for the helpless. It’s what Seneca meant when he wrote that we give not to man but to humanity. Not just for the people we know but out of a shared feeling for humanity itself.

If we accept a vision of history as a sequence of sealed epistemes—each age defined by its own system of cruelties, each as senseless as the last, with “humanism” reduced to a polite fiction—then the past loses its moral urgency. The history of imprisonment becomes a catalogue of absurdities, to be met with dulled resignation. Even our efforts at reform begin to feel like the latest round in an unwinnable, ageless struggle with power.

It need not be so. The dialogues of the dead are not dialogues of the deaf. The conversation between antiquity and modernity, this new study implicitly argues, is real and constructive. We feel for the victims of both times. For that matter, it’s why poor, exiled Ovid and cautious, persecuted Shakespeare speak so happily across more than a thousand years, why Shakespeare’s poems so closely mirror the Roman poet’s: they are speaking the same language, about the same desires and the same sufferings of the body and the heart. The idea of a common humanity, in this very stakesy view, is not an invention that separates us from the ancients but an inheritance that connects us to them. It’s what makes the dialogue of the dead a conversation among the living. ♦