By Fiona Macdonald
The same cartoon-and-jokes series, now used to tell the honest truth about being enslaved in ancient Greece.
This entry in the funny fact-book series takes on a subject that isn't funny at all, and that tension is the point. You are a captured servant in ancient Greece, and the book walks you through what that meant: the slave market, the household you're sold into, the endless work, and, if your luck is worst, the silver mines. It keeps the series' cartoon look and wry captions, but it doesn't pretend slavery was anything other than what it was. For a classroom, it's a way to show children that the glory of ancient Greece was built on the backs of people who owned nothing, not even themselves.
It gives a class the underside of the ancient Greece unit, the enslaved majority behind the philosophers and the temples, in a format a reluctant reader will actually finish. The familiar cartoon style lowers the barrier, but the content is honest enough to anchor a real discussion about who did the work in a great civilization and what it cost them. It stands alone and pairs naturally with any Greece read, from the myths to a straight history.