Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The People 107
vary wildly, from 60,000 to 400,000. Paul Cartledge (Oxford Classical
Dictionary, 1415), drawing on evidence from modern slave societies
including Brazil, the Caribbean, and the antebellum South,
estimates that “between 450 and 320 b.c.e. about 80,000 to100,000
slaves of all kinds were active in Attica at any one time (out of a
total population of perhaps a quarter of a million).”
In Classical times, the possession of at least one slave was regarded
as not only a necessity but also a basic right. In a lawsuit written by
Lysias, the speaker states, “I have a trade but I don’t earn much. I
find it difficult making ends meet and I can’t save enough money
to buy anyone to do the work for me” (On the Refusal of a Pension to
an Invalid 6). It is a mark of his meanness that Theophrastos’s Tight-
Fisted Man refuses to buy his wife a slave girl and instead hires one
from the women’s market (Characters 22.10). Every Athenian, like
virtually every other Greek, would have aspired to own at least
one slave, though in reality only members of the middle and upper
classes could afford to do so. Most well-to-do Athenians probably
owned two or three slaves, whereas the wealthy possessed
between ten and twenty. The super rich, however, owned a great
many more. Nikias, one of the richest men in Athens in the late
fifth century b.c.e. , owned a thousand slaves, whom he leased out
to fellow citizens at the rate of one obol per slave per day (Xenophon,
Revenues 4.14). In conclusion, it is probably accurate to state
that the servile population of Athens did not exceed the freeborn
population.
The Racial Diversity of Athens’s Slaves
Athenian slaves were imported from a variety of regions, including
Thrace, Skythia, Illyria, Kolchis, Syria, Karia, and Lydia. Most
of them, in other words, came from the fringes of the Greek world
or beyond. The Thrakians, who occupied the territory that approximately
corresponds to modern Bulgaria, seem to have made it a
custom to offer themselves and their children for sale as slaves.
The names Thrax and Thratta, meaning Thrakian male and Thrakian
female, were among the most common slave names in Athens.
But, although slaves came from a variety of regions, what most of
them had in common, from an Athenian perspective, was the fact
that they were assimilable to the categorization “barbarian.” It is
unthinkable that Greeks from Corinth, Thebes, Sparta, or any other
Greek polis would have served as slaves in Athens.
The purchase price of a slave varied according to such criteria as
skills, age, looks, and place of origin. Obviously, an educated slave