AMDG

5 Classical Studies 1

First, some general points.

1. Athens does not = Greece in general. If you do a slavery question, make sure you are clear whether it is referring to Athens or to the whole Greek world; & if the latter, make the point that since most of our evidence comes from Athens, it is mainly Athenian conditions that we are entitled to talk about.
2. Slavery is one only of several different forms of unfree labour found in the ancient world—and even slavery itself can have various different legal definitions: at Athens, it makes sense to speak of chattel-slavery, in which the slave is the legal property of his master, as if he/she were a piece of livestock, or, to use Aristotle's memorable phrase, a 'tool with a soul' (émpsychon órganon). That does not apply to e.g. Homeric society, to Athenian society before Solon (arch. 594 BC), or Sparta in the classical period—in these societies, there existed forms of serfdom (e.g. helots), debt-bondage, or other systems of unfree dependent labour.
3. The existence of unfree labour is closely connected with the lack of technological advancement. Most farming in classical Greece was at subsistence level, cultivators hoping through their own & their family's labour to support themselves & their dependants, & little more: self-sufficiency was the first aim, not profit as from 'cash'-crops. (In contrast, modern equipment enables a handful of the population in developed countries to feed the rest of us). It is hotly disputed whether the lack of technological advance in either Greek or Roman antiquity was a consequence of the availability of unfree labour, or a cause; happily this is not a question you need to decide.
4. Specific agricultural conditions differed from place to place. Egypt is outstandingly fertile along the Nile valley, & so became an important bread-basket for Rome; likewise Messenia & Laconia in Greece. In such places it was much easier to produce a surplus of crops over the needs of the population than it was in Attica, where the soil is unsuitable for grain, though good for vines & olives; hence to some extent the development of the Athenian cash-based eco-system, in which olive products & silver were traded abroad for grain to be imported.
5. You cannot generalise about the living-conditions & treatment of slaves even in Athens, since at least three principal subdivisions can be seen (and even within these there will have been stark differences from case to case):
   (a) publicly owned slaves in 'civil' service;
   (b) privately owned slaves in small-scale domestic service & production;
   (c) large commercial establishments in private ownership, such as Nikias'.
6. Remember to show that you know what kind of evidence exists for slavery in Athens. Four main categories of evidence are involved, viz.:
   (a) Comedy—slaves appear as characters in several of Aristophanes' plays, & their personal relations with their masters in the relevant scenes are highly revealing (as Aristophanes generally is for social history).
   (b) Forensic oratory—i.e., law-court speeches. Of 150 or so surviving speeches, probably half concern disputed property, arising from e.g. arguments over wills, & such property often includes slave-households, like that of Demosthenes'.
   (c) Philosophical writings—Plato, Aristotle & the essayist Xenophon have quite a lot to say about slavery in theory or practice: Aristotle, e.g., begins the first book of the Politics by discussing the basic social unit of a polis, which was the oikos (= 'household'), & this naturally includes slaves; & Socrates' discussion with Ischomachus in Xenophon's Economicus (= 'The Householder') is also highly revealing.
   (d) Inscriptions—those dealing with slaves are few, but important. For example, the Erechtheum accounts show slave craftsmen working alongside their free masters on the building; while the accounts relating to the public auction of the property of Kephisódoros (a metic implicated in the Herms & Mysteries scandals) shows the origins & prices of slaves put up for sale.
   Perhaps surprisingly, the narrative histories (of Herodotos, Thuc. & Xenophon) have little to contribute to our knowledge of slavery, though one passage of Thuc. is important (see below); the same goes for Plutarch's Lives. (I should perhaps add that the evidence of oratory & philosophy comes mainly from the fourth century BC, not the fifth; but this does not much weaken it as evidence for general social conditions which are unlikely to have changed much, although it often makes it unsuitable evidence for the politics of the fifth century).
7. It is worth stressing again that since unfree labour was exploited in some form everywhere in the ancient world, its moral justification was not an issue for Athenians or for anyone else. I have more to say about this, but it is enough to repeat here that every Athenian who could afford to would have at least one or two domestics—though the number who could afford to is disputed.
   

Now to some specifics.

First, Sources, Numbers & Prices of slaves. Precious evidence issues from the estate of Kephisódoros (M/L 79), as attested in an inscription recording the sale at public auction of his property following his disgrace, including the following:
Property of Kephisodoros, resident in Peiraeus:

All the slaves there registered are foreign—Lycians, Syrians, Carians &c. Many slaves also had names ‘such as Threix or Kar ('Thracian', 'Carian'), betraying their foreign origins. Plato at one point protested that it was immoral for Greeks to enslave fellow-Greeks—which proves that sometimes it happened, but equally reflects Greeks' widespread belief that they were naturally superior to other races (a belief frequently attested by oratorical, rhetorical and even philosophical texts, such as Aristotle’s Politics), and morally entitled therefore to enslave them. Oriental bárbaroi in particular were thought to be by nature servile (i.e. 'suitable' or 'fit' for slavery) & unfitted to exercise the rights & privileges of citizenship in a political community such as a Greek pólis. Herodotos has a good story on this: the Spartan King Damaratos at Xerxes' court explains that the Spartans are the best fighters in the world, to which the astonished Xerxes responds by asking how they can be when they have no master (as he was himself‘) master of the Persians): Damaratos replies that the Spartans have indeed a master, namely nómos (the law). Secondly, Kephisódoros' slaves are sold for prices ranging from dr. 70 to something over dr. 300. Admittedly, we do not know whether these were typical prices, nor if these slaves, being sold at public auction & for the benefit of the public exchequer, were lower than the average. The evidence, however, of Socrates’ remarks to Antisthenes (Xen. Mem. 2.5.2), (One slave might be worth two minas [= 200 dr.], another not even half a mina, another as much as ten; and Nikias is said to have paid as much as a talent [= 6,000 dr.] for a manager of his silver-mines) & of Demosthenes' speech against his former guardian Aphobos (27.4ff.—which lists the property forming his estate, including 40-odd slaves) confirms the general area of these valuations. To make sense of such prices, you have to bear in mind that a skilled manual labourer (mason or carpenter for instance) can earn dr. 1-11/2 per day in the 5th century; while rowers in the Athenian fleet drew dr. 1 per day in the 430s. At the richest end of Athenian society, Demosthenes (again) has an estate worth tal. 14 (tal. 1 = dr. 6,000), & a cost of about tal. 1 could be reckoned with for performing a trierarchy; & the so-called hóros-inscriptions (stone markers indicating mortgages for land & houses) have debt-valuations ranging from a few hundred drachmae to about dr. 7,000. For other cost-of-living figures, see Jones, Athenian Democracy, p. 135. The conclusion to draw is that buying a slave or slaves was well within the reach of most Athenians of moderate wealth, as well as that of people with houses in Bishop's Avenue—though it remains unclear what proportion of the citizenry would count as 'moderately' well off.

Total slave numbers are hard to assess, because the evidence is thin, & at least two of the texts offering figures are patently absurd (Athenaeus gives 400,000 at the census of 317, which no-one believes), & probably corrupt. Reasonable estimates vary between about 20,000 (Jones) & about 90,000 (M. H. Hansen, Three Studies in Athenian Demography, 7-12), with Finley, Lauffer & others going for a figure between 60,000 & 80,000; Robin Osborne (Figures in a Classical Landscape), suggests 50,000. Against this we have to ‘reckon with a citizen-population in the fifth century of 30,000-40,000 (double or triple that to account for women, children & metics). Hansen rightly points out that numbers will have fluctuated with the relative prosperity of Athens generally, & reckons on ca. 65,000 during lean periods.
The total numbers are one thing. How they were distributed is quite another. Should we assume that the slaves were widely owned in small numbers, with perhaps one or two per household as the general rule, & establishments such as Nikias' alleged 1,000 mine-workers (Xen. Vect. 4.14f.) ( ‘Those of us who have given thought to the matter have heard long ago that Nikias, son of Nikeratos, once owned a thousand slaves in the silver mines, and these he hired out to Sosias the Thracian on condition that Sosias paid an obol per slave per day, and always kept their number the same’.) very much the exception? Or rather, do the numbers owned by the rich & the super-rich absorb so many that there must have been many Athenians who did not own even a single slave? The main evidence for widespread slave ownership comes from Xenophon:
Those who are able to do so buy slaves, in order to have fellow-workers.
Memorabilia 2.3.3

This is significant in two ways: the fact that slaves are mentioned as fellow-workers proves that Xenophon is not thinking of the rich or the super-rich, since no Greek who could afford to live without working himself would choose to do so. The situation here envisaged is therefore like that of the workers on the Erechtheum. Secondly there are some—an unspecified number—of free men who cannot afford slaves.
One should infer, then, that while all Athenians would like to own slaves, at least some did not. To this must be added two further remarks. First, the situation is not quite straightforward as regards property-ownership in general. An estate belonged legally to the head of an oikos & might consist of, say, five acres, a house & a cow, together with a few pigs & chickens. Equally it might consist of thirty or forty acres, plus a house in the town, & a workshop manned by a dozen 'factory'-slaves of the kind Demosthenes inherited. & living in the oikos would be, in addition to the individual concerned, his wife & children, perhaps his aging mother & a couple of domestic servant slaves (a cook & a nanny?). But now roll forward twenty years or so: the oikos-owner is in his mid fifties, & his two sons have grown up to full adult status. One of them, aged 25, marries, & so receives a dowry from his father-in-law, consisting of another patch of land in a neighbouring deme, for farming which he buys a pair of slaves. Now, to whom do they belong? Obviously in practice they are his. But in a sense—especially if he, his wife (and the baby, when that arrives), still live on the property of his father, & rents out the dotal land—he is not an independent paterfamilias, to whom property can legally belong. This can be taken a stage further: it is possible for three generations of adult males in direct line of succession to occupy parts of the same estate, in which case grandfather is technically the oikos-owner. We now have three Athenian citizens using slave labour, but only one actually owns them in the eyes of the law. I point this out because it is generally neglected in the modern literature on the subject.

Secondly, a recent book (E. Meiksins Wood, Peasant, Citizen & Slave: the Foundations of Athenian Democracy, 1988) has made out a strong case against the prevailing assumption that most Athenian citizens will have owned at least one or two slaves. Wood by no means denies the dependence of the rich on slave labour in Attica, but argues that a majority of Athenian peasants (like Dikaiopolis in Aristophanes' Acharnians, who gets very upset about losing his oxen, but appears to have no agricultural slaves anywhere), & most of the Athenian urban lower class, will have had none. I am not convinced by her arguments, partly for the reasons given in the last paragraph, but it is a stimulating contribution.

As regards the work done by slaves in classical Athens: the main point is that there was no productive job done only by slaves or only by citizens: every kind of art or craft would have been done somewhere by slaves. It is highly likely that slave labour was much commoner in the silver mines & their associated workshops than free labour, but we do hear occasionally in fourth-century speeches of free citizens who made their living that way. Slaves were excluded, of course, from political participation in any form, until & unless they were manumitted & given citizenship (which did happen occasionally—the most famous example is the fourth-century banker Pasion, who became very rich after starting life as a slave clerk with another firm); & slaves were also excluded from priesthoods & the like connected with civic religion—but not, of course, from joining in at the big public festivals such as the Panathenaea (that ‘could hardly be regulated), & they were equally entitled with free men to become mystoí ('Initiates') at Eleusis. Finally, we should not forget the publicly owned slaves: notably the Scythian archers who acted as 'police' keeping order (cf. the opening scene of Aristophanes' Acharnians), & others employed as e.g. accountants & clerks, or as guards at the prison.

Attitudes to Slaves, Treatment & Living-conditions of Slaves
The distinction between free & unfree is so deeply built into the thinking of ancient Greeks that it spills over into many other categories of judgment (cf. K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality, 114ff., for evidence of moral associations with 'freedom' & 'slavery' of such notions as 'generosity', 'trustworthiness', 'self-sacrifice' &c., all characteristics of free men, & their opposites, regarded as typical of slaves: what do you notice about the passages which seem to contest these assumptions, which Dover cites from Euripides & elsewhere on pp. 115f.).
The fundamental assumption that slaves were not entitled to moral consideration as human beings in their own right, & the consequent tendency to think that all slaves were by nature suspect or hostile to their masters in principle (Lysias 7.35 says that slaves are 'implacably hostile' to their masters, while Xenophon, Hiero 4.3, 10.4, can speak of a state of perpetual war between masters & slaves) is confirmed by several details in Athenian social & legal practice. Note especially:
(a) The orators regularly refer to torture of slaves for the purpose of extracting 'truthful' testimony in lawsuits, & moreover regard torture as an exceptionally reliable means of getting at the truth (Dover, GPM 285), despite Antiphon 5.31, who points out that under torture a slave is likely to say whatever he thinks will please his interrogators ‘well enough to get them to stop. We do not know whether slaves were tortured in all cases in which they were called upon to give evidence, nor, when they were, whether the 'torture' was in all cases severe—particularly in the case of slaves who were themselves willing to testify;
(b) Scenes in comedy such as those between the god Dionysus & his slave Xanthias in ‘Aristophanes' Frogs (and many others, cf. CA 63-5; Dover, GPM 284) presuppose that beatings were frequent for many domestic slaves—and not only at the hands of their masters. Significantly, the Old Oligarch complains that at Athens, free men cannot safely beat slaves who fail to step aside for them in the street as they can elsewhere, which presupposes the assumption that it is proper for any free individual to beat any slave at any time;
(c) A general presumption exists that the working conditions for slaves involved in mining operations at Laurium & elsewhere must have been dreadful. This may be partly confirmed by the report of Thucydides (7.27) that after the Spartans' occupation of Decelea, some 20,000 slaves ran away from their posts—where Thucydides' word for them, cheirótechnai (translated by Warner as 'skilled workmen') is ambiguous but probably should be taken to mean that they were mainly employed in manufacturing & other productive crafts not including husbandry, & may imply mineworkers. If it is true that many of these were in mining work, it suggests that this was particularly nasty work, from which they were eager to run away as soon as an opportunity arose;
(d) Masters had a vested interest in extracting as much work & the best work they could from their slaves; they were not therefore likely to maltreat them deliberately in any way that would damage their long-term usefulness—as Dover writes (GPM 286): 'Careful...treatment of slaves was probably as common as careful maintenance & handling of a car nowadays, & similarly motivated'. But this would not apply to the large numbers of slaves not employed directly by their owners but leased out for profit to others (see Xen. Vect. 4.14ff. again), any more than it applies to the treatment of hired vehicles by their lessees: Nikias as owner would insist on losses being replaced, but one cannot expect those working slaves under lease to have been much concerned about their welfare except in so far as it affected profits. & it was at least widely believed that the only reason for slaves to work for their masters was fear of punishment.

So far, evidence & considerations which tend to produce a grim picture of the position of slaves at Athens: they were rightless, socially scorned, beaten & humiliated by their masters & others, made to perform nasty jobs, & inclined to run away when the chance offered.

This, however, is a one-sided picture. First, it is as important in Athenian history as in Roman to stress that the specific conditions in which any one slave might live might be very different from those of others. Illiterate 'navvies' forced to work in silver-smelting workshops amidst poisonous fumes & having to shovel tons of waste dirt had reason to envy the trusted domestic manager of a man like Xenophon's Ischomachos, with whom Socrates discusses estate-management in his Oeconomicus (see CA 67). Further points to modify the picture:
(a) In comic scenes, even where slaves get beaten by masters, there seems to be a good ‘deal of cheerful enough banter between them (cf. Dover, GPM 287f.), & situations arise in which comic mileage is gained from certain types of role-reversal (Dionysus & Xanthias in the Frogs, for example; this leads on in so-called 'New Comedy' at the end of the fourth century to the emergence of a stock figure of a shrewd & manipulative slave, who is the central character organising his master's life & love-affairs for him, like a rougher version of Jeeves): in the Wasps, for example, the slaves of the household must help their young master Bdelykleon to confine their old master Philokleon to the house;
(b) The Erechtheum accounts (CA 357) show slaves working alongside their masters on the same jobs. It is relevant again to refer also to the Old Oligarch's complaint that 'you cannot strike a slave who refuses to step aside for you', for the reason he gives is very revealing: this is that it is impossible to tell the difference between slaves & (some) free men from their appearance, so the slave you have just beaten might turn out to be a free man after all, in which case you have committed an indictable offence against him. What this shows is that in practice, much the same kind of clothing was worn by them—hence presumably much the same kinds of occupation were followed, & similar standards of living enjoyed, by some free men as by some slaves;
(c) Though we do not know much about manumission in Athenian society (certainly much less than we do about it in Rome), it certainly existed as a future prospect of reward for a loyal & hard-working slave (Dover, GPM 287);
(d) Sometimes a slave who was manumitted could become a respected & popular society figure, like Pasion (cf. CA 48);
(e) Public slaves might perform tasks requiring them to exercise important enough responsibilities— as clerks to the courts, for example—or a measure of authority even over citizens—like the Scythian archers, or the public executioner.
(f) Some privately owned slaves, if they were lucky, might even be able while in service to have some sort of family life of their own (Xen. Oec. 9.5)( ‘”I showed her also the women’s quarters, which were separated from the men’s by a bolted door, to prevent any undesirable traffic between the two, and to stop the slaves breeding without our consent. For if good slaves are allowed to breed, it usually makes therm amenable,but if bad ones are paired, they are even more productive of trouble”.), or form enduring personal & emotional attachments with the families they served: the ageing, but loyal, family servant is a figure recognisable from Homer's Odyssey in the old nurse Eurykleia & the swineherd Eumaios, & recurring in several fifth-century tragedies.
(g) Although one of the things that distinguished the free man from the slave in Greek eyes was the fact that certain forms of insult or violence against the free counted as hybris (Dover GPM 285f.), but were not thought improper against slaves, Athenian law does appear to have accepted, at least by the fourth century, that it was possible to behave hybristically (therefore wrongly) to slaves too: Aeschines (1.17) & Demosthenes (21.46) refer to a law prohibiting such treatment; & to the point thus made by Dover (GPM 285f.), one should add that some ancient sources, both Greek & Roman, refer to forms of asylum or sanctuary which runaway slaves could claim (F. Kudlien, Hermes 116 [1988], 232ff.), though it is not clear whether this often worked in practice. Probably a slave's best protection lay in pleasing his master with the work he did & the attitude he displayed, hoping thereby to earn his master's protection from the abuse of others.
On the question of treatment, then, there is one clear message: we cannot generalise, & in any essay on the subject, you should show that you are aware of the wide range of different situations in which slaves could find themselves.

Was Athenian Democracy Dependent on Slave Labour?
This question has often been asked, & not just by examiners. On the contrary, it has been a hot issue for several centuries. M. I. Finley (Ancient Slavery & Modern Ideology, 1980, 20ff.) has a fascinating account of the development of the discussion since the sixteenth century, when the French humanist Jean Bodin first issued a bitter condemnation of slavery in the context of Greece & Rome. Finley shows that most modern analysis has been influenced by the political or religious prejudices of the scholars who have discussed it. Christian scholars, for example, tried to prove that the early Christians disapproved of slavery (which they by no means all did). Conservatives tended either to ignore the question or to defend slavery within its historical context as essential to civilisation—as were the hordes of Irish navvies who built Britain's railway network in the nineteenth century essential to the development of the British economy & culture between 1840 & 1940. Conservatives opposed to democracy (whether ‘ancient or modern) tried to use slavery, or to be more precise, the charge that Athens‘) depended on slavery to a degree unequalled anywhere else in the Greek world, as a stick with which to beat democratic political organisations in general. Liberals or 19th-century socialists, on the other hand, who usually admired Athens for being democratic, & giving equality to all citizens, played down the uncomfortable & unpalatable fact that Athens was in some sense a slave society.

So: the issue of the importance of slavery in the economy & society of Athens was closely connected with that of real political argument in modern Europe, down to the present century; and, broadly speaking, Athens was 'on trial', with 'conservative' scholars prosecuting, more liberal scholars pleading in Athens' defence. The charge-sheet ran roughly as follows:

1. All civilisation requires a social order.
2. In that social order there have to be some who rule & others who are ruled: too many chiefs & not enough Indians = anarchy & jungle-law.
3. Athens' civilisation depends on a social order in which citizens are free to enjoy the privileges of their citizenship, i.e. are 'rulers'.
4. Unlike other societies in which the citizen body was divided into classes (e.g. Rome), Athenian citizens were all equal.
5. Slaves therefore were necessary to perform the menial productive tasks which elsewhere are done by free men for wages.
6. Therefore Athens' citizen-poor enjoyed their status & privileges at the expense of the slaves they exploited, rather than working themselves.
7. Therefore Athens' culture, & her direct democracy, were economically based on slave labour, & could not have existed without it.

For the defence, many different pleas have been put. They fall into three main groups:

1. The German scholar Joseph Vogt & his pupils tried to show that, although Athens (like most ancient societies) used slave labour, that labour was not always & everywhere badly treated; & slaves in Athens were not generally so badly off that the slave economy itself should be regarded as a crucial moral stain on Athens' political structure: in short, democracy based on slave labour was OK, if the slaves were treated OK.
   
2. A. H. M. Jones, always a gallant defender of Athens against her critics, & to some extent his pupil G. E. M. de Ste Croix (who taught LGHH), accepted that Athenian slaves were not always well treated, but tried to minimise the significance of slavery ‘for the democratic order of Athens by either (a): lowering their estimates of the total number of slaves in Athens, & hence the importance of the slave sector of the Athenian economy as a whole; or (b) drawing attention to the at least equally rotten conditions of slaves, helots, debt-bondsmen &c. in other Greek cities, Sparta, Rome &c., to show that Athens was at least no worse than anywhere else;
   
3. Attempts to show that slavery was, although a contingent characteristic of Athenian culture & society, not necessary to it: in other words, Athenian democracy happened to be a society which had slaves, but the relationship between democracy & slave-ownership was coincidental rather than one of dependence (E. M. Wood, Peasant, Citizen & Slave... is a refined version of this view, with elements of the Jones/Croix theory: Athens was indeed a slave-owning society; but the men that really made it democratic—viz. the peasants & poor artisans who made up the majority of the citizenry were not usually themselves slave-owners, or were so in smaller numbers than has usually been thought; most slaves in Attica belonged to the rich, who should therefore field whatever blame Athens incurs for being a slave society.)

All three approaches to defending Athens have things in their favour. But they all miss the point too. The best analysis of the relation between slavery & democracy is Finley's. Put very briefly, it is this: it is precisely in democratic Greek societies that the most extensive positive rights were accorded to citizens: the more extensive these rights, the wider the gap between citizen & non-citizen. The positive rights of citizens, therefore, create chattel-slavery—given some form of unfree labour in the first place, for it is only in a society in which citizens' rights are so far developed that a concept of private property exists that people can own slaves. Slavery in democracies like Athens', therefore, goes hand-in-hand with the political organisation (and rights) of citizens. Greek democracies are therefore slave-societies in ways in which e.g. Sparta, where individual citizen-rights are less highly developed, are not. Slavery is thus intrinsic to ancient democracies, quite independently of the actual number of slaves employed or what they are employed for Finley's treatment of the subject has one great strength & one great weakness. It has the strength of showing very clearly that it is not the number of slaves that determine whether a society is a slave society, but the extent to which the existence of some unfree persons affects the legal relationships of the free: Athens cannot be whitewashed by lowering the estimate of the number of slaves her citizens exploited; but by the same token, Athens cannot be blamed for developing democratic institutions at the expense of exploited slave labour, because the two things are aspects of the same coin—the one cannot explain the other, nor be dependent on it. Both together require explanation. In short: to say that Athenian democracy depended on slave labour is a truism, & should not therefore be made the basis for moral posturing any more than the statement 2 + 2 = 4.

Finley's treatment, however, also suffers from one major failing. Even if we accept that theoretically, it is not the number of slaves which determine whether a society is a slave-society, but rather the respective legal definitions of free & unfree, we may still wish to know how many individual Athenians owned slaves, how they treated them, & how essential was the contribution of their labour to the material prosperity of the community as a whole. Or at least, we may wish to assemble the evidence relating to these questions & see how far it will take us; for most of us will feel that however alien to our own moral presuppositions slavery is, its awfulness may be mitigated if it can be shown that slaves were‘ at least sometimes not badly off, or had chances of improving their lot etc. & this counts even at the highly theoretical level at which Finley argues, since manners, moral attitudes, values & behaviour are, just as much as the laws which determine the legal statuses of slave & free, integral parts of the way a society operates, & therefore relevant to judging that society's cultural achievement (or failings). How many slaves classical Athens had, & how they were employed, may not then answer the question about the dependence of democracy on slavery, though we probably can say that many or most of the cultural achievements of the ancient world would have been impossible without unfree labour in some form (who actually built the pyramids?); while the presence or absence of exploited unfree labour seems to have made very little difference to the production or otherwise of art, literature, architecture, pottery etc, if you consider that of all the many hundreds of (slave-owning) classical Greek city-states, it is only Athens that produces these commodities in large enough quantity to survive. Moreover, while a lot of ‘Athens' cultural achievement was due to the wealth she amassed in the 5th century BC, & a lot of that wealth came from people Athens exploited—but these were not only slaves employed in Attica, perhaps not even mainly slaves employed in Attica.

It is, however, necessary to conclude with one very important, indeed central, point about the Athenians' economic life & relations with the outside world, which those who seek to defend Athens from the charge of being dependent on slave labour seldom if ever mention—indeed as I write I can think of no statement in print to this effect, not even in de Ste Croix' Class Struggle book, where most other wisdom of this sort can be found. Everybody knows that Athens was crucially dependent on corn imported from the fertile lands of the Black Sea area, especially south Russia. Now some scholars recently, such as P. Garnsey, have tried to lower estimates of the extent of that dependence. But most will continue to accept that in most years Athens needed some imported corn, & in 'bad' years she needed a great deal—even Garnsey accepts that in normal years up to half of her grain requirements had to be met by imports. Demosthenes informs us that Leukon, ruler of the Bosporan kingdom, supplied Athens with 400,000 médimnoi of corn a year (1 médimnos = a little more than 50 litres, so Demosthenes' figure means some 15,000-20,000 tons per annum). Who produced this? Clearly, Leukon's subjects. But what kind of operation did Leukon run? His kingdom, situated in the northern central fringe of the Black Sea, was for several decades in the fourth century, & probably in the fifth too, on friendly terms with Athens, as a famous inscription (Tod, GHI 165) shows, confirming Demosthenes' words. But the area, though fertile, was hardly the most civilised—and it is not to be thought that when Leukon & others of his dynasty received payment for the grain in silver from Athens, they at once distributed this generously to their subjects. The fringes of the Greek world were full of semi-civilised, semi-Hellenized, baronies, ruled over by tin-pot despots or tyrants like Leukon & his sons, who were not in the business of protecting the human rights of their subjects, any more than are the rulers of some Latin American or African countries today.

So, even on a favourable estimate: Athens depended on imported corn; the corn was produced by extraction of the surplus from the peasant-subjects of dictators on the edges of the Greek world; these subjects had little or no choice in the matter; therefore Athens depended on unfree labour in one centrally important, though neglected, aspect.