AChAEMENID ANATOLIA AND ThE SLAVE SUPPLY 323
Secondly, the transportation of foreign slaves to the Greek islands and main-land implies sea travel. Our Phrygian slave would have been loaded onto
a merchant ship, like Hypsipyle in Euripides’ play, who bewails her condi-
tion as a piece of wretched merchandise (meleon empolan: Eur. Hyps. 759a88
[Cropp]). Pragmatically, though, this means that the slave trade responded to
the rhythms of seafaring and maritime trade in general. A peak season from
May through September will have delivered the bulk of slaves and we should
expect that prices were lower during this period due to the increase in sup-
ply.^35 Less slave trading presumably occurred in the winter months when traffic
on the sea-lanes slackened. It should be noted that whether some merchants
specialized in transporting slaves by sea, or whether slaves simply travelled
‘piggyback’ on ships with other commodities, there would not have been
any need for specialized vessels such as those which ran the ‘triangular trade’
between Europe, Africa and the Americas. We can also factor out of our equa-
tion the fatality levels which blighted that trade: the journey from a port such
as Cyzicus to Athens would have only have been a matter of days (compared to
the two-month Atlantic crossing),^36 and there was little need to pack slaves like
sardines into the ship’s hold.^37 All in all, we are looking at a process that need
not have involved many middlemen, need not have killed-off many slaves from
physical exertion, starvation or disease, and need not have taken a particularly
long time (with the attendant effects on food and supervision costs).^38
A short hop by sea from Cyzicus or one of the many other Greek ports inAnatolia would have allowed slaves to be dispersed to a wide array of Aegean
markets. As is so often the case, Athens is the only such market for which
detailed data survive, and it is to this market that we shall presently turn.^39 It is
worth stating that little is known about the merchants who transported these
slaves. The recently discovered speech Against Timandus by Hyperides suggests
drawing a distinction between the emporoi (maritime traders) who brought
in the slaves by sea (probably alongside various other commodities) and the
andrapodokapêloi (slave retailers) who sold them in Attica.^40 At any rate, let us
now consider the sale of our Phrygian once he or she had arrived in Attica.
The Sale of Slaves in Attica
Recently, Braund has written that ‘there is no real indication at all in our
sources that in Attica, the region we know best, there were specific slave mar-
kets or special slave sales.’^41 This statement is problematic, for two reasons. First,
what is meant by the phrases ‘specific slave markets’ and ‘special slave sales’? If
Braund means a permanent market with auctions, one should note that even
in nineteenth-century New Orleans, the hub of slave commerce in the U.S.
South, private transactions were only supplemented by a major auction every
Saturday; likewise, the slave auction in Salé in Morocco during the eighteenth