AChAEMENID ANATOLIA AND ThE SLAVE SUPPLY 329
they were destined. There was no need to foster the slave family as a social
institution: permission to marry or set up house with another slave could, of
course, be granted as an incentive for hard work (Xen. Oec. 9.5), and we must
reckon with the impulse of most slaves themselves to achieve something of this
sort. But it is unlikely that marriage and family was the standard fate of most
Athenian slaves, for the slave population seems to have maintained its ‘barbar-
ian’ character over time, and there was no wider need to foster slave families
due to labor requirements.^70 At Sparta, the situation was completely different.
Slave families were the prime institution underpinning the labor supply, which
necessitated a completely different approach to the utilization of slave labor.
Access to a reliable slave supply gave Athenian slave-owners flexibility andvolume in their labor needs. Not only could slaves be employed in a diverse
range of tasks regardless of whether these tasks were favourable or not to pop-
ulation reproduction, but access to foreign supply provided choice of skills and
scope for expansion. Take, for instance, the Athenian liturgical class. Many of
the key sources of wealth for this class were dominated by slave labour, from
agricultural production to craft workshops and mining. For an entrepreneur-
ial Athenian setting up a craft workshop or mining concession and aiming to
maximize his profits, labour supply was a key variable.^71 Because Athens was
connected to extensive inter-regional markets via maritime routes, its econ-
omy was effectively plugged-in to levels of demand that well exceeded domes-
tic requirements. This meant that ventures such as craft workshops were able to
expand in terms of individual size and aggregate number to meet this demand.
If labour supply were restricted, this would have imposed a ceiling on effective
expansion, but with a supply of foreign labour that was abundant and flexible,
workshop owners were not encumbered with such restraints and could poten-
tially expand their operations within the limits imposed by technology and
basic organisational structures (see Chapter 6). Fine-pottery production is one
obvious example: Athens had been producing fine wares for both domestic
and foreign markets well before the advent of the Classical period. Or take the
production of objects such as shields: the aspidopegeion (shield factory) owned
by Lysias and Polemarchus must have employed close to 100 slaves (Lys. 12.19),
and Pasion’s shield factory perhaps 60–70 (Dem. 36.11).^72 It is clear that these
establishments were not producing to meet piecemeal local orders but were
churning out large numbers of shields that could be sold in foreign markets.^73
Here we can see how the slave supply, whose tendrils reached into the interior
of Thrace, Anatolia and beyond, interlocked with Athens’ export trade in man-
ufactured goods and silver. The latter simply could not have existed without
the former; nor could it have expanded as it did on a home-grown helot-style
population: cheap imported labour from Phrygia, Paphlagonia, Caria, Thrace
and a range of other regions was the essential ingredient.^74