proposes to‘buy’a daughter of Xenophon’s, should he have one (7.2.38).
Seuthes implies the custom of bride price, and the discussion is part of a
series of statements about friendship and loyalty, terms that re-emerge
later in the narrative, when Medosades complains about the way that
Xenophon and his men were treating villages in Medosades’control. He
threatens to defend his territory against the depredations of the‘Cy-
reans’, who had, by Xenophon’s own admission, rampaged at will before
they had become the‘friends’of Seuthes and his subordinates (7.7.3–5;
cf. 7.16). In Xenophon’s narrative, Seuthes, Medosades, and the
unnamed senior Odrysian nobleman come across as circumspect and
measured negotiators, more careful in their choice of words and diplo-
matic in their style of communication than the Spartan officials at
Byzantion and other locations on either side of the Straits, who appear
far more intolerant of the‘Cyreans’as a social force.
Subordinated people and peoplesThe economic role of slaves in classical antiquity is still hard to specify,
even though very large numbers of slaves (tens of thousands in second-
centurybcItaly),^81 are sometimes documented. Slaves were forcibly
acquired, involved a degree of insecurity for their owners, and were
expensive to maintain. Even if these hurdles were overcome, the realities
of ancient slavery fall short of the Marxian definition of‘slave-owning
societies’.^82 The biggest argument against such a radical claim is the
(^81) Str. 14.5.2 (mid second-century Delos) withCEHGRW, 504 – 5 (Morel); 354– 5
(Davies, citing Xen.Vect. 4.14–17: owners of 300, 600, and 1,000 slaves, hired out to
mine contractors in latefifth-century Attica). Xenophon urged his fellow Athenians to
buy three slaves for every citizen to expand production in the silver mines (Vect. 4.25). This
would have produced perhaps 90,000 slaves—an unlikelyfigure; yet Hypereides talked of
150,000 slaves in the Attic mines (Against Aristogeiton,fr. 29, Jensen). Lauffer (1979, 124–8;
140) considers that there may have been some 35,000 slaves in the Laureion mines at its
maximum period of exploitation in the fourth century. Fisher puts the overall number of
slaves infifth- to fourth-centurybcAthens at 100,000–150,000 (Fisher 1993, 34–6; followed
by Lewis 2011, 108). Andreau and Descat opt for a highfigure of 200,000–250,000 slaves
(although they reject the enormous number of supposed slaves, 400,000 [oiketai] quoted by
Athenaeus, citing the historian Ktesikles [FGrH245 fr. 2 = Athen. 10.445c], as a misun-
derstanding of the wordoiketes, which by Athenaeus’own admission includes any house-
holders, free or unfree: Athen. 6.267e); see further Oliver 2007, 80–6, for detailed analysis,
and 74–100 for the broader demographic context, putting the global population of Attica at
200,000–300,000; Andreau and Descat 2006, 67–71, 115–28 on the employment of slaves in
agriculture and production. 82
Cf. Ch. 1 n.60; De Ste Croix 1981, 4, introduces the central importance of unfree
labour, which in his view was responsible for the largest share of agricultural production (cf.
118 Societies and economies