vulnerable livestock and people. Animals and people were high-value
items for exchange and therefore involved a higher risk for buyers and
sellers. Healthy creatures meant healthy prices. Abdera had anagorano-
mos, a magistrate responsible for regulating market transactions, so the
city was able to supervise the potentially complex kinds of sales that the
law implies.^91 The Abderitans would have benefited from the proceeds of
the market transactions through market taxes, so wanted to ensure that
merchants were keen to bring their sales to their city and that purchasers
did not go away with poor opinions that would damage the market’s
reputation. A passage in Plato’sLaws(Leg.915e–916c) and a reference to
sale contracts and terms under which they might be cancelled in Hyper-
eides’speechAgainst Athenogenes(7.1) show that the Abderitan law was
in line with regulations elsewhere in the Aegean in this period.
The kinds of locations historically attested for slave markets include
points of sale for captives from a wide range of origins, as in the case of
Byzantion (Plb. 4.38), or Mylasa in Karia, and Ephesos in Ionia; as well as
those where periodic markets provided opportunities for occasional
sales, as in the case of Anaktorion, where the festival and associated
panegyrisof Apollo at Aktion was used by the Corinthians as an occasion
to sell 800 prisoners from Kerkyra, all of whom were already technically
slaves, according to Thucydides, in 431bc.^92 In all these cases there were
potentially various institutional mechanisms for ensuring that merchants
who might be dissatisfied with their purchases could seek recourse to
law. This kind of reassurance could not be given with much confidence
in the case of a small roadside town like the one identified at Nea Karvali
which, even if it were occupied in the middle of the fourth centurybc,
lacked the infrastructure of a civic centre with a range of appropriate
officials who could enforce inter-state laws. At the time of the naval
inscription already referred to, the Pistyros/Pistiros to which the slave
name refers is more likely to have been the eponymous emporion
mentioned on the so-called Pistiros inscription from inland Thrace, cut
on a stone many hundreds of kilometres from the Aegean coast.^93 The
inland site near Vetren provides a much more plausible focus of captives
drawn from a wide hinterland beyond the Central Plain of Thrace, that
(^91) SEG 30.662 (bronze weight from Abdera, early third centurybc);I ThrAeg, p.189.
(^92) Thuc. 1.55.1: 250 citizens of Kerkyra were well treated, on the other hand, with the
aim of re-installing them at Kerkyra when circumstances changed; Andreau and Descat
2006, 102–4 on slave markets;panegyreisas opportunities for slave sales: Paus. 10.32.15 and
Str. 12.5.3; Ephesos as a slave name: L. Robert,BCH59/1 (1935) 453 col. B, l.11; Lewis 2011,
96 n.20; cf. Fraser 2000.
(^93) See Ch. 1 n.19 with refs.
122 Societies and economies