AChAEMENID ANATOLIA AND ThE SLAVE SUPPLY 319
In a recent essay, Braund has argued that both trading and raiding by Greeks
played a significant role in the acquisition of foreign slaves; in his view raid-
ing seems to play almost as important a role as trade.^10 It should be noted that
a model which accounts for the acquisition of slaves from Anatolia mainly
through raids and warfare by Greeks against non-Greeks is at least historically
plausible: one might note the tactics of Arab slavers in the Sudan, who gutted
the interior in their expeditions for slaves.^11 The model advocated in various
permutations by these scholars is not therefore a priori unlikely.
It does, however, contain serious flaws. First and foremost is a lack of evi-dence, for the examples of Greek raids into the interior are few and do not nec-
essarily represent a wide-scale phenomenon. Xenophon’s Anabasis, although it
describes in detail the predations of a Greek army, can hardly stand as indica-
tive of normal conditions throughout the classical period. The sheer ubiquity
of Anatolian slaves in the Aegean,^12 if accounted for mainly by Greek raids,
would imply predation on a massive scale. If this were so, surely we would
expect it to be mentioned more prominently in our texts, and such a phenom-
enon must have generated diplomatic friction with the Persians, a subject one
of our writers would have commented on. Yet they do not. If many or most of
the Anatolian slaves in the Aegean world were not snatched by Greek raiders,
they must have been acquired by other means. What could these have been?
The most compelling answer is that Greeks had little to do with the primaryprocesses of enslavement; rather, slaves were an abundant native ‘commodity’
exchanged for Greek wares through commercial interactions; these are detect-
able archeologically from an early period. Space does not permit a full survey,
but a brief consideration of the excavations at Gordion, the old seat of the
Phrygian kings, should be sufficient to illustrate the point. The finds provide
striking evidence for the steady import of Greek goods to Gordion from the
eighth century onwards. Despite its location hundreds of miles from the coast,
trade in various commodities from the Greek world is evident, particularly pot-
tery and foodstuffs, the transport of which can have been no easy feat.^13 Attic
fine wares seem to have been popular with local elites, and Greek transport
amphoras can be found in large numbers, attesting to local tastes for Greek
wine. What is more, this trade seems to have run unabated despite political and
military friction between Persia and Greece. De Vries writes the following:
One of the most significant aspects of the succeeding period, the Early
Classical, c. 480–450 B.C., is that Attic pottery continued to arrive with
no drop-off. This was, of course, the period when, in the aftermath of the
failed Persian invasion of mainland Greece, the Delian league, under the
direction of Athens, went on the offensive against the Persian Empire (.. .)
the variously hot to cold war, though, had no discernible negative effect
on the trade in Attic fine ware to Gordion or, for that matter, in another
commodity conspicuous at the time, Chian wine.^14