AChAEMENID ANATOLIA AND ThE SLAVE SUPPLY 325
auctioned off slaves confiscated by the state in a similar manner.^52 That is a
minimal picture, and we should not rule out the possibility of auctions at mar-
kets such as Sounion adjacent to the mining district. Slave sales in Athens were
warranted by law to prevent sharp practice and many were recorded to aid
proof of title.^53 In other words, we are looking at a process that was in no way
haphazard, but regular, organised and subject to the laws (and taxes) of the polis.
It has already been noted that slaves were sold for comparatively low amountsin Athens. The implications of this fact are significant: low slave prices relative
to wages enabled the option of slave ownership to trickle much further down
the wealth spectrum in Classical Athens than was the case in other well-known
slave societies such as Imperial Rome or the U.S. South. Our price data dove-
tail well with our information on the distribution of slave ownership from lit-
erary and epigraphic texts. Although Attic texts note disparity in slaveholdings
between rich and poor (e.g., Ar. Eccl. 593), this was much less pronounced than
in Rome. The normative upper ceiling lies at around fifty slaves; few individu-
als could have owned more than this number. But only the poorer elements
of the free population will have not owned any slaves.^54 This pattern of slave
ownership fundamentally shaped the Athenian economy; the most obvious
explanation is that it was a function of the low prices of slaves, which resulted
in turn from a well-organised system of supply and low transport costs. That
this supply was clearly capable of meeting high levels of demand is evident
in contemporary literature. For example, Xenophon’s plans outlined in the
Poroi to revitalise public finances in the 350s presuppose the availability of slave
labour on a large scale – to the extent that within several years the state could
buy 10,000 slaves for the mines, and buy them cheaply: his computations are
based on a price of around 180 drachmas per slave.^55 Such proposals only make
sense against the backdrop of a well-organised and abundant supply of cheap
slaves, and do not add up if we suppose that the slave supply was dependent on
the staccato injections of bodies into the market implied by any model based
largely on warfare and predation by Greeks against non-Greeks. To understand
the economic opportunities of which Athenians took advantage by tapping
into this source of external supply, it is worth contrasting Attica’s slave system
with a neighbouring slave system which did not engage with foreign markets
to any appreciable degree: Sparta.
The Athenian and Spartan Slave Populations: Relative
Strategies of Supply
Let us begin by debunking a popular myth: that the Spartan helots were serfs,
public slaves, a mixture of the two, or held some mystery status located in the
murky area ‘between slavery and freedom.’ Ducat convincingly argued that the
helots, at least during our period, were privately owned slaves, and Luraghi has