Silver and Slaves — HIST 304: Greek Civilization (Stephenson)

Silver as the Currency of Subjection — The Phoenician-Assyrian Nexus c. 900 – 600 BCE | the international infrastructure of the slave trade

Silver, exchange and coerced labour. Long before Athenian coinage, people in western Asia used weighed silver in transactions that could transfer control over other people. Conquest, resettlement, debt and private sale created different forms of dependence. The parallel columns follow these wider histories beside the Greek institutions through which households and cities claimed labour and its products.

c. 900–612 BCE · Assyria

Deportation and labour in the Neo-Assyrian empire

Royal annals and administrative records describe conquered populations being moved across the Assyrian empire. Sargon II’s account of Samaria reports the deportation of 27,290 people, a royal claim to the redistribution of a community and its labour. Resettled households supplied agricultural workers, craftspeople and other skills to new districts. Their conditions varied: deportation, dependence on an estate or palace, and sale as private property gave those commanding labour different rights. These records place Greek slavery within a wider history of coercion, settlement and the movement of skilled people.

c. 900–600 BCE · Phoenicia — Tyre and Sidon

Phoenician routes for silver and other goods

Ports such as Tyre and Sidon connected eastern Mediterranean markets with Cyprus, North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia and Iberia. Silver moved east from western deposits through networks that also carried agricultural produce, manufactured goods and people. Ezekiel’s account of Tyre’s trade includes human beings among its commodities, while settlements and metal finds document the reach of exchange. These routes developed over centuries, bringing merchants into contact with different systems of ownership and dependence. The lecture’s early Levantine silver hoards extend the history of western metal reaching the east into the tenth century BCE.

c. 1,800–500 BCE · Mesopotamia — Old Babylonian to Neo-Babylonian periods

Weighed silver and the sale of people

Sale documents from Old Babylonian, Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian settings record human beings priced in silver, using units of weight long before coinage. Prices depended on period, place, age, skills and the terms of the transaction. Differences in local weight standards also matter when comparing records. At the Athenian standard of approximately 4.3 grams to the drachma, 100–180 drachmae represent about 430–774 grams of silver. Converting units lets us compare quantities, while the contracts and historical setting explain how each sale was organised. The three Attic Stelai entries in Task B supply a small, specific Athenian comparison.

900–612 BCE

c. 900–600

c. 1,800–500

c. 800 BCE

c. 800–700 BCE · Early archaic Greece

Enslavement and attachment in Homer

The Iliad and Odyssey place enslaved people within households, warfare and exchange. Briseis mourns Patroclus and recalls her earlier losses; Eumaeus tells how he was taken from his father’s house and eventually sold to Laertes. His abduction also contains another history: the woman who helps take him away had herself been captured and was trying to return home with Phoenician traders. Loyalty to a household coexists with remembered displacement and the desire to escape. The poems give these experiences narrative form within stories concerned with the restoration of elite households.
Homer, Odyssey 15 · Eumaeus’ account

c. 800–650 BCE · Greeks at the eastern emporia

Al-Mina and eastern Mediterranean exchange

Greek pottery at Al-Mina, near the mouth of the Orontes in northern Syria, documents connections with the Aegean from the early Iron Age. Its setting brought the coast into contact with inland commercial and political networks. Interpretations of the settlement’s population and organisation differ, but the pottery establishes exchange across regions. Al-Mina belongs beside the Phoenician routes in this timeline as a place to consider the movement of goods and people between communities using weighed silver. Purchased labour, captivity and household dependence formed part of the wider world in which those contacts developed.

Across the columns

Silver could be weighed, divided, remelted and transferred between communities. Claims over people also passed through warfare, trade and public decisions. The connections between these histories took different forms in a Babylonian contract, a Spartan household and an Athenian auction account.

Solon’s Paradox — Debt Bondage and Purchased Slavery c. 630 – 480 BCE

Protection within the civic community. Solon’s reforms released Athenians from particular forms of dependence while preserving unequal property and the ownership of other human beings. Family labour, tenancy, hire and purchase remained available to households in different combinations. The following cards connect those arrangements to the growing demand for agricultural, craft and mining work.

Metics and civic membership. Resident foreigners were legally free, paid particular taxes and normally lacked rights to own Attic land or participate in the assembly unless granted privileges. The category developed over time. A metic could own a workshop and enslaved workers, as Lysias’ family did, while lacking a citizen’s political standing. Economic occupation therefore crossed legal categories.

c. 1,750 BCE · Babylonia

The Code of Hammurabi and different forms of dependence

The Babylonian law collection distinguishes free people, persons of different social standing and people held as slaves. Section 117 provides for release in the fourth year after specified family members have served for debt; sections 118–119 deal separately with people already owned as slaves. Sections 15–20 concern escape and recovery, while 278–279 regulate a buyer’s claims over illness and ownership. These provisions help distinguish temporary debt service from continuing rights of disposal over a person. Solon’s much later reforms addressed Athenian debt bondage within a different civic setting.
Code of Hammurabi · §§15–20, 117–119 and 278–279

c. 600–500 BCE · Neo-Babylonian period

Temple dependants in Neo-Babylonian society

Temples organised substantial bodies of labour and property. People dedicated to a temple, often described as širkū, could live within enduring obligations of service, supported by rations or other arrangements. Some held property and undertook transactions of their own while remaining dependent on the institution. Temple service therefore needs to be considered alongside debt obligations, royal resettlement and private ownership. The comparison also keeps the Greek side of the timeline varied: citizens, resident foreigners, freed people, helots and chattel slaves occupied different positions, with further differences within each legal category.

c. 1,750 BCE

630–560 BCE

594 BCE

c. 550 BCE

c. 630–560 BCE · Athens — the debt crisis

The hektemoroi and the pre-Solonian crisis

Later accounts describe poor Athenians dependent on wealthy landholders, some facing enslavement and sale abroad. The hektemoroi, or “sixth-parters”, owed a share of agricultural production; the origin and exact terms of that obligation remain debated. Solon’s own verse recalls removing markers from the land and bringing back people sold away. Cultivation, indebtedness and personal dependence were connected in the crisis. A claim on a harvest could expose a household to a creditor’s power over its members, giving Solon’s release of people and land its political importance.
Athenian Constitution 2 · dependence before Solon

594 BCE · Athens

The seisachtheia and the protection of Athenians

The reforms conventionally dated to Solon’s archonship in 594/3 BCE cancelled obligations and prohibited loans secured on a person. Solon celebrated the return of Athenians sold abroad and the release of others subjected to masters at home. The reforms protected members of the civic community while leaving private ownership of other human beings and unequal landholding in place. Wealthy households could obtain labour through family members, tenants, hired workers and purchased slaves. Protection against citizen debt bondage may have encouraged recruitment from outside Attica, as farming, workshops and mining created different demands for labour.
Athenian Constitution 12 · Solon’s verse

c. 550–480 BCE · Athens — the growing slave population

The routes supplying purchased labour

Warfare, kidnapping and trade brought enslaved people into Attica, while children born within enslaved households could also become an owner’s property. Later Athenian speeches and sale records attach designations such as Thracian, Carian, Syrian and Scythian to individuals. These labels locate people within a commercial geography as their origins were understood or represented by others. Demand changed with household resources and the expansion of production. Farmers, craft businesses and mining operators drew on overlapping supplies of labour, with the terms of ownership and hire determining who received the income.

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From civic protection to the organisation of workSolon’s reforms gave Athenian membership a material protection against debt bondage. Households continued to draw on family labour, tenants, hired workers and people they owned, while farming, crafts and mining created changing demands for work. Following those arrangements into the Classical period connects civic decisions with the resources available to particular households.

Helots and the Spartan System — Subjection as a Military Institution c. 700–369 BCE

Helot produce and Spartan households. Cultivators in Laconia and Messenia maintained families and communities under enduring subjection. Public authority over service, punishment and liberation coexisted with household claims to labour and produce. Those resources supported the common messes and military life, and gave some elite Spartan women substantial interests in land and income.

c. 900–600 BCE · Neo-Assyrian empire

Conquest, resettlement and agricultural dependence

Assyrian deportation relocated communities and their skills, supplying labour to fields, estates and institutions across the empire. Resettlement could preserve households while removing people from their previous land and political attachments. Sparta’s subjection of Messenia offers a comparison in the way conquest redirected agricultural produce, although the Messenians remained attached to their own territory. Place and community mattered to the possibilities of resistance: people retaining neighbours, kin and a shared memory of conquest could organise differently from individuals sold far from home.

c. 720–650 BCE

Classical Sparta

464 BCE

371 / 369 BCE

c. 720–650 BCE · Sparta — the conquest of Messenia

Messenian conquest and the support of Spartan households

Spartan conquest subjected cultivators in Messenia to enduring claims on their production. Tyrtaeus describes the conquered bringing half the fruits of the earth to their masters under compulsion; the verses speak from the conquerors’ side. Helotage also developed in Laconia, with origins and arrangements that varied locally. Helot families and communities supplied produce sustaining Spartan households, common messes and military activity. Herodotus’ seven helots accompanying each Spartiate at Plataea in 479 BCE describe one army’s deployment. Women, children and people outside that force must also enter any estimate of the whole population.

Classical Sparta · later literary accounts

The krypteia and exemplary violence

Plutarch’s later account describes selected young Spartans moving through the countryside and killing helots, and reports an annual declaration of war attributed to Aristotle. The development and function of the krypteia remain debated. His account preserves a tradition in which violence against a dependent population formed part of civic institutions and education. Thucydides records a separate episode involving about 2,000 helots selected after claiming distinguished service. They wore garlands and visited sanctuaries, then disappeared. He connects their killing with Spartan fear of helot numbers and boldness, showing how a claim to service could expose its bearers to coercive authority.

464 BCE · Sparta — the great earthquake and its aftermath

The earthquake, revolt and later Messenian independence

The earthquake of 464 BCE was followed by revolt and prolonged resistance at Ithome in Messenia. Sparta summoned allied help but dismissed the Athenian contingent, a decision that contributed to the rupture between the two powers. Fear of dependent populations shaped Spartan choices alongside the demands of alliance and warfare. Military need could also lead to liberation: Brasidas’ helot hoplites were subsequently freed, while other freed helots served as neodamodeis without becoming full Spartiates. After Leuctra in 371, the establishment of an independent Messenia in 369 deprived Spartan households of a major territory and its labour.
Thucydides 1.101–103 · the revolt and allied intervention

The Chattel Economy of Classical Athens — Fields, Households, and Workshops c. 480–340 BCE

Work across legal categories. Estimates of the enslaved population depend on assumptions about farming, mining, household ownership and the numbers of free residents. Comparing all enslaved people with adult male citizens alone leaves out citizen women and children, metics and their families. Accounts and speeches bring free and enslaved workers into view together, while recording different claims over their earnings and movements.

First century BCE text · Egyptian gold mines

Diodorus on Egyptian gold mining

Diodorus, writing in the first century BCE and drawing on an earlier account, describes Egyptian gold mining through the work of captives, condemned people and others subjected to coercion. He follows the division of tasks from breaking rock to crushing and washing, describing confinement, blows and severe suffering. His narrative provides a comparison for Laurion, where galleries, tool marks and processing installations record the physical demands of extraction. It concerns Egyptian gold workings, while the literary and documentary evidence for Attica establishes the substantial use of enslaved labour there.
Diodorus 3.12–14 · Egyptian gold workings

480–413 BCE

480–340 BCE

First century BCE

c. 480–413 BCE · Attica — agricultural slavery

Enslaved labour in the Attic countryside

Ploughing, harvesting, tending vines and olives, guarding stores and handling animals required labour throughout the agricultural year. Household members, hired workers and enslaved people supplied different combinations of that work, depending on the size and resources of the holding and its seasonal demands. The orators and comedy bring enslaved agricultural workers into view through particular disputes and representations. Their place in farming belongs beside domestic service and mining in any reconstruction of Attica’s economy. The work could put people of different legal standing in the same field while giving them very different powers over the harvest and their movements.

c. 480–340 BCE · Athens — household slaves and sex slavery

Household service, skilled work and sexual labour

Enslaved people cared for children, prepared food, fetched water, spun and wove, and worked in crafts and commerce. Some organised production or dealt with customers, with earnings allocated according to arrangements controlled by an owner. The prosecution in Against Neaira describes girls purchased for sexual labour and later negotiations over Neaira’s release. As the previous lecture showed, the term hetaira does not settle a woman’s legal status. Wealthy metic households could exercise power over enslaved workers while remaining vulnerable to citizen authorities; Lysias’ account of the Thirty’s seizure of his family’s property brings those inequalities together.
Against Neaira · purchase, earnings and release

Laurion — Silver, Fleet, Empire, and Catastrophe c. 483 – 413 BCE | the centrepiece

Revenue required continuing work. A decision to spend mining income on ships connected the assembly with mine operators, owners of workers, shipbuilders and suppliers. Timber, water, fuel, equipment and maintenance were needed throughout production. The resulting landscape includes galleries, washeries, furnaces and harbours, with lead-bearing particles carried beyond the places where the metal was processed.

Classical Laurion · compared with Egyptian mining

Processing ore and organising work

The Egyptian account and the Laurion installations both draw attention to successive operations: breaking the ore, carrying it, crushing and sorting, washing, smelting and refining. Each needed workers, equipment and supplies, with tasks divided according to the requirements of production. At Laurion, cisterns and arrangements for recovering water made washing possible in a dry district. Smelting and cupellation brought workers into contact with heat, dust and lead-bearing substances. Tracing these operations connects the underground galleries with the wider mining landscape, including fuel supplies and the atmospheric particles preserved far from the furnaces.

483/2 BCE

480 BCE

c. 450–413

413 BCE

483/2 BCE · Laurion, Attica

Mining revenue and the naval programme

Herodotus 7.144 describes a proposed distribution of ten drachmae per citizen and Themistocles’ successful argument for building 200 ships for the war against Aegina. The later Athenian Constitution 22.7 gives a different financial mechanism: 100 talents advanced to 100 wealthy Athenians, each responsible for a trireme. Both traditions connect mining revenue with naval expansion. Once built, a fleet required timber, sails, cordage, crews, repairs and places to store and maintain the ships. Laurion supplied revenue within a larger economy of public decisions, skilled work and continuing expenditure.
Herodotus 7.144 · the naval decision

c. 450–413 BCE · Laurion

Ownership, hire and income at Laurion

Xenophon reports that Nicias owned 1,000 enslaved workers whom he leased to Sosias the Thracian for one obol each per day, with their number maintained. Six obols made a drachma and 6,000 drachmae a talent, so 360 paid days would yield 360,000 obols, or 60,000 drachmae: ten talents. This was the owner’s hire income. Mining could involve workers and equipment owned or leased under different arrangements. In Ways and Means 4, Xenophon proposes building a publicly owned workforce, discussing stages of 6,000 and 10,000 people. Their projected payments made enslavement a proposed source of civic revenue.
Xenophon, Ways and Means 4 · hire and proposed public investment

413 BCE · Dekeleia

Flight during the occupation of Dekeleia

The Spartan fortification of Dekeleia in 413 BCE turned seasonal invasion into continuing occupation, disrupting farming, routes and supplies. Thucydides includes the departure of more than 20,000 enslaved people among Athens’ losses, describing most as cheirotechnai, workers in manual crafts. Their flight challenged the control on which households and production depended. Opportunities differed with supervision, skills, contacts and the risks of travel, while a garrison could offer a prospect of getting beyond an owner’s reach. Athens continued fighting for another nine years, and mining activity is documented again in the fourth century.
Thucydides 7.27 · Dekeleia and flight

Resistance, Manumission, and the Classical Reckoning c. 430 – 320 BCE

Records produced for particular purposes. A public account records sales; a historian explains a war; a court speech seeks a judgement; a philosophical work defends an argument. These sources bring different actions and relationships into view. The sale account and the evidence for flight can be read together to follow the exercise of ownership and attempts to move beyond it.

Second millennium BCE–Hellenistic period · Near East and Egypt

Flight and the institutions of recapture

The Code of Hammurabi regulates harbouring and returning escaped slaves. Assyrian and Babylonian documents also record attempts to recover dependent workers, while later Ptolemaic Egyptian papyri describe fugitives through identifying features and rewards. Written for owners, officials or those pursuing a reward, such records show resources devoted to restoring control over people who left. Alongside laws, household arrangements and opportunities for release, they give flight a continuing place in the history of coerced labour. The Greek accounts of departure and manumission belong within this wider field of action and attempted recovery.
Code of Hammurabi · escape and recovery

414 BCE

413 BCE

375/4 BCE

c. 330 BCE

414 BCE · Athens

The Attic Stelai and the public sale of people

In 414 BCE, records of confiscated property sold after the prosecutions over the Herms and the Mysteries included people belonging to Kephisodoros, a metic in the Piraeus. A Syrian man brought 240 drachmae; a Scythian man, 144; a small Carian child, 72. The account records classifications, prices and sales tax, and many entries have no personal name. The auction transferred control to new purchasers after proceedings against the previous owner. Task B uses these three entries to examine how a public account organised the sale of people as property.
IG I³ 421 · annotated translation and inscription images

Fourth century BCE · Athens

Aristotle on natural and legal slavery

In Politics 1.4–7, Aristotle discusses the household and distinguishes an alleged natural capacity for subjection from enslavement imposed by law or conquest. His proposed natural slave can apprehend another’s reason but supposedly lacks the capacity for independent rational rule. The text also records objections that slavery rests on force and convention. These arguments belong beside the knowledge and initiative exercised by enslaved workers in households, workshops, trade and flight. The lecture ends with a public slave entrusted with testing silver coins: expertise that the city needed was exercised by a person it could purchase and supervise.
Aristotle, Politics 1.4–7
The law on approvers of silver coinage, 375/4 BCE

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Silver, labour and public authorityMining and exchange connected distant communities, while households and cities organised claims over people and their work. The lecture’s enslaved silver tester brings these histories together: the city relied on expertise exercised by a person it owned. The two tasks below follow production through its environmental traces and ownership through a public sale account.

Two short pair tasks

Allow about twenty minutes for each task. Use the evidence supplied below and write one paragraph together for each.

A20 min · Pairs · Silver and the environmentSilver production and lead pollutionOpen taskClose task

Smelting and cupellation released lead-bearing particles into the air. Read these summaries of the two environmental records discussed in “Laurion and the fleet”.

Aegean peat and marine sediments

A regional record of metalworking

At Tenaghi Philippon in northern Greece, peat records lead above natural background from about 3250 BCE and a decline around 1150–850 BCE. Around 200 BCE, pollution increased across both peat and marine records, alongside woodland clearance and expanding cultivation. The early peat signal was local enough to be absent from the Bronze Age marine record.

Read the Aegean study · results and figures

Greenland ice · 1100 BCE–AD 800

Emissions carried over long distances

A sustained rise in reconstructed emissions began around 1000 BCE, alongside Phoenician expansion. High levels accompanied mining in Carthaginian and Roman Spain, followed by the highest sustained emissions under the early Roman Empire and a marked decline in the second century AD. Atmospheric modelling indicates that this ice record is especially sensitive to western European emissions.

Read the Greenland study · historical linkages and Figure 3

Discuss: trace the journey from ore processing to a preserved layer of peat or ice. How do the two records connect changes in metal production with developments in different parts of the ancient world?

Write together: 80–100 words explaining how silver production changed environments beyond the mining site. Use one dated finding from each record and connect one of those findings with a historical process discussed in the lecture.

B20 min · Pairs · Slavery and public salePeople in an auction accountOpen taskClose task

In 414 BCE Athens sold confiscated property after prosecutions concerning the Herms and the Mysteries. These selected entries record people belonging to Kephisodoros, a metic living in the Piraeus. The descriptions below paraphrase the sale account.

Attic Stelai · IG I³ 421, column 1, lines 33–46

Three entries from the sale account

Recorded descriptions and sale prices, with tax omitted
Recorded description	Price in drachmae
Syrian man	240
Scythian man	144
Small Carian child	72

The inscription lists sales tax separately. These three people have no personal names in the entries. Their sale followed proceedings against their previous owner.

Read the annotated translation and view the inscription records

Discuss: who could classify, sell and purchase the people in this account? Consider how age, attributed origin and price organise the record, and what changed when a buyer acquired control.

Write together: 80–100 words explaining how this public sale exercised ownership over people. Use two details from the entries and identify the roles of the city, the previous owner and the purchasers.

Optional sources and further reading

Andreas Koutsodendris and colleagues, “Societal changes in Ancient Greece impacted terrestrial and marine environments”, Communications Earth & Environment 6 (2025), article 25. The Aegean findings are linked in Task A.
Joseph R. McConnell and colleagues, “Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues, wars, and imperial expansion during antiquity”, PNAS 115 (2018), 5726–5731. The open article is linked in Task A.
For the Attic Stelai, W. Kendrick Pritchett, “The Attic Stelai”, Hesperia 22 (1953), 225–299, and Part II, Hesperia 25 (1956), 178–328. Task B links the annotated translation.
Homer, Odyssey 15, especially 403–484; Xenophon, Ways and Means 4; Thucydides 7.27; and Aristotle, Politics 1.4–7 supply the longer accounts behind the timeline.
The lecture’s bibliographical essay develops the comparative scholarship. Useful starting points remain Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980); Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context (2018); Jameson, “Agriculture and Slavery in Classical Athens” (1977–1978); and Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000).