Silver and Slaves

The Walters Art Museum holds a silver tetradrachm struck at Syracuse between 478 and 472 BC, showing a four-horse chariot beneath a winged Victory and, on its other face, Arethusa surrounded by dolphins. We can study it before our visit, returning to the city encountered through Himera’s soldiers, Gelon’s mercenaries and the Athenian expedition promoted by Alcibiades. A contemporary Athenian owl in the Getty Museum, dated 475–465 BC, travelled east into a hoard near Bostra. The two cities put their own images on silver moving through a wider Mediterranean economy.

Silver had served as money in western Asia long before coinage, weighed as ingots, cut ornaments and fragments that could buy grain or a person. Small quantities of lead remaining in the metal preserve isotope proportions that can be compared with geological deposits. Silver from a tenth-century BC hoard at Dor includes material matching south-western Sardinia, establishing exchange between west and east. Early Athenian coins also contain varied sources and mixtures; Laurion became dominant around the great mining revenues of 483/2 BC. Analyses of five other contemporary Syracusan coins found both Laurion and northern Aegean silver, connecting Sicilian money with Aegean metal supplies.

Solon’s poetry recalls Athenians sold abroad and others subjected to masters at home. His reforms of 594/3 BC cancelled obligations and prohibited loans secured on a person, protecting members of the civic community while leaving unequal landholding and the ownership of other human beings in place. Households obtained labour from family members, tenants, hired workers and purchased slaves, in combinations shaped by their resources and the demands of production. Citizens and metics could both own workshops and enslaved people, although resident foreigners paid particular taxes and normally lacked political rights and the right to own Attic land.

In 404 BC the Thirty seized property from Lysias’ wealthy metic family, including shields, money and 120 enslaved people. The family’s vulnerability to citizen authorities coexisted with its power over workers it owned. Building accounts bring different legal categories into the same workplace: in 408/7 BC, Ameiniades received eighteen drachmae for column fluting on the Erechtheion, with eighteen entered for work by Somenes, his slave. The task carried the same rate, while ownership governed claims on earnings. Across farms and households, cultivating vines, harvesting olives, grinding grain, weaving and caring for children required sustained work by free and enslaved people.

Our previous lecture followed these relationships through women’s supervision of households and the history of Neaira. Owners could direct labour, take earnings, regulate movement and reproduction, sell a person or grant release, sometimes attaching continuing obligations. Skilled work and access to money gave some enslaved people opportunities to negotiate, accumulate resources and seek freedom. In Homer, the woman who takes Eumaeus away with Phoenician traders is also attempting to escape her own enslavement. Her effort to return home begins the journey that ends with his sale to Laertes.

Spartan households drew agricultural income from helot communities in Laconia and conquered Messenia. Tyrtaeus describes the conquered surrendering half their produce, harvests that sustained common messes and military life. Public authority over punishment, service and liberation operated alongside household claims to labour. Messenians retained connections to land, neighbours and a shared history of conquest, supporting collective resistance after the earthquake of 464 BC. Sparta used exemplary violence and selective liberation, including the release of helots who served with Brasidas. Independent Messenia, established in 369, deprived Spartan households of a major territory and its dependent labour.

At Laurion, workers broke ore underground, carried it out, crushed and washed it, then smelted and refined the concentrated material. Cisterns and water recovery sustained washing in a dry district; furnaces required fuel and controlled heat. Cupellation separated silver by oxidising lead, exposing workers to heat, dust and lead-bearing substances. Fine particles travelled through the atmosphere into soils, peat, marine sediments and distant snow, leaving successive layers through which we can follow the environmental consequences of metal production.

At Tenaghi Philippon in northern Greece, peat records lead above natural background around 3250 BC and a decline around 1150–850 BC. The early signal is local; a widespread increase appears in peat and marine sediments around 200 BC, accompanied by woodland clearance and expanding cultivation. Greenland ice preserves a wider record, especially sensitive to western European emissions. A sustained rise began around 1000 BC alongside Phoenician expansion, followed by larger increases with Carthaginian and Roman mining, particularly in Iberia. Emissions reached their highest sustained levels under the early Empire before falling sharply during the second century AD.

Ownership made mining labour a source of income. Xenophon reports that Nicias leased 1,000 enslaved workers to Sosias for one obol each per day: 360 paid days would yield ten talents a year to their owner. Mining revenue also supported the naval programme of 483/2 BC. Herodotus describes a decision to build 200 ships; the later Athenian Constitution gives a different account of 100 talents advanced to 100 wealthy Athenians, each responsible for a trireme. Ships then needed timber, sails, cordage, crews and repairs, with shipsheds and slipways at the Piraeus supporting the repeated work of maintenance.

When Sparta occupied Dekeleia in 413 BC, more than 20,000 enslaved people left Athenian control, most described by Thucydides as workers in manual crafts. Their flight disrupted households, production and the war effort. A year earlier, an auction account recorded people belonging to Kephisodoros: a Syrian man at 240 drachmae, a Scythian man at 144 and a small Carian child at 72. The city’s sale of confiscated property transferred control to purchasers.

Aristotle’s proposed natural slave could apprehend another’s reason but supposedly lacked the capacity for independent rational rule. His text also records objections that slavery rested on force and convention, preserving disagreement about the justification of ownership. The work of enslaved people required knowledge and initiative. In 375/4 BC, a law entrusted the testing of silver coins to public slaves, directing the Council to purchase a suitable person if necessary. Athens relied on expertise exercised by people it owned.

Lecture summary: 1,002 words