Sources of Slaves
Captives taken in war provided an important source of
slaves1, and relatively few slaves seem to have been born and raised in the households
of those for whom they worked. Slaves were also imported from the regions to the north
and east of Greek territory, where non-Greek people would be seized by pirates or
foreign raiders. The fierce bands in these areas would also capture each other and sell
the captives to slave dealers. The dealers would then sell their purchases in Greece at
a profit. Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century B. C., reported that some of
the
Thracians2, a group of peoples living to the north of mainland Greece, “sold
their children for export.” But this report probably meant only that one band
of Thracians sold children captured from other bands of Thracians, whom the first group
considered different from themselves. The Greeks lumped together all foreigners who did
not speak Greek as
“barbarians”3—people whose speech sounded to Greeks like the repetition of the
meaningless sounds “bar, bar.” Greeks, like Thracians and other
slave-holding peoples, found it easier to enslave people whom they considered different
from themselves and whose ethnic and cultural otherness made it easier to disregard
their shared humanity. Greeks also enslaved fellow Greeks, however, especially those
defeated in war, but these Greek slaves were not members of the same polis
as their masters. Rich families prized Greek slaves with some education because they
could be made to serve as tutors for children, for whom there were no publicly-financed
schools in this period.
