Of course the slave cannot be treated quite as one would treat an ox.  Aristotle takes pains to point out the desirability of holding out to your “chattel” the hope of freedom, if only to make him work better; and the great philosopher in his last testament gives freedom to five of his thirteen slaves.  Then again it is recognized as clearly against public sentiment to hold fellow Greeks in bondage.  It is indeed done.  Whole towns get taken in war, and those of the inhabitants who are not slaughtered are sold into slavery.[*] Again, exposed children, whose parents have repudiated them, get into the hands of speculators, who raise them “for market.”  There is also a good deal of kidnapping in the less civilized parts of Greece like Aetolia.  Still the proportion of genuinely Greek slaves is small.  The great majority of them are “Barbarians,” men born beyond the pale of Hellenic civilization.

[*]For example, the survivors, after the capture of Melos, in the Peloponesian War.

40.  The Slave Trade in Greece.—­There are two great sources of slave supply:  the Asia Minor region (Lydia and Phrygia, with Syria in the background), and the Black Sea region, especially the northern shores, known as Scythia.  It is known to innumerable heartless “traders” that human flesh commands a very high price in Athens or other Greek cities.  Every little war or raid that vexes those barbarous countries so incessantly is followed by the sale of the unhappy captives to speculators who ship them on, stage by stage, to Athens.  Perhaps there is no war; the supply is kept up then by deliberately kidnapping on a large scale, or by piracy.[*] In any case the arrival of a chain gang of fettered wretches at the Peireus is an everyday sight.  Some of these creatures are submissive and tame (perhaps they understand some craft or trade); these can be sold at once for a high price.  Others are still doltish and stubborn.  They are good for only the rudest kind of labor, unless they are kept and trained at heavy expense.  These brutish creatures are frequently sold off to the mines, to be worked to death by the contractors as promptly and brutally as one wears out a machine; or else they become public galley slaves, when their fate is practically the same.  But we need not follow such horrors.

[*]A small but fairly constant supply of slaves would come from the seizure of the persons and families of bankrupt debtors, whose creditors, especially in the Orient, might sell them into bondage.

The remainder are likely to be purchased either for use upon the farm, the factory, or in the home.  There is a regular “circle” at or near the Agora for traffic in them.  They are often sold at auction.  The price of course varies with the good looks, age,[*] or dexterity of the article, or the abundance of supply.  “Slaves will be high” in a year when there has been little warfare and raiding in Asia Minor.  “Some slaves,” says Xenophon, “are well worth