On a rough calculation, of the ninety thousand slaves in Hellas in the fifth century, twenty thousand adult males were working in the various mines of the country. Of the remaining seventy thousand, thirty-five thousand were adult males, twenty-five thousand were adult females, and ten thousand were children. |
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Slaves began to be used in the Laurion mines after
the 520s B.C. To judge from Thucydides (7.27),
there were during the fifth century, when production peaked,
about twenty thousand slaves working in the Laurion
mines. The Athenian state kept a firm hold on mining
rights. The actual working of the mines, however, was in
the hands of private persons, the lessees, who used
slaves to do the manual labour of digging, carrying,
sorting, collecting, cleaning, and casting the silver. |
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The slaves were obliged to work long hours in cramped, badly-ventilated pits. They were treated as property available for renting out by a mine owner or a lessee to somebody else. Would-be runaways who were caught, and insubordinate workers, were branded on the face with a hot iron, apparently, or made to work in chains. Loyal slaves, by contrast, were often given positions of trust, above all the job of overseeing the other slaves. |
Both the housing and the feeding of slaves are known to in general have been under the control of the polis. More detailed information is lacking for this period, however.
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