Our literary sources from the Classical period do no more than sketch the conditions of slaves. The pseudo-Xenophon gives us a picture of an oligarchically-inclined Athenian criticizing his fellow-citizens for excessive leniency towards bad behaviour from slaves and metics. But comedy is full of jokes about slaves afraid of being tortured by their masters. And in the Athenian law courts it was common practice to put slaves through torture as a way of testing the reliability of their master's evidence in court. Most Athenians took the existence of slaves for granted. Very few thinkers of Classical times mounted an attack on slavery. Among those who did were the playwright Euripides, Alkidamas (a pupil of Gorgias') and Philemon.
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