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hi, i'm looking for references on slavery ratios in the greek cities & macedon. ancient sources/census stuff would be great also.

i read somewhere a LONG time ago that athens was said to be 70-75% slave & thebes supposed to be close to 90% slave in population. can't remember where i read it. so i'm wondering what the statistics were & who cites them. & what about macedon? i was surprised to read one of hammond's books that macedon was more a serf society than slave, except apparently for towns philip conquered like olynthus.

thanks a lot.

Most everything seems to come down to educated guesses. One very good work I've read on the subject (though it is not limited to this subject) was Barry Strauss's published thesis Athens After the Peloponnesian War. It will be pretty hard to find though as it is out of print. Libraries may still have a copy. I have one .... someplace.

Other than that, there are tomes on the subject such as The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ste. Croix).

Paralus wrote:Other than that, there are tomes on the subject such as The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ste. Croix).

In addition, I'm pretty sure that Moses Finley, "The Ancient Economy", has stuff on slave numbers (and if it doesn't, it should!).

And ... I've just seen that he actually wrote a book called "Classical Slavery", which I must have forgotten about. Something tells me there'll be good information in there (there's good information in anything Moses Finley wrote).

ATB

thanks for the advice i'll start looking.