E L Hunter

Chains and Laurels: Slavery and the Making of Ancient Greece The civilisation that gave the world the word "freedom" was built and sustained by people who had none. At the height of classical Athens, perhaps one person in three was a slave - and the democracy, the philosophy, and the Parthenon itself could not have lasted a day without them. Chains and Laurels tells Greece's story with the enslaved at its centre.
It follows them into the silver mines that paid for the navy, the households that freed citizens to sit and think, the workshops and brothels and law courts that defined a living person as property to be sold at a word. Here is the Thracian child renamed for the place she was bought; Neaira - purchased in childhood, worked through the trade, and pursued decades later by a prosecution that is the only reason her name survives; and the twenty thousand slaves who crossed to the Spartan lines in a single summer, abandoning the city that had argued about freedom for a century without once offering it to them. It also traces the longer shadow: how Aristotle's claim that some people are slaves by nature was carried forward into later centuries to justify bondage he never imagined, and how Greek slavery differed - crucially - from the racial slavery of the Atlantic world that came after.
This is the story of what it means to inherit democracy, philosophy, and the examined life from a society that never seriously asked whether owning people was wrong. Clear-eyed popular history that never looks away. The first book in the Price of Civilization series.