But the supply produced by war seldom equalled the demand; and in consequence a race of kidnappers sprung up, who, partly merchants and partly pirates, roamed about the shores of the Mediterranean, as similar miscreants do now about the slave-coasts, picking up solitary and unprotected individuals. Sometimes their boldness rose to the wives or daughters of the chiefs; as in the case of Paris, who robbed the house, and carried away the wife of Menelaus; and of those Phœnicians who having landed at Argos and held, during several days, a fair on the beach, ended by stealing the king’s daughter.[21] Mitford’s supposition that both Io and her companions may have been allured on board,[22] is founded on the apologetical narrative of the pirates themselves. The practice of kidnapping certainly prevailed widely. Thus Eumæos was, by the Phœnicians, sold to Laertes, and a similar fate awaited the woman whom the Taphian pirates stole away at the same time.[23] Odysseus himself relates how a Phœnician rogue plotted against his liberty when he was sailing with him towards Libya, and that the Thesprotians had meditated a like design.[24] To enumerate no other instances, Laomedon menaces Apollo and Poseidon with servitude, observing that he will have them bound and shipped to some distant island for sale.[25] ----- Footnote 21: Herod, i. 1. Footnote 22: History of Greece, i. 32. Footnote 23: Odyss. ο. 427. 482. Footnote 24: Odyss. ζ. 340. Footnote 25: Iliad. φ. 453, seq. Feith observes that the Romans afforded no encouragement to those low and sordid villains who stole and sold their fellow-creatures, and kept none as slaves, but such as were lawfully captured in war. Antiq. Hom. ii. 20. ----- Neither war, however, nor piracy sufficed at length to furnish that vast multitude of slaves, which the growing luxury of the times induced the Greeks to consider necessary. Commerce by degrees conducted them to Caria and other parts of Asia Minor, particularly the southern coasts of the Black Sea, those great nurseries of slaves from that time until now.[26] The first Greeks who engaged in this traffic, which even by the Pagans was supposed to be attended by a curse, are said to have been the Chians, and we shall presently see how ill it prospered with them. They purchased their slaves from the barbarians, among whom the Lydians, the Phrygians, and the natives of Pontos, with many others were accustomed, like the modern Circassians, to carry on a trade in their own people.[27] We find mention made in the Anabasis of a Macronian, who having been a slave at Athens and obtaining his liberty, afterwards became a soldier and served the Ten Thousand as an interpreter at a critical moment during their passage through his native country.[28] ----- Footnote 26: Female slaves were obtained from Thrace, Phrygia, and Paphlagonia. Schol. Aristoph. Acharn. 261. Philost. Vit. Apoll. Tyan. viii. 7. 12. Cf. Plut. Sympos. v. 7. 1. Footnote 27: