In the historic period the slaves in Greece were for the most part barbarians, chiefly from the districts north of the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor. The Greek dealers supplied themselves from the great slave markets held in the towns on the Black Sea and on the Asiatic coast of the Archipelago, not only by the barbarians themselves, but even by Greeks, in particular the Chians, who carried on a considerable slave trade. These slaves were then put up for sale at home; at Athens there were special markets held for this purpose on the first of every month; the slaves were arranged on platforms, so that the buyers might examine them on all sides, for they sought chiefly to obtain physical perfection and strength of limb for hard work, and therefore, if the purchasers desired it, the slaves had to be undressed. Of course, those slaves who were bought merely for the sake of their bodily strength were least valuable; a higher price was given for those who had any special skill or were suited for posts of confidence, and considerable prices were also given for pretty female slaves or handsome boys. Consequently, there was great variety of price; at the time of Xenophon the price for a common male slave, who was only suited for rough work, was half a mina (about £2), else the ordinary average was two minae (about £8); for slaves who possessed any technical skill or higher education the price rose from five to ten minae (£20-£40), and even in exceptional cases amounted to one talent (£240). A large portion of the slave population consisted of those who were born in slavery; that is, the children of slaves or of a free father and slave mother, who as a rule also became slaves, unless the owner disposed otherwise. We have no means of knowing whether the number of these slave children born in the houses in Greece was large or small. At Rome they formed a large proportion of the slave population, but the circumstances in Italy differed greatly from those in Greece, and the Roman landowners took as much thought for the increase of their slaves as of their cattle. Besides these two classes of slave population, those who were taken in war or by piracy and those who were born slaves, there was also a third, though not important, class. In early times even free men might become slaves by legal methods; for instance foreign residents, if they neglected their legal obligations, and even Greeks, if they were insolvent, might be sold to slavery by their creditors, a severe measure which was forbidden by Solon’s legislation at Athens, but still prevailed in other Greek states. Children, when exposed, became the property of those who found and educated them, and in this manner many of the hetaerae and flute girls had become the property of their owners.