CHRISTOPHER STEDMAN PARMENTER Journeys into Slavery along the Black Sea Coast, c. 550-450 BCE This article argues that descriptions of the Black Sea found in the Archaic poets, Herodotus, and later geographers were influenced by commercial itineraries circulated amongst Greek slave traders in the north. Drawing on an epigraphic corpus of twenty-three merchant letters from the region dating between c. 550 and 450 BCE, I contrast the travels of enslaved persons recorded in the documents with stylized descriptions found in literary accounts. This article finds that slaves took a variety of routes into—and out of—slavery, and that fear of enslave- ment was widely felt even among Greeks. Law courts might have been as important as “bar- barian” warfare in ensnaring captives for export, and even slave traders themselves risked enslavement alongside their victims. Reconstructing the travels of individual slaves allows us to pursue a study in the spirit of what Joseph C. Miller has called the “biographical turn” in the study of slavery, privileging the experiences of the enslaved over the accounts of their masters. Although the lands around the distant Black Sea were never the leading source of slaves for Aegean cities, the wealth of primary testimony from the region puts it at the fore- front in the history of slavery in ancient Greece. During the summer or fall of some year during the third quarter of the sixth cen- tury BCE, a slave named Phaylles was put on board a ship departing Borysthenes (modern Berezan) on the Bug/Dnieper Liman. Everything known about his life comes from his sales receipt, inscribed on a lead tablet found at Phanagoria on the modern Kerch Strait: ὁ παῖς : οὗτος | ἐ Βορυσθενέος | ἐπρήθη : ὄνομα :| αὐτῶι : Φαύλλης,| πά̣ντα : θέλομεν :|[-- ἀπο]δ̣ [όσ]θαι This article was written with the support of the New York University Department of Classics and the Global Research Institute in Athens. Many thanks are due to my supervisor Barbara Kowalzig, David Konstan, Laura Viidebaum, David Levene, Calloway Scott, Philip Katz, Samuel Holzman, Stephanie Crooks, Del Maticic, Antonia Noori Farzan, and also to Steven Johnstone and Classical Antiquity’ s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Classical Antiquity, Vol. 39, Issue 1, pp. 57–94. ISSN: 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344(e) © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1525/ca.2020.39.1.57