But, to make my meaning clearer on the question of maintenance, I will
at this point explain in detail how the silver mines may be furnished
and extended so as to render them much more useful to the state. Only
I would premise that I claim no sort of admiration for anything which
I am about to say, as though I had hit upon some recondite discovery.
Since half of what I have to say is at the present moment still patent
to the eyes of all of us, and as to what belongs to past history, if
we are to believe the testimony of our fathers,[10] things were then
much of a piece with what is going on now. No, what is really
marvellous is that the state, with the fact of so many private persons
growing wealthy at her expense, and under her very eyes, should have
failed to imitate them. It is an old story, trite enough to those of
us who have cared to attend to it, how once on a time Nicias, the son
of Niceratus, owned a thousand men in the silver mines,[11] whom he
let out to Sosias, a Thracian, on the following terms. Sosias was to
pay him a net obol a day, without charge or deduction, for every slave
of the thousand, and be[12] responsible for keeping up the number
perpetually at that figure. So again Hipponicus[13] had six hundred
slaves let out on the same principle, which brought him in a net
mina[14] a day without charge or deduction. Then there was
Philemonides, with three hundred, bringing him in half a mina, and
others, I make no doubt there were, making profits in proportion to
their respective resources and capital.[15] But there is no need to
revert to ancient history. At the present moment there are hundreds of
human beings in the mines let out on the same principle.[16] And given
that my proposal were carried into effect, the only novelty in it is
that, just as the individual in acquiring the ownership of a gang of
slaves finds himself at once provided with a permanent source of
income, so the state, in like fashion, should possess herself of a
body of public slaves, to the number, say, of three for every Athenian