A large number of slaves were prisoners of war, usually part of the booty seized by the victorious army. One famous example comes from Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s father), who sold 20,000 women and children into slavery after the invasion of Scythia in 339 BC.
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The connection between war booty and slave procurement was so tight that slave traders sometimes joined the armies during their campaigns so they could buy the prisoners immediately after they were captured. Other streams of slave procurement included piracy, debt, and even barbarian tribes who were willing to exchange their own people for specific goods. Trading posts also acted as big suppliers of slaves for Greece. Many of these were located around the Black Sea, and some cities such as Byzantium and Ephesus also had large slave markets.
In Athens, making a living by working for others was perceived negatively. State employment was the only form of wage labor free from this prejudice. Since most free citizens avoided wage labor as much as they could, slaves were used to fill the workforce gaps.
As a result, saves could perform a wide range of jobs in ancient Greece.We know of slaves being employed as cooks, craftsmen, maids, miners, nurses, porters, and even in the army as attendants to their masters, baggage carriers, and sometimes as fighters. Some specific public positions were performed by slaves, the most famous example being (surprisingly) the police in Athens, which, at least during part of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, consisted mostly of Scythian slaves.
Owning slaves was a fairly common practice in ancient Greece. A middle-class family might have had between three and 12 slaves, but those numbers are just estimations by scholars and hard to verify. The number of slaves varied according to time and place.In his work Ecclesiazusae, Aristophanes equates not owning any slaves to a sign of poverty. The two major owners of slaves in ancient Greece were the state, where slaves were employed as police and various other public functions, and also wealthy businessmen, who supplied slaves for working in the mines.