> Many slaves were captured and famous intellectuals (Aesop is a famous example) or educated and used as tutors, they were not as modernists assume to be universally ill treated and abused.

And far, far more slaves worked the fields or lived short nasty lives in mines, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion (near Athens):

> Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life.

> ...The Romans provided cheap slave labor and new technologies gave the Greeks new means of extracting silver in more efficient ways.