This chapter discusses (1) slavesʼ independent operation of businesses at Athens, (2) the use of representatives, «agents», to permit enslaved businessmen to accomplish through third parties undertakings that were otherwise impossible, and (3) in the context of the history of «agency» law, Athenian legal adaptations that largely resolved commercial difficulties arising from limitations on the legal capacity of unfree businessmen. The juridical acceptance of representatives – permitting businessmen lacking legal capacity to effectuate through third parties acts and practices that would otherwise have been legally impossible – constituted for Athens a remarkable innovation, responsive to the economic and social needs of fourth-century Attic enterprise. This Athenian adaptation should not, however, anachronistically be confused with legal mechanisms conceived hundreds of years later by Roman imperial practitioners and scholars, nor should it be juridically enmeshed with Anglo-American concepts of legal «agency» developed thousands of years later.
