Pasion

Pasion was a slave in ancient Athens who rose to become a banker and an Athenian citizen in the early 4th century BCE. His origin is unknown, though he is widely presumed to have come from Syria and the Levant. Owned by the bankers Antisthenes and Archestratus, who had a bank at the Piraeus, he rose to chief clerk at a money-changing table and by 394 BCE had been freed and made a resident alien. He inherited the bank when his owners retired, set up a shield factory, gave Athens one thousand shields and a trireme, and was granted citizenship. When he died in 370 BCE his widow Archippe, who knew the bank's business, married Phormion, the slave who ran it, to keep the bank in the family.