At the base of this democracy and this culture lies the production and distribution of wealth. Some men can govern states, seek truth, make music, carve statues, paint pictures, write books, teach children, or serve the gods because others toil to grow food, weave clothing, build dwellings, mine the earth, make useful things, transport goods, exchange them, or finance their production or their movement. Everywhere this is the foundation.

Supporting all society, is the peasant, the poorest and most necessary of men. In Attica he has at least the franchise; only citizens are permitted to own land, and nearly all peasants own the soil that they till. Clan control of the land has disappeared, and private ownership is solidly established. As in modern France and America, this great class of small proprietors is a steadying conservative force in a democracy where the propertyless city dwellers are always driving toward reform. The ancient war between the country and the city-between those who want high returns for agriculture and low prices for manufactured goods, and those who want low prices for food and high wages or profits in industry-is especially conscious and lively in Attica. Whereas industry and trade are accounted plebeian and degrading by the Athenian citizen, the pursuits of husbandry are honored as the groundwork of national economy, personal character, and military power; and the freemen of the countryside tend to look down upon the denizens of the city as either weakling parasites or degraded slaves:

The soil is poor: of 630,000 acres in Attica a third is unsuitable for cultivation, and the rest is impoverished by deforestation, meager rainfall, and rapid erosion by winter floods. The peasants of Attica shirk no toil for themselves or their handful of slaves – to remedy this dry humor of the gods; they gather the surplus flow of headwaters into reservoirs, dike the channels of the streams to control the floods, reclaim the precious humus of the swamps, build thousands of irrigation canals to bring to their thirsty fields the trickle of the rivulets, patiently transplant vegetables to improve their size and quality, and let the land lie fallow in alternate years to regain its strength. They alkalinize the soil with salts like carbonate of lime, and fertilize it with potassium nitrate, ashes, and human waste; the gardens and groves about Athens are enriched with the sewage of the city, brought by a main sewer to a reservoir outside the Dipylon, and led thence by brick-lined canals into the valley of the Cephisus River. Different soils are mixed to their mutual benefit, and green crops like beans in flower are plowed in to nourish the earth. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and planting are crowded into the brief days of the fall; the grain harvest comes at the end of May, and the rainless summer is the season of preparation and rest. With all this care Attica produces only 675,000 bushels of grain yearly – hardly enough to supply a quarter of its population. Without imported food Periclean Athens would starve; hence the urge to imperialism, and the necessity for a powerful fleet.

The countryside tries to atone for its parsimonious grain by generous harvests of olives and grapes. Hillsides are terraced and watered, and asses are encouraged to make the vine more fruitful by gnawing off the twigs. Olive trees cover many a landscape in Periclean Greece, but it is Peisistratus and Solon who deserve the credit for introducing them. The olive tree takes sixteen years to come to fruit, forty years to reach perfection; without the subsidies of Peisistratus it might never have grown on Attic soil; and the devastation of the olive orchards in the Peloponnesian War will play a part in the decline of Athens. To the Greek the olive has many uses: one pressing gives oil for eating, a second, oil for anointing, a third, oil for illumination; and the remainder is used as fuel. It becomes Attica's richest crop, so valuable that the state assumes a monopoly of its export, and pays with it and wine for the grain that it must import.

It forbids altogether the export of figs, for these are a main source of health and energy in Greece. The fig tree grows well even in arid soil; its spreading roots gather whatever moisture the earth will yield, and its stinted foliage offers scant surface for evaporation. Furthermore, the husbandman learns from the East the secret of caprification: he hangs branches of the wild male goat fig (caprificus) among the boughs of the female cultivated tree, and relies upon gall wasps to carry the fertilizing pollen of the male into the fruit of the female, which then bears richer and sweeter figs.

These products of the soil-cereals, olive oil, figs, grapes, and wine-are the staples of diet in Attica. Cattle rearing is negligible as a source of food; horses are bred for racing, sheep for wool, goats for milk, asses, mules, cows, and oxen for transport, but chiefly pigs for food; and bees are kept as providers of honey for a sugarless world. Meat is a luxury; the poor have it only on feast days; the heroic banquets of Homeric days have disappeared. Fish is both a commonplace and a delicacy; the poor man buys it salted and dried; the rich man celebrates with fresh shark meat and eels. Cereals take the form of porridge, flat loaves, or cakes, often mixed with honey. Bread and cake are seldom baked at home, but are bought from women peddlers or in market stalls. Eggs are added, and vegetables-particularly beans, peas, cabbage, lentils, lettuce, onions, and garlic. Fruits are few; oranges and lemons are unknown. Nuts are common, and condiments abound. Salt is collected in salt pans from the sea, and is traded in the interior for slaves; a cheap slave is called a "salting," and a good one is "worth his salt." Nearly everything is cooked and dressed with olive oil, which makes an excellent substitute for petroleum. Butter is hard to keep in Mediterranean lands, and olive oil takes its place. Honey, sweetmeats, and cheese provide dessert; cheesecakes are so fancied that many classic treatises are devoted to their esoteric art: Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants. Snow and ice are kept in the ground to cool wine in the hot months. Beer is known but scorned in Periclean days. All in all, the Greek is a moderate eater, and contents himself with two meals daily. "Yet there are many," says Hippocrates, "who, if accustomed to it, can easily bear three full meals a day."

Out of the earth come minerals and fuels as well as food. Lighting is provided by graceful lamps or torches-burning refined olive oil, or resin-or by candies. Heat is derived from dry wood or charcoal, burning in portable braziers. The cutting of trees for fuel and building denudes the woods and hills near the towns; already in the fifth century timber for houses, furniture, and ships is imparted. There is no coal.

Greek mining is not for fuels but for minerals. The soil of Attics is rich in marble, iron, zinc, silver, and lead. The mines at Laurium, near the southern tip of the peninsula, are in the phrase of Aeschylus "a fountain running silver" for Athens; they are a main support of the government, which retains all subsoil rights, and leases the mines to private operators for a talent ($6000) fee and one twenty-fourth of the product yearly. In 483 a prospector discovers the first really profitable veins at Laurium, and a silver rush takes place to the region of the mines. Only citizens are allowed to lease the properties, and only slaves perform the work. The pious Nicias, whose superstition will help to ruin Athens, makes $170 a day by teasing a thousand slaves to the mine operators at a rental of one obol (17 cents) each per day; many an Athenian fortune is made in this way, or by lending money to the enterprise. The slaves in the mine number some twenty thousand, and include the superintendents and engineers. They work in ten-hour shifts, and the operations continue without interruption, night and day. If the slave rests he feels the foreman's lash; if he tries to escape he is attached to his work by iron shackles; if he runs away and is captured his forehead is branded with a hot iron. The galleries are but three feet high and two feet wide; the slaves, with pick or chisel and hammer, work an their knees, their stomachs, or their backs:' The broken ore is carried out in baskets or bags handed from man to man, for the galleries are too narrow to let two men pass each other conveniently. The profits are enormous: in 483 the share received by the government is a hundred talents ($600,000) – a windfall that builds a fleet for Athens and saves Greece at Salamis. Even for others than the slaves there is evil in this as well as good; the Athenian treasury becomes dependent upon the mines, and when, in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans capture Laurium the whole economy of Athens is upset. The exhaustion of the veins in the fourth century co-operates with many other factors in Athenian decay. For Attics has no other precious metal in her soil.

Metallurgy advances with mining. The ore at Laurium is crushed in huge mortars with a heavy iron pestle worked by slave power; then it goes to mills where it is ground between revolving stones of hard trachyte; then it is sized by screening; the material that passes through the screen is sent to an ore washer, where jets of water are discharged from cisterns upon inclined rectangular tables of stone covered with a smooth thin coat of hard cement; the current is turned at sharp angles, where pockets snare the metal particles. The collected metal is thrown into small smelting furnaces equipped with blowers to raise the heat; at the bottom of each furnace are openings through which the molten metal is drawn. Lead is separated from the silver by heating the molten metal on cupels of porous material and exposing it to the air; by this simple process the lead is converted into litharge, and the silver is freed. The processes of smelting and refining are competently performed, for the silver coins of Athens are ninety-eight per cent pure. Laurium pays the price of the wealth it produces, as mining always pays the price for metal industry; plants and men wither and die from the furnace fumes, and the vicinity of the works becomes a scene of dusty desolation.

Other industries are not so toilsome. Attics has many of them now, small in scale but remarkably specialized. It quarries marble and other stones, it makes a thousand shapes of pottery, it dresses hides in great tanneries like those owned by Cleon, rival of Pericles, and Anytus, accuser of Socrates; it has wagon-makers, shipbuilders, saddlers, harness makers, shoe manufacturers; there are saddlers who make only bridles, and shoemakers who make only men's or women's shoes. In the building trades are carpenters, molders, stonecutters, metalworkers, painters, veneerers. There are blacksmiths, swordmakers, shieldmakers, lampmakers, lyre tuners, millers, bakers, sausage men, fishmongers – everything necessary to an economic life busy and varied, but not mechanized or monotonous. Common textiles are still for the most part produced in the home; there the women weave and mend the ordinary clothing and bedding of the family, some carding the wool, some at the spinning wheel, some at the loom, some bent over an embroidery frame. Special fabrics come from workshops, or from abroad-fine linens from Egypt, Amorgos, and Tarentum, dyed woolens from Syracuse, blankets from Corinth, carpets from the Near East and Carthage, colorful coverlets from Cyprus; and the women of Cos, late in the fourth century, learn the art of unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm and weaving the filaments into silk' In some homes the women become so highly skilled in textile arts that they produce more than their families can use; they sell the surplus at first to consumers, then to middlemen; they employ helpers, freedmen or slaves; and in this way a domestic industry develops as a step to a factory system.

Such a system begins to take form in the age of Pericles. Pericles himself, like Alcibiades, owns a factory. No machinery is available, but slaves can be had in abundance; it is because muscle power is cheap that there is no incentive to develop machinery. The ergasteria of Athens are rather workshops than factories; the largest of them, Cephalus' shield factory, has 120 workmen, Timarchus' shoe factory has ten, Demosthenes' cabinet factory twenty, his armor factory thirty.' At first these shops produce only to order; later they manufacture for the market, and finally for export; and the spread and abundance of coinage, replacing barter, facilitates their operations. There are no corporations; each factory is an independent unit, owned by one or two men; and the owner often works beside his slaves. There are no patents; crafts are handed down from father to son, or are learned by apprentices; the Athenians are exempted by law from caring for the old age of parents who have failed to teach them a trade. Hours are long but work is leisurely; master and man labor from dawn to twilight, with a siesta at summer noons. There are no vacations, but there are some sixty workless holydays every year.

When an individual, a family, or a city creates a surplus, and wishes to exchange it, trade begins. The first difficulty here is that transport is costly, for roads arc poor, and the sea is a snare. The finest road is the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis; but this is mere dirt, and is often too narrow to let vehicles pass. The bridges are precarious causeways formed by earthen dikes, which as likely as not have been washed away by floods. The usual draft animal is the ox, who is too philosophical to enrich the trader that depends upon him for transport; wagons are fragile, and always break down, or get bogged in the mud; it is better to pack the goods on the back of a mule, for he goes a trifle faster, and does not take up so much of the road. There is no postal service in Greece, even for the governments; they are content with runners, and private correspondence must wait the chance of using these. Important news can be flashed by fire beacons from hill to hill, or sent by carrier pigeons.' There are inns here and there on the road, but they are favored by robbers and vermin; even the god Dionysus, in Aristophanes, inquires of Heracles for "the eating-houses and hostels where there are the fewest bugs."

Sea transport is cheaper, especially if voyages are limited, as most of them are, to the calm summer months. Passenger tariffs are low: for two drachmas ($2) a family can secure passage from the Piraeus to Egypt or the Black Sea, but ships do not cater to passengers, being made to carry goods or wage war or do either at need. The main motive power is wind upon a sail, but slaves ply the oars when the wind is contrary or dead. The smallest seagoing merchant vessels are triaconters with thirty oars, all on one level; the penteconter has fifty. Back about 700 the Corinthians launched the first trireme, with a crew of two hundred men plying three banks or tiers of oars; by the fifth century such ships, beautiful with their long and lofty prows, have grown to 256 tons, carry seven thousand bushels of grain, and become the talk of the Mediterranean by making eight miles an hour.

The second problem of trade is to find a reliable medium of exchange. Every city has its own system of weights and measures, and its own individual coinage; at every one of a hundred frontiers one must transvalue all values skeptically, for every Greek government except the Athenian cheats by debasing its coins. "In most cities," says an anonymous Greek, "merchants are compelled to ship goods for the return journey, for they cannot get money that is of any use to them elsewhere." Some cities mint coins of electrum – a compound of silver and gold – and rival one another in getting as little gold as possible into the mixture. The Athenian government, from Solon onward, helps Athenian trade powerfully by establishing a reliable coinage, stamped with the owl of Athena; "taking owls to Athens" is the Greek equivalent of "carrying coals to Newcastle." Because Athens, through all her vicissitudes, refuses to depreciate her silver drachmas, these "owls" are accepted gladly throughout the Mediterranean world, and tend to displace local currencies in the Aegean. Gold at this stage is still an article of merchandise, sold by weight, rather than a vehicle of trade; Athens mints it only in rare emergencies, usually in a ration to silver of 14 to 1. The smallest Athenian coins are of copper; eight of these make an obol – a coin of iron or bronze, named from its resemblance to nails or spits (obeliskoi). Six obols make a drachma, i.e., a handful; two drachmas make a gold stater; one hundred drachmas make a mina; sixty minas make a talent. A drachma in the first half of the fifth century buys a bushel of grain, as a dollar does in twentieth-century America. [In this volume an obol is reckoned as equivalent in buying power to 17 cents in United States currency in 1938, a drachma as $1, a talent as $6000. These equivalents are only approximate, for prices rose throughout Greek history; cf. section V of this chapter.] There is no paper money in Athens, no government bonds, no joint-stock corporations, no stock exchange.

But there are banks. They have a hard struggle to get a footing, for those who have no need for loans denounce interest as a crime, and the philosophers agree with them. The average fifth-century Athenian is a hoarder; if he has savings he prefers to hide them rather than entrust them to the banks. Some men lend money on mortgages, at 16 to 18 per cent; some lend it, without interest, to their friends; some deposit their money in temple treasuries. The temples serve as banks, and lend to individuals and states at a moderate interest; the temple of Apollo at Delphi is in some measure an international bank for all Greece. There are no private loans to governments, but occasionally one state tends to another. Meanwhile the money-changer at his table (trapeza) begins in the fifth century to receive money on deposit, and to lend it to merchants at interest rates that vary from 12 to 30 per cent according to the risk; in this way he becomes a banker, though to the end of ancient Greece he keeps his early name of trapezite, the man at the table. He takes his methods from the Near East, improves them, and passes them on to Rome, which hands them down to modern Europe. Soon after the Persian War Themistocles deposits seventy talents ($420,000) with the Corinthian banker Philostephanus, very much as political adventurers feather foreign nests for themselves today; this is the earliest known allusion to secular – nontemple – banking. Towards the end of the century Antisthenes and Archestratus establish what will become, under Pasion, the most famous of all private Greek banks. Through such trapezitai money circulates more freely and rapidly, and so does more work, than before; and the facilities that they offer stimulate creatively the expansion of Athenian trade.

Trade, not industry or finance, is the soul of Athenian economy. Though many producers still sell directly to the consumer, a growing number of them require the intermediary of the market, whose function it is to buy and store goods until the consumer is ready to purchase them. In this way a class of retailers arises, who peddle their wares through the streets, or in the wake of armies, or at festivals or fairs, or offer them for sale in shops or stalls in the agora or elsewhere in the town. To the shops come freemen or metics or slaves to haggle with tradesmen and buy for the home. One of the severest disabilities suffered by the "free" women of Athens is that custom does nor allow them to shop.

Foreign commerce advances even faster than domestic trade, for the Greek states have learned the advantages of an international division of labor, and each specializes in some product; the shieldmaker, far example, no longer goes from city to city at the call of those who need him, but makes his shields in his shop and sends them out to the markets of the classic world. In one century Athens moves from household economy – wherein each household makes nearly all that it needs – to urban economy – wherein each town makes nearly all that it needs – to international economy – where each state is dependent upon imports, and must make exports to pay for them. The Athenian fleet for two generations keeps the Aegean clear of pirates, and from 480 to 430 commerce thrives as it never will again until Pompey suppresses piracy in 67 b.c. The docks, warehouses, markets, and banks of the Piraeus offer every facility for trade; soon the busy port becomes the chief center of distribution and reshipment for the commerce between the East and the West. "The articles which it is difficult to get, one here, one there, from the rest of the world," says Isocrates, "all these it is easy to buy in Athens." "The magnitude of our city," says Thucydides, "draws the produce of the world into our harbor, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own." From the Piraeus merchants carry the wine, oil, wool, minerals, marble, pottery, arms, luxuries, books, and works of art produced by the fields and shops of Attica; to the Piraeus they bring grain from the Byzantium, Syria, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily, fruit and cheese from Sicily and Phoenicia, meat from Phoenicia and Italy, fish from the Black Sea, nuts from Paphlagonia, copper from Cyprus, tin from England, iron from the Pontic coast, gold from Thasos and Thrace, timber from Thrace and Cyprus, embroideries from the Near East, woofs, flax, and dyes from Phoenicia, spices from Cyrene, swords from Chalcis, glass from Egypt, tiles from Corinth, beds from Chios and Miletus, boots and bronzes from Etruria, ivory from Ethiopia, perfumes and ointments from Arabia, slaves from Lydia, Syria, and Scythia. The colonies serve not only as markets, but as shipping agents to send Athenian goods into the interior; and though the cities of Ionia decay in the fifth century because the trade that once passed there is diverted to the Propontis and Carla during and after the Persian War, Italy and Sicily replace them as outlets for the surplus products and population of mainland Greece. We may estimate the amount of Aegean commerce from the return of 1200 talents from a 5 per cent tax laid in 413 upon the imports and exports of the cities in the Athenian Empire, indicating a trade of $144,000,00 a year.

The danger lurking in this prosperity is the growing dependence of Athens upon imported grain; hence her insistence upon controlling the Hellespont and the Black Sea, her persistent colonizing of the coasts and isles on the way to the straits, and her disastrous expeditions to Egypt in 459 and to Sicily in 415. It is this dependence that persuades Athens to transform the Confederacy of Delos into an empire; and when, in 405, the Spartans destroy the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, the starvation and surrender of Athens are inevitable results. Nevertheless it is this trade that makes Athens rich, and provides, with the imperial tribute, the sinews of her cultural development. The merchants who accompany their goods to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective, and alert and open minds; they bring new ideas and ways, break down ancient taboos and sloth, and replace the familial conservatism of a rural aristocracy with the individualistic and progressive spirit of a mercantile civilization. Here in Athens East and West meet, and jar each other from their ruts. Old myths lose their grasp on the souls of men, leisure rises, inquiry is supported, science and philosophy grow. Athens becomes the most intensely alive city of her time.

Who does all this work? In the countryside it is done by citizens, their families, and free hired men; in Athens it is done partly by citizens, partly by freedmen, more by metics, mostly by slaves. The shopkeepers, artisans, merchants, and bankers come almost entirely from the voteless classes. The burgher looks down upon manual labor, and does as little of it as he may. To work for a livelihood is considered ignoble; even the professional practice or teaching of music, sculpture, or painting is accounted by many Greeks "a mean occupation." [Plutarch, Pericles. Zimmem The Greek Commonwealth, 272, and Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, 61, feel that the Athenian disdain for manual labor has been exaggerated; but cf. Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work, 160.] Hear blunt Xenophon, who speaks, however, as a proud member of the knightly class:

The base mechanic arts, so called . . . are held in ill repute by civilized communities, and not unreasonably; seeing they are the ruin of the bodies of all concerned in them, workers and overseers alike, who are forced to remain in sitting postures of to hug the gloom, or else to crouch whole days confronting a furnace. Hand in hand with physical enervation follows apace an enfeebling of soul, while the demand which these base mechanic arts make on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state.

Trade is similarly scorned; to the aristocratic or philosophical Greek it is merely money-making at the expense of others; it aims not to create goods but to buy them cheap and sell them dear; no respectable citizen will engage in it, though he may quietly invest in it and profit from it so long as he lets others do the work. A freeman, says the Greek, must be free from economic tasks; he must get slaves or others to attend to his material concerns, even, if he can, to take care of his property and his fortune; only by such liberation can he find time for government, war, literature, and philosophy. Without a leisure class there can be, in the Greek view, no standards of taste, no encouragement of the arts, no civilization. No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

Most of the functions associated in history with the middle class are in Athens performed by metics – freemen of foreign birth who, though ineligible to citizenship, have fixed their domicile in Athens. For tile most part they are professional men, merchants, contractors, manufacturers, managers, tradesmen, craftsmen, artists, who, in the course of their wandering, have found in Athens the economic liberty, opportunity, and stimulus which to them is far more vital than the vote. The most important industrial undertakings, outside of mining, are owned by metics; the ceramic industry is theirs completely; and wherever middlemen can squeeze themselves in between producer and consumer they are to be found. Law harasses them and protects them. It taxes them like citizens, lays "liturgies" upon them, exacts military service from them, and adds a poll tax for good measure; it forbids them to own land or to marry into the family of a citizen; it excludes them from its religious organization, and from direct appeal to its courts. But it welcomes them into its economic life, appreciates their industry and skill, enforces their contracts, gives them religious freedom, and guards their wealth against violent revolution. Some of them flaunt their riches vulgarly, but some of them, too, work quietly in science, literature, and the arts, practice law or medicine, and create schools of rhetoric and philosophy. In the fourth century they will provide the authors and subject of the comic drama, and in the third they will set the cosmopolitan tone of Hellenistic society. They itch for citizenship, but they love Athens proudly, and contribute painfully to finance her defense against her enemies. Through them, chiefly, the fleet is maintained, the empire is supported, and the commercial supremacy of Athens is preserved.

Mingled with the metics in political disabilities and economic opportunities are the freedmen-those who once were slaves. For though it is inconvenient to liberate a slave, since usually he must be replaced by another, yet the promise of freedom is an economical stimulus to a young slave; and many Greeks, as death approaches, reward their most loyal slaves with manumission. The slave may be freed through ransoming by relatives or friends, as in the case of Plato; or the state, indemnifying his owner, may free him for service in war; or he himself may save his obols until he can buy his liberty. Like the metic, the freedman engages in industry, trade, or finance; at the lowest he may do for pay the work of a slave, at the top he may become a magnate of industry. Mylias manages Demosthenes' armor factory; Pasion and Phormio become the richest bankers in Athens. The freedman is especially valued as an executive, for no one is more severe with slaves than the man who has come up from slavery, and has known only oppression all the days of his life.

Beneath these three classes – citizens, metics, and freedmen – are the 115,000 slaves of Attica. [The figure is Gomme's, I.e. Possibly the number was much greater: Suidas, on the authority of a speech uncertainly attributed to Hyppereides in 338, gives the number of adult male slaves alone as 150,000; and according to the unreliable Athenaeus the census of Attica by Demetrius Phalereus about 317 gave 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and freedmen, and 400,000 slaves. Timaeus about 300 reckoned the slaves of Corinth at 360,000, and Aristotle, about 340, those of Aegina at 470,000. Perhaps these high figures are due to including slaves transiently offered for sale in the slave marts of Corinth, Aegma, and Athens.] They are recruited from unransomed prisoners of war, victims of slave raids, infants rescued from exposure, wastrels, and criminals. Few of them in Greece are Greeks. The Hellene looks upon foreigners as natural slaves, since they so readily give absolute obedience to a king, and he does not account the servitude of such men to Greeks as unreasonable. But he balks at the enslavement of a Greek, and seldom stoops to it. Greek traders buy slaves as they would merchandise, and offer them far sale at Chios, Delos, Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and wherever else they can fend purchasers. The slave dealers at Athens are among the richest of the merits. In Delos it is not unusual for a thousand slaves to be sold in a day; Cimon, after the battle of the Eurymedon, puts 20,000 prisoners on the slave market. At Athens there is a mart where slaves stand ready for naked inspection and bargaining purchase at any time. They cost from half a mina to ten minas ($50 to 1,000). They may be bought for direct use, or for investment; men and women in Athens find it profitable to buy slaves and rent them to homes, factories, or mines; the return is as high as 33 per cent. Even the poorest citizen has a slave or two; Aeschines, to prove his poverty, complains that his family has only seven; rich homes may have fifty. The Athenian government employs a number of slaves as clerks, attendants, minor officials, or policemen; many of these receive their clothing and a daily "allowance" of half a drachma, and are permitted to live where they please.

In the countryside the slaves are few, and are chiefly women servants in the home; in northern Greece and most of the Peloponnesus serfdom makes slavery superfluous. In Corinth, Megara, and Athens slaves do most of the manual labor, and women slaves most of the domestic toil; but slaves do also a great part of the clerical, and some of the executive work, in industry, commerce, and finance. Most skilled labor is performed by freemen, freedmen or merits; and there are no learned slaves as there will be in the Hellenistic period and in Rome. The slave is seldom allowed to bring up children of his own, for it is cheaper to buy a slave than to rear one. If the slave misbehaves he is whipped; if he testifies he is tortured; when he is struck by a freeman he must not defend himself. But if he is subjected to great cruelty he may flee to a temple, and then his master must sell him. In no case may his master kill him. So long as he labors he has more security than many who in other civilizations are not called slaves; when he is ill, or old, or there is no work for him to do, his master does not throw him upon public relief, but continues to take care of him. If he is loyal he is treated like a faithful servant, almost like a member of the family. He is often allowed to go into business, provided he will pay his owner a part of his earnings. He is free from taxation and from military service. Nothing in his costume distinguishes him, in fifth-century Athens, from the freeman; indeed the "Old Oligarch" who about 425 writes a pamphlet on The Polity of the Athenians complains that the slave does not make way for citizens on the street, that he talks freely, and acts in every detail as if he were the equal of the citizen. Athens is known for mildness to her slaves; it is a common judgment that slaves are better off in democratic Athens than poor freemen in oligarchic states. Slave revolts, though feared, are rare in Attica.

Nevertheless the Athenian conscience is disturbed by the existence of slavery, and the philosophers who defend it reveal almost as clearly as those who denounce it that the moral development of the nation has outrun its institutions. Plato condemns the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, but for the rest accepts slavery on the ground that some people have underprivileged minds." Aristotle looks upon the slave as an animate tool, and thinks that slavery will continue in some form until all menial work can be done by self-operating machines. The average Greek, though kind to his slaves, has no notion of how a cultured society can get along without slavery; to abolish slavery, he feels, it would be necessary to abolish Athens. Others are more radical. The Cynic philosophers condemn slavery outright; their successors, the Stoics, will condemn it more politely; Euripides again and again stirs his audiences by sympathetic pictures of war-captured slaves; and the sophist Alcidamas goes about Greece preaching, unmolested, the doctrine of Rousseau almost in the words of Rousseau: "God has sent all men into the world free, and nature has made no man a slave." But slavery goes on.

The exploitation of man by man is less severe in Athens and Thebes than in Sparta or Rome, but it is adequate to the purpose. There are no castes among the freemen in Athens, and a man may by resolute ability rise to anything but citizenship; hence, in part, the fever and turbulence of Athenian life. There is no tense class distinction between employer and employee except in the mines; usually the master works beside his men, and personal acquaintance dulls the edge of exploitation. The wage of nearly all artisans, of whatever class, is a drachma for each actual day of work;" but unskilled workers may get as low as three obols (50 cents) a day. Piecework tends to replace time-work as the factory system develops; and wages begin to vary more widely. A contractor may hire slaves from their owner for a rental of one to four obols a day. We may estimate the buying power of these wages by comparing Greek prices with our own. In 414 a house and estate in Attica cost twelve hundred drachmas; a medimmnus, or 1½ bushels, of barley costs a drachma in the sixth century, two at the close of the fifth, three in the fourth, five in the time of Alexander; a sheep costs a drachma in Solon's day, ten to twenty at the end of the fifth century; in Athens as elsewhere currency tends to increase faster than goods, and prices rise. At the close of the fourth century prices are five times as high as at the opening of the sixth; they, double from 480 to 404, and again from 404 to 330.

A single man lives comfortably on 120 drachmas ($120) a month; we may judge from this the condition of the worker who earns thirty drachmas per month, and has a family. It is true that the state comes to his relief in times of great stress, and then distributes corn at a nominal price. But he observes that the goddess of liberty is no friend to the goddess of equality, and that under the free laws of Athens the strong grow stronger, the rich richer, while the poor remain poor. [The great fortunes of Greek antiquity were of course modest in amount by modern standards. Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, is said to have had two hundred talents ($1,200,000); Nicias, one hundred.] Individualism stimulates the able, and degrades the simple; it creates wealth magnificently, and concentrates it dangerously. In Athens, as in other states, cleverness gets all that it can, and mediocrity gets the rest. The landowner profits from the rising value of his land; the merchant does his best, despite a hundred laws, to secure corners and monopolies; the speculator reaps, through the high rate of interest on loans, the lion's share of the proceeds of industry and trade. Demagogues arise who point out to the poor the inequality of human possessions, and conceal from them the inequality of human economic ability; the poor man, face to face with wealth, becomes conscious of his poverty, broods over his unrewarded merits, and dreams of perfect states. Bitterer than the war of Greece with Persia, or of Athens with Sparta, is, in all the Greek states, the war of class with class.

In Attica it begins with the conflict between the new rich and the landed aristocracy. The ancient families still love the soil, and live for the greater part on their estates. Division of the patrimony through many generations has made the average holding small (the rich Alcibiades has only seventy acres), and the squire in most cases labors personally on the soil, or in the management of his property. But though the aristocrat is not rich he is proud; he adds his father's name to his own as a title of nobility, and he remains aloof as long as he can from the mercantile bourgeoisie which is capturing the wealth of Athens' growing trade. His wife, however, cries for a city home and the varied life and opportunities of the metropolis; his daughters wish to live in Athens and snare rich husbands; his sons hope to find hetairai there and to give gay parties in the style of the nouveaux richer. As the aristocrat cannot compete in luxury with the merchants and manufacturers, he accepts them, or their children, as sons-in-law or daughters-in-law; they are anxious to climb, and willing to pay. The upshot is a union of the rich in land with the rich in money, and the formation of an upper class of oligarchs, envied and hated by the poor, angry at the excesses and extravagance of democracy, and fearful of revolution.

It is the insolence of the new wealth that brings on the second phase of the class war – the struggle of the poorer citizens against the rich. Many of the bourgeoisie flaunt their wealth like Alcibiades, but few others can so charm the "mechanic multitude" by dramatic audacity and elegance of person or speech. Young men conscious of ability and frustrated with poverty translate their personal need for opportunity and place into a general gospel of revolt; and intellectuals eager for new ideas and the applause of the oppressed formulate for them the aims of their rebellion. They call not for the socialization of industry and trade but for the abolition of debts and the redistribution of the land – among the citizens; for the radical movement in fifth-century Athens is confined to the poorer voters, and never dreams, at this stage, of liberating the slaves, or letting the metics in on the reallotment of the soil. The leaders talk of a golden past in which all men were equal in possessions, but they do not wish to be taken too literally when they speak of restoring that paradise. It is an aristocratic communism that they have in mind-not a nationalization of the land by the state, but an equal sharing of it by the citizens. They point out how unreal is the equality of the franchise in the face of mounting economic inequality; but they are resolved to use the political power of the poorer citizenry to persuade the Assembly to sluice into the pockets of the needy – by fines liturgies, confiscations, and public works – some of the concentrated wealth of the rich. And to give a lead to future rebels they adopt red as the symbolic color of their revolt

In the face of this threat the rich band themselves in secret organizations pledged to take common action against what Plato, despite his communism, will call the "monstrous beast" of the aroused and hungry mob. The free workers also organize – have at least since Solon organized – themselves into clubs (eranoi, thiasoi) of stonemasons, marble cutters, woodworkers, ivoryworkers, potters, fishermen, actors, etc.; Socrates is a member of a sculptor's thiasos. [The sculptors and architects of Greece formed a guild of builders, with their own religious mysteries, and became the forerunners of the Freemasons of later Europe.] But these groups are not so much trade-unions as mutual benefit societies: they come together in meeting places called synods or synagogues, have banquets and games, and worship a patron deity; they make payments to sick members, and contract collectively for specific enterprises; but they do not enter visibly into the Athenian class war. The battle is fought on the fields of literature and politics. Pamphleteers like the "Old Oligarch" issue denunciations or defenses of democracy. The comic poets, since their plays require rich men to finance their production, are on the side of the drachmas, and pour ridicule upon tile radical leaders and their utopias. In the Ecclesiazusae (392) Aristophanes introduces us to the lady communist Praxagora, who makes an oration as follows:

I want all to have a share of everything, and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; no longer shall we see one man harvesting vast tracts of land, while another has not ground enough to be buried in . . . . I intend that there shall only be one and the same condition of life for all . . . . I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all . . . . Women shall belong to all men in common."

"But who," asks Blepyrus, "will do the work?" "The slaves," is her reply. In another comedy, the Plutus (408), Aristophanes allows Poverty, who is threatened with extinction, to defend herself as the necessary goad to human tail and enterprise:

I am the sole cause of all your blessings, and your safety depends upon me alone . . . . Who would wish to hammer iron, build ships, sew, turn, cut up leather, bake bricks, bleach linen, tan hides, or break up the soil with the plow and garner the gifts of Demeter if he could live in idleness and free from all this work? . . . If your system [communism] is applied . . . you will not be able to sleep in a bed, for no more will ever be manufactured; nor on carpets, for who would weave them if he had gold?

The reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles are the first achievement of the democratic revolt. Pericles is a man of judgment and moderation; he does not wish to destroy the rich but to preserve them and their enterprise by easing the condition of the poor; but after his death (429) the democracy becomes so radical that the oligarchic party conspires again with Sparta, and makes in 411, and once more in 404, a rich man's revolution. Nevertheless, because wealth is great in Athens and trickles down to many, and because fear of a slave uprising gives the citizenry pause, the class war in Athens is milder, and sooner reaches a working compromise, than in Greek states where the middle class is not strong enough to mediate between rich and poor. At Samos, in 412, the radicals seize the government, execute two hundred aristocrats, banish four hundred more, divide up the lands .rid houses among themselves, and develop another society- like that which hey have overthrown. At Leontini, in 422, the commoners expel the oligarchs, but soon afterward take to fight. At Corcyra, in 427, the oligarchs assassinate sixty leaders of the popular party; the democrats seize the government, imprison four hundred aristocrats, try fifty of them before a kind of Committee of Public Safety, and execute all fifty at once; seeing which a considerable number of the surviving prisoners slay one another, others kill themselves, and the rest are walled up in the temple in which they have sought sanctuary, and are starved to death. Thucydides describes the class war in Greece in a timeless passage:

During seven days the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies; and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the monies owed to them. Death thus raged in every shape, and as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain upon it . . . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places where it arrived last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions . . . and the atrocity of their reprisals . . . . Corcyra gave the first example of these crimes . . . of the revenge exacted by the governed -who had never experienced equitable treatment, or, indeed, ought but violence from their rulers-when their hour came; of the iniquitous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed poverty, and ardently coveted their neighbors' goods; and the savage and pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the struggle not in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their passions . . . . In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, aoove respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority . . . . Reckless audacity came now to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent Hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability to act on any . . . .

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition . . . . The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of the political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish; and, recoiling from no means in their struggle for ascendancy, engaged in the direst excesses . . . . Religion was in honor with neither party, but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation . . . . The ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down, and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow . . . . Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel or because envy would not suffer them to escape . . . . The whole Hellenic world was convulsed.

Athens survives this turbulence because every Athenian is at heart an individualist, and loves private property; and because the Athenian government finds a practicable medium between socialism and individualism in a moderate regulation of business and wealth. The state is not afraid to regulate: it sets a limit upon the size of dowries, the cost of funerals, and the dress of women; it taxes and supervises trade, enforces fair weights and measures and honest quality so far as the ingenuity of human rascality permits; it limits the export of food, and enacts sharp laws to govern and chasten the practices of merchants and tradesmen. It watches the grain trade carefully, and legislates severely against corners – even to the death penalty – by forbidding the purchase of more than seventy-five bushels of wheat at a time; it interdicts loans on outgoing cargoes unless the return shipment is to bring grain to the Piraeus; it requires that all corn loaded by vessels owned in Athens shall be brought to the Piraeus; and it prohibits the export of more than a third of any corn cargo that reaches that port. By keeping a reserve of grain in state-owned storehouses, and pouring this upon the market when prices rise too rapidly, Athens sees to it that the price of bread shall never be exorbitant, that millionaires shall not be created out of the hunger of the people, and that no Athenian shall starve. The state regulates wealth through taxation and liturgies, and persuades or compels rich men to supply funds for the fleet, the drama, and the theoric payments that enable the poor to attend the plays and the games. For the rest Athens protects freedom of trade, private property, and the opportunity to profit, deeming them the necessary implements of human liberty, and the most powerful stimuli to industry, commerce, and prosperity.