Selected from J. P. Mahaffy’s “Old Greek Life.”
CHAPTER IV.—PUBLIC LIFE OF THE GREEK CITIZEN.
The aristocracy of the older Greek society was one based on the exclusive owning of land, and of civic rights, and was not marked by titles, but by the name of the clan. Thus at Athens an Alcmæonid[1] was respected much as the member of an old Scottish clan is now by his fellows. But poverty injured the position of the old Greek more than that of the Scotchman. In the aristocratic days all work in the way of trade or business was despised by the landed gentry, and idleness was called the sister of freedom. The pursuit of a trade often disqualified a man for political rights, and in any case deprived him of all public influence. This feeling did not die out even in the complete democracies of later days, and there was always a prejudice in the Greek mind against trades and handicrafts, because they compelled men to sit at home and neglect the proper training of the body by sports, and the mind by society. Mercantile pursuits were also objected to by Greek gentlemen, but on different grounds. It was considered that the making of profits by retail trading was of the nature of cheating, and the life of a merchant in any Greek city not his own was always one of dependence and fear, for nowhere were aliens treated with real justice and liberality. Thus even the poor citizen of Athens, living by the small pay (nine cents daily) given him for sitting on juries, and performing other public duties, looked down with contempt upon the rich tradesman, who was confined all day to a close dark shop, or still worse, did his work in the hot atmosphere of a furnace. Consequently the greater part of the shops in Athens, and most of the trades were in the hands of licensed aliens who paid certain taxes to the state, and by making large profits recouped[2] themselves for the risk of being persecuted and plundered by the citizens in days of danger and distress. These people may be compared, as to their social and political position, with the Jews in the middle ages, who lived all through the cities of Europe without civic rights, or landed property, merely by trade and usury. They were despised and persecuted, but still tolerated as useful, and even necessary, by the governments of those days. Rich capitalists, on the contrary, who were able to manage a large business through an overseer and a number of slaves, were not at all despised, even though their ways of making profits were sometimes very shameful. But any free man who was compelled by poverty to perform this manual labor was held little better than a slave. There were certain privileged classes in Homer’s day, such as the leech,[3] the seer, the bard, and the cunning worker of brass. So in later days the sculptor and the sophist were in some respects considered good society, but still the gaining of money by giving up their time to others told very seriously against them.
A great part of the ordinary clothing and breadstuffs was prepared by the slave within the Greek house. The principal tradesmen who supplied the other necessaries of life were the architect, who was often a great and important person—indeed, the only tradesman very honorably mentioned; under him masons, carpenters, and cabinet-makers. There were potters, who must have been a very large body, considering the great demand for their wares, as neither glass nor wooden vessels were much used. So there were separate makers of lamps, jewelry, weapons of war, musical instruments. There were a few weavers, and hardly any tailors—as the forms of dress were perfectly simple, and the fashions did not change—but many bleachers and dyers of clothes. The making of shoes was even subdivided among several tradesmen. There were in the market, cooks (hired by the day), ropemakers, tanners, and also many perfumers and druggists. Tanners were generally compelled to have their workshops outside the city. We may also, without doubt, consider military service by sea or land one of the ordinary trades of Greece, practiced from very early times in Asia, and all through Greek history by the Arcadians, who were the Swiss of the old world. The usual pay for a mercenary soldier or sailor was four obols, which was often raised in times of difficulty. When the former outlet which enterprising young men had found in new colonies throughout Asia Minor, Pontus, and Magna Græcia, was closed by the rise of new races and new empires, this trade, disreputable as it was, became very common indeed. The celebrated 10,000 whom Xenophon brought safely from the heart of the Persian empire, were an army made up of these adventurers, who had followed the younger Cyrus merely for the sake of pay and plunder. Thus Agesilaus[4] and Cleomenes, kings of Sparta, were not ashamed to serve in Egypt as mercenaries.
MERCANTILE PURSUITS.
We may first notice the lower sort, the retail merchants, who were employed in buying the husbandman’s and the tradesman’s goods, and selling them in the markets or through the towns at a profit. It was indeed much in fashion among the Greeks, to sell one’s own produce in the market, but of course such people as fishermen or shepherds could not leave their business to journey often a long way to a market town. Thus we find in large places like Athens, many butchers, fishmongers, vegetable and other grocers, and particularly wine sellers, who went about with their wine in carts. All these people were accused of extortion and insolence, the fishmongers of selling stale fish, the vintners of watering their wine (a very harmless adulteration). There were street cries, and often even the buyer going into the market called out what he wanted.
The wholesale merchant was of course a more important person, and the rise of this larger trade was in fact what raised up a wealthy city class in opposition to the landed aristocracy, and was generally the cause of overthrowing oligarchies.[5] Many respectable citizens (except in Sparta) thought it no disgrace to follow this sort of business, and none of them scorned to invest money in it as a speculation. As the land traffic in Greece is unusually difficult and roundabout, almost all commerce was carried on by sea, so that a merchant was often called a skipper. We are fully informed about Athenian commerce only.
We must imagine the Greek waters not as they are now, lonely and desolate, with often not a single boat to give life to a great bay or reach of water, but rather covered in the summer with traffic and with life, so much so that a Greek poet speaks of sailors as the “ants of the sea,” hurrying in all directions with ceaseless industry. There were public wharves and warehouses close to the quays, where the skipper brought samples of his cargo. With the exception of the corn and slave factors, the Greek merchants did not confine themselves to trading in one kind of goods, but conveyed anything according as they saw chances of profit. Pottery from Samos and Athens, fine woolen stuffs and Assyrian carpets from Miletus, paper, unguents, and glass from Egypt, salt fish, skins and corn from the Black Sea, ship timber and slaves from Thrace and Macedonia, ivory and spices from Cyrene[6]—these were among the usual articles imported and exported through the Greek waters. Merchants were in some places treated with peculiar favor, had their taxes and military duty forgiven, and above all, were granted a speedy trial, and in the idle winter months, in case of disputes about contracts, or other lawsuits.