As mercenary warfare was common, so that of mercenary general was practiced, even by distinguished Greeks, such as Agesilaus and Cleomenes, in later days. As the pay was only four times that of the common soldier, it is evident that extortion and plunder must have been presupposed as an additional means of gain, and this was the case with many of the older citizen generals of whom we read in history, such as Pausanias, Themistocles, and others. The profession of military engineer was not common, but was practiced with success and fame by a few remarkable men, such as Artemon,[9] whose mechanical genius made them very valuable.
LAW.
As men pleaded their own case among the Greeks, the legal profession, as far as we know, could only give friendly advice, or compose speeches for litigants, and this was an extended and lucrative profession at Athens. In some cases friends or supporters were allowed to speak in addition to the actual litigants, but paid counsel were not directly recognized. When the state retained what we should call a public prosecutor, he was only paid one drachma (nineteen cents) for a speech, which reminds us of a mediæval entry quoted by Hallam, where eight cents and his dinner was a lawyer’s fee. But distinguished orators like Demosthenes obtained large private fees. There was also in almost all democracies special encouragement, in the absence of state lawyers, for any citizen to denounce any violation of the laws which he could detect. This gave rise to a profession called sycophancy, which usually degenerated into that of a spy or informer; and such men constantly extracted money from rich people and from politicians by threats of accusation.
LITERATURE.
In addition to the schoolmasters, who were not in high repute, and were rather considered a trade than a profession, there were the sophists, who were both rhetoricians and philosophers, and who performed exactly the functions now expected from universities, as distinguished from schools. People spoke of a pupil of Isocrates as they now do of “a Harvard man.” These men taught politics, rhetoric, literary criticism, and higher science in a practical way, and made large incomes in spite of their great unpopularity with the old-fashioned side of both political and social Greece. At first they obtained enormous fees, but by competition these were reduced to an average of from five to ten minæ for a course of instruction. Their course lasted about three years.
We do not hear of any authors making a livelihood by their work, except poets, who were largely paid for occasional poems by both states and kings, and whose dramatic works were a source of profit as well as honor. Copies of books were easily multiplied by means of slave labor, so that we hear of Anaxagoras’[10] treatise being sold for one drachma, then very dear. This was at a regular bookstall in Athens, from whence books were actually an article of exportation as far as the Black Sea. Still, collections of books were rare till after the time of Euripides, and we know of no fortunes made by writing books. Anaxagoras himself, though so popular with the rising generation, is said to have died in poverty.
The profession of architects was esteemed far the greatest among artists, and was the most richly paid. They were no doubt men of culture, and were literary men, as, for example, Ictinus,[11] one of the architects of the Parthenon, who wrote a special work about the great temple. The professions of sculptor and painter were not so at first, the sculptor being hardly more than a skillful workman, and this seems to be the case in most great art epochs. Men like Pheidias and Polygnotus,[12] who were of a higher level, often worked without accepting any pay, but the sculptors who adorned the Erectheum at Athens, one of the most beautiful of Greek temples, were either paid by the day from one to two drachmæ, or by the job, receiving two hundred to two hundred and forty drachmæ (under $50) for each figure or small group of figures. This was in Pericles’ time, when art had reached its highest perfection.
Similarly in music, though amateur singing and playing were very common, it was not thought gentlemanly to live by them, and professional musicians were ranked with actors and jugglers, and the other classes who lived by amusing the rich. At later periods, however, both celebrated musicians and celebrated actors became important personages, and were courted by a society which had abandoned higher and more serious pursuits.
The medical profession had always a high position in Greek life, from the days of Machaon Podalirius,[13] in Homer, down to the doctors of Plato’s day, who sometimes brought an orator with them to persuade the patient to take their remedies. This was done because it was the fashion to discuss everything in Greece, and people were not satisfied to submit silently to anybody’s prescriptions.
There was of course a great deal of superstitious quackery, which dealt in amulets and charms, and there were slave assistants, who visited slave patients, but the higher members of the profession were not only well paid, but appointed publicly by the various cities as official physicians.