[78] Ibid. v. 8.
[79] Ibid. v. 8, 11.
[80] Ibid. v. 8.
[81] Ibid. v. 10.
[82] Ibid. v. 12.
[83] Ibid. v. 14.
[84] Ibid. vi. 9.
[85] Ibid. v. 7.
[86] Ibid. vi. 10.
The argumentative manner in which these views were expressed by the philosophers indicates, however, that industrial occupations were deficient in public appreciation.[87] Herodotus says that not only among most barbarians but also throughout Greece those who are given wholly to war are honoured above others.[88] This was especially the case at Sparta, where a freeman was forbidden to engage in any industrial occupation.[89] Contrasting Lycurgus’ legislation with that of Solon, Plutarch observes that in a state where the earth was sufficient to support twice the number of inhabitants and where there were a multitude of Helots to be worn out by servitude, it was right to set the citizens free from laborious and mechanic arts and to employ them in arms as the only art fit for them to learn and exercise.[90] At Thebes there was a law that no man could hold office who had not retired from business for ten years, because it was looked upon as a mean employment.[91] Even at Athens, in spite of its democratic institutions and its laws against idleness, trade and handicrafts were despised, both by the general public and by the philosophers. Xenophon’s Socrates said that the industrial arts are objectionable and justly held in little repute in communities, because they weaken the bodies of those who work at them by compelling them to sit and to live indoors and in some cases to pass whole days by the fire; for when the body becomes effeminate the mind loses its strength.[92] Moreover, mechanical occupations leave those who practise them no leisure to attend to the interests of their friends or the commonwealth, hence men of that class seem unsuited alike to be of advantage to their connections and to be defenders of their country.[93] Plato maintains that manual arts are a reproach because they “imply a natural weakness of the higher principle”;[94] by their meanness they maim and disfigure the souls as well as the bodies of those who are employed in them.[95] When Hesiod said that “work is no disgrace,”[96] he could certainly not have meant that there was no disgrace for example in the manufacture of shoes or in selling pickles.[97] And in his ‘Laws’ Plato lays down the regulation that no citizen or servant of a citizen should be occupied in handicraft arts; “for he who is to secure and preserve the public order of the State has an art which requires much study and many kinds of knowledge, and does not admit of being made a secondary occupation.”[98] Aristotle, again, observes that in a community which has an aristocratic form of government the mechanic and the labourer will not be citizens, because honours are there given according to virtue and merit, and “no man can practise virtue who is living the life of a mechanic or labourer.”[99] Corinth was the place in Greece where the mechanic’s occupation was least despised[100]—no doubt because its situation naturally led to extensive trade and thence to that splendour of living by which the useful and ornamental arts are most encouraged.[101]