The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Such a system begins to take form in the age of Pericles. Pericles himself, like Alcibiades, owns a factory.17 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.18 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.19 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.

  III. TRADE AND FINANCE

  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 are 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.20 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.”21

  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,22 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.23

  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.24 “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.”25 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.”26 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 I.27 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.*28 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 lends 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 not allow them to shop.29

  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, for 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.”30 “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.”31 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, wools, 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 Caria 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 $144,000,000 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.

  IV. FREEMEN AND SLAVES

  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.”* 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 or 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.32

  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 the 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. The 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,33 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.* 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 for sale at Chios, Delos, Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and wherever else they can find purchasers. The slave dealers at Athens are among the richest of the metics. 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.34 At Athens there is a mart where slaves stand ready for naked inspection and bargaining purchase at any time. They cos
t from half a mina to ten minas ($50 to $1000). 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.35 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.36 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 metics; 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. lie 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.39 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.40 Slave revolts, though feared, are rare in Attica.41