Attitudes to Work and Leisure in Ancient Greece

Attitudes to Work and Leisure in Ancient GreeceAuthor(s): Maurice BalmeSource: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Oct., 1984), pp. 140-152Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642580 .

Accessed: 15/07/2014 12:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and The Classical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Greece &Rome.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 77.215.246.253 on Tue, 15 Jul 2014 12:45:19 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=classical

http://www.jstor.org/stable/642580?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Greece & Rome, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, October 1984

ATTITUDES TO WORK AND LEISURE IN ANCIENT GREECE1

By MAURICE BALME

The Puritan ethic insists that work is both necessary and virtuous. But if automation makes work unnecessary, is it still virtuous? Indeed, if work is in short supply, may not industry actually be vicious, since it would mean taking more than one's fair share of the work available to the community as a whole, a new sort of rhAEovEL'a? A letter appeared in the national press recently which said: 'Work is virtuous only when it is necessary, and much of what was done in the past and for which people were trained, no longer needs to be done. We already have butter mountains, beef mountains, barley mountains, lakes of milk, surfeits of electricity generating capacity, of shipping, of coal and so on.... Twenty thousand miners could be retired tomorrow on ?10,000 a year and there would still be a surplus of ?50,000,000 from the quarter of a billion pounds we spend on keeping open uneconomic pits. Rather than see these pits close, Mr Scargill wants to condemn his members in perpetuity to that unpleasant job, when they could have the money without doing the work. I see nothing virtuous in a miner doing that sort of work for its own sake.'

Such reflections make it worth while considering again the attitudes to work prevalent in ancient Greece. For there is a common belief that in ancient Greece slaves did the work while free citizens lived a life of leisure at the expense of the state, and so we might find some useful lessons for ourselves in the new age of automation.

Did the Greeks consider work neither necessary nor virtuous? Aristotle is quite clear that work is not an end in itself. The end which man aims at is happiness: 'Happiness seems to depend on leisure; we work (J'aXoAovt'E6a) in order to enjoy leisure (schole), just as we make war in order to enjoy peace' (Nic. Eth. 1177b). Not that leisure (schole) is equivalent to idleness (argia), for happiness consists in a peculiarly strenuous form of activity: 'happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect arete' and this activity is contemplation. And so work, i.e. manual work, is in itself an obstruction to happiness as disagreeable as war; no right-minded man would undertake either of these activities for its own sake.

Aristotle's argument, which leads to the condemnation of all forms of manual labour as banausic, harmful to body and soul, is the clearest and most logical statement of a view which seems to have been com- monly held by the intelligentsia of the late fifth- and fourth-century



ATTITUDES TO WORK AND LEISURE IN ANCIENT GREECE 141

Athens. Thus Socrates says (Xen. Oec. 4.2): 'The so-called banausic crafts are criticized and have a very poor reputation in our poleis, quite reasonably.' Plato in the Republic (415c) has a rigid caste system in his ideal polis, which permanently excludes from all part in government the demiourgoi (craftsmen) and georgoi (farmers). Aristotle says quite succinctly (Pol. 1278a8): 'The best polis will not make an artisan (banauson) a citizen.' Nor were these the ideologues of a few philosophers, for they drew their inspiration from contemporary practice. Thus Socrates ends the passage quoted above by saying: 'And in some poleis none of the citizens is even allowed to work at banausic crafts.' This was perfectly true; no Spartiate, for example, sullied his hands with manual labour; he was forbidden to do so under the Lycurgan system; at Thebes any man who had traded in the agora during the last ten years was excluded from citizenship (this would exclude not only the craftsmen who sold their own products - the majority - but also

peasants who brought their produce into the city for sale). Herodotus (2.163ff.) sums up the situation when, explaining the Egyptian caste system, which did not allow a warrior to practise a techne, he adds that nearly all barbarian peoples consider those who learn technai less honourable than the rest of the citizens and that all the Greeks follow this valuation, the Spartans showing the greatest contempt for handi- craftsmen and the Corinthians showing least.

Philosophers and statesmen who subscribed to such views or framed such constitutions justified their restrictions both on moral grounds (banausic crafts deform both body and soul) and on practical grounds (manual labour and trade do not allow the leisure necessary for taking part in politics). But how widespread was this attitude of lofty contempt for work? Did most Greeks, not greedy for material goods, despise work as the province of slaves and seek their happiness in 'contemplation' when they were not discussing questions of politics and morals in the agora, watching the plays of Sophocles. in the theatre, or listening to the speeches of Pericles on the Pnyx?

The evidence is thin and scattered, inevitably, since with one exception our sources are not much concerned with the everyday life of the ordinary man. But luckily near the beginning of Greek literature stands Hesiod, the archetype of the Greek peasant and, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, of the peasant throughout the world and throughout history. Work is one of the leading motifs of the Works and Days: 'Work, foolish Perses' is the recurrent theme in his advice to his erring brother. Work is ordained by the gods and approved by men, and idleness is condemned by both alike: 'Gods and men are angry with the man who lives in idleness, like the stingless drones in character.... By work men become rich in flocks and wealthy; and by working they are far dearer



142 ATTITUDES TO WORK AND LEISURE IN ANCIENT GREECE

to the immortal gods; work is no shame, it is idleness that is shame' (lines 303ff.). It is true that in the Golden Age there was no need to work: 'They (the men of the Golden Age) had all good things; the bountiful earth bore fruit in boundless plenty.' But after Prometheus' sin in stealing fire, the gods punished mankind, not only by sending Woman to plague him but also by making work a necessity: 'For the gods have hidden from men the means of life. For easily you might work for a day and so have sufficient for a year even tho' you were idle.... But Zeus has hidden the means in the anger of his heart' (lines 41-6). It is the story of the Fall:

'Unto Adam God said: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat of the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return."'

For both Hesiod and the author of Genesis work is a disagreeable necessity and one which there is no escaping, since it is enjoined by God as a punishment for sin, and man can never return to the Garden of Eden or to the Golden Age. The idler is condemned by both gods and men, but work also has its compensations; it leads to the love and protection of the gods, to the respect of fellow men, and, if you are lucky, to wealth. What you may do with your wealth when you have acquired it is another matter; Hesiod expresses no views on leisure; no doubt the lot of the peasant in his day lay too close to the subsistence line to encourage much day-dreaming on this subject.

Hesiod has little to tell us about attitudes to craftsmen; they exemplify 'the good strife', what we would call 'healthy competition'. 'Potter is angry with potter and joiner with joiner and beggar envies beggar and singer singer', as they hasten on the road that leads to wealth; and no doubt they sweated, for 'the immortal gods have made men sweat for excellence'. And, although Hesiod, a canny Boiotian peasant, is always apt to see things in terms of material gain or loss, no doubt the potter not only strove to sell more pots, but also to produce better pots from pride in workmanship. Homer's attitude to craftsmanship is plain enough. For him craftsmen were demiourgoi, men who worked for the people, which may fairly be seen as a term of approval; theirs is an honourable calling and included in their ranks are doctors, singers, and seers. Their professions are taught by and patronized by gods (Athene and Hephaistos), just as doctors are taught by Paion, singers by the Muses, and seers by Apollo. And Homer clearly has great admiration for craftsmen, for instance: 'As when a man inlays silver with gold, a knowing man, whom Hephaistos has taught and Pallas Athene every craft and he makes works of grace, so she (Athene) poured grace over




his (Odysseus') head and shoulders' (Od. 6.230ff.). We may conclude that at the beginning of our tradition work was considered both virtuous and necessary, that idleness was condemned, and that the craftsman was held in high esteem.

There is no evidence to suggest that in the succeeding centuries these attitudes changed in most poleis. To Thales of Miletus (fl.600 B.C.) are attributed the sayings 'Idleness is a pain' (11) and 'Don't be idle even if you are rich' (15). His contemporary Solon of Athens was a glutton for work. The tradition followed by Plutarch ascribes to him a law that no son was obliged to look after his father in old age if he had not bred him up to a craft, and that he ordered the Areopagites to examine how every man got his living and punish the idle (he also says that under Dracon's bloody code those convicted of idleness were put to death). Quoting Hesiod, he asserts that in Solon's time 'Work was no shame' and that no distinction was made with regard to a man's trade.

Plutarch may not be a very reliable authority for this early period, but fortunately we have considerable fragments of Solon's own poems and number 1, a complete poem seventy-six lines long, supports the picture which Plutarch draws. In this poem Solon says that he would like to be rich, but he rejects unjust gains, for they soon result in ate (destruction), since Zeus punishes the unjust. He then lists the various occupations by which men can justly acquire wealth: 'Different men speed on different roads....'; the merchant, the peasant, the craftsman, the seer, and the doctor make up the list; and perhaps it is comprehensive, since normally the peasant and the craftsman sold their own products in the agora or in their workshop; middle men (kapeloz) were always few and perhaps scarcely existed in Solon's time. No distinction of worth is made between these occupations, as Plutarch says; the craftsman's work is as honourable as that of the poet, who has learnt the glorious gifts of the Muses, the seer, who is inspired by Apollo the Farshooter, and the doctor, who practises the work of Paion: 'Another knows the works of Athene and Hephaistos of the many crafts and makes his living with his hands.' There is not the slightest suggestion that the man who makes his living in this way is inferior or banausic in the perjorative sense.

It would be strange if the occupations of peasant and craftsman were honoured and respected in the aristocratic society of Homer's time and in the timocratic society of Solon's time, and yet despised and rejected in the radical democracy of Athens. How widespread, then, were the attitudes apparently held by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in fifth- and fourth-century Athens? How many of the sovereign demos were in a position to take this attitude of lofty contempt for manual work, and how large a proportion in fact had to earn their living by the work of their hands? In the Gorgias (515e) Plato has Socrates say, 'I hear this,




that Pericles has made the Athenians idle and worthless chatterboxes by first introducing pay for public service'. Was it then really true that under the radical democracy the people could live on the state, as Aristophanes implies in the Ecclesiazousai (lines 1132ff.); the servant girl tells Blepyros that he has been invited to dinner. 'What? me?', says Blepyros. 'Yes, you are the only man to be invited. For you are the only man who hasn't dined at state expense when more than thirty thousand do.'

It is therefore worth enquiring how in fact the people of Athens were employed. Aristotle (Politics, 1291 bff.) gives a comprehensive list of the classes of people who together compose any state. He lists eight classes:

1. The farmers. 2. The so-called banausic class. 3. The agoraion - those occupied in the agora in buying and selling

as retailers (kapeloi) or wholesalers (emporoi). 4. The thetic, i.e. hired labourers. 5. The warrior class. We can omit these, since in Athens they would

not be a separate class; all citizens after serving as epheboi were liable to be called up for military service; by profession they would belong to one of Aristotle's other classes.

6. The judicial class. In Athens these would be the six thousand members of the jury panel, who received two, or later three, obols for each day they served. But this was not a living wage and employment was irregular, depending on the requirements of the courts on any day; perhaps Aristophanes is right as representing them as mostly old men who were past regular work. In any case this was not an occupation which could support a family.

7. The rich who serve the state (leitourgiai). 8. Public servants and those serving in state offices. There is no doubt that in Athens by far the largest class was that of

the farmers. Thucydides (2.14) in describing the evacuation of Attica before the first Peloponnesian invasion says, 'They found the evacuation difficult, because the majority had always been accustomed to live in the country', and he goes on to explain why this was more true of Athens than of other contemporary states. It is often said2 that in the fifth century at least three-fifths of the citizen population were peasants and that the number declined to two-fifths in the fourth century (Aristotle - Ath. Pol. 24.1 - says that there was a drift from the country to the city from the 460s on). The farms of these peasants were mostly very small; in the fourth century the hoplite census (Solon's zeugitai, i.e. those who owned a yoke of oxen) was two thousand drachmas; in terms of land value this is about five acres; and no doubt there were some peasants who owned even less land and supplemented their




income by working as hired labourers. At the other end of the scale Jones3 calculates that an estate of two talents might put a man on the trierarchic register, which included only the twelve hundred richest men in Athens; in terms of land value two talents would be about thirty acres. It would be wrong to assume that all or even most of these farmers used slave labour to work their farms. The figures for the total number of slaves in Attica are largely guess-work, but many families, even of hoplite status, probably had no slaves, and a family with only one or two slaves would be more likely to use them for domestic duties than for agricultural labour; there were slack periods in the farmer's year and it would not be economical to keep a slave just to work on the farm. As Aristotle says (Pol. 1252b), 'For poor men the ox takes the place of the slave'. The peasant in Euripides' Electra has no slave; he goes to plough the field himself at dawn with a characteristic gnome: 'No man that's idle, tho' he has the gods on his lips, could make a living without toil.' He has no domestic slave either, for it is Electra who goes to the spring to fetch water. And Demosthenes (24.197) speaks of the collectors of war tax (payed only by the six thousand richest Athenians) who remove doors, seize blankets, and take off servants from anyone who has a servant, implying that even some of this class have no slave. The conclusion seems to be that the vast majority of peasants worked their farms with their own hands.

Whatever Plato and Aristotle may imply in some passages about attitudes to agricultural labour, other evidence makes it clear that such work was always considered respectable and, indeed, admirable. Passages to show this could be multiplied. Aristophanes treats his peasant 'heroes' like Dicaiopolis with affection; even if Strepsiades is a twister, there is no suggestion that his occupation is disreputable. In Euripides' Electra the peasant is the only admirable character apart from the old shepherd, and he quite changes Orestes' views on what makes a good man. And there are more explicit passages, notably Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4.2. Socrates has just condemned the banausic arts in the passage quoted earlier. 'But what arts do you advise us to follow?', asks Critoboulos. Socrates replies that one can hardly do better than follow the example of the King of Persia, whose main concerns are farming and war. And his interest is not confined to encouraging good practice in his empire; Cyrus actually works on the land himself. When Lysander admired the paradise at Sardis, Cyrus proudly claimed that he had not only planned the park but had done some of the planting himself. Lysander, a good Spartiate, exclaimed: 'What do you mean, Cyrus? Did you really plant some of these trees with your own hands?' To which Cyrus replied: 'I never sit down to dinner without first sweating at either martial exercises or farming work.' Even the




wealthiest, Socrates goes on, cannot refrain from farming, and he lets rip on the benefits which ensue from its practice - not only strength of body and readiness for war, but also moral benefits: 'For earth teaches justice too to those who can learn.' He paints an idyllic picture of the farmer's life - in winter comforted by generous fires and hot baths, in summer enjoying cool waters and breeze and shade. He sums up his panegyric by saying: 'This form of work is easiest to learn and pleasantest to practise; it gives the body the greatest strength and beauty and to the soul the greatest amount of leisure for serving one's friends and one's city.... And for these reasons this way of life has the highest reputation in our cities, because it seems to produce the best citizens.'

Aristotle's second class is the 'so-called banausic'. This class, of course, takes the greatest pounding from the writers we have quoted; it is worth continuing the passage of Xenophon which I have already referred to: 'The so called banausic crafts are criticized and have a very poor reputation in our cities, and rightly; for they deform the bodies of both those who work at them and those who oversee them, forcing men to sit and stay in the shade, and some of them even to spend the day by a fire. And when the body becomes effeminate, the soul also becomes much weaker. And the banausic crafts allow least leisure for attending to one's friends and politics, so that people of this class seem to be bad at relations with friends and bad defenders of their country.... And in some states none of the citizens is allowed to work at banausic crafts.'

Although we have no means of telling how many craftsmen there were in Athens amongst the citizens, they must have formed a large class, serving, as Aristotle says, both the essential crafts, without which a city cannot exist, and those which contribute to luxury and the good life. In Xenophon's Memorabilia (7.5-6) Socrates asks Charmides why he is reluctant to speak in the Assembly: 'Is it the fullers you are shy of or the cobblers or the farmers or the merchants or those who barter in the market place and who are concerned with what they can buy for less and sell for more? For it is of all these that the Assembly is composed.' Of the groups Socrates lists the farmers would form the majority in the Assembly, if they were all present; but many would be unable to attend the Assembly regularly since they lived too far from Athens and could not leave their farms in the busy seasons. The merchants were certainly a small class, wholesale traders, dealing mostly in goods imported and exported by sea. They may have been considered disreputable in Homer's time, but from the early sixth century at least they were eminently respectable, including a number of nobles, like Sappho's brother, who traded in wine to Egypt, or Solon himself. The retail traders (kapeloi) were also a small class, if we mean by this those who make their living solely by retail trade. They always had a bad




reputation for cheating their customers. When Aristophanes in the Knights wants to create a really low character to supplant the Paphla- gonian tanner Cleon, he is a sausage seller: 'A sausage seller!', exclaims Nicias, when he hears the prophesy, 'Poseidon, what a trade!' He is a creature who cannot even think of himself as a man at the beginning of the play: 'And how shall I, a sausage seller, become a man?' When Socrates warns Hippocrates of the dangers of buying education from a sophist, he says it is even more dangerous than buying food from a kapelos; they have no idea whether their wares are good or bad for you but praise them all alike (Plato, Protagoras 313d). Their only purpose is to buy for less and sell for more (Xen. Mem. 7.6).

If the merchants and the retailers were few and the farmers were often unable to attend the Assembly, it seems to follow that often the banausoi may have formed a majority of the Assembly. Both Plato and Xenophon had suffered at the hands of the sovereign demos, which may help to explain their prejudice, but we can show from their own works that craftsmen were not held in general contempt and that idleness was still considered the cardinal sin. Plato (Republic 565a) divides the demos into drones, who live in idleness (the politicians, I regret to say), the rich, who provide fodder for the drones, and 'all who work for themselves (autourgoi) and keep out of politics (apragmones), not very rich'. The autourgoi here includes both peasants and craftsmen. Plato is echoing Hesiod here, and by implication the autourgoi are the best of a bad bunch. Socrates himself, of course, was a stone-mason; interested in all technai, he used to visit craftsmen in their shops and question them about their work. In the Apology (21-2) he says that in his quest to find the meaning of Apollo's oracles (that there was no man wiser than Socrates), he first visited the politicians and poets and found them wanting; finally he went to the craftsmen and found that they were wiser (sophoteroi) than he, although 'Good craftsmen, because they were good at their craft, each claimed to be very wise in other important matters too'. Despite this criticism, the language expresses strong approval for the craftsman (demiourgos) and his skill (sophia). And, of course, at the top of the scale stood the artists of distinction and renown, the potters and painters who signed their splendid works, the great architects like Ictinus, in demand all over Greece, the great sculptors like Pheidias, the friend of Pericles. It must be remembered that all craftsmen were in a sense artists, striving towards sophia in their techne; there was no distinction, such as there is in the modern industrial world, between objects mass-produced and objects made by craftsmen who are artists. The largest factory we know of was the shield factory of Cephalus, father of Lysias, which employed one hundred and twenty men; most cheirotechnai (handicraft men) worked with a few assistants, slave or




free, or with none (like the man in Lysias 24, who could not afford a slave to help him - admittedly he was very poor and, he says, incapaci- tated, so that he was claiming the dole). There were, of course, degrees of excellence, and no doubt these craftsmen, working next door to each other - the Potters' quarter, the Bronzesmiths' quarter, etc. - showed the good eris of Hesiod ('Potter is angry with potter ...'), each taking pride in his sophia and not in the least ashamed to proclaim his techne, as their grave reliefs show; on these their trade is often represented and they describe themselves as 'goldsmith', 'bronzesmith', 'shoemaker', etc.

Nor was it a disgrace to come down in the world, provided you worked to escape poverty; so Pericles says in the Funeral Speech (Thuc. 2.40): 'And to admit poverty is not disgraceful to anyone, but not to try to escape it by working is disgraceful.' In Xenophon's Memorabilia (2.7) Socrates meets an old friend who has lost his property in the war and who is reduced to physical labour in order to provide the necessities of life - 'that's better than begging', he says. Socrates suggests that he should find a job which will assure him a living when he is too old for physical labour, as an overseer for a richer man. His reply is: 'I really couldn't endure slavery, Socrates.' He did not mind working with his own hands and saw no disgrace in it, but he would not work for a richer man, being, as he puts it, 'at his beck and call'.

The Athenian was intensely concerned for his independence. And so no one would choose to be a hired labourer, one of Aristotle's thetic class. This class would include assistants hired by craftsmen, who would no doubt hope to set up shop for themselves in time; the craftsmen whom we find listed in building inscriptions working beside slaves on state projects; these might well have their own shop and take on state employment occasionally; it would include poor peasants whose farms were below the hoplite census and who did casual labour for richer farmers during the busy periods; it would include the nautikos ochlos (the sailor mob), who manned the sixty triremes which, according to Plutarch, Pericles kept at sea for eight months of the year (twelve thousand of them, if they were all citizens). All these no doubt would be striving to escape poverty by work and hoping to attain the independence which was the Athenian's most prized possession.

One who was successful in this was Socrates' poor friend Aristarchus (Xen. Mem. 7.7), who, after the Revolution, found himself saddled with fourteen sisters, nieces, and cousins in his house. In those hard times he could not support them. Socrates suggests that he should set them to work, and, when Aristarchus replies that he cannot do this, since they are ladies, Socrates gives him a stern lecture on the virtues of work: 'Would people be better behaved if they were idling or if they were




engaged in useful employment? Would they be more righteous if they were working or if they were idly discussing where the next mouthful would come from?' Aristarchus was convinced and turned his house into a cloth factory; 'and the women breakfasted while they worked and had supper when they had finished their work (no union rules!); there were cheerful smiles instead of frowns and instead of glaring at each other jealously they looked on each other with pleasure....' A truly moral story, with a happy ending!

Two of Aristotle's eight classes remain to be accounted for. First the rich, who serve the state by leitourgiai, those who in Plato's Republic are said to produce the honey for the drones. This was undoubtedly a very small class, at least in fourth-century Athens, when we can glean some statistical information from speeches in the law courts. In 357/6 the leitourgia of trierarch was reorganized on a group system (symmories); twelve hundred citizens were liable, supposed to include the richest men in Athens; as I said earlier, an estate of two talents could get a man on to this register (thirty acres in land value). Even by ancient standards this is not a large fortune, and it is impossible to believe that such men did not have to work. At the top of the scale we have the Three Hundred - the Leaders, Second Men, and Third Men of the war-tax symmories; these were the richest men of all, enrolled by the generals; there was no stated property qualification, but Demosthenes implies that by no means all the Leaders of symmories had fifteen talents, let alone the Second and Third Men; fifteen talents in terms of land value would be two hundred and twenty-five acres and this would be a very large fortune in Athenian terms. These men, no doubt, would have no need to work; they might own several farms, let out to tenants, and might have mining concessions at Laurium, like Nicias, worked by slaves under a manager. But they were certainly a small number.

The last of Aristotle's classes is that of public servants and those serving in state offices. In Ath. Pol. 24.3 we are told that in Pericles' time over twenty thousand men served the state for pay, which was provided by the tribute and taxes. The offices are listed, starting with the six thousand who composed the jury panel. We are reminded of Plutarch's assertion that Pericles was bringing the whole polis into paid service, one great nationalized corporation, a socialist paradise. But when we consider the list in detail, we find that the majority of the offices listed were annual (like the five hundred Councillors, none of whom could serve more than twice in a life time), or occasional (like the jurymen), and that the pay was low (a drachma a day, the wage paid to hired workmen, slave or free, working on the Erechtheum, or a mere two obols - later three - for the jurymen). The purpose of pay for office as instituted by Pericles was to enable the ordinary citizen to keep body




and soul together while he had to neglect his profession; it justifies his claim in the Funeral Speech (Thuc. 2.37) that no citizen is prevented from serving the state because he is poor, and that 'We are the only people who consider the man who takes no part in politics not as one who minds his own business but as useless'. Moreover, nearly all state officers were chosen by lot, so that the citizen had no option if he was selected and had to be compensated for the time when he was forced to neglect his own affairs. Pericles certainly did not make the people idle and avaricious by instituting pay for office.

When Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 42ff.) describes the constitution of his own time, he lists seven hundred and thirty-eight officials (including the five hundred members of the Council) annually chosen by lot for civilian services, apart from thirty-two military officials elected by show of hands. These would all have been working for the state for a year, and they form a significant proportion of the total citizen body (21,000), but it is hard to tell how arduous were the duties of many of them and whether they had to neglect their own affairs completely; for instance, how much time did the ten Restorers of Temples or the five Road Supervisors have to spend on their functions? Were they more like a quango than permanent civil servants? We have no way of telling, but we can say confidently that they were not going to make a fortune from their office and that the picture of the majority, or even a large number, of the citizens living off the state in idleness is entirely misleading.

The conclusion is that the vast majority of Athenians supported themselves by the labour of their own hands, that work was considered both virtuous and necessary, and that the attitude of contempt for banausic crafts and manual labour was limited in Athens to a few intellectuals who are prominent in our tradition. Their argument that manual labour, or at least banausic crafts, deformed body and soul is unconvincing; the argument that it left the labourer no leisure to play a proper part in politics needs some brief consideration.

The simple answer to this argument is that in fact the radical democracy worked with extraordinary success before the war and in the fourth century. The peasants and the cobblers, the fullers and the bronzesmiths filled the offices when selected by lot and attended the meetings of the Assembly (not all forty each year presumably, but certainly in large numbers at every meeting; if they failed to attend they were liable to a fine). No doubt the peasants were often prevented from coming to the city for meetings by their work, and one wonders how they managed when they were elected to the Council, for instance; perhaps their drachma's pay enabled them to hire one of the thetic class in the busy periods and there were slack periods in the farmer's year, when they could afford to leave the farm. The craftsmen were indepen-




dent and could shut up shop when they wished to or had to; it was no doubt inconvenient, but it was possible. Pericles (Thuc. 2.40) says that at Athens the same people (i.e. the whole citizen body) manage their own business and the affairs of the city, and despite their varied occupations are adequately informed on politics. The picture of Athens painted by Pericles in the Funeral Speech is idealized, but the claim he makes here does not seem inconsistent with the facts as we know them. If Plato and Xenophon take a different view, we might reply to them as Callicles does to the criticism of Pericles in the Gorgias, 'You hear that from men with bruised ears', that is from philo-Laconians who were opposed to democracy.

As for leisure apart from politics, the Athenians provided for that quite as well as modern states. No doubt much time was spent chatter- ing in the agora; the picture which Aristophanes paints in the opening of the Clouds is familiar to anyone who has seen Italians and Greeks of today in their town square. But the state laid on entertainment in a big way; as Pericles says: 'We provide more recreation from toil for the mind than any other state, enjoying competitions and sacrifices throughout the year.' These included drama, music, dancing, athletic games, processions, in which many citizens took part and which all could attend for nothing. And private occasions also were celebrated with a certain style - weddings, funerals, eranoi (parties to which all the guests contributed) were a regular part of life. One forms the impression that the average Athenian's life was extraordinarily full, but certainly not drab.

My final conclusion is that most Athenians would have come down heavily on the side of the Puritan ethic; they believed that work was both virtuous and necessary, and, indeed, that work was virtuous even if it was unnecessary -'Don't be idle, even if you are rich' (Thales); idleness was vicious under all circumstances. If in the age of automation we are going to be relieved of much unpleasant manual labour and work appears less necessary, we seem to be faced with a choice like that of Heracles. When he was reaching man's estate, he went off alone to decide what manner of life he should pursue. As he sat reflecting, he saw two women of great stature coming towards him. The first, Eudaimonia (Happiness), but also called Kakia (vice), promised him the easiest and pleasantest road: 'You shall taste all pleasure and hardships you will never know.' The other, Arete (Virtue), says that she will tell him the truth without deception: 'Of all that is good and noble the gods give nothing to man without toil and diligence.' She ends her account of the goods which come from following her path by saying: 'After completing such labours, Heracles, child of noble parents, you can win the most blessed happiness.' Heracles had no need to work, but all know




what he chose - a life of ceaseless labour in the service of mankind. Perhaps the story has a moral for us today.

NOTES

1. The original version of this paper was the author's Presidential address to the London branch of the Classical Association.

2. E.g. V. Ehrenberg, The Greek State (London, paperback 1972), p. 32. 3. A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1960), p. 86.



Documents

Attitudes to Work and Leisure in Ancient Greece