THE divorce which we have remarked in Greece between the cities with an agricultural society and the commercial cities appears definitely when each type is asked what it thinks of labour, and especially manual labour.
Herodotos had already observed that the difference of opinions obtaining on this subject was a question, not of race, but of government and economy. He said that the contempt of the barbarian peoples for the mechanical arts was shared by the warlike aristocracies of Greece, and that Corinth, as a trading and manufacturing city, distinguished herself from the other oligarchies by her ideas about the craftsman. And indeed the cities in which the nobility was in power had nothing but disdain for the labouring classes. Often the name of citizen seemed to them incompatible with the exercise of any trade whatever. In Thebes the shopkeepers were excluded from the magistracies and were only admitted to them ten years after retiring from business. At Thespise every profession was a disgrace, even that of farmer. At Epidauros the infamy attaching to manual tasks was such that the State had to form them into an administrative service entrusted to public slaves. In application of the same principle, the law forbade the Spartiate to descend to any occupation. But as a rule aristocratic prejudice did not go so far. It admitted that the citizen could earn his living in an independent and self-respecting way by agriculture, and even by the higher forms of business and banking; but it regarded retail trade and manual labour as dishonouring. Even art was not excepted. The hereditary pride of the Boeotian nobility was one day to find a faithful spokesman in Plutarch. Even a literary man of his knowledge dared to say that no man of high mind would wish to be Pheidias or Polycleitos, who after all were just craftsmen, and were in the same case as perfumers and dyers; their products gave pleasure but they were none the less low and contemptible persons.
Even in the cities won over to democratic ideas the minority held obstinately to the notions beloved of oligarchy. They lived on their land, aloof from the tradesmen and manufacturers, on whom they looked down. The craftsmen are indispensable, but why make so much of them? Think what you like of the work, the workman is a degraded being. He will never have the full worth of a man. His sedentary life, far away from the free air and the palaestra, warps his body as he stoops over the bench or the counter. The passion for gain prevents him from cultivating his mind, and the habit of executing small work makes him small. His whole soul, absorbed in the pursuit of sordid lucre, is closed to great and beautiful thoughts, and through submission to the will of others it becomes flat and stunted. That a citizen? No, nor a free man either. The artist or scholar preserves his dignity only if he refuses pay. Let him aspire to honours but turn aside from wealth. Genius merits esteem provided that it does not turn glory into cash. Polygnotos, who covers a portico with paintings and does not accept money, is worthy to obtain citizenship; Gorgias, who levies tribute on the enthusiasm of his audience, is only a vile trader in eloquence.
These prejudices had their theorists. Most of the philosophers were led to defend them by their mania for things Spartan and their tenderness for the manners and constitution of their forefathers. They had a personal reason for attaching themselves to them still more in the repugnance with which intellectual labour regards manual labour, as keen as that which landed property feels for trade and industry. The belief in the superior dignity of science dug a trench between the elect and the mass, between those who had leisure for meditation and those who had not.
Socrates was an exception. He loved to go into shops and works and to chat with the traders and craftsmen. When men who lived on their income were reduced to poverty, he encouraged them to work. He persuaded Aristarchos, not without a struggle, to fit up a work-room in his house for his womenfolk and to sell the cloth which they wove. He exhorted Eutheros to take a post as steward, but did not succeed in bending a pride which would not brook servitude. His opponents reproached him with teaching that all work is good. In reality he only recommended those occupations which do not deprive a man of leisure, the source of liberty. But even that was enough to distinguish him from the other philosophers and from his immediate disciples.
Plato sets above all others the inventors, poets, and artists, whose soul emanates from divine Eros. Among these privileged ones he allows a place, on principle, to the craftsmen who are able to maintain the liberty of the gods in production and the moderation of the wise in the acquisition of property. But how can labour follow the right road, that is to say create beauty without any other object than the common good? In the ideal city, it is true, a life of labour can still be honourable. But in real life it is almost impossible for the craftsman to master all the wild-beast element which he contains within himself. The body and soul of the banausos bear the stamp of his gross life. Between the exercise of a mechanical profession and the duty of a citizen there is a radical incompatibility. And, since the craftsman cannot be a good man, it is necessary that the good man should lead the craftsman.
In bringing the Platonic dream to the ground Aristotle does not allow even as a metaphysical hypothesis that the craftsman or the trader can be virtuous. He condemns without mercy every occupation which does not derive direct from nature and has the remotest connexion with chrematistike. Like a good Macedonian, Aristotle is ready to include under the head of natural labour the working of forests and mines, but he disapproves of all other industries, because of the wages which make craftsman and labourer alike dependent upon the customer or the employer. Not one of the manual professions escapes his censure. The most mechanical are those which most deform the body, the most servile are those which take up the most time, the most degrading are those which require the least virtue—i.e., intelligence and morality; but even the most elevated are both degrading and servile. Whatever he may do, the banausos has in him “a certain element of slavishness.” If the exercise of a paying profession is a disgrace even to the musician, the pedagogue, and the sophist, still more is this so with the occupations which warp the body and the soul. The man who takes to them is unworthy to count among the citizens, and the worst democracy is one of craftsmen and workers.
These systems were the joy of little circles in which they consoled vanities weary of waiting and ambitions run to seed. But they did not spread very far. The bulk of Athenian society remained strongly attached to the idea of equality. Public opinion was favourable to labour. Old traditions supported and fortified the very logic of the democratic system. The Athenians had a law against idleness; it applied to citizens who had no regular means of livelihood. Another law exempted the son from providing for the maintenance of his father if the latter had not caused him to learn a trade. Finally, the laws on slander punished anyone who insulted a citizen by reproaching him with his trade. The ideas of the Athenians upon labour are expressed by Thucydides, in the mouth of Pericles. “Among us it is no disgrace to acknowledge your poverty, but more disgraceful to do nothing to escape it. Here the same men are at once concerned with their own affairs and those of the city, and those who have taken to a profession are none the less acquainted with political matters.” There was a kind of pact between the trades and the city; they devoted a part of their time to it, and it placed at their disposal a part of its resources. If the social programme of Pericles gave work to all the corporations of craftsmen, it was because the Assembly of the people was composed, as Socrates says, of fullers, cobblers, carpenters, smiths, farmers, retailers, pedlars, and dealers in old goods. Here it was, with a vengeance, the system which the philosophers detested, “the worst democracy,” that of the workers. Merchants and manufacturers pushed into the highest posts of the State, and to make these offices accessible to the humble a salary was attached to them. Even the Metics, despite their foreign origin, were by no means despised when their calling was not wholly despicable; they could obtain citizenship after making their fortune. Some were surrounded with respect, like the armour-manufacturer Cephalos, who enjoyed personal relations with Pericles and is given a place of honour by Plato himself in his Republic.
The obligation to work, the law of Zeus which Hesiod preached to the peasants, now fell on all men and made all trades creditable. Listen to Socrates, exhorting Aristarchos to have weaving done in his house for sale. “Because these ladies are free women and your relations, do you think that they should do nothing but eat and sleep? Why, does happiness for free men consist in living in idleness rather than in following a useful occupation for which one is qualified?… Who are the wiser, the lazy ones or those who are usefully employed? Who are the more righteous, those who work or those who fold their arms and dream of means of subsistence?” These were the ideas current in Athens. Later, the New Comedy, the mouthpiece of popular sentiment, made commonplaces of it. “Earn your living in any way, provided you do nothing evil.” “Laziness does not feed a poor man.” “A shipwrecked man would not save himself if he did not reach land; nor can a man fallen into poverty be sure of his living if he has no trade.—But I have wealth, lands, houses.—You know the turns of fate, which in a night make a well-to-do man into a beggar. You must shelter in the haven of the trades, to lower your anchor in all security.” The Athenian submitted to this necessity without grumbling. He felt it no humiliation to have a profession; he spoke of it without embarrassment. When Euphronios dedicates an ex voto he does not omit to call himself a potter. On the tombs the reliefs show the dead man heroized with the tools of the blacksmith or shoe-maker, and the inscriptions declare without false shame that the deceased was a goldsmith, teacher, actor, steersman, shepherd, or bath-keeper, or, if a woman, was a salt-merchant, clothes-dealer, wet-nurse, or “good dancer.” When in 401 the people conferred honours on the Metics who had fought for the democracy, it did not feel that it was vulgarizing its decree by mentioning the profession of each, or even by putting a journeyman before a statuary. The blending of arts and crafts, which led aristocrats to despise the artist as much as the craftsman, led these democrats to honour the craftsman as much as the artist. Even the banausos was a man of the arts, a technites; he exercised a “manual art,” a cheirotechne.
Nevertheless, in a country in which the classes were mingled by their daily life, the theories in favour among the philosophers spread from the circles which welcomed them out of interest to those which affected them out of snobbishness. The agrarian system had left a hereditary stamp on the whole population, and still formed men’s minds in the country demes. The merchants and manufacturers for their part differentiated between the professions according to the chances of fortune, the degree of independence, and the facilities for work. While abolishing political and legal distinctions, the democracy did not prevent social distinctions. Thus a rough order of precedence among the trades became established. Between one profession and another either there was a certain feeling of envy or airs of superiority were assumed. The self-satisfaction of the “best” people, the vanity of upstarts, and the conceit of intellectuals áre the same in all times.
The small land-owner had for the city worker feelings akin to those of the great land-owner for the rich business man. The instinctive antipathy of the peasant for the townsman was enhanced by the dull irritation felt by the farmer against those who sold him manufactured goods so dear, and by the contemptuous pity of the truly free man for the unfortunates who were compelled to toil in a prison. Aristophanes, who loves to talk the language of the countryside, makes fun of the women who combine many small trades, or with an offensive laugh accuses Cleon of stinking of leather.
In the town public opinion did not regard important merchants and small shopkeepers as of the same rank. Still more, then, were the retailers who sat in the Agora or hawked their goods in the streets held in low esteem. They were mostly foreigners, and Aristophanes dealt Euripides a hard blow when he said that his mother was a greengrocer. We shall see how hard it was for an Athenian to defend his honour and his citizenship when an enemy reproached him with his mother’s profession. A client of Demosthenes would like to appeal to the law forbidding insulting allusion to a profession; he does not dare. He seeks for excuses, and finds them, with blushes, in his poverty. “It is true, we do sell ribbons; we do not live in the manner we should wish.… They say, too, about my mother that she was a wet-nurse. Yes, at the time of the national misfortunes, in the midst of the general ruin; the fact is true, we do not deny it.… But let none of you take that in bad part. We often see free persons reduced by poverty to servile and low occupations. You should pity them; that is fairer than to crush them. Many Athenian women have been forced by the distress of the time to go as nurses or as weavers or to hire themselves out for the vintage.… But be careful not to speak hardly of the poor—it is bad enough already to be poor—especially of those who have a trade and earn their living honestly.” At every word of this confession we feel how strongly manners, even in democratic Athens, opposed the laws of equality, and how much they differentiated between professions.
In industry the distinctions established were for a long time of a moral order. Solon had forbidden respectable people to manufacture perfumes; when the prohibition disappeared a prejudice survived. But from the Yth century the heads of great factories, men like Cleon or Cephalos, were in a different rank from the mere craftsmen, and labour in the workshop was considered superior to that in the mines. However, the difference cannot yet have been perceptible between the master and his men, any more than between the skilled worker and the labourer. All wages alike were one drachma a day, for the man who carried the scaffolding as for the architect and the sculptor, for the slave as well as for the citizen. Later, in the IVth century, when the labourer still drew his old salary and the skilled worker or craftsman got one and a half, two, or even two and a half drachmas a day, these differences in remuneration were clearly related to the consideration in which the various trades were held, and, within each trade, the various classes of worker.
There are no definite lines of division. In the depths we discern a crowd dedicated to the hard drudgery, the repulsive and degrading tasks; there the waste of society crouches together with the slaves. Above them are all the professions suitable to free men, Metics or citizens. But a further division soon came into being in this class. After a few generations the citizens lost the inclination for work on the land or in trade or in industry. Those who could, ceased to take a personal part in their business. Pericles had a steward to manage his properties; chiefs of industry and craftsmen hired out slaves whom they had trained, and sometimes even a mine or workshop complete with staff. Thus the Athenians tended to become rentiers, men without profession living on their income. For them the great attraction was politics. The party leaders, who had at first been land-owners, and later merchants or manufacturers, were in the end orators without any other profession. Plain citizens left their field or shop for whole years to serve in the Council or in a magistracy. A time came when it was no longer true that in Athens every one was equally able to attend to the affairs of the State and to his own business. Furthermore, the sons of craftsmen and merchants aimed at professions which gave less work to the hand than to the head. Sophocles’ father was a blacksmith, that of Socrates a stone mason, Lysias and Demosthenes were the sons of armourers, and Apollodoros deserted the paternal bank for the bar. As time went on, from the mass of “liberal” professions certain arts which are especially “liberal” became more and more detached, and the citizens of Athens were more and more disposed to confine themselves to these. They did not despise the commercial or industrial careers, but they insensibly abandoned them for art and letters, administration and politics. Athenogenes sold his father’s perfume-works to a farmer, to live by the art of oratory. A woodman named Timomachos had a woodworker for son and a Strategos for grandson. Here we see clearly the stages through which many families in Attica passed; the countrymen, allured by the town, go into trade and industry, and the sons of successful merchants and craftsmen turn to the liberal careers.