THE entrance of populous countries into the sphere of Greek civilization increased the total of wants to be satisfied; the extension of money economy furnished the indispensable capital; the development of town life kept pace with the general progress of the division of labour, and collected sufficiently plentiful and skilful workers in groups. For industry, then, conditions were eminently favourable, but only if it abandoned the cities of Greece proper and settled in the Eastern monarchies, where the population was dense and government strongly organized. Vigorous interference of the State with a view to intense production—that was the essential feature of industry in the Hellenistic period. Nowhere was it more clearly marked than in Egypt and the kingdom of Pergamon.
In Egypt the king, who was the chief land-owner, was also the chief manufacturer. To feed his treasury he counted on his workshops almost as much as on his fields. The priest-hood, too, made money by trades of every kind. The Egyptian temple, like the mediaeval convent, was an important centre of economic enterprise. With its lands and its flocks and herds, its mills and its bakery, it sold its surplus of grain, flour, bread, vegetables, and salted goods; the Klosterbrau made beer, and paid for a licence for the public houses in which it established tenants. The priests had also their workshops, for luxury manufactures; they produced the fine oil and the beautiful byssos fabrics demanded by the gods. In the country they were almost the only stonemasons, sculptors, and painters. To make the best use of their wealth, they did banking. In a word, their accounts of receipts give a good place to “income from trade and crafts.” But, in spite of this double competition, individuals erected thousands of workshops in the big towns, and managed to make a living as craftsmen in the very smallest villages.
There was no lack of labour. With its seven million inhabitants, Egypt contained an enormous mass of small farmers who, between seed-time and harvest, in summer and in winter, left the sun and the river to do their work. At home they were weavers, smiths, brick-makers, masons; one had his little workshop, another took work with a neighbour. Some left the village; Alexandria, the first of “octopus’* cities, attracted hundreds of thousands of workers. They congregated by trades in quarters and streets, even in a second-class town like Arsinoe. They formed corporate associations which, from the country town or the great city, extended their action out into the nome. These men, abstemious, trained to obedience, and delighted to draw a wage in money, were easy to please. It is true that the discipline in the royal factories was not always to their liking, and they fought shy of the excessively hard labour of earth-works, quarries, and mines. But when the State wanted their labour it could impress them. Free labour (if one can speak of freedom under such a system) was therefore sufficient for almost all tasks.
Indeed it is surprising how small a part slave labour played in Ptolemaic Egypt. The land needed none; there were quite enough fellahs. In the country a few wealthy Greek houses owned slaves, but only in small numbers, never more than four. They were chiefly women, either domestic servants or, very often, the master’s concubines. The crafts did not employ slaves except in the Greek cities. Alexandria perhaps contained two hundred thousand; but many of them served only for luxury and pleasure, and those engaged in a trade generally led an independent life, apart from settling their accounts with their master. Thus in Egypt there was practically no reason for slavery to exist, and where it did exist, having been introduced by the Greeks, it appeared in a remarkably mild form.
For even in Greece slavery was no longer what it had become exceptionally in certain industrial cities. Alexander’s expeditions, which might have been expected to throw multitudes of prisoners on to the market, on the contrary reduced very few to slavery; and the reason was that this circumspect policy did not conflict with economic interests. The field for recruiting opened to dealers in human flesh might be larger, but the slaves were not more numerous. At Delos, where a big market was held, the customers came chiefly from Italy. From Greece, where free labour was almost sufficient for work which had become much less, one must go to Asia to find fairly large gangs of slaves employed in the trades. The kings of Pergamon maintained a slave staff, male and female, in their workshops; Miletos employed public slaves of both sexes on stock-breeding and weaving, while Didyma used sacred slaves for the extraction of marble and building; in a small Carian town a well sinker had five superior workmen and thirty other labourers at his disposal. But at Delos, the very centre of the trade, the temple owned not more than half a dozen, and it is very rarely that one finds in the accounts of works a carpenter or a mason accompanied by his slave. While the economic decline reduced the number of slaves, moral progress improved their condition. The coming together of races, the spread of Athenian philanthropy and of Stoicism, the idea, ever more definite, of the brotherhood of man, all helped to transform slavery. The number of freedmen increased as that of the slaves went down. We can reckon the servants to whom Aristotle and his three successors at the Lyceum granted freedom in their wills. At first we find five freed out of thirteen, then, in succession, five out of nine, four out of six, and eleven out of twelve. From 200 onwards the inscribed walls at Delphi are covered with deeds of manumission placed under the guarantee of the god. No doubt the masters lost nothing by the act; they got the ransom and, very often, they obliged the freedman to continue to serve them. But even that was a remarkable phenomenon; slavery was gradually superseded by free or partially free labour.
The division of labour required more and more intense training in the craftsman. Trades were not only learned in the family. In the papyri apprentices’ indentures appear fairly often; we find slaves bound to a wool-carder, to a fuller, to a stenographer, to a flute-woman. The master received an allowance for feeding and clothing the apprentice, and had a right to his services. Precautions were taken in the interest of discipline and good morals; the apprentice could not go out without leave. In other cases, where the family could pay nothing, the apprentice was attached to his master as a domestic servant.
It seems as if technical processes were on the point of being transformed by the wholesale application to industry of the great discoveries of science. The screw of Archimedes made it possible to build engines, with drums or wheels, driven by human motors, for raising water. Ctesibios invented the pump and opened the path of fertility which Heron of Alexandria would follow. Egypt, the land of surveys, canals, and shadoofs, was the right place for the use of geometry for the most delicate land-measuring, levelling, and hydraulic operations. The groma, which was fairly difficult to regulate, was superseded by the dioptra, a portable water-level with a leg, which could be fitted easily on any plane. The engineer solved problems hitherto insoluble; he could determine the difference in level between two given points, measure the distance and altitude of an inaccessible point, or reckon the volume of water supplied by a fountain. A new machine for hoisting and traction, the baroulkos, usefully supplemented the old windlass and sheers. The water-mill replaced the hand-mill, many years before Antipatros of Thessalonica exclaimed “Mill-girls, touch the quern no more! Sleep in peace, and let the cock announce the dawn with his song. Demeter has bidden the Nymphs do your work. They rush on to the top of a wheel and make its axle turn, which, by moving spokes, sets in motion the heavy mass of four hollow-faced millstones.”
In spite of these timid experiments, ancient industry was never governed by machines, in Alexandria, or earlier in Athens, or later in Rome. There was no inducement to adopt them, for human labour was not scarce or expensive. But, at least in the artistic industries, technical methods and the division of labour had made great strides. To meet the fashion for rich garments, which revived like a vengeance of Asia on Europe and of aristocratic ideas on democracy, Cos wove bombyx fibre into muslins like those of Babylon, Alexandria made brocades on looms with many heddles, and thè royal factory of Pergamon produced fabrics worked with gold wire. Moulders sold the bronze-workers and gold-smiths matrices with which they could reproduce decorative motives taken from the masterpieces of chased-work.
The participation of the State in industry manifested itself in the Hellenistic period in the systematic exploitation of Crown rights, especially of the right to the subsoil. In Attica the State had left soft materials to the owner of the surface, and reserved for itself the mines and quarries of hard stone; it confined itself to putting concessions up to auction and collecting rents. In the new Greece the city extended its rights and sometimes realized them direct. At Rhodes, Cnidos, Smyrna, Paros, Thasos, Olbia, an official stamp was punched on the vases, because they were made of clay from clay-pits of which some were worked direct by the State and others were leased. In the former case the stamp mentioned the director of the manufacture, in the second it named the concessionnaire and certified that a tax had been paid. We need not ask whether, in the great monarchies, the eminent right of the king over the whole land extended underground. The Seleucids included among their revenues “the riches contained in the soil.” The Ptolemies left only the commonest materials to private individuals. The mines, with which the quarries of precious stones and precious materials like alabaster were classed, were worked direct; agents of the Government supervised the work of impressed men and convicts. But as a rule the quarries were farmed out in the same way as the land of the domain and the taxes. Since the materials extracted went to the State, the contractor did no more than hire out labour. He undertook to furnish and maintain the number of workmen needed for a given output; in many cases even tools were placed at his disposal. The administration exercised a permanent control over his management; he was told what cuttings to undertake, and he was obliged to send periodical reports to the “architect” or engineer of the Government. In return for this he received allowances at fixed intervals.
Moreover, the working of the mines and quarries in Egypt was part of a great system. There were countless monopolies, of production, of manufacture, and of sale. The organization in question was not a developed form of household economy; nor was its object to furnish models to private industry, nor to educate the public taste. It was a purely fiscal institution, with no object except profits. The methods of exploitation varied greatly; certain monopolies were farmed out under control, others were worked direct by the officials, while leaving room for free competition, some did not touch manufacture but reserved sole rights of sale, and others were absolute.
Of all these monopolies we best know the monopoly of oil. We have the decree by which it was organized. It provides for everything. The king’s manager and the nomarchs (governors of provinces) include among their duties the cultivation of oleaginous plants. They decide the surface of land to be sown, they fix the quantities of each kind to be grown—sesame, croton, safflower, colocynth, linseed, etc.— and they supervise the harvest. The whole produce must be sold to the king’s agents, at the king’s price, less tax. Manufacture is concentrated in the royal factories. When the monopoly was created, individuals who owned presses and mortars were obliged to hand them over to the nearest factory, and minute precautions were taken against clandestine pressing. The priests alone have a privilege, and it is limited. They can make sesame oil, the finest kind, but only for the use of the temple, during two months, under the eye of the inspectors. They are forbidden to sell what they do not consume to any but the king. Thus sale to the public is most severely monopolized. It is effected in shops licensed by the State. Each village has its oil-merchant, who receives the goods at the legal wholesale price, and sells them at the legal retail price, which leaves him a profit of one eighth. To prevent foreign competition, the State forbids all importation of the kinds which it produces. Olive oil, which it does not produce, can come in, but only on payment of a duty of 25% on the price of the best home-grown quality. Thus the oil monopoly makes a profit of one third. To protect itself against any miscalculation, the treasury completes the system by an insurance; every two years it forms a guaranteeing syndicate which, in return for a premium on every metretes manufactured, takes upon itself the risks of a bad harvest.
We may imagine similar arrangements for the growing, manufacture, and sale of papyrus, and no doubt also for the textile monopoly. Wool, tow, and cotton were converted in the royal mills into fabrics and garments of every kind. Here again the temples had a privilege; they made the finest materials, those of byssos; but they sold to the king all that was not required to clothe the priestly personnel and the statues of the gods. Licences were granted to individuals; but they could only work in the workshops, and perhaps with the looms, of the king, and they took their output to the authorities, who paid them the tariff price. All the subsidiary industries, such as fulling and dyeing, were attached to the textile monopoly.
Foreign precious articles, the frankincense of Arabia and the myrrh of the Troglodytes, were distributed in Egypt and abroad through the king. In addition to this monopoly of sale, the king, or perhaps the queen, had the exclusive right of manufacturing pomades, ointments, and balsams.
These are only examples. To obtain a complete notion of the part played by the royal administration in the industry of Egypt and in its economic life in general, it would be necessary to know more exactly to what control the breweries of the temples and of private individuals were subjected, by the side of the royal breweries (the H of bran), to have more information regarding the king’s rights over wine, bees and honey, wood, rope-making, the building and hiring of boats, tanning, brick-making, luxury glass-ware, the working of precious stones, artistic bronze-work, and goldsmith’s work. All these trades were monopolies. The king even reserved to himself elephant-hunting and the sale of ivory.
In the kingdom of the Seleucids and in that of the Attalids the same principles of policy led to the same economic results. The balm of Gilead was sold for the profit of a dynastic monopoly. The kings of Pergamon, who had their own stores of corn and wine, also possessed tile-works and brickfields, their parchment competed with the Ptolemies’ papyrus, and they placed their beautiful gold-worked fabrics on the market. At the head of the industrial service a director of the royal workshops was placed. What the king did on a large scale the independent cities of the Asiatic states did on a small scale. The authorities at Miletos sold wool from the public sheep-runs or transformed it into cloth, garments, and carpets in the municipal factories; they authorized the temple of Didyma to maintain its own quarrymen, stone-cutters, and masons.
The services done by this strong organization of industry may be gauged by the poverty of the means at the disposal of private individuals, not only in countries with a State monopoly but also—and especially—in cities which remained true to the system of freedom in industry and trade. The individuals themselves were compelled to form a group, to combine their capital, if their business was of any size. In Egypt small contractors could offer tenders for the exploitation of a quarry, because such concessions were given out in small lots; but work.on the dams and canals was given out to companies (sometimes comprising a whole village), the director of which, chosen from among the lenders of money or the high officials, was alone competent to make a contract with the State. At Delos, where private initiative was not hampered by any restriction, it is amazing to see how little money and how few men the citizens, even with the help of foreigners, could give to building work. The concessionnaires received part payment beforehand in instalments, the first of which was almost always equal to half the total; and even then, if an undertaking was of any size at all, they combined in twos, threes, or fours. Theophantos of Carystos does minor repairs by himself, he combines with Xenophanes of Syros for a job valued at 40 dr., and both of them have to bring in Democrates in Qrder to get, at the auction, an order worth 1,300 dr. Associations like these, made for one operation only and never comprising the same partners for two years running, give the impression of a paltry, unenterprising industry.
The position of the workers varied with the country and with the trade. The condition of the convicts and their families in the mines on the Nubian border was ghastly. The underground workers were buried in dark, narrow, winding galleries. Day and night they hacked at the rock with plain iron picks, lamp on forehead, naked, bent in every position, loaded with chains, under the whip of the overman. Behind them the children picked up the ore which had been dug and carried it away. The surface workers were divided into gangs of crushers, washers, and smelters. The men over thirty years old broke up the ore in mortars, while the women and old men worked at the hand-mill in twos and threes to reduce it to powder. The washing in running water required continuous attention. The smelting was done in vessels which stood on the fire five days and five nights. All these unfortunates were supervised by foreign soldiers. They never obtained more than the scantiest nourishment and they soon succumbed to their hard work. Only the impressed men who were added to them in case of need were entitled to wages.
Even the free workers were subject to harsh discipline under the Graeco-Egyptian regulations. In the king’s workshops and on the farmed-out building-yards there was a large body of supervisors. Cleon, the chief engineer on the reclamation of the Fayum, had a whole staff of inspectors under him to supervise the contractors, and the contractors had foremen and overseers to help them to manage an army of navvies, grouped in gangs of ten, one of whom was the gang-leader. There was a holiday (without pay) one day in ten. Abstention from work was forbidden under the most severe penalties.
Workers by the day were generally fed, but for their opsonion they received a money allowance, which soon became a regular wage. The land-worker got one obol a day under this head. We find quarrymen getting 2 ob. in coin, one choenix of corn (nearly 2 pts.), and a kyathos of oil (121/2 drams), which brings the daily wage to rather over 21/2 ob. When Ptolemy Euergetes sent 100 masons and 350 labourers to the Rhodians he set aside a sum of 14 talents for their yearly salary; that is to say, he probably allowed 2^ ob. a day to the labourer, 4 ob. to the skilled worker, and 1 dr. to the gang-leader. The rate of these salaries was a quarter of that which obtained in Attica in the IVth century.
Work by the job underwent exactly the same transformation. Brick-laying, which had cost between 12 and 17 dr. the thousand in Attica, now came to 4 dr. Since it took a gang of three men about two and a half days to lay a thousand bricks, we again get the average salary of 3 ob. a day. Navvies were paid at one tetradrachm for a cube varying between 40 and 75 aoilia, the difference in the rate being due to the nature of the ground and the season. In any case, the navvy’s pay was only one obol a day on the average; but we must regard this as an allowance for impressed labour, and not a true wage.
In the king’s oil-mills the crushers, although paid by the job, had to dispose of a minimum amount in a day, for example at least one artabe (1 bushel) of safflower. Their pay was low. But from the profits of the sale they got a share of 21/2 dr. per metretes of oil, which was brought down by costs to 1 dr. 4 ob. Since 8 artabai of seed gave one metretes of oil, they thus made an extra 11/4 ob. or 11/2 job. a day. It should be noted that their share was higher than that of the contractor, who was entitled to only 1 dr. per metretes.
All the information which the papyri give about wages comes from the country towns. In Alexandria pay was better in appearance; hence the exodus of workers to the great city. But the high cost of living there cut down savings and made it impossible to rear a large family. We have the letter of a workman to his wife, who has remained in the country. He promises to send her the pay which he is going to receive, and advises her, when the child which she is expecting is born, to expose it if it is a girl. In the country wages were lower, but on the whole they ensured a supportable standard of living, because prices were not high. They averaged 10 or 15 drachmas a month. Now the financial authorities gave the recorder 10 drachmas a month and the beadle 20 dr.; the army authorities allowed the elephant-hunters 4 ob. a day. A woman who lived by the work of her hands in a small town earned enough to be able to go and have a hot bath regularly.
The position of the worker in Ptolemaic Egypt would therefore not have been too bad, if his chiefs had always carried out their undertakings. Unfortunately the managers of the royal factories and the contractors committed all kinds of abuses. Euergetes II had to pass an edict forbidding work below the tariff in the textile mills. The correspondence of the engineer Cleon tells us of the continual complaints of the quarrymen and the difficulties resulting from their discontentment. One gang complains of the foreman, who always puts it to work on hard stone; they have to wait for assistants to clear away the small stones and sand; the Government does not supply the proper wedges, the iron is of bad quality; food is short, the money does not come; the contractor cannot use his vouchers because they are not in order; the Departments do not answer, but put the responsibility off on one another. What with all this, the men are fed up; they throw down their tools or pawn them; they have struck. And then they get worked up; things are beginning to look ugly; for, as he says in a letter to another engineer, “you know what goes on in the gangs when they stop work.”
In Greece proper and the islands emigration and the general decline of industry led to a serious shortage of labour. Employers had great difficulty in keeping their men for the whole duration of a contract job. Provision was made for this difficulty in the contracts. At Delos, for a building order of 300 drachmas, it was stipulated that the contractor must keep permanently on the yard at least four workers with their assistants, failing which the sacred administration would replace the missing men and require a fine of one drachma per man per day. Voluntary relinquishing of work was therefore feared more than shortage of hands.
But, even without competition, the remuneration of labour inevitably diminished from the IVth century to the IIIrd. The general fall in prices caused a greater fall in wages. At Delos skilled workers now made only 2 dr. a day instead of 2f dr. (masons, carpenters), and If dr. instead of 2 dr. (plasterers); unskilled labourers returned to the one drachma of the Vth century; assistants had to be content with even less. It is true that the cost of living was no longer what it had been; a grown man could just manage on 2 dr. a day, and with one drachma he could provide a wife and one or two children with absolute necessaries. But lack of employment prevented him from always being sure of this minimum, and certainly from raising himself to a perceptibly higher standard of living. Then engagements by the month and by the year were introduced; this system gave every advantage to the administration, which was sure of its labour, and to the worker, who was sure of his pay. Thus stone-masons form part of the personnel attached to the temple. But their position is hardly as good as that which the public slaves once enjoyed in Athens. For the first two years they receive their sitos—a chcenix and a half of wheat (2*8 pts.) or three ehoenices of barley (5*7 pts.) a day—, clothing, and an opsonion of 120 dr. in coin. Then, for fourteen years, their sitos is paid, like the opsonion, in money, 240 dr. in all, plus clothing, which is worth 20 or 22 dr. So these men, who might have worked by the day at 2 dr., preferred a regular salary on an average of 4J ob. The reason probably was that they would not have earned the 2 dr. on more than one day out of three. Even the architect’s salary was much reduced. For about fifty years it remains at the normal rate of 720 dr. a year or 2 dr. a day; for artists of repute it may be 3 or 4 dr. These figures are already 30% lower than those given in the accounts of Delphi about 345. From 250 onwards a further fall brings the salary down to the rate of 11/2 dr., which was paid by Epidauros more than a century before.
What kept pay by the day low was the combination of work by the piece and the measure with the system of auctioning contracts. If the mason at Delos got 20% less per day than the mason in Athens once received, it was because he accepted 25% less per square yard (6 dr. for ashlar foundations, instead of 8 dr.). And the mason could better resist the fall than other men, in an island where much building was done and brick-laying remained unalterably at 8 ob. the hundred. But, by skilful alternation of contracts by the whole job and contracts by the piece, the administration succeeded in bringing the blacksmith, who got an obol for every tool he sharpened in 281, down to accepting half an obol seven years later. The varnisher, who in 296 was paid 3 dr. 4 ob. for every metretes of pitch employed, received only 1 dr. 4 ob. in 250—55% less. The stone-engraver’s pay fell even more. Already in the second half of the IVth century, at Delphi and Epidauros, the price for a hundred letters had been reduced from one ^Eginetan drachma to one Attic drachma. At Delos the rate of one drachma the hundred soon gave place to that of one drachma the three hundred. This rate became permanent, at Delos and also at Lebadeia. In general, the price of labour fell quicker and further than that of commodities in the last quarter of the IVth century and the first half of the Illrd; then, when the price of commodities showed a slight tendency to rise, that of labour remained at the lowest level for good.
These wretched wages were not even certain. The contractors, being responsible for bad work, shifted the onus on to their workers. For a serious fault the employer deducted part of a man’s pay; or even forfeited it all. If he was rapacious or dishonest, he found a way of dismissing the workman without pay, on the pretext that his work was worth nothing. Once Laomedon had driven Apollo away like this, and threatened to cut off his ears; so, too, in a comedy a cook is obliged to pack off empty-handed. Athens in her great days settled such disputes through the ordinary channels. The Nautodikai of the Peirseeus dealt justice rapidly to the workers of the port, and craftsmen and labourers could benefit by the same proceedings as enabled a sophist to claim his fee. In the Hellenistic period disputes regarding the payment of wages were bound to multiply. They grew more bitter. Strikes ensued. But the new theories of the rights of the State authorized its representatives to intervene between employers and employees without waiting for a formal complaint to be submitted. According to contracts from Lebadeia and Tegea, commissioners of supervision were empowered to fine or to expel from the yards inefficient or disobedient workmen. There is a decree from Paros in honour of an Agoranomos who had successfully 44prevented wage-earners and employers from wronging each other, for, in accordance with the laws and agreements, he compelled the men to abstain from striking and to carry out their task, and the employers to pay the workers their wages without legal proceedings.”
So the working classes had much to endure, but far more in the districts of Greece proper, which had no raw materials, than in the eastern countries, where the building of great cities and the riches of the soil favoured industry. We can understand why public office and the liberal arts exercised an ever stronger attraction on the townsman. We can understand why so many workers left their country and exchanged their tools for arms, at the prospect of the fine pay offered by the kings. The brilliance of Hellenistic civilization covers more misery than can be reckoned.