But as far as the circumstances of
daily life go, the difference between the rich man and the poor
man was immeasurably less than in any modern community, and the
incentives to the acquirement of wealth were, as a consequence,
comparatively slight.
I do not mean to say that the Athenians did not engage in
business. Their city was a commercial city, and their ships
covered the Mediterranean. They had agencies and factories at
Marseilles, on the remote coasts of Spain, and along the shores
of the Black Sea. They were in many respects the greatest
commercial people of antiquity, and doubtless knew, as well as
other people, the keen delights of acquisition. But my point is,
that with them the acquiring of property had not become the chief
or only end of life. Production was carried on almost entirely by
slave-labour; interchange of commodities was the business of the
masters, and commerce was in those days simple. Banks, insurance
companies, brokers' boards,--all these complex instruments of
Mammon were as yet unthought of. There was no Wall Street in
ancient Athens; there were no great failures, no commercial
panics, no over-issues of stock. Commerce, in short, was a quite
subordinate matter, and the art of money-making was in its
infancy.
The twenty-five thousand Athenian freemen thus enjoyed, on the
whole, more undisturbed leisure, more freedom from petty
harassing cares, than any other community known to history.
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