uld support half
a dozen. It cost the Athenian but a few cents daily to live, and even
these few cents might be earned by his slaves. We need not, therefore,
be surprised to learn that in ancient Athens there were no paupers or
beggars. There might be poverty, but indigence was unknown; and because
of the absence of fashion, style, and display, even poverty entailed
no uncomfortable loss of social position. The Athenians valued wealth
highly, no doubt, as a source of contributions to public festivals and
to the necessities of the state. 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. Nowhere else can we find,
on careful study, so little of the hurry and anxiety which destroys the
even tenour of modern life,--nowhere else so few of the circumstances
which tend to make men insane, inebriate, or phthisical, or prematurely
old.

This being granted, it remains only to state and illustrate the obverse
fact. It is not only true that Athens has produced and educated a
relatively larger number of men of the highest calibre and most complete
culture than any othe