=--In almost all the Greek cities the domains, the
shops of trade, the merchant ships, in short, all the sources of
financial profit were in the hands of certain rich families. The other
families, that is to say, the majority of the citizens,[102] had
neither lands nor money. What, then, could a poor citizen do to gain a
livelihood? Hire himself as a farmer, an artisan, or a sailor? But the
proprietors already had their estates, their workshops, their
merchantmen manned by slaves who served them much more cheaply than
free laborers, for they fed them ill and did not pay them. Could he
work on his own account? But money was very scarce; he could not
borrow, since interest was at the rate of ten per cent. Then, too,
custom did not permit a citizen to become an artisan. "Trade," said
the philosophers, "injures the body, enfeebles the soul and leaves no
leisure to engage in public affairs." "And so," says Aristotle, "a
well-constituted city ought not to receive the artisan into
citizenship." The citizens in Greece constituted a noble class whose
only honorable functions, like the nobles of ancient France, were to
govern and go to war; working with the hands was degrading.
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