part labor was not considered in any way noble or admirable.
Th e ideal life, as presented in literary sources, was one that
did not involve manual work in any capacity—all such work
being done by slaves. When work was necessary, it was repu-
table only in the context of agriculture on one’s own land. So
the poet Hesiod urges diligence and constant eff ort but on a
privately held farm. His audience is assumed to be other land-
owners, however small and meager their holdings may have
been. Other laborers appear in Work s and D ays but only as
less-than-admirable tools that the independent farmer might
hire, or buy, to support his own eff orts.
Th ere seems to have been among the ancient Greeks
no distinction between a person and the person’s labor.
Th e consequence of this was a failure to distinguish in any
meaningful way between wage labor and slavery. An em-
ployer was not buying merely the labor of a worker but in
eff ect the worker himself, making the laborer nothing more
than a temporary slave. Accordingly, there are passages in
ancient literature where it seems that a wage laborer actually
maintained a lower status than a slave. A slave was perma-
nent property, aft er all, and enjoyed a place in the household;
a slave’s person was valuable and worth protection. A wage
laborer had no fi xed place in the community and, when the
task for which he was hired came to completion, was no lon-
ger valuable.
Th e social and economic crises that affl icted many com-
munities during the sixth century b.c.e. were refl ections of
this failure to distinguish between wage labor and slavery.
Small farmers increasingly fell into debt to more wealthy
landowners, having borrowed seed or money to buy seed in
times of poor harvests. Since, in a largely premonetary econ-
omy, the small farmers had nothing of value with which to re-
pay their creditors, they repaid them by mortgaging sections
of their farms; the debtor would then, in a following year,
continue to work that land, but the proceeds from its harvest
belonged to the creditor. With even less produce for himself,
the small farmer was likely to continue in this spiral of debt
until the majority of his farm was worked for the profi t of the
creditor, making the debtor, in his own eyes and in the eyes
of the community, a virtual slave, selling his own labor to an-
other. Th e resolution to this state of aff airs, in many Greek
cities, was revolution and the institution of popular tyrannies
and ultimately to enact democratic reforms.
Th ere had to be, of course, members of the community
who were not independent farmers, and even in the Homeric
poetry of the Greek dark ages we fi nd an acknowledgement of
their worth. Th ese were the “public workers,” certain craft s-
men, prophets, healers, builders, and singers of tales who
were not attached to a particular household but whose labor,
or at least the results of whose labor, benefi ted the farmers
and their households.
Nonagricultural labor was always necessary, of course,
as people needed manufactured goods, ores from mines, wo-
ven clothing, and luxury items. Th ere were, therefore, various
“industries” in any Greek community. Only rarely, however,
did they employ paid workers. Furniture pieces, ships, pot-
tery items, weapons, perfumes, and the like were the products
of “workshops,” small local enterprises under the control of
a master and staff ed by slaves. Th e father of the orator Dem-
osthenes, for example, died in the early fourth century b.c.e.
and left as part of his estate two workshops, one manufac-
turing swords and knives and employing 32 slaves and the
other a furniture shop employing 20 slaves. Such industry
contributed useful implements to the local markets—swords
and furniture—and generated wealth to the owner, Demos-
thenes’ father, and presumably to the people who sold ivory,
iron, and wood to the owner. But this kind of industry did
not create wealth in the modern economic sense, since it did
not employ anyone. Th e slaves earned no income, and so the
fi nancial benefi t to the community of either of these work-
shops was much less than, for example, a bicycle shop in a
small town, which might support its owner, but also provide
incomes to several employees, who would in turn contribute
to the economy in other ways.
During the fi ft h century b.c.e. the city of Athens under-
took an enormous project of public building, funded by the
tribute paid to Athens by its “allies,” the cities and islands
of the Aegean under Athenian domination. Inscriptions de-
tailing the work on the temples of the Athenian Acropolis
survive and show that, in this enormous community eff ort,
the labor of slaves, resident aliens, and citizens was employed
nearly equally. What is most remarkable is that laborers seem
to have been paid the same, regardless of whether they were
citizen, foreigner, or free.
Th e inscription noting wages paid for the workers who
cut the fl utes in the columns of the Erechtheum in 409 b.c.e.
records these fi gures for workers cutting channels in one col-
umn: “Onesimus, a slave belonging to Nikostratos: 16 drach-
mas, 4 obols; Eudoxus from Alopeke [a citizen]: 16 drachmas,
4 obols; Kleon [perhaps a foreigner]: 16 drachmas, 4 obols;
Simon [foreigner] who lives in Agryle: 16 drachmas, 4 obols;
Antidotus, a slave of Glaukos: 16 drachmas, 4 obols; Eudikos
[status unknown]: 16 drachmas, 4 obols.” All told, of the ar-
chitects, secretaries, guards, masons, sculptors, carpenters,
and all the laborers who are recorded as having built this
temple, 24 are known to have been citizens, 42 to have been
resident aliens, 20 to have been slaves, with 21 whose status
remains unknown.
Citizens, foreigners, and slaves alike were paid the same
rate, and it seems that all these laborers were paid the same
wage of one drachma per day, regardless of whether they
were sculptors working on the statuary of the temple’s frieze,
sawyers making wooden scaff olding, architects, or guards.
More than any other evidence, this serves to demonstrate
that while “work” was necessary and known to have a certain
value, “labor” as a concept—something that built wealth, that
was itself a commodity with greater or lesser value according
to the circumstances, the demand, the supply, and the skill
involved—was largely absent from ancient Greek economic
thinking.432 employment and labor: Greece