ANCIENT GREECE AND SLAVES ZABOROWSKI, 599 



contempt." Spartomania, a love for military training in idleness, 

 should be vigorously condemned. 



Xenophon commended those cities which forbade every citizen 

 from practicing the mechanical profession; for, thought he, the soul 

 is thus degraded, tlio body is weakened, and workmen are poorly 

 prepared by the sedentary life for the exigencies of military strug- 

 gles. 



At Thebes the practice of a trade was incompatible with the exer- 

 cise of a magistracy. 



According to Aristotle himself, mechanical employments were 

 unworthy of a free man. For one to work with his hands for him- 

 self, well and good, but to work for others, that was to perform the 

 labor of a mercenary and a slave. In order to be a citizen one 

 should be free from labors necessary for the maintenance of life. 

 The spnit of man, in order to unfold itself, must have freedom, and 

 freedom is leisure, Aristotle even believed that all workmen were 

 foreigners or slaves. 



Plutarch professed contempt for all manual labor. "While tak- 

 ing pleasure in the work," says ho, 'Sve despise the workman, 

 though that workman be a talented artist, such as Phidias." 



Aristophanes, in his turn, had only reproachful peals of laughter 

 for those who worked with their hands in commerce or industry — for 

 Lysicles, a sheep dealer; for Hyperboles, a maker of lamps; for the 

 great Euripides himself, ''the son of a fruit trader." 



The law wisely prohibited casting a stigma on a citizen of Athens 

 for a trade he had practiced at the Agora, but public opinion went 

 further and they struck a man from the list of citizens simply because 

 his mother sold ribbon at a market. A law was even proposed for 

 reducing all artisans to servitude. 



The inevitable consequence and force of such prejudices would be 

 to bring about the gradual fall of a free workman, the despising and 

 abandonment of mechanical arts, and placing idleness pure and simple 

 above everything. It is truly painful to know that the ceramic 

 workmen of Athens, who originated so much and advanced so far 

 for all time the artistic reputation of their city, were utterly despised. 

 They have not left a trace in history. Their studios were not numerous 

 and their quarters became those of classes of the lower ranks. This 

 was not perhaps what philosophers, lovers of intellectual culture, 

 would wish in emancipation from despised material cares, those M^ho 

 taught nobility of life in advising estrangement from the base tasks 

 and sordid gains. But, thinking only of exalting themselves, counting 

 only a small elite as capable of being consecrated, like themselves, 

 to science and virtue, they were in the eyes of all the nation devoted 

 to a fatal ideal, already well spent, which was to live by doing nothing, 

 from the work of the slaves. 



