62 Slaves and free workers 



Common humanity gains recognition as a guide of conduct. Many of 

 the fragments have been handed down as being neatly put moral 

 sentences, and of these not a few 1 recognize the debt that a slave owes 

 to a good master. These are utterances of slaves, for the slave as a 

 character became more and more a regular figure of comedy, as comedy 

 became more and more a drama of private life. Side by side with this 

 tone is the frank recognition of the part played by chance 2 in the 

 destinies of master and slave ; a very natural reflexion in a state 

 of things under which you had but to be captured and sold out of 

 your own country, out of the protection of your own laws, to pass 

 from the former condition to the latter. A few references to manu- 

 mission also occur, and the Roman adaptations suggest that in the later 

 Comedy they were frequent. On the other hand several fragments 

 seem to imply that circumstances were working unfavourably to the 

 individual free craftsmen, at least in some trades. The wisdom of 

 learning a craft (rexvrj), as a resource 3 that cannot be lost like external 

 possessions, is insisted on. But in other passages a more despairing 

 view 4 appears ; death is better than the painful struggle for life. No doubt 

 different characters were made to speak from different points of view. 



It is to be noted that two fragments of the earlier Comedy refer to 

 the old tradition 5 of a golden age long past, in which there were no 

 slaves (see under Herodotus), and in which the bounty of nature 6 pro- 

 vided an ample supply of food and all good things (see the passages 

 cited from the Odyssey). Athenaeus, who has preserved 7 these extracts, 

 remarks that the old poets were seeking by their descriptions to ac- 

 custom mankind to do their own work with their own hands (avrovpyofa 

 elvcu). But it is evident that the subject was treated in the broadest 

 comic spirit, as his numerous quotations shew. When in the restoration 

 of good old times the articles of food are to cook and serve themselves 

 and' ask to be eaten, we must not take the picture very seriously. 

 These passages do however suggest that there was a food-question at 

 the time when they were written, of sufficient importance to give point 

 to them : possibly also a labour-question. Now Crates and Pherecrates 

 flourished before the Peloponnesian war and during its earlier years, 

 Nicophon was a late contemporary of Aristophanes. The evidence is 

 too slight to justify a far-reaching conclusion, but it is consistent with 

 the general inferences drawn from other authorities. In the fragments 

 of the later Comedy we begin to find passages bearing on agriculture, 



1 e.g. Antiphanes 265, Philemon 227, Menander 581, etc. 



2 Philemon 95. 



3 Philemon 213, Menander 68, 716, Hipparchus 2. 



4 Menander 14, Posidippus 23 with Kock's note. 



5 Pherecrates 10, Crates 14. Nicophon 13, 14. 

 7 Athenaeus vi pp 263, 267^-270 a. 



