8o Fate of the worn-out slave 



easy to apply in agriculture. It was not easy to know what to do with 

 a worn-out farm-hand, unless he was transferred to lighter duties on 

 the farm ; for he would be useless elsewhere. Sooner or later a time 

 would come when he could no longer do anything of any value. What 

 then? Was he charitably fed by the master 1 whom he had served, or 

 was he cast adrift in nominal freedom? From the fragments of Comedy 

 one may perhaps guess that the humaner practice generally prevailed. 

 But the silence of Plato seems to suggest that to him, and indeed to 

 Greeks generally, the point was not an important one. Even for a 

 citizen, if destitute in old age, the state-relief was very small. We must 

 therefore not wonder at the silence generally maintained as to the 

 treatment of the worn-out rustic slave. Slave artisans, and those whose 

 services were let out to other employers with reservation of a rent to 

 their own masters, could scrape together the means of sustenance in 

 their old age. It is possible that manumission of rustic slaves may 

 have occasionally taken place, and that they too may have scraped to- 

 gether some small savings: but I can find no ground for thinking that 

 such cases were normal or even frequent. In the Laws Plato allows 

 for the presence of freedmen 2 , and frames regulations for their control, 

 probably suggested by experience of the Attic laws and their defects. 

 Manumission by the state 3 as reward of slave-informers is also men- 

 tioned. But there is nothing in these passages to weaken the natural 

 inference that town slaves, and chiefly domestics, are the class to 

 whom in practice such rules would apply. In short, we must not look 

 to a philosopher reared in a civilization under which manual labour 

 tended to become the burden of the unfree and the destitute, and to 

 be despised as mean and unworthy of the free citizen, for a wholesome 

 solution of the problem of farm-labour. 



XVI. THE EARLIER ATTIC ORATORS. 



It is convenient to take the speeches and pamphlets of the masters 

 of Attic oratory in two sections, though there can be no exact chrono- 

 logical division between the two. The political background is different 

 in the two cases. To Isocrates the urgent problem is how to compose 

 Greek jealousies by uniting in an attack on the common enemy, 

 Persia: to Demosthenes it is how to save the separate independence 

 of the weary Greek states from the control of the encroaching king of 

 Macedon. True, the disunion of Greece was not to be ended by either 



1 The problem of the worn-out plantation slave was much discussed in the United States 

 in slavery days. An interesting account of the difficulties arising from emancipation in 

 British Guiana is given in J Rodway's Guiana (1912) pp 114 foil. 



2 Laws 914-5, and an allusion in Republ 495 e. 3 Laws 9140, 932 d. 



