96 Merits and defects of the Attic model 



than his food : the profits of the farm and the profits of war-booty 

 fell to be shared in either case by few. 



Aristotle, who was well aware of the merits of the working farmer, 

 the peasant citizen, and recognized that such men had been a sound 

 and stable element in the Athens of former days, would surely not 

 have treated agriculture as a work reserved for servile hands, had he 

 not been convinced that the old rural economy was gone and could 

 never be revived. For, if suggestions from Sparta influenced him 

 when designing Utopian institutions, it is no less clear that the 

 Utopian setting territory, city, port-town, are merely modifications 

 of Attica, Athens, Peiraeus. In Greece there was no state so favoured 

 geographically, so well equipped by nature for independence pros- 

 perity and power. If a Greek community was ever to realize an 

 artistic ideal, and live in peaceful and secure moderation a model 

 life of dignity and virtue, it could hardly have a better chance of 

 success than in some such advantageous position as that enjoyed by 

 Athens. Her defects lay in her institutions, such as he viewed them 

 at their present stage of development. These could not be approved 

 as they stood : they needed both political and economic reform. Into 

 the former we need not enter here : the later democracy could not 

 but disgust one who judged merit from the standpoint of his doctrine 

 of the Mean. Economically, we may infer from his own model project 

 that two great changes would be required. Citizens must all have an 

 interest in the land, though farmed by slave labour. The port-town 

 must no longer be a centre of promiscuous commerce, thronged with 

 a cosmopolitan population of merchants seamen dock-labourers etc 

 and the various purveyors who catered for their various appetites. In 

 truth the Peiraeus was a stumbling-block to him as to Plato, and 

 probably to most men 1 who did not themselves draw income from its 

 trade or its iniquities, or who did not derive political power from the 

 support of its democratic citizens. To have a state ' self-sufficing ' so 

 far as to get its necessary food from its own territory, and to limit 

 commerce to a moderate traffic sufficient to procure by exchange such 

 things as the citizens wanted but could not produce (for instance 2 

 timber), was a philosopher's aspiration. 



While proposing to restrict commercial activity as being injurious 

 in its effect, when carried to excess, on the higher life of the state, 

 Aristotle like Plato admits 3 that not only slaves but free aliens, per- 

 manently or temporarily resident, must form a good part of the 



1 Deinarchus refers (in Dem 69 p 99) to Demosthenes' ownership of a house in Peiraeus, 

 and goes on to denounce him as heaping up money and not holding real property, thus 

 escaping taxation. Yet the laws enjoin that a man who is a political leader ought yrjv evros 

 opwv KCKrrjffdai. This wild abuse at least is a sign of existent feelings. 



2 We may at least add slaves. 3 Pol vn 4 6. 



