Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

86 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Vase-painters at work. Courtesy akg-images, London:
Peter Connolly.
political aspect. What percentage of the Greek population belonged
to this privileged class is impossible to determine with accuracy,
but it was probably somewhere between 12 and 20 percent.
The landed gentry had little in common with any other socioeconomic
group. Certainly their lifestyle was in no way comparable to
that of poor farmers, known as the gêôrgoi, who either owned only
a small plot of land or rented from the rich in return for receiving
a percentage of the harvest. Thukydides tells us that, at the time of
the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, more than half the population
of Attica was living in the countryside. This is another way of
stating that more than half the population was engaged in agriculture,
although some allowance should be made for fishermen and
those who ran cottage industries. The rural poor were extremely
vulnerable to natural disasters, such as drought or crop failure.
A number of groups toiled on the land in various parts of mainland
Greece, such as “the dusty feet” in Epidauros, “the wearers of
sheep skins” in Sikyon, “the toilers” in Thessaly, and “the naked