Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

232 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
cut by half. Unlike hoplites, whose service was intermittent, rowers
constituted a full-time professional body. Because Athens generally
maintained at least one hundred ships on active service during
the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. , its fleet must have provided
employment for some twenty thousand men. Because its rowers
were mostly drawn from the poorest class of citizens, the growth
in Athenian naval power coincided with a growth in the political
importance of the lowest social group, known as the thêtes. Maintaining
the fleet in a seaworthy condition required the services of a
large and highly specialized workforce of joiners, fitters, rope makers,
painters, and sailcloth makers. Many of these were probably also
rowers, who worked in these capacities when the fleet was laid up.
Because the size of its tribute exceeded the cost of maintaining
its fleet, Athens was also able to support other programs that paid
the wages of state employees. The most costly was the Periklean
building program, instituted in 447 b.c.e. The building accounts for
the Erechtheion indicate that citizens, slaves, and metics worked
alongside one another on this project. Skilled workers, like rowers,
were paid one drachma per day.
As we have already seen, the allied tribute also funded Athens’s
pool of 6,000 jurors, who served for a year at the rate of two obols
per day, though this was increased after about 425 b.c.e. to three
obols per day. Because most jurors were probably elderly or infirm,
jury service therefore functioned as a kind of old-age pension- cumdisability
allowance, if we assume, as seems likely, that most of the
6,000 were called upon to serve most days of the year.
Although being a state employee was preferable to being in the
employ of another citizen, an Athenian who had to work for his
living would have been regarded as socially inferior to one whose
livelihood derived from the land.
Conclusions
Lacking any notion of job satisfaction, the Greeks were not much
in favor of hard work. Why should they have been? Almost all the
manual labor was done by slaves—cooking, cleaning, fetching and
carrying, shopping, tending the garden, babysitting, nursing, sewing,
taking down correspondence, and so on. Nor were they burdened
with anything comparable to the Protestant work ethic. Most
of them were probably fairly content with their economic status; or,
at any rate, they did not make themselves miserable by entertaining
grandiose dreams of one day becoming rich since they knew full