the rent of our apartments.
The slaves did all the cooking and baking and candlestick making of the
entire city. They were the tailors and the carpenters and the jewelers
and the school-teachers and the bookkeepers and they tended the store
and looked after the factory while the master went to the public meeting
to discuss questions of war and peace or visited the theatre to see the
latest play of AEschylus or hear a discussion of the revolutionary
ideas of Euripides, who had dared to express certain doubts upon the
omnipotence of the great god Zeus.

Indeed, ancient Athens resembled a modern club. All the freeborn citizens
were hereditary members and all the slaves were hereditary servants, and
waited upon the needs of their masters, and it was very pleasant to be a
member of the organisation.

But when we talk about slaves, we do not mean the sort of people about
whom you have read in the pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It is true that
the position of those slaves who tilled the fields was a very unpleasant
one, but the average freeman who had come down in the world and who had
been obliged to hire himself out as a farm hand led just as miserable
a life. In the cities, furthermore, many of the slaves were more
prosperous than the poorer classes of the freemen. For the Greeks, who
loved moderation in all things, did not like to treat their slaves after
the fashion which afterward was so common in Rome, where a slave had as
few rights as an engine in a modern factory and could be thrown to the
wild animals upon the smallest pretext.

The Greeks accepted slavery as a necessary institution, without which no
city could possibly become the home of a truly civilised people.

The slaves also took care of those tasks which nowadays are performed by
the business men and the professional men. As for those household duties
which take up so much of the time of your mother and which worry your
father when he comes home from his office, the Greeks, who understood
the value of leisure, had reduced such duties to the smallest possible
minimum by living amidst surroundings of extreme simplicity.

To begin with, their homes were very plain. Even the rich nobles spent
their lives in a sort of adobe barn, which lacked all the comforts which
a modern workman expects as his natural right. A Greek home consisted
of four walls and a roof. There was a door which led into the street but
there were no windows. The kitchen, the living rooms and