The Ionians in Attica boasted that they sprang from their native soil. They were therefore the primitive tillers and cultivators of their not over-fertile and rather rocky land, of about one hundred and ninety square miles. This land was divided more or less equally into small homesteads worked by yeomen, to whom chattels would have been a burden. Centuries after the heroic or legendary epoch, when Attica possessed wealthier landowners, Hesiod advises the agriculturists to work their lands by the free labor of the Thetes in preference to slave labor. Athens became very early a commercial city, and perhaps piratical expeditions for the kidnapping of slaves were fitted out from the Piræus. At any rate, slavery, chattelhood, was especially, if not exclusively, fostered when commerce became more extensive. Athens was the seat and focus of domestic slavery. In the course of time almost all trades were carried on by slaves, as also mining, and finally, farming. But all this was the growth of the long process of centuries. Debtors were enslaved; but Solon abolished this right of the creditor. He likewise abolished the custom of going about armed in the community. Generally it is a sign of a dangerous and very degraded state of society when men carry arms as a necessity. By a strange coincidence, since slavery has been proclaimed a moral and religious duty, the use of bowie-knives, revolvers, and rifles becomes more and more the order of the day in the South. Not against the slave, not against any foreign enemy, not even against the abolitionist, do the men of the South arm themselves, but it is against each other that they have recourse to armed assaults in their private and public intercourse. From the South the savage custom invades the North, and it has in some cases been forced on peaceful Northern members of Congress in self-defence against the assaults of their Southern colleagues. The Ionic race had no serfs or Helots, either in Attica or elsewhere. But in Attica, as in other Greek communities, and indeed throughout the whole world, from among the primitive yeomen or peasants, emerged those who, more thrifty, more successful, or more brave, accumulated wealth in various ways. Such was one mode in which aristocracy originated. These yeomen growing richer, acquired more land, bought out smaller farmers, and could hire more field hands. Even before Solon the aim of the rich was to transform freeholders into tenants, but Solon stemmed this current for a long period of time. Parents could sell their children into slavery; Solon reduced this right to such daughters as willingly submitted to seduction. A poor man could sell himself into slavery, and children exposed by their parents were enslaved by the public authorities.