The aristocracy of the older Greek society was one based on the exclusive owning of land, and of civic rights, and was not marked by titles, but by the name of the clan. Thus at Athens an Alcmæonid[1] was respected much as the member of an old Scottish clan is now by his fellows. But poverty injured the position of the old Greek more than that of the Scotchman. In the aristocratic days all work in the way of trade or business was despised by the landed gentry, and idleness was called the sister of freedom. The pursuit of a trade often disqualified a man for political rights, and in any case deprived him of all public influence. This feeling did not die out even in the complete democracies of later days, and there was always a prejudice in the Greek mind against trades and handicrafts, because they compelled men to sit at home and neglect the proper training of the body by sports, and the mind by society. Mercantile pursuits were also objected to by Greek gentlemen, but on different grounds. It was considered that the making of profits by retail trading was of the nature of cheating, and the life of a merchant in any Greek city not his own was always one of dependence and fear, for nowhere were aliens treated with real justice and liberality. Thus even the poor citizen of Athens, living by the small pay (nine cents daily) given him for sitting on juries, and performing other public duties, looked down with contempt upon the rich tradesman, who was confined all day to a close dark shop, or still worse, did his work in the hot atmosphere of a furnace. Consequently the greater part of the shops in Athens, and most of the trades were in the hands of licensed aliens who paid certain taxes to the state, and by making large profits recouped[2] themselves for the risk of being persecuted and plundered by the citizens in days of danger and distress. These people may be compared, as to their social and political position, with the Jews in the middle ages, who lived all through the cities of Europe without civic rights, or landed property, merely by trade and usury. They were despised and persecuted, but still tolerated as useful, and even necessary, by the governments of those days. Rich capitalists, on the contrary, who were able to manage a large business through an overseer and a number of slaves, were not at all despised, even though their ways of making profits were sometimes very shameful. But any free man who was compelled by poverty to perform this manual labor was held little better than a slave. There were certain privileged classes in Homer’s day, such as the leech,[3] the seer, the bard, and the cunning worker of brass. So in later days the sculptor and the sophist were in some respects considered good society, but still the gaining of money by giving up their time to others told very seriously against them.