The wholesale merchant was of course a more important person, and the rise of this larger trade was in fact what raised up a wealthy city class in opposition to the landed aristocracy, and was generally the cause of overthrowing oligarchies.[5] Many respectable citizens (except in Sparta) thought it no disgrace to follow this sort of business, and none of them scorned to invest money in it as a speculation. As the land traffic in Greece is unusually difficult and roundabout, almost all commerce was carried on by sea, so that a merchant was often called a skipper. We are fully informed about Athenian commerce only. We must imagine the Greek waters not as they are now, lonely and desolate, with often not a single boat to give life to a great bay or reach of water, but rather covered in the summer with traffic and with life, so much so that a Greek poet speaks of sailors as the “ants of the sea,” hurrying in all directions with ceaseless industry. There were public wharves and warehouses close to the quays, where the skipper brought samples of his cargo. With the exception of the corn and slave factors, the Greek merchants did not confine themselves to trading in one kind of goods, but conveyed anything according as they saw chances of profit. Pottery from Samos and Athens, fine woolen stuffs and Assyrian carpets from Miletus, paper, unguents, and glass from Egypt, salt fish, skins and corn from the Black Sea, ship timber and slaves from Thrace and Macedonia, ivory and spices from Cyrene[6]—these were among the usual articles imported and exported through the Greek waters. Merchants were in some places treated with peculiar favor, had their taxes and military duty forgiven, and above all, were granted a speedy trial, and in the idle winter months, in case of disputes about contracts, or other lawsuits. WEIGHTS, MEASURES, AND COINAGE. All these great helps to trade were originally imported from the Babylonians, through the Phœnicians into Greece, but with so many variations that the computing of values according to the different standards is very intricate. As to measures of length, it seems that the Olympic stadium or furlong was generally received through Greece. It was the one-fortieth of our geographical mile, and was divided into six plethra of one hundred feet each. Each foot, which was nearly equal to our English foot, was divided into four hands, and each of these into four inches. Cubic measures started from the half pint, and were used for both fluids and solids. In these measures the Æginetan,[7] Attic, and Olympic standards varied. The latter, though originally brought from Babylon, was somewhat smaller, the cubic foot being only two-thirds of the Babylonian. To this Olympic cubic foot the Attic was as twenty-seven to twenty, the Æginetan as nine to four. Similarly as to weight, the Babylonians had fixed a cubic foot of rain water as the standard weight of their talent. The Attic talent was much smaller.