The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, January 1885, No. 4Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Religion
The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, January 1885, No. 4
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
We do not hear of any authors making a livelihood by their work, except
poets, who were largely paid for occasional poems by both states and
kings, and whose dramatic works were a source of profit as well as honor.
Copies of books were easily multiplied by means of slave labor, so that
we hear of Anaxagoras’[10] treatise being sold for one drachma, then
very dear. This was at a regular bookstall in Athens, from whence books
were actually an article of exportation as far as the Black Sea. Still,
collections of books were rare till after the time of Euripides, and we
know of no fortunes made by writing books. Anaxagoras himself, though so
popular with the rising generation, is said to have died in poverty.
The profession of architects was esteemed far the greatest among artists,
and was the most richly paid. They were no doubt men of culture, and
were literary men, as, for example, Ictinus,[11] one of the architects
of the Parthenon, who wrote a special work about the great temple. The
professions of sculptor and painter were not so at first, the sculptor
being hardly more than a skillful workman, and this seems to be the case
in most great art epochs. Men like Pheidias and Polygnotus,[12] who
were of a higher level, often worked without accepting any pay, but the
sculptors who adorned the Erectheum at Athens, one of the most beautiful
of Greek temples, were either paid by the day from one to two drachmæ, or
by the job, receiving two hundred to two hundred and forty drachmæ (under
$50) for each figure or small group of figures. This was in Pericles’
time, when art had reached its highest perfection.
Similarly in music, though amateur singing and playing were very common,
it was not thought gentlemanly to live by them, and professional
musicians were ranked with actors and jugglers, and the other classes who
lived by amusing the rich. At later periods, however, both celebrated
musicians and celebrated actors became important personages, and were
courted by a society which had abandoned higher and more serious pursuits.
The medical profession had always a high position in Greek life, from the
days of Machaon Podalirius,[13] in Homer, down to the doctors of Plato’s
day, who sometimes brought an orator with them to persuade the patient to
take their remedies. This was done because it was the fashion to discuss
everything in Greece, and people were not satisfied to submit silently to
anybody’s prescriptions.
There was of course a great deal of superstitious quackery, which dealt
in amulets and charms, and there were slave assistants, who visited slave
patients, but the higher members of the profession were not only well
paid, but appointed publicly by the various cities as official physicians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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