mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400 B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest. The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary view as to the poverty of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (_Lectures on Roman History_, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling the Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of Cox, _General History_, 2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil could not compete with the output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to a low level (Curtius' _History_, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii). As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x, 410, 412, 413. When it became possible thus to draw a revenue from investment, the Athenian publicists rapidly developed the capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support of trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. § 2 In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a secondary place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of its newly acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece proper would tend to pass into fewer hands,[271] thus _pro tanto_ narrowing more than ever the free and cultured class, and relatively enlarging that of the slaves.