The growth of contempt for labour has been explained by Drumann[119] as due in part at least to the Persian wars and the resultant plunder, which must have made a good many citizens financially independent. The payment of the huge panels of jurymen, which at Athens did so much to release the poorer citizens from the necessity to work, was an ultimate outcome of the Persian wars. The Peloponnesian war may have completed the process. It lasted through nearly thirty campaigns (431–404 B.C.) and must have deeply disorganized the labour market. Slaves must in all directions have supplanted the free men who were wanted for military service, just as women took men’s places in the modern counterpart of the Greek disaster[120]. The continued campaigning is sure to have left many of the fighting men with a distaste for the dull routine of industry[121]. In the _Plutus_ of Aristophanes, brought out in 388 B.C., Poverty argues against an even distribution of wealth on the ground that it would destroy the slave trade and drive free men to manual labour as smiths, shipbuilders, tailors, wheelwrights, shoemakers, brickmakers, laundrymen, tanners and ploughmen[122]. Rather than return to their trades they preferred active service in distant lands. When early in the fourth century Agesilaus of Sparta was campaigning in Asia Minor against the King of Persia we are told that most of his troops except his own Spartans were potters, smiths, carpenters and the like[123]. Mechanical occupations are said by Aristotle to have been in his own days in some Greek cities mainly in the hands of slaves and outlanders: “in ancient times in some cities the artizan element (τὸ βάναυσον) was servile or alien, for which reason most of them are such now[124].” This growing contempt and dislike for manual labour as such, combined with the passion for freedom and independence, would make free citizens particularly unwilling to become factory hands or miners or anything that meant working under a master for a daily wage, the receipt of which tended to be regarded as a degradation[125]. Ciccotti[126] observes that piece work becomes much commoner at this period. He explains the tendency in abstract Marxian principles. The change may be due to much more human causes, such as the workman’s growing desire to work his own hours at his own pace. The work that the free man refused to do was undertaken by the growing population of slaves. There was at this time a glut in the slave market, as is sufficiently proved by the single fact that while the prices of all other commodities went up in the fifth and fourth centuries, that of slaves went down[127]. Among the unpleasant occupations that fell more and more completely into servile hands were mining and quarrying[128], two of the occupations with which we shall find that the early tyrants were most frequently concerned.