goes early to his business, and spends his afternoon and evening in the club or the House of Commons, only returning to dine or to sleep at home. The Attic boys were sent to day-schools, and attended by old slaves, who were unfit for harder work. The girls were brought up in seclusion as strict as that of a convent. In no case does the Athenian citizen seem to have had time or inclination to educate them himself.
5. There was, moreover, an immense population of slaves, which did all menial work, and made the life of even poorer people a life free from drudgery, with a certain sense of power and superiority foreign to modern democratic society. The great majority of these slaves were not Hellenes, but from the wilds of Thrace and the effete populations of Asia Minor. The Athenians regarded them as the American planters in our day regarded their negroes. But as in the States the frequent case of slaves almost purely European was the weak point of the system, and that which gave the orator and the novelist their chief ground of attack, so the existence of Greek slaves, chiefly prisoners of war who could procure no ransom, was felt a hardship and a misfortune by those who reflected on the improvement of society. Nothing was further from the Greek democrat than to assert by proclamation or otherwise the equality of men. Even the Greek theorists who propounded socialist and communist schemes, propounded them on the aristocratic basis of a select society of privileged equals, served by subjects and slaves. Nevertheless the social discomfort of a wife who was no companion, and of slaves who were not loyal, led to the practical conclusion that the one ought to be educated and the others conciliated, and we hear that before the end of the Periclean period the condition of slaves at Athens was so much better than elsewhere as to suggest the sneer that you might mistake them for freemen in the streets, for they dressed no worse, and the laws forbade you to strike any but your own.
