The Athenian Working Class

Abstract

Abstract This chapter looks at those Athenians who were ‘working-class’ in the sense that they derived part or all of their livelihood by performing wage labour. It argues that that about 90 per cent of Athenians were in this category around 600 bce, and that most of them worked under highly exploitative conditions for a wage of only one-sixth of the crops they cultivated on their employers’ farms. Economic growth and social reform in the sixth century meant that a substantial ‘middle class’ of independent working producers emerged and that in classical Athens only about 55 per cent of citizens were still reliant on wages, now earned from casual or seasonal labour. Contrary to recent claims that wage labour was exceptionally well rewarded in classical Athens, this chapter argues that the Athenian working class continued to earn only a bare subsistence.