THE “SOCIAL STATUS” OF MARITIME TRADERS

Having dealt with Athenian legal and administrative mechanisms, I now turn to the Athenians themselves. What were the attitudes adopted by Athenian society at large towards the emporoi and nauklēroi trading with Athens? In Chapter 5 we saw the vital service they performed for both citizens and others within the polis. Can we, in addition to identifying the economic role emporoi and nauklēroi played, say anything about their “social status”? How seriously, in other words, did their largely foreign origins influence Athenian estimations? Or, again, how respectable was the work they did?

That they did real work for a living may have earned maritime traders the blanket disapproval of the Athenian leisure class. Davies shows how during the classical period the composition of this leisure class changed, with newcomers whose sources of wealth were more diverse, but there is no evidence that it changed its view of those without leisure. In particular we should not misread an aristocrat's eagerness for imports as social approval of those who brought them.

How far down the social scale did this leisure ideal go? Relative estimations are another matter, and have to do with the various ways in which different Athenian strata viewed the sort of work a maritime trader did. Nowadays the corporal reserves his envy for the sergeant. He acknowledges the higher status of the major, but the gap fails to engage his aspiration.