learning, have had an influence beyond their own ranks.
Those free persons who are not dwellers in the city, i.e. the fortress, like the king or the leading nobles, appear in Homer as either ἀγροιώται, i.e. tillers of the soil, shepherds, and herdsmen, or, on the other hand, as τέκτονες ἄνδρες, or δημιόεργοι, namely, craftsmen, tradesmen, and what we should call professional men.[1] All these clearly formed part of the community (δῆμος),[2] as distinguished from the slaves; they served in war κατὰ Φῦλα κατὰ Φρήτρας (Il. ii. 362), i.e. according to the groups of kinship in which they lived at home.[3] On the whole, the "people" of the Homeric age must be thought of as numerous, industrious, and content with their position as labourers on the land or artisans in the city.[4]
We do not know for certain what part of Greece the Homeric descriptions represent; but in historical times the lower populations of many States do not accord with them, owing to changes caused by migrations and conquests, of which the greatest was
3 This population may have been gradually increased in certain ways, e.g. by liberation of slaves, and by reception of foreigners skilled in some craft; as e.g. in Od. xvii. 383, "craftsmen of the people, a prophet or a healer of ills, a shipwright, or a godlike minstrel"; but whether such persons were admitted into the Φῦλα and Φρήτραι must be very doubtful.
- ↑ Fanta, Der Staat in der Ilias u. Odyssee, p. 42 foll.
- ↑ This is the word in Homer for the city and its land taken together, e.g. Il. ii. 547. Fanta, p. 12.
- ↑ 3
- ↑ These last would live, as seems to have been the case at Mycenæ and the Acropolis of Athens, not in the citadel, but in the suburb below.
