Somewhere in the Attic countryside, far from the political turbulence agitating the city, a banal real estate transaction took place in 403: A rich Athenian citizen, whose name is unknown, convinced a certain Anticles to sell him a small piece of land. On the edge of the field, surrounded by a fence, stood an olive tree, carefully bypassed by the local road. About ten years later, this very same man was accused before the venerable Areopagus Council of having uprooted the tree. At first sight, the situation seems incongruous to say the least: More than a decade after it happened, in a city rife with political conflicts of all kinds and which aspired to play a leading role in the Greek world again, how should we interpret the fact that the fate of a modest olive tree gave rise to such a solemn lawsuit?

It is well known that olive cultivation was central to both religious and political Athenian identity. When the Athenians had to decide between Poseidon and Athena for their guardian, it was by giving them an olive tree that the goddess won the contest. As a result, she became the protective divinity of the new community, to which she offered her name. Placed in front of the Erechtheion, the stump of the olive tree donated by the goddess had even started growing branches again the day after the army of Xerxes set fire to the Acropolis in 480, symbolizing the invulnerability and the permanence of the city.Footnote ¹ At the heart of the classical period, the festival of Panathenaia showed how important cultivating olives was in Athenian life. Its celebration coincided first of all with the arrival on the market, under the city’s control, of the oil produced in Attica, which had been the main Athenian export since the beginning of the sixth century.Footnote ² More importantly, winners of competitions were honored with large amphorae of oil from the sacred olive trees scattered around Athenian territory, which were the property of Athena.Footnote ³ It is precisely one of these sacred olive trees that our man was accused of having uprooted, constituting a crime inflicted on the goddess herself and making him liable for capital punishment.Footnote ⁴

A Scene of Rural Life: The Olive Tree of Discord

We owe the knowledge of this astonishing judicial case to the existence of a short speech attributed to Lysias. Its anecdotal character paradoxically suggests to historians that they have their hands on a document of exceptional significance, allowing them to observe the slow pace of a rural society supposedly insensitive to the hectic course of political and military history as described in the narratives of writers like Thucydides and Xenophon. In fact, better than any other source, the speech sensitively brings to life elements of the rural landscape of classical Athens. Visible from all sides, the field bought by our man was not surrounded by dry stone wallsFootnote ⁵: Should we deduce from this that open fields dominated the Athenian rural landscape? The account of the litigant invites us to imagine the existence of scattered settlements, without knowing if this configuration is representative of the Attic countryside. Let us also observe that while our man belongs to the city’s elite, his properties are composed of several plots dispersed across the whole civic territory, which undoubtedly constitutes a characteristic feature of the Athenian agrarian structure.Footnote ⁶ Finally, the speech reveals some of the features of rural sociability: In particular, it shows the social control exercised by the neighborhood over a small community of classical Athens.Footnote ⁷

And yet, historians would be wrong to claim that reading this speech allows them to understand the longue durée and to dissipate the ‘delusive smoke’Footnote ⁸ of political events. While they may believe it allows them to observe the structural features of rural Athenian society – how to size up the distribution of landed property and identify the way in which peasant work was organized – these elements escape them or, more exactly, let themselves be grasped only in a very singular configuration. Beyond the illusory stability of agricultural life in a small Attic deme, the situation depicted by the litigant is indeed inseparable from the political events of the end of the fifth century.

The land in question has an exceptional history, since it had been confiscated by the city from property belonging to Peisander, one of the leaders of the Four Hundred, after democracy was restored in 411/10. It was then offered as an honorary gift to Apollodorus of Megara, celebrated as one of the glorious assassins of Phrynichus, another representative of the regime of the Four Hundred.Footnote ⁹ Apollodorus, undoubtedly threatened by the return of the oligarchs in 404, had sold it to a certain Anticles, from whom our man bought it in 403.Footnote ¹⁰ One cannot therefore deny that the accusation made by Nicomachus may have had a political dimension, taking aim at a man who, having easily acquired property in Attica in the middle of a civil war, seemed to support at least implicitly the regime of the Thirty.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, far from attesting to the permanence of an immobile ritual life, disconnected from political agitation, the specific attention brought to the question of olive production is explained by the new scale that the city intended to confer to the festival of Panathenaia in the aftermath of the restoration of democracy.Footnote ¹²

Disturbed by this political event, the underlying structures of Athenian rural life that Lysias’ speech sheds light on only appear through a lens that is by nature distorting, in their own way falling under the ‘exceptional normal’ (or ‘exceptional typical’) category theorized by Edouardo Grendi.Footnote ¹³ One of the main contributions of the speech lies nevertheless in the portrait it paints of the world of agricultural work at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries by highlighting two different categories of workers, farmers and slaves. The litigant belongs to the liturgical class of the richest Athenians.Footnote ¹⁴ While he claimed he now intended to work his field himself, he had initially chosen to rent it out to four successive farmers from 403 to 396. After a certain Callistratus worked the field the first two years (403–401), Demetrius then Alcias, a freedman of Antisthenes, took turns (400–399), before Proteas worked the field for the first three years of the fourth century, from 399 to 396.Footnote ¹⁵ Such a high turnover, which is exceptional with regard to our knowledge of most ancient leases,Footnote ¹⁶ is difficult to explain: Should it be attributed to the particular situation of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, characterized by an underexploitation of the land with regard to the number of available men?Footnote ¹⁷ Should it lead us, on the contrary, to reevaluate the importance of the land rental market in classical Athens, which was much more active than we are used to thinking?Footnote ¹⁸ It is impossible to settle the matter. But the speech suggests above all the importance of servile labor on farms. According to the litigant, slaves were the only labor force working regularly in the field; only they could have cut the trunk of the olive tree in question. And this is the reason why he pretends to want them to testify, under torture, before the court.Footnote ¹⁹

Elusive Men: Free Employees

On reading the speech in question, however, historians may come to doubt its veracity, for it seems that this description of farming ignores, or conceals, an essential component of agricultural labor. Like an alchemist, they need to divine a vital ingredient, without which the social history of classical Athens would remain incomprehensible: free men, whether metics or citizens, who had no property rights and who worked on the farms of other citizens for varying lengths of time.

A passage in Xenophon’s Memorabilia features just such a man, called Eutherus, in the aftermath of the restoration of democracy in 403. As he meets his ‘old comrade’ Socrates, Eutherus describes his sad situation:

Pitying him, Socrates advises him to do paid work for a rich landowner who needs workers on his estate:

Reluctant, Eutherus claims that he ‘shouldn’t like to make [him]self a slave,’ and that he has ‘no inclination to expose [him]self to any man’s censure,’ but the philosopher ends up convincing him by pointing out that ‘it is by no means easy to find a post in which one is not liable to censure.’Footnote ²¹

Of course, the character of Eutherus is likely to be a pure invention of Socratic literature. His name is significant, depending on whether one literally recognizes in him the good prey (eu-theros; i.e. the good game in the hunt of the philoi described by Xenophon) or the good hunter (eu-theros). His fate was nevertheless similar to that of many Athenians after the Peloponnesian War. While his father did not have any land, he had been allotted a plot in the territories of the Athenian empire, undoubtedly cultivated by the local workforce. Once the Delian League had collapsed, however, Eutherus, now deprived of any property, had no other solution other than to temporarily accept work on a farm.Footnote ²²

To what collective does Eutherus lend his name? Or more precisely: To what extent is this character the spokesman of a chorus, that of free men who are not property-owners and who work temporarily on the lands of Athenian citizens? Measuring the influence of this category of workers is not an easy task. The difficulty lies first of all in the disdain shown by ancient literature, which sees this group as a negligible part of the composition of any polis worthy of the name. When he undertakes to list the different professions in his ideal city, Plato places those ‘who sell the use of their strength for a misthos’ last, after craftsmen and merchants.Footnote ²³ Because of their lack of intellectual qualities, they are the least prestigious – and least necessary – part of the community. These free men who ‘voluntarily place themselves at the service of others’Footnote ²⁴ cannot claim to have acquired any political knowledge. In fact, the way Xenophon’s Socrates presents Eutherus’ work reveals his contempt for any form of paid work, viewed as it is through the prism of servitude, even when it is temporary.Footnote ²⁵ Socrates suggests to Eutherus that he should turn to a large landowner to ‘act as his bailiff, helping to get in his crops and looking after his property.’ He therefore places two very different activities on the same level: the harvesting of the fruits and the stewardship of the farm, because they are both tasks accomplished for others and are therefore devalued. Eutherus, on the other hand, only agrees to consider working for another free man on an occasional basis, considering long-term work as a form of slavery.

This episode is indicative of a dominant feature of Greek political thought in the fourth century, which assessed work as a servile relationship between master and slave. ‘Slavery (in one form or another) is on the horizon of every relationship of service,’Footnote ²⁶ meaning that work performed by free men appears to be fundamentally servile. Thus, in Politics, Aristotle comes to describe the work done for others by free men as ‘servitude’ (douleia), apparently distinguished from legal slavery only because of its limitation in time.Footnote ²⁷

More broadly, the very notion of wage labor in the sense in which it has been understood since the nineteenth century has hardly any equivalent in classical Greece. Labor was never envisaged as an abstract category that could be isolated from the person who performed it, quantified numerically and exchanged for wages.Footnote ²⁸ On the building sites of the city as well as in the craftsmen’s workshops, pay calculations usually took into account the result of the activity and not the amount of time worked.Footnote ²⁹ The term misthos itself does not refer to a form of remuneration indexed to work time and retains ‘the meaning of a [somewhat] casual and honorific remuneration.’Footnote ³⁰ Eutherus is a misthōtos, and if we wish to translate this term as ‘salaried’ or ‘waged,’ it is in the sense in which the French of the ancien régime used it to designate the ‘gens de peine’ (day laborers) who are distinguished from the ‘gens de métier’ (carpenters, physicists or lawmen). Uncertainty and social vulnerability characterized wage conditions at that time, a far cry from the role that salaries play in European societies of the twentieth century that include a certain number of guarantees and protective measures attached to the exercise of a job.Footnote ³¹

The devaluation of free work done for others in the political thought of the classical period tells us nothing, however, of its importance in the economic life of cities. To measure it historians are unfortunately reduced to hypothetical reconstructions, which are based on singularly fragile documentary evidence. The decree proposed by Phormisius, the day after democracy was restored in 403, wanted to reserve full citizenship to the owners of land. The Athenians were opposed to such a restriction. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, applying this decree would have deprived 5,000 Athenians of their citizenship. Thus, in the Athens of the end of the fifth century, the model of the citizen-owner apparently remained in the majority, leading us to believe that citizens who were misthōtoi may have been few and far between.Footnote ³² The figure invoked by Dionysius of Halicarnassus nevertheless arouses a certain skepticism, especially as nobody really knows from which data his calculation proceeded.Footnote ³³ To this doubtful figure, derived from a late source, it is necessary to oppose a determining fact in the social and political history of classical Athens. The disconnection of land ownership from citizenship had been a characteristic of the democratic regime since the end of the sixth century; the history of the democratization of Athens coincided with the rise in power of citizens with no property, together with the ‘craftsmen’ of the city, in the development of democratic institutions and the assertion of an imperialist policy. Several specific features of fifth-century Athenian politics find their explanation here. If the Periclean strategy at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which recommended everyone abandon the territory and withdraw behind the city’s walls, was a lasting success among the people, one would be wrong to impute this to the oratory talents of the general. It is rather that the majority of the Athenian demos were not impacted when Spartan troops periodically ravaged the countryside.Footnote ³⁴ Although the connection is inaccurate, it is significant that a lexicographer like Pollux considers all thetes to have been misthōtoi: ‘The words pelates and thetes designate the free who serve as slaves for money, because of their poverty.’Footnote ³⁵

Certainly, most ancient authors present recourse to paid work as the product of exceptional circumstances, resulting from the misfortunes that can suddenly strike a family.Footnote ³⁶ But Isocrates’ complaints should not deceive us: There is every indication that free men working in the service of other free men were in fact very numerous. Eutherus is by no means an exception, and in the course of Athenian speeches or comic plays we encounter other individuals of free status who ‘live by the work of their hands’ in the Athenian countryside. In Menander’s Dyskolos, a character weeps over the fate of a peasant forced to harvest the crops alone, having no slaves and no misthōtos to help him.Footnote ³⁷ The Boor in Theophrastus’ Characters is a man who, throwing caution to the wind, reports everything he has heard in the Assembly to the misthōtoi who work in his fields,Footnote ³⁸ while the litigant of Against Euboulides evokes the case of Athenian women obliged to become ‘nannies, housekeepers and grape-pickers’ because of a reversal of fortune.Footnote ³⁹ The link that unites an employer to his misthōtoi even serves as a model to assess relationships based on reciprocal and temporary interests, and which for this very reason prove to be fragile. While in Aristophanes’ Wasps, Athenian judges are compared to olive-pickers ready to serve anyone for a misthos,Footnote ⁴⁰ Demosthenes portrays Aeschines as the employee of Philip, whom he compares to ‘harvesters or those who do something for pay.’Footnote ⁴¹

Reading all of these texts, one realizes how much the valorization of the peasant-owner working on his own land is above all an ideological stereotype in ancient literature. The autourgos of Aristophanes or Menander is a comic archetype that masks the reality of the agricultural world, which largely ran on the work of slaves and the temporary work of free men and women.Footnote ⁴² There is little knowledge of salaried employees working long term in craft workshops,Footnote ⁴³ but the evidence for misthōtoi exercising their activity in town is not negligible. For example, in the bank of the famous Pasion, misthōtoi of free status practiced their trade alongside slaves.Footnote ⁴⁴ The father of Hagnon, general from 431–429, was, according to the chorus of Cratinos’ Ploutoi, ‘formerly a hardworking stevedore, a wage earner (misthōtos) of Pithias.’ Footnote ⁴⁵ According to an ancient tradition, the philosopher Cleanthes ‘was renowned for his industry, being indeed driven by extreme poverty to work for a living (misthophorein).’Footnote ⁴⁶ In Aristophanes’ Frogs, Xanthias suggests to Dionysus that he hire (misthōsai) a dead man to carry furniture to Hades, and Dionysus comes to negotiate with one of the resurrected dead men for the amount of his wages.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Intermittent Chorus

The contours of a specific category of workers therefore take shape little by little around the figure of Eutherus. It gathers together both citizens without property, forced to work temporarily in the workshops or the fields of Attica, and foreigners resident in Attica. Indeed, the misthōtoi made up a considerable share of the metic population. At the time of the battle of Mounychia, two men, Astyages and Eucolion, fought under Thrasybulus’ orders the army of the oligarchs alongside Gerys. In the decree of 401 that honors them with the privileges of isoteleia (fiscal equality with citizens) and engguēsis (the right to marry a member of the community of the Athenians and have legitimate offspring), these two men are qualified as misthō(toi). Contrary to the other honored individuals, whose names are accompanied by the mention of their profession, be they peasants, bakers or porters, Astyages and Eucolion are designated by the mention of this ‘wage relationship’ alone. Eucolion and Astyages, like Eutherus, were workers of free status who sold their skills as laborers according to market needs.

The particular features of this category of workers deserve to be placed in the context of the Athenian economy, within which coexisted complex forms of forced labor that did not fall under the category of slavery. These ‘free wage earners’ are quite different from the debt slaves who placed themselves at the service of a creditor until they had repaid them.Footnote ⁴⁸ They should also be distinguished from pelatai, bound to their employer by a relationship of personal dependence akin to a form of clientelism, and which probably implied legal protection on the behalf of the patron.Footnote ⁴⁹ Likewise, they were not to be counted among the freedmen who were so present in all sectors of Athenian economic life, and whose work was very often one of the obligations they owed to their former master. All these men enjoyed an intermediate status between full freedom and slavery, and their activity was determined by a legally enshrined bond of personal dependence, which guaranteed the stability of the workforce. It was quite different for free men like Astyages, Eucolion or Eutherus, who were hired for temporary farmwork: Their right to break off this engagement at any time was an essential component of their freedom. Clearly, these men of different statuses were able to share the same work space: Many poor citizens worked alongside slaves or freedmen in the countryside of Attica as well as in the urban workshops of the city. The status of free men nevertheless played a determining role in the form their work could take, limiting the employer’s ability to impose physical and legal constraints, while depriving these individuals of certain forms of protection offered by the relationship of dependency.

Identifying a category of workers is one thing. But when a type of work comes to define a shared identity, that is another matter. The invisibility of free-status ‘wage earners’ in Athenian political thought in the classical period is in itself intriguing. Was there a chorus of misthōtoi active in the year 404/3? Certainly, Eutherus, Eucolion and Astyages belonged to a singular group in the city, distinguished from both the owners of workshops or agricultural lands, be they citizens or metics, and from all the workers exercising their activity as part of a personal relationship of dependency. They were vulnerable, living hand to mouth, always adjusting to circumstance.Footnote ⁵⁰ At first glance, one concept seems an apt characterization of these men’s condition: precariousness. The term has been used over the last thirty years to describe, beyond the overly general term of poverty, the new neoliberal ordering of labor relations. ‘To the realm of the poor can correspond a collective and individual identity, a universe of stigmas, of symbols […]. To the realm of the precarious, which is mobile and discontinuous, seems to correspond the paradox of an identity built on “the provisional”,’ wrote Claudine Offredi, in one of the first attempts at a systematic definition of the ‘phenomenon of precarity.’Footnote ⁵¹ The weakening of social ties and the loss of professional identity in a context of great occupational instability are constitutive of the contemporary ‘precariat.’ It is tempting to draw a parallel with the condition of misthōtos, characterized in civic epigraphy by the absence of a professional identity. The category of free employees is based, in short, on a negative identification, collectively qualifying all those who do not have any particular technē.Footnote ⁵²

It goes without saying, however, that both individual and collective forms of subjectivation differ radically in modern wage societies and in the ancient city. The absence of a professional identity is not the stigma of a hypothetical disaffiliation but experienced as relegation from the community. Eutherus, as described by Xenophon, defines his position in Athenian society primarily in terms of his status as a free man. Athenian society of the classical period therefore remained a status-based society in two ways: Firstly, in the sense that the logic of status, and not of the market, determined the different ways production was organized – even when they worked side by side, free and dependent individuals did not perform ostensibly identical tasks in the same way, as we have seen; and secondly, insofar as all forms of individual and collective identification remained essentially defined by legal status.

The Impossible Union of Wage Workers

But the misthōtoi of free status are perhaps not the only men of classical Athens whose work was subject to a ‘wage,’ at least if one understands by this term the payment of money in return for completing a specific task. It is appropriate here to note a category of workers whose importance has been largely underestimated by historians: that of slaves who were rented out by their masters to a third party. Compared to a Eutherus, who was a citizen, or a Eucolion, who was a metic, these rented slaves were at the opposite end of the city’s status spectrum, but from the point of view of the mechanisms of the Athenian economy, they were, on the contrary, singularly close to them and belonged to the same labor market, however embryonic that may have been.

At the end of the fifth century, Pseudo-Xenophon depicts slave hiring as a common feature of Athenian social life, and it is very tempting to attribute the rise of this practice to the modernity of the Attic economy.Footnote ⁵³ Athenian oratory of the fourth century reveals numerous cases of rented slaves exercising their activity in a wide variety of sectors.Footnote ⁵⁴ When we are allowed a glimpse of the composition of a rich Athenian family’s estate, these rented slaves often constitute an important part of it.Footnote ⁵⁵ We can therefore guess that they formed a supplementary workforce, essential to the activity of many craftsmen’s workshops as well as to large agricultural holdings. Thus, at the beginning of the fourth century, a certain Therippides had placed three of his slaves in the workshop of Demosthenes’ father. In the middle of the fourth century, a man named Arethousius regularly received rent for the slaves he had temporarily entrusted to landowners to carry out agricultural work. Entire sectors of Athenian economic activity, such as the mining industry or prostitution, were dependent on the hiring of slaves. In the middle of the fourth century, over 5,000 slaves worked, it seems, in Laurion. The renting of slaves was largely regulated by the city, which levied a tax on the income paid to the owner,Footnote ⁵⁶ and a law dating back to the Solonian period had carefully delimited the respective responsibilities of those who hired out their slaves and those who rented them.Footnote ⁵⁷ Slaves were paid according to how long they worked, not what they actually did; this system is, without a doubt, the most similar thing to modern wage employment within the ancient economy.Footnote ⁵⁸

Now, insofar as they were present in the various sectors of the Athenian economy, these slaves could compete with the misthōtoi. Certainly, it may be risky to look for traces of ‘a real labor market, which would be organized with clear rules and whose evolution would be autonomous’ in the classical city.Footnote ⁵⁹ The work of most of the productive forces in the city (i.e. slaves working under the direct management of their masters) was not subject to competition on the part of an organized market. But this observation, which in fact applies as much to eighteenth-century France as to fifth-century Athens,Footnote ⁶⁰ should not lead us to overlook the existence of specific configurations within which free workers and slaves were de facto placed in competition. Since it offered a labor force that was always available, capable of working over long periods of time without any remuneration other than the cost of physical upkeep, the institution of slavery relegated the salaried work of free men to a necessarily intermittent and always marginal occupation. In this sense, slavery hindered the development of a stable and durable wage-earning system within the free population. Based on the internal arrangements of the servile relationship, the renting of slaves nevertheless led to limited but very real competition between the misthōtoi of free status and the misthophoroi (slaves who provided their masters with a regular income). From an external point of view, which was that of the workshop-owners or farmers, this generated a chorus of enslaved misthophoroi and free misthōtoi, among whom it was possible to recruit workers.

But the competition between these two categories could obviously not give rise to any form of common subjectivation or solidarity: Misthōtoi and misthophoroi lived in two different worlds. In classical times, the renting of slaves and the recruitment of free men for seasonal activities was organized in two very different places. In the Anakeion, located near the Theseion on the northern slope of the Acropolis, anybody could come to hire slaves for a limited period of time.Footnote ⁶¹ To the west of the Agora, in the deme of Colonus, there was a specific place that the Athenians called the misthōterionFootnote ⁶²: Here, free men could come to sell their skills as laborers for one day or one month.

Dividing the workforce that fed into the same labor market between two specific locations is in itself significant. While from the point of view of those who hired them, these two groups of workers were one and the same, with price variations likely correlating to each of the two markets, it was essential to keep them separate. No form of collective identity could result.

Friendship as a Mask for Subjection

Around the name Eutherus, historians are therefore condemned to a highly paradoxical operation, which consists of identifying a large and yet invisible category in the sources of the classical period. The end of the dialogue reported in Xenophon’s Memorabilia sheds light on the value of this invisibilized work. Socrates concludes the conversation with his old friend Eutherus by recommending he finds ‘benevolent men’ to work with. ‘In this way, I think, you are most likely to escape censure, find relief from your difficulties, live in ease and security, and obtain an ample competence for old age,’Footnote ⁶³ he adds. If the whole of book II of the Memorabilia is devoted to a reflection on the nature of friendship (philia), the dialogue with Eutherus is part of a succession of four reported conversations in which Socrates gives advice to his friends who are experiencing financial hardship. In the first two dialogues, Socrates defends the value of an individual life based on work. The philosopher’s purpose is indeed to highlight the value of the work of free men and women, considering that it is, by nature, different from that of slaves and can allow the fulfilment of individual virtue. While Eutherus provides us with the case of a citizen impoverished by the end of the Athenian empire, the character of Aristarchus embodies the rich Athenian who can no longer enjoy the income from his properties because of the stasis tearing the city apart. His sisters, cousins and nieces have even taken refuge in his house, and Aristarchus does not see how he can feed them.Footnote ⁶⁴ In both cases, Socrates suggests turning to work: Just as he advises the poor Eutherus to work for a wealthy Athenian, he recommends the rich Aristarchus puts the fourteen free women who have moved into his house to work, as spinning wool will allow him to make the profit necessary for the survival of his oikos. In these two instances, Socrates truly vindicates the idea of work, which is unusual, to say the least, among classical authors.

However, we must remember that Eutherus cannot commit himself permanently to a job in the service of another without seeing it as a form of slavery. For Eutherus, the challenge is to make his work for others last, ensuring him a form of protection in the long run without affecting his status as a free man. Now, if Socrates defends the idea that working for others may be necessary in order to achieve a self-sufficient life, a relationship based on work can only legitimately be considered an extra-economic bond – a relationship of dependency, in short – that takes a clientelist form. In the Memorabilia, the dialogue with Eutherus is only the first in a series of three chapters in which Socrates comes to defend a utilitarian conception of philia, based on the complementarity and reciprocity of interests.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this respect, Eutherus has Crito, a rich childhood friend of Socrates, who is prey to the Athenian sycophants, as his polar opposite. The philosopher advises the latter to establish patronage relationships with poor Athenian citizens. To keep the ‘wolves’ away from his fortune, he is encouraged to feed the ‘dogs’; in other words, to establish stable bonds of philia with those we might call his ‘clients’ and maintain them in exchange for protection against the sycophants’ attacks. The reciprocal exchange of benefits is at the heart of a client-like relationship ‘adorned in the flattering attire of philia.’Footnote ⁶⁶

According to the same utilitarian conception of philia, Socrates convinces Eutherus to place himself under the patronage of a powerful citizen, engaging in a long-term unequal relationship based on the exchange of goods or services. Thus, it is only in the form of friendship that the work a free individual does for others can find its ideal social form: that of a durable, asymmetrical but consensual social link, whose logic exceeds that of the exchange of goods. The register of philia can therefore enchant and veil what stay usually hidden: the dependency inherent in work carried out for others, which is always in danger of being interpreted as a form of slavery.

* * *

To what extent is the political commitment of the Athenians in 403 explained by their economic condition, regardless of whether they were owners of land and workshops or simply workers in a precarious situation? The character of Eutherus invites us to consider the role played by forms of collective identification based neither on adherence to a political camp – that of the democrats, neutrals, oligarchs or moderates – nor on membership of a statutory group, but on ‘work status.’Footnote ⁶⁷ In fact, Thrasybulus’ army, in Samos in 411, as in Piraeus in 403, included misthōtoi citizens and metics, as well as former slaves, and one might be tempted to recognize in them the coalescence of free and nonfree individuals forming a chorus of precarious workers. At the same time, one cannot underestimate the elitist dimension of the policy conducted by the so-called moderates, such as Archinus, who, when democracy was restored, took care to destroy any possible alliance between workers brought together by the shared experience of battle.

As pertinent as it may be in explaining the events of 403, such an interpretation, which seemingly anchors political confrontations in the forms of social conflict rife in Athenian society (beyond the divide between free men and slaves), is nevertheless difficult to uphold in the light of the ancient sources, which tend to render invisible the world of free workers. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, the bond of dependence between Eutherus and his future patron relegates the chorus of the precarious misthōtoi of classical Athens to an off-stage position, which is so difficult to reconstitute and yet so very real. The Socratic discourse is indeed an ideological enterprise, in that it aims to conceal the conflict that sometimes divided the community of free men. Viewed through the lens of philia, the enhanced vertical bonds between rich owners and precarious workers tend to obfuscate the forms of subjectivation that perhaps brought together free workers and some of the slaves or freedmen, despite their different statuses.