I 30 TRADERS AND CRAFTSMEN V
general sense*1 Here again, the normal business was on a
small scale, the cheirotechnes poor and without capital, often
even without a house of his own and living in hired rooms.2
In times of war at least, workmen might even go to another
city to help in some urgent building work.3 Such conditions
brought artisan and tradesman close together. Usually they
were one and the same person, and if not, at least they stood
on the same social level
Even the peasant, the Attic as well as the Boeotian or
Megarlan peasant, sold his products himself in the market of
Athens, and afterwards made his own small purchases 4 The
vine-dresser naturally sold to the consumer or to the inn-
keeper. Frequently he may have sold his wine straight from
the press, just as the olives, or the oil produced from them, were
sold either on the spot in the olive-orchard or in the market 5
Cattle were often sold direct to the household, therefore the
magetros was both cook and butcher, and he had to know how
to detect possible diseases in the cattle.6 For the poorer towns-
people> however, there must have been some retail trade in
meat The greengrocers, usually women, as a rule sold the
products of their own garden and fields; it is said as a joke
that Euripides grew up 'among the herbs of the field', as if his
mother did not even sell garden products.7 A peasant or a
gardener coming to town may have sold some of his neigh-
bour's fruit as well, but that did not make any essential
difference in the nature of this kind of trade which was every-
where on a small scale, and consisted in the producer selling
his own products.
Not quite the same is true of the fish-trade.8 It can be shown
by a very large number of passages from comedy that fish was,
1 P-30£ Cf. the combination of specialization and team-work m the Erech-
theion inscriptions (IG I2, 373-4)
2 Pi 533ft 6i5^ - Xen symp 4, 4. 3 Thuc IV, 69, 2, V, 82, 6
4W.i69f,E8i7ff-A7i9ff,8i8,90o. 5 Cloche, 8iff
6 A 1015, P ioi7f — K 375f It is unintelligible why in Pherekr 64 the
women boast that nobody had seen a poysipociva or !)(6uoTrcbAoavcc As to the
latter, the irony seems obvious, women fishmongers certainly existed We may
also believe that housewives and slave-girls not only cooked (there is no question
about that), but also sometimes killed at least poultry (cf Pherekr 22)
7W497f,Th387 -Th456
8 Cf. Bohlen, Die Eedeutung der Tucherei fur die antike Wirtschaft Diss
Hamburg, 1937