This passage, from Aristophanes' Wasps (655-60, trans. Henderson), performed in 422 before thousands of citizens, encapsulates a fascinating feature of fifth-century Athens: the place of money, economic activity, and numeracy in the life of citizens from rich to poor, urban to rural. It suggests an audience with a fondness for calculating and counting, one attuned to economic advantages - in short, an Athenian economic mentality. Aristophanes' verses also encompass many central facets of the fifth-century economy that will be surveyed in this chapter and illuminate the relationship among individual, polis, and empire in the pursuit of financial and economic benefit. Bdelycleon, the speaker, aims to deflate his father Philocleon's conviction that he has great wealth and power as a result of his position as a juror, for which he receives state pay (the ultimate justification, in Philocleon's view, for performing that service). Bdelycleon produces as argument the city’s staggering national wealth in order to show how little Philocleon gets out of it. “So the pay we’ve been getting,” Philocleon exclaims, “doesn’t even amount to a tenth of the revenue!” (664). The underlying assumption is that individual citizens have a right to benefit materially from the city’s power.