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Work and Wages in Athens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
Büchsenschütz in his Besitz und Erwerb comes to the conclusion (on pp. 343 and 349) that the rate of pay in Athens for an artizan was from 5 obols to a drachma and for a labourer 3 obols. The facts and figures on which he bases his conclusions are taken from Boeckh (Staatshaushaltung, Bk. I. c. 21), the conclusions are his own. Büchsenschütz is indeed somewhat puzzled by two facts, viz. that on 3 obols a man could scarcely support himself, much less a wife and family, and that in an inscription of the Periclean age (now published in C.I.A. I. 325) a mere labourer got a drachma a day. However, Büchsenschütz neither attempts to explain these two facts nor does he allow them to modify his conclusions.
But since the publication of Besitz und Erwerb some inscriptions have been discovered (now in C.I.A. II. ii. 834 b and c) which throw more light on these points. These inscriptions are fragments of the building accounts of the epistatae of Eleusis and the treasurers of the two goddesses, 834b in the archonship of Cephisophon (329/8), and 834c some ten or twenty years later.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1895
References
1 For this ellipse of δραχμῶν cf. C.I.A. I. 321, lines 11 and 16.
2 In C.I.A. IV. i. 2, lines 15 to 25 we have the pay-bill of the 
for the prytany complete, giving both the separate items and the total, and the names of the workmen and the amounts paid to them. It is headed, 
. The last word 
probably means ‘daywages’ (sc. 
, cf. Suidas s.v. 
), and 
by itself probably means pay for piece-work, because some of the 
are expressly said to be paid by the day 
and others are paid for work by the piece (e.g. lines 32—34). But if any one were to suggest that the word agrees with 
understood, then he would have to regard this passage as conclusively proving that the 
were 
in B.C. 408 as they were in B.C. 329, for the meaning of the words, on this view, must be that the account following includes the cost of the food as well as of the wages of the 
But there is no separate entry for food; therefore the cost of each man's food must be included in the amount paid to him and set opposite to his name. But that amount is, in the case of daylabourers, one drachma per diem, e.g.
