silver and gold talents were of the same weight? and how vast must the size of such crowns have been? And even if we suppose that 100 talents of gold were equal to 600 gold drachmas, and 60 talents of gold to 360 drachmas, these crowns still remain of considerable weight. Excepting the crown of Jupiter at Tarracona, 15lbs. in weight, and that which the Carthaginians sent to the Capitoline Jupiter in the year of the city 412, of 25lbs. of gold (1875 Attic drachmas,) and the immense one in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, of 10,000 gold staters (which, at a festival in the time of that king, was laid upon the throne of Ptolemy Soter,) together with another, 80 cubits in length, of gold and precious stones, I find no example of such large crowns as those two were, even if they only weighed 600 and 360 drachmas. In the Acropolis of Athens there were golden crowns of 172, 182, of 20, and 25 drachmas or rather more; also another of 26; four of which the joint weight was 135 drachmas; one of 29, others of 33, 59, and 85 drachmas. A crown, which the celebrated Lysander sent as a sacred offering to the Parthenon of Athens, weighed 66 drachmas 5 oboli. Two crowns, honorary gifts to Minerva of the Acropolis, weighed, the one 245 drachmas 1 oboli, the other 272 drachmas 34 oboli. Another for the same goddess weighed 232 drachmas 5 oboli. A crown, dedicated the Delphian Apollo at the great festival which was celebrated every fourth year, cost only 1500 drachmas of silver; and consequently, if the workmanship is estimated at the lowest possible rate, can hardly have weighed a hundred drachmas of gold. According to these facts then, the talents in which the weight of the Carthaginian and Chersonetan crowns is stated, must have been small talents of six drachmas of gold. Yet there can be no question but that as much gold as was equal to the value of a silver talent, is often called a talent of gold; as also that a quantity of gold weighing 6000 drachmas was known by the same name; which therefore in this case is manifestly independent of any relation to the value of silver." pp. 37-40.

The area of Attica, calculated according to the map of Barbié du Bocage, published in 1811, is (including Salamis and Helena, the former containing twenty-six, the latter five square miles,) six hundred and fifty-six English square miles. Taking the English geographical mile to the statute mile as four to three, the whole area of Attica, including those islands, would be only eight hundred and seventy-four square miles-something more than the one-thirtieth part of the small State of SouthCarolina, aud much less than the single district of Charleston, This small space is admitted on all hands to have been well peopled, but there has been some diversity of opinion as to the precise amount of its population. That the number

of citizens who were entitled to receive compensation for assisting at the public assemblies was thirty thousand, was generally assumed from the time of the Persian to the end of the Peloponnesian war. This appears from a passage which we had VOL. VIII.-NO. 16. 35

occasion to cite on a former occasion, from the Ecclesiazusæ of Aristophanes, and some other authorities, to the same effect, have been added by our author. He thinks, however, that this was an exaggeration, and after collating and examining a number of texts which have a bearing upon the subject, adopts the usual mean average of twenty thousand. The following passage embodies the result of this very able and interesting discussion:

"Soon after this au enumeration of the people occurs, which is the very one to which the number mentioned in Plutarch of the citizens who remained and were disfranchised in the reign of Antipater, was adapted. It was carried on by Demetrius Phalereus when Archon in Olymp. 117. 4. and yielded, according to Ctesicles, 21,000 citizens, 10,000 resident aliens, and 400,000 slaves. From this very important statement the whole number of the population of Autica has been variously determined. According to the usual rule of Statistics, the adults have been generally taken as a fourth part of the population. This gave for the citizens 84,000, and for the aliens 40,000. But when they came to the slaves, these calculators fell into an embarrassment: for, according to the same or somewhat lower proportion, their number came out far above what could be deemed probable. Hume, wishing to shew that the population of ancient times has been greatly overrated, contends with many reasons against this number of slaves, and ends by substituting 40,000 in the place of 400,000 whom he considers as the adults, to which it would be then necessary to add the women and children. But his arguments are partly inconclusive, and partly founded upon false suppositions. Thus all that he says concerning the national wealth of Attica, that it was only equal to 6000 talents, is completely false; and, in the next place, slaves were not computed by adults or fathers of families, which is a term wholly inapplicable to slaves; but they were counted, like sheep or cattle, by the head, and were regarded in the same light with property, as Gillies has already observed, for they were in the strictest sense a personal possession. 400,000 is therefore the sum total of the slaves; and the population of Attica would amount, on this supposition, to 524,000 souls. Wallace's computation is higher, for he makes the whole population amount to more than 580,000, and Sainte Croix goes as far as 639,500. The latter writer erroneously adds 100,000 children to the number of slaves, and likewise 4 and not 4 for every male adult or father of a family, so that the free as well as the slave population is made more numerous. As however this proportion appears to be more correct for southern countries, the citizens with their families may be fairly taken at 94,500 and the resident aliens at 45,000. In order however not to proceed solely upon the period of Demetrius, but upon the mean average of 20,000 citizens, I reckon only 90,000 free inhabitants, and 45,000 resident aliens. With regard to the total amount of slaves, it is stated too much in round numbers for perfect accuracy; the historian doubtless added

*Ve. 1124. Southern Review, No. 4,-Art. Rom. Orators.

whatever was wanting to complete the last hundred thousand, although the correct number might not have been so great by several thousands. It will be sufficient to reckon 365,000 slaves together with women and children, which latter however were proportionally few. Adding to these 135,000 free inhabitants, we may take as a mean average of the population 500,000 in round numbers; of whom the larger proportion were men, since fewer female than male slaves were kept, and not many slaves were married." pp. 50-52.

The

The distribution of this population which is the next object of inquiry, is involved in as much difficulty as its amount. circumference of Athens, including the Piræus and Phalerum, was equal to two hundred stadii, and the city itself contained ten thousand houses. In general only one family lived in a house, and Mr. Boeckh, on the authority of Xenophon (Soc. Mem. ii. 7. 2.) takes a family of fourteen free persons to have been a large one. There were duvoxía, however, which-whether we interpret the word as meaning lodging-houses, or a collection of houses--contained a greater number of inhabitants, and the factories of various sorts, for which Athens was renowned, were, no doubt, filled with many hundreds of slaves. The mines, too, were in a space sixty stadii wide, and are known to have been worked by a vast multitude of hands. For these our author allows twenty thousand people, and to the city and the two seaports, one hundred and eighty thousand-two hundred thousand for the thirty-two square miles included within both. There then remain three hundred thousand for the other six hundred and eight square miles--which gives something less than four hundred and ninety-three and a half to a square mile. This is an immense population--but Mr. Boeckh thinks, that, considering the number of small towns or. market places, villages and farms in Attica, it is not to be wondered at. Since the publication of his work, (as we are informed by the translator) this whole subject has been examined by several writers, one of whom concurs very nearly with our author, another* differs so widely as to set down the whole population of Attica at only two hundred and twenty thousand; but the reasonings of the latter are glaringly inconclusive, and his positions wholly untenable.

If the estimate of Mr. Boeckh is to be relied on, the supplying such a population with food must have been one of the most serious and pressing concerns of State, and accordingly we find that the corn-laws of Attica were remarkable for a most jealous spirit and a stern and even tyrannical severity of enactment. Admitting, as our author alleges, that the soil of Attica was not

* M. Lebronne-Mémoires de l'Acadèmie des Belles Lettres. Tom. vi.

quite so sterile as has been generally supposed, still it is certain that eight hundred thousand medimni (about twelve hundred thousand bushels) of foreign corn were imported into Athens.* We are not to wonder, therefore, that, in an age when the great truths of Political Economy were wholly unknown even to philosophers, legislators adopted what our author is pleased to call "judicious arrangements" to prevent the scarcity with which the country was always threatened. Not to speak of the expenses incurred for fortifications and convoy-fleets, with a view to the protection of the corn-trade, the exportation of all grain was absolutely prohibited, Two-thirds of the corn imported into the Piræus, were required to be brought to Athens-that is to say, only one-third could be sent away to other countries. Engrossing was laid under severe restrictions. The buying more than a certain quantity of corn at a time was prohibited on pain of death, and purchasers were compelled to resell at an advance of only an obolus on the medimnus. This sort of people were very odious at Athens, and Mr. Boeckh expresses himself in regard to them, with an earnestness of censure that is quite diverting. This particular brauch of tradeinstead of being, like all other commodities, under the inspection of the Agoranomi-was committed to an especial magistracy, the Sitophylaces, and to insure or increase the importation of corn, there was a general law that no money should be lent upon any vessel which would not bring back to Athens a return cargo of corn, and that no Athenian should ship corn to any other market.‡

With regard to this last law, there is a difference of opinion between Salmasius and Mr. Boeckh, which we advert to here because it has an important bearing upon a question we are about to discuss. Salmasius thinks that it refers exclusively to the corn-trade, and we confess that we were strongly inclined to agree with him, until we read over again the oration of Demosthenes against Lacritus, upon which he relies. The words of the Statute are cited by Mr. Boeckh. He thinks it apparent, on the very face of it, independently of some cogent reasons which he adduces to establish the inference, that this oppressive regulation extended to all contracts of the kind (bottomry or

Demosth. in Leptin. Mr. Boeckh states it at a million of medimni-equal to a third part of the whole consumption.

† ίςε ρὰρ δήπου, «ανδρες δικαζοί, τον νόμον ὡς χαλεπός έςιν, ἐάν τις 'Αθηναίων άλλωσέ τη σιτηγήση η Αθήναζε, ή χρήματα δανείση εις άλλο τι εμπόριον * το 'Αθηναίων, οίαι ζημίαι περὶ τουτων εισιν, ὡς μεγάλαι καὶ δεῖναι. Demosth.

in Lacrit. 941.

The client of Demosthenes might well characterize such a statute as xaλstos.

respondentia) whatever might be the subject of them. The words of the law itself might bear another construction, but we are constrained to admit that no other interpretation than Mr. Boeckh's is consistent with the context of the speech and the case of Lacritus itself. It is greatly to be regretted that the other heads of the statute, which are alluded to in this pleading, are not extant. As it is, we are left to conjecture what could have been the object of so odious an enactinent. Why should the State prohibit contracts of fanus nauticum, where the return-cargo was to be delivered at any other port than that of Athens? We confess that, notwithstanding the words of the law and the speech referred to are comprehensive enough, as we have said, to include all contracts of the kind, we strongly suspect the motive of the lawgiver to have been some indirect encouragement of the corn-trade, and that he thus acted on a high ground of public policy. This leads us to the point which we intimated, just now, our purpose to discuss.

Was freedom of trade the standing policy of Athens? And if it was, was it so upon principle, or only because the simple and elegant reason of the Greeks had not gone deep enough into the theory of social life, to discover the benefits of a system of monopoly and exclusion? There are those who talk of a Romantic or Gothic school in literature as contradistinguished from the classical. It would be curious to trace a similar contrast in matters of philosophy and government, and to shew that we are indebted for the barbarous, narrow-minded, narrowhearted, unchristian restrictions to which the intercourse of mankind, and the exchange of the common blessings of nature have been subjected in modern times, to an age of darkness, anarchy and violence, when the poverty of necessitous kings compelled them to traffick away to the burgers of petty corporations the right to truck and huckster in their turn, at the expense of every body else, upon their own terms, and to transmit the same fraudulent privileges and selfish spirit to their successors, even down to this period of universal illumination. In this connexion, we quote the following passage:

"Among the many proposals for the advancement of commerce which Xenophon makes in his Treatise upon the Revenues, there is no where an exhortation to restore the freedom of trade: either this was not one of the points which lay within the knowledge of antiquity; or it must have existed without any limit. The latter supposition is nearly maintained by Heeren: "they were ignorant," says he, "of a balance of trade, and thus all the violent measures that flow from it naturally

* See the instances adduced by Hallam. Mid. Ages. v. i. p. 165 and seqq.