3. But we must return to the individual Roman of the masses, whom we
have now seen well supplied with the necessaries of life, and try
to form some idea of the way in which he was employed, or earned a
living. This is by no means an easy task, for these small people, as
we have already seen, did not interest their educated fellow-citizens,
and for this reason we hear hardly anything of them in the literature
of the time. Not only a want of philanthropic feeling in their
betters, but an inherited contempt for all small industry and retail
dealing, has helped to hide them away from us: an _inherited_
contempt, because it is in fact a survival from an older social
system, when the citizen did not need the work of the artisan and
small retailer, but supplied all his own wants within the circle of
his household, i.e. his own family and slaves, and produced on his
farm the material of his food and clothing. And the survival was all
the stronger, because even in the late Republic the abundant supply of
slaves enabled the man of capital still to dispense largely with the
services of the tradesman and artisan.

Cicero expresses this contempt for the artisan and trading classes in
more than one striking passage. One, in his treatise on Duties, is
probably paraphrased from the Greek of Panaetius, the philosopher who
first introduced Stoicism to the Romans, and modified it to suit
their temperament, but it is quite clear that Cicero himself entirely
endorses the Stoic view. "All gains made by hired labourers," he says,
"are dishonourable and base, for what we buy of them is their labour,
not their artistic skill: with them the very gain itself does but
increase the slavishness of the work. All retail dealing too may be
put in the same category, for the dealer will gain nothing except
by profuse lying, and nothing is more disgraceful than untruthful
huckstering. Again, the work of all artisans (_opifices_) is sordid;