boast themselves of being no hearty "meat eaters" like their Boeotian
neighbors, but of preferring the more delicate fish. No dinner
party is successful without a seasonable course of fish. The arrival
of a fresh cargo from the harbor is announced by the clanging of
a bell, which is likely to leave all the other booths deserted,
while a crowd elbows around the fishmonger. He above all others
commands the greatest flow of billingsgate, and is especially notorious
for his arrogant treatment of his customers, and for exacting the
uttermost farthing. The "Fish" and the "Myrtles" can be sure of
a brisk trade on days when all the other booth keepers around the
Agora stand idle.

All this trade, of course, cannot find room in the booths of the
open Agora. Many hucksters sit on their haunches on the level
ground with their few wares spread before them. Many more have
little stands between the pillars of the stoe; and upon the various
streets that converge on the market there is a fringe of shops,
but these are usually of the more substantial sort. Here are the
barbers' shops, the physicians' offices (if the good leech is more
than an itinerant quack), and all sorts of little factories, such
as smithies, where the cutler's apprentices in the rear of the shop
forge the knives which the proprietor sells over the counter, the
slave repositories, and finally wine establishments of no high
repute, where wine may not merely be bought by the skin (as in the
main Agora), but by the potful to be drunk on the premises.


17. The Morning Visitors to the Agora.--The first tour of inspection
completed, several facts become clear to the visitor. One is the
extraordinarily large proportion of MEN among the moving multitudes.