There is much talk today of the enthusiasm with which young entrepreneurs are setting up businesses. One reason why this appears such a daring development is that the industrial revolution changed our thinking about jobs and work so radically that ‘big business’ seemed the only form of honest employment. Before that, going it alone was the norm. Classical Athens was a prime example, though one would never think it to read most accounts of the subject.
Take the great Lord Macaulay: the famous picture he drew of daily life in Athens — Pheidias putting up a frieze, rhapsodes in the streets reciting Homer to weeping crowds, a meeting of the democratic Assembly and a play by Sophocles — is not only nonsense but ignores the hard reality of Athenian life on the ground.
It is worth remembering that Socrates was a stonemason, and his friend Simon a shoemaker (his shop has been excavated).
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