ABSTRACT
In a speech Demosthenes wrote for him, Diodorus indignantly reproaches Timocrates with the unseemly vigour he and his ally Androtion used to collect arrears of eisphora, the special tax imposed on Athens’ property owners in times of war. ‘You would enter houses along with the Eleven, the receivers and their assistants and you never took pity on anyone. No, you stripped off their front doors and snatched away the sheets from off their beds and, if a man had a maidservant, you seized her as payment of his debt’ (Dem. 24.197). The passage makes an appearance in A.H.M. Jones’ account of the economic basis of Athenian democracy, where Jones takes it to show that relatively few Athenians, the better-off only, owned slaves. ‘The domestic servant probably did not go very far down the social scale.’1 The maidservant plays a similar part in Jones’ Cambridge inaugural lecture, also published in 1952.2 Just
three years later, however, Jones revisited the households of the payers of eisphora at Athens, only to find that they had come down in the world. Now, many such taxpayers ‘were relatively poor’.3
