Occupations

Since Ancient Athens was primarily an agrarian society - that is, agriculture was extremely prominent in their way of life, to such a point where a person’s worth and rank in the social classes was determined by the amount of food they could produce, measured in bushels – most people of the lower-mid classes spent their times working in the fields or in other areas of manual labor to fulfill their place in the Athenian labor force.

This is not to say, however – that Athens was primarily a produce-only society, drawing a contrast between Athens and Sparta shows that Athens is more equivalent to one of the more advanced infrastructure economies that exist today, for example, Germany or Japan. Sparta is to Australia what Athens is to China – while Athens was capable of producing its own natural resources, it often eschewed that in favor of relying on its prominent trading links, thus resulting in the extremely diverse range of professions available – almost all of them related to manufacture in some way. Most of the population were agricultural workers in some way or another.

Jobs were not restricted to just agricultural centric ones though – anything from actors and writers to jewelers and gynecologists had roles in Athenian society – although all those roles and the ones in-between could only be taken on by males. Effectively anything imaginable for a more advanced ancient culture – Athens had it.

Females had a distinctly different role in the Athenian workforce – they were primarily either seamstresses or managers/overseers of the home, ensuring that the various elements required for a household to run properly were met – often resulting in a woman directly managing a team of slaves. Wealthier women very rarely worked aside from providing guidance to slaves, though poorer women often had such duties normally filled by slave labour to do for themselves.

In the rare event that an Athenian woman actually held a job outside of the home, they had a limited selection to choose from – very few became hetaerae, female companions to men (note: not specifically prostitutes, they were also conversationalists and were responsible for organizing parties and generally entertaining men) and even fewer became priestesses, whom performed various religious ceremonies pertaining to the Athenian gods.