More reputable, though not less noisy, is the fish market.  Athenians 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.  Except for the bread women and the flower girls, hardly one female is to be found among the sellers.  Among the purchasers there is not a single reputable lady.  No Athenian gentlewoman dreams of frequenting the Agora.  Even a poor man’s wife prefers to let her spouse do the family marketing.  As for the “men folk,” the average gentleman will go daily indeed to the Agora, but if he is really pretentious, it will be merely to gossip and to meet his friends; a trusted servant will attend to the regular purchasing.  Only when an important dinner party is on hand will the master take pains to order for himself.  If he does purchase in person, he will never carry anything himself.  The slaves can attend to that; and only the slaveless (the poorest of all) must take away their modest rations of boiled lentils, peas, beans, onions, and garlic, usually in baskets, though yonder now is a soldier who is bearing off a measure of boiled peas inside his helmet.

Another thing is striking.  The average poor Athenian seems to have no purse.  Or rather he uses the purse provided by nature.  At every booth one can see unkempt buyers solemnly taking their small change from their mouths.[*] Happy the people that has not learned the twentieth century wisdom concerning microbes!  For most Athenians seem marvelously healthy.