play.  Another visitor is a careful and competent ship merchant who is fitting for a voyage to Crete, and who requires a loan to buy his return cargo.  Ordinary interest, well secured, is 18 per cent, but a sea voyage, even at the calmest season, is counted extra hazardous.  The skipper must pay 24 per cent at least.  A poor tradesman also appears to raise a trifle by pawning two silver cups; and an unlucky farmer, who cannot meet his loan, persuades the banker to extend the time “just until the next moon"[+]—­of course at an unmerciful compounding of interest.

[*]Without the Arabic system of numerals, elaborate bookkeeping surely presented a sober face to the Greeks.  Their method of numeration was very much like that with the so-called Roman numerals.

[+]"Watching the moon,” i.e. the end of the month when the debts became due, appears to have been the melancholy recreation of many Athenian debtors.  See Aristophanes’s “Clouds,” I. 18.

82.  Drawbacks to the Banking Business.—­Nicanor has no paper money to handle, no stocks, no bonds,—­and the line between legitimate interest and scandalous usury is by no means clearly drawn.  There is at least one good excuse for demanding high interest.  It is notoriously hard to collect bad debts.  Many and many a clever debtor has persuaded an Athenian jury that all taking of interest is somewhat immoral, and the banker has lost at least his interest, sometimes too his principal.  So long as this is the case, a banker’s career has its drawbacks; and Demosthenes in a recent speech has commended the choice by Pasion’s son of a factory worth 60 mine per year, instead of his father’s banking business worth nominally 100.  The former was so much more secure than an income depending on “other people’s money!”

Finally it must be said that while Nicanor and Pasion have been honorable and justly esteemed men, many of their colleagues have been rogues.  Many a “table” has been closed very suddenly, when its owner absconded, or collapsed in bankruptcy, and the unlucky depositors and creditors have been left penniless, during the “rearrangement of the tables,” as the euphemism goes.

83.  The Potter of Athens.—­There is one other form of economic activity in Athens which deserves our especial notice, different as it is from the bankers’ tables,—­the manufacture of earthen vases.  A long time might be spent investigating the subject; here there is room only for a hasty glance.  For more than two hundred years Attica has been supplying the world with a pottery which is in some respects superior to any that has gone before, and also (all things considered) to any that will follow, through night two and a half millenniums.  The articles are primarily tall vases and urns, some for mere ornament or for religious purposes,—­some for very humble household utility; however, besides the regular vases there is a great variety of dishes, plates, pitchers, bowls, and cups all of the same