His distinction of productive and acquisitive arts can, furthermore, hardly be interpreted as intending to limit production to the material merely, though learning is relegated to the acquisitive class. Such an interpretation would be out of harmony with the whole trend of his thought.118
His further classification of productive agencies as creative (ἕνεκα τοῦ ποιεῖν τι) or preventive (τοῦ μὴ πάσχειν)119 substantiates this, for many of the preventive agencies are intellectual and scientific.
The general attitude of Plato toward economic production may be inferred from his insistence upon the thorough application of the division of labor for the perfection of industry.120
He evidently recognized it as the necessary basis of all higher life. We have seen above, also that one of his chief objections to excessive wealth or poverty was the fact that they caused inefficiency in production.
Agriculture.—Of the three factors that enter into production—land, labor, and capital—the most important in the mind of the Greek thinkers was land. The relative prominence of agriculture was partly the cause of this, but in the case of the philosophers, their ethical passion, their idea of the necessity of leisure for personal development, and their conservative attitude toward industry and commerce were the chief motives that impelled them to urge their contemporaries back to the simple life of the farm.121
The aristocratic feeling, still strong in European countries, that landed property is the most respectable, probably also had some influence, though land was not so distinctively in the hands of the upper classes in Attica.
Though the praise of agriculture was a characteristic feature of Greek literature in all periods, it was not at first a conscious economic theory.122