Very far was the typical Alexandrian from the quiet "leisure" which the average Greek or Latin believed requisite for a refined life--a life in which slaves did all the necessary work, and amassed an income for the master to expend in polite recreations.

In Rome, for a free citizen to have been a handicraftsman would have been a disgrace; he could be farmer, banker, soldier,--nothing more.

In Alexandria the glass-workers, paper-makers, and linen weavers were those who were proudest and most jealous of their title of "Men of Macedonia."[173] Money, Cornelia soon discovered, was even a greater god here than in Rome.

Cleomenes himself was not ashamed to spend a large part of the day inspecting his factories, and did not hesitate to declare that during a period when he and his family had been in great distress, following the failure of the banking house of Agias's father, he had toiled with his own hands to win bread for his daughters.
[173] The official title of Alexandrian Greek citizens.
The conception that any honest labour, except a certain genteel agriculture, might not make a man the less of a gentleman, or a woman the less of a lady, was as new to Cornelia as the idea that some non-Romans could claim equality with herself.

Neither proposition did she accept consciously.