I looked at the article for numbers, and the closest I could find was that a trirarch paid many multiples of a laborer's yearly salary. That could mean the bene

I looked at the article for numbers, and the closest I could find was that a trirarch paid many multiples of a laborer's yearly salary. That could mean the benefactor was shouldering a large burden, or that the benefactors were stupendously wealthy compared to the average laborer and the financial obligation was not heavy for them. I don't know what the case was. I could find no estimates of total tax burden, which at this point would be mostly conjecture but better than nothing. Compared to a modern-day country like Belgium or France, where the tax burden is about 44-46% of GDP, I would wager that the Athenian tax burden was very low as a fraction of the economy. To achieve modern levels of taxation you need a bureaucracy which did not exist in classical Athens.