When we speak of Athens, we think of it as an important town, the capital of Greece, like Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire. That was NOT the case.

Greece did not have a central government, was not a federation of states, cantons, countries, townships, whatever you may call them, cf. the USA, Germany, Switzerland... It was a country divided up into totally independent states with their own laws, their own political and social institutions. What they did have in common was race (sort of, some Dorian, some Ionian), religion and history. Think of Homer's Iliad, all the Greek "kings" united against Troy because one of "them" had had his wife abducted by Paris of Troy.

What we are concentrating on here is the "Athenian Democracy", and what is said here concerns solely Athens, NOT Greece as a whole.

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Why was the evacuation difficult?
What was the Peloponnesian invasion? (see page V, About this Course, 2nd paragraph)
Look at the map p. XIII (though I suggest you find yourself a better one): where is the Peloponnese?
And where is Attica? (this mini-map won't tell, but its capital is Athens)
The evacuation was more than difficult, it was disastrous. The farmers were forced to remove themselves and their families from their homes in the country to Athens, for protection against the attacks of Sparta and her allies (the Peloponnesian league, just in case you didn't look it up, page V), overcrowding the town with all that entails: lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of higiene. Which in turn lead to disease, the worst of all, the plague, decimating the population. Pericles himself (their Prime Minister or President, whatever you want to call him) died of it and with him Athen's Golden Age, and supremacy over the Greek world, came to an end.

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Imagine the life of our αὐτουργός, self-employed Dikaiopolis.
Why sheep and goats rather than cows?
What the author forgot to explain is: How did those αὐτουργοί survive if they "aimed at self-sufficiency, but few would have attained it"? It can't have been olive oil and/or wine alone, since it says "if they had a surplus".

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If you are like me you have no idea how much a bushel is, and the expression "hide one's light under a bushel" isn't any help either. I looked it up, so you don't have to: a bushel is the equivalent of

8 gallons (british) 36 litres (continental) 64 US pints

Multiply that by   50 and you won't be any the wiser. I wasn't, so then I changed it into 50 kg sacks ( I can just about carry one of those, so that makes sense, to me at least). 500 sacks! Now that I can imagine, but it doesn't seem very much. Anyway, that's what a millionnaire's land produced in a year. They must have had other sources of income apart from that, though, the "πεντακοσιομεδιμνοί ".
The population was divided into 3 groups: Athenian citizens, metics and slaves. (That information is provided in lesson 2a.)
Athens was a democracy and in a democracy all are equal, and there are no classes in theory. So what was the purpose of these 4 classes?
I wonder where the Greek shopkeepers, merchants, artists, butchers... fitted it?

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This chapter explains why Dikaiopolis and his family were chosen to provide the story-line and introduce us to Attic Greek.