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Greece

The emergence of the Hellenic city-states in the Aegean zone predates the classical epoch proper, and only its outlines can be glimpsed from the unwritten sources available. After the collapse of Mycenean civilization about 1200 B.C., Greece experienced a prolonged ‘Dark Age’ in which literacy disappeared and economic and political life regressed to a rudimentary household stage: the primitive and rural world portrayed in the Homeric epics. It was in the succeeding epoch of Archaic Greece, from 800 to 500 B.C., that the urban pattern of classical civilization first slowly crystallized. At some time before the advent of historical records, local kingships were overthrown by tribal aristocracies, and cities were founded or developed under the domination of these nobilities. Aristocratic rule in Archaic Greece coincided with the reappearance of long-distance trade (mainly with Syria and the East), the adumbration of coinage (invented in Lydia in the 7th century), and the creation of an alphabetic script (derived from Phoenicia). Urbanization proceeded steadily, spilling out overseas into the Mediterranean and Euxine, until by the end of the colonization period in the mid 6th century, there were some 1,500 Greek cities in the Hellenic homelands and abroad – virtually none of them more than 25 miles inland from the coastline. These cities were essentially residential nodes of concentration for farmers and landowners: in the typical small town of this epoch, the cultivators lived within the walls of the city and went out to work in the fields every day, returning at night – although the territory of the cities always included an agrarian circumference with a wholly rural population settled in it. The social organization of these towns still reflected much of the tribal past from which they had emerged: their internal structure was articulated by hereditary units whose kin nomenclature represented an urban translation of traditional rural divisions. Thus the inhabitants of the cities were normally organized in descending order of size and inclusiveness – into ‘tribes’, ‘phratries’ and ‘clans’; ‘clans’ being exclusive aristocratic groups, and ‘phratries’ perhaps originally their popular clienteles.¹ Little is known of the formal political constitutions of the Greek cities in the Archaic age, since – unlike that of Rome at a comparable stage of development – they did not survive into the classical epoch itself, but it is evident that they were based on the privileged rule of a hereditary nobility over the rest of the urban population, typically exercised through the government of an exclusive aristocratic council over the city.

The rupture of this general order occurred in the last century of the Archaic Age, with the advent of the ‘tyrants’ (c. 650–510 B.C.). These autocrats broke the dominance of the ancestral aristocracies over the cities: they represented newer landowners and more recent wealth, accumulated during the economic growth of the preceding epoch, and rested their power to a much greater extent on concessions to the unprivileged mass of city-dwellers. The tyrannies of the 6th century, in effect, constituted the critical transition towards the classical polis. For it was during their general period of sway that the economic and military foundations of Greek classical civilization were laid. The tyrants were the product of a dual process within the Hellenic cities of the later archaic period. The arrival of coinage and the spread of a money economy were accompanied by a rapid increase in the aggregate population and trade of Greece. The wave of overseas colonization from the 8th to the 6th centuries was the most obvious expression of this development; while the higher productivity of Hellenic wine and olive cultivation, more intensive than contemporary cereal agriculture, perhaps gave Greece a relative advantage in commercial exchanges within the Mediterranean zone.² The economic opportunities afforded by this growth created a stratum of newly enriched agrarian proprietors, drawn from outside the ranks of the traditional nobility, and in some cases probably benefiting from auxiliary commercial enterprises. The fresh wealth of this group was not matched by any equivalent power in the city. At the same time, the increase of population and the expansion and disruption of the archaic economy provoked acute social tensions among the poorest class on the land, always most liable to become degraded or subjected to noble estate-owners, and now exposed to new strains and uncertainties.³ The combined pressure of rural discontent from below and recent fortunes from above forced apart the narrow ring of aristocratic rule in the cities. The characteristic outcome of the resultant political upheavals within the cities was the emergence of the transient tyrannies of the later 7th and 6th centuries. The tyrants themselves were usually comparative upstarts of considerable wealth, whose personal power symbolized the access of the social group from which they were recruited to honours and position within the city. Their victory, however, was generally possible only because of their utilization of the radical grievances of the poor, and their most lasting achievement was the economic reforms in the interests of the popular classes which they had to grant or tolerate to secure their power. The tyrants, in conflict with the traditional nobility, in effect objectively blocked the monopolization of agrarian property that was the ultimate tendency of its unrestricted rule, and which was threatening to cause increasing social distress in Archaic Greece. With the single exception of the landlocked plain of Thessaly, small peasant farms were preserved and consolidated throughout Greece in this epoch. The different forms in which this process occurred have largely to be reconstructed from their later effects, given the lack of documented evidence from the pre-classical period. The first major revolt against aristocratic dominance that led to a successful tyranny, supported by the lower classes, occurred in Corinth in the mid 7th century, where the Bacchiadae family was evicted from its traditional grip over the city, one of the earliest trading centres to flourish in Greece. But it was the Solonic reforms in Athens that furnish the clearest and best recorded example of what was probably something like a general pattern of the time. Solon, not himself a tyrant, was vested with supreme power to mediate the bitter social struggles between the rich and the poor which erupted in Attica at the turn of the 6th century. His decisive measure was to abolish debt bondage on the land, the typical mechanism whereby small-holders fell prey to large landowners and became their dependent tenants, or tenants became captives of aristocratic proprietors.⁴ The result was to check the growth of noble estates and to stabilize the pattern of small and medium farms that henceforward characterized the countryside of Attica.

This economic order was accompanied by a new political dispensation. Solon deprived the nobility of its monopoly of office by dividing the population of Athens into four income classes, according the top two rights to the senior magistracies, the third access to lower administrative positions, and the fourth and last a vote in the Assembly of the citizenry, which henceforward became a regular institution of the city. This settlement was not destined to last. In the next thirty years, Athens experienced swift commercial growth, with the creation of a city currency and the multiplication of local trade. Social conflicts within the citizenry were rapidly renewed and aggravated, culminating in the seizure of power by the tyrant Peisistratus. It was under this ruler that the final shape of the Athenian social formation emerged. Peisistratus sponsored a building programme which provided employment for urban craftsmen and labourers, and presided over a flourishing development of marine traffic out of the Piraeus. But above all, he provided direct financial assistance to the Athenian peasantry, in the form of public credits which finally clinched their autonomy and security on the eve of the classical polis.⁵ The staunch survival of small and medium farmers was assured. This economic process – whose inverse non-occurrence was later to define the contrasting social history of Rome – seems to have been common throughout Greece, although the events behind it are nowhere so documented outside Athens. Elsewhere, the average size of rural holdings might sometimes be bigger, but only in Thessaly did large aristocratic estates predominate. The economic basis of Hellenic citizenry was to be modest agrarian property. Approximately concomitant with this social settlement in the age of the tyrannies, there was a significant change in the military organization of the cities. Armies were henceforward composed essentially of hoplites, heavily armoured infantry which were a Greek innovation in the Mediterranean world. Each hoplite equipped himself with weaponry and armour at his own expense: such a soldiery thus presupposed a reasonable economic livelihood, and in fact hoplite troops were always drawn from the medium farmer class of the cities. Their military efficacy was to be proved by the startling Greek victories over the Persians in the next century. But it was their pivotal position within the political structure of the city-states that was ultimately most important. The precondition of later Greek ‘democracy’ or extended ‘oligarchy’ was a self-armed citizen infantry.

Sparta was the first city-state to embody the social results of hoplite warfare. Its evolution forms a curious pendant to that of Athens in the pre-classical epoch. For Sparta did not experience a tyranny, and its omission of this normal transitional episode lent a peculiar character to its economic and political institutions thereafter, blending advanced and archaic features in a sui generis mould. The city of Sparta at an early date conquered a relatively large hinterland in the Peloponnese, first in Laconia to the east and then in Messenia to the west, and enslaved the bulk of the inhabitants of both regions, who became state ‘helots’. This geographical aggrandizement and social subjection of the surrounding population was achieved under monarchic rule. In the course of the 7th century, however, after either the initial conquest of Messenia or the subsequent repression of a Messenian rebellion, and as a consequence, certain radical changes in Spartan society occurred – traditionally attributed to the mythical figure of the reformer Lycurgus. According to Greek legend, the land was divided up into equal portions, which was distributed to the Spartans as kleroi or allotments, tilled by helots who were collectively owned by the State; these ‘ancient’ holdings were later reputed to be inalienable, while more recent tracts of land were deemed personal property that could be bought or sold.⁶ Each citizen had to pay fixed subscriptions in kind to commensal syssitia, served by helot cooks and waiters: those who became unable to do so automatically lost citizenship and became ‘inferiors’, a misfortune against which the possession of inalienable lots may have been purposefully designed. The upshot of this system was to create an intense collective unity among the Spartiates, who proudly designated themselves hoi homoioi – the ‘Equals’ – although complete economic equality was never at any time a feature of the actual Spartan citizenry.⁷

The political system which emerged on the basis of the kleroi farms was a correspondingly novel one for its time. Monarchy never entirely disappeared, as it did in the other Greek cities, but it was reduced to a hereditary generalship and restricted by a dual incumbency, vested in two royal families.⁸ In all other respects, the Spartan ‘kings’ were merely members of the aristocracy, participants without special privileges in the thirty-man council of elders or gerousia which originally ruled the city; the typical conflict between monarchy and nobility in the early archaic age was here resolved by an institutional compromise between the two. During the 7th century, however, the rank-and-file citizenry came to constitute a full city Assembly, with rights of decision over policies submitted to it by the council of elders, which itself became an elective body; while five annual magistrates or ephors henceforward wielded supreme executive authority, by direct election from the whole citizenry. The Assembly could be over-ruled by a veto of the gerousia, and the ephors were endowed with an exceptional concentration of arbitrary power. But the Spartan Constitution which thus crystallized in the pre-classical epoch was nevertheless the most socially advanced of its time. It represented, in effect, the first hoplite franchise to be achieved in Greece.⁹ Its introduction is often, indeed, dated from the role of the new heavy infantry in conquering or crushing the Messenian subject population; and Sparta was thereafter, of course, always famed for the matchless discipline and prowess of its hoplite soldiery. The unique military qualities of the Spartiates, in their turn, were a function of the ubiquitous helot labour which relieved the citizenry of any direct role in production at all, allowing it to train professionally for war on a full-time basis. The result was to produce a body of perhaps some 8–9,000 Spartan citizens, economically self-sufficient and politically enfranchised, which was far wider and more egalitarian than any contemporary aristocracy or later oligarchy in Greece. The extreme conservatism of the Spartan social formation and political system in the classical epoch, which made it appear backward and retarded by the 5th century, was in fact the product of the very success of its pioneering transformations in the 7th century. The earliest Greek state to achieve a hoplite constitution, it became the last ever to modify it: the primal pattern of the archaic age survived down to the very eve of Sparta’s final extinction, half a millennium later.

Elsewhere, as we have seen, the city-states of Greece were slower to evolve towards their classical form. The tyrannies were usually necessary intermediate phases of development: it was their agrarian legislation or military innovations which prepared the Hellenic polis of the 5th century. But one further and completely decisive innovation was necessary for the advent of classical Greek civilization. This was, of course, the introduction on a massive scale of chattel slavery. The conservation of small and medium property on the land had solved a mounting social crisis in Attica and elsewhere. But by itself it would have tended to arrest the political and cultural development of Greek civilization at a ‘Boeotian’ level, by preventing the growth of a more complex social division of labour and urban superstructure. Relatively egalitarian peasant communities could congregate physically in towns; they could never in their simple state create a luminous city-civilization of the type that Antiquity was now for the first time to witness. For this, generalized and captive surplus labour was necessary, to emancipate their ruling stratum for the construction of a new civic and intellectual world. ‘In the broadest terms, slavery was basic to Greek civilization in the sense that, to abolish it and substitute free labour, if it had occurred to anyone to try this, would have dislocated the whole society and done away with the leisure of the upper classes in Athens and Sparta.’¹⁰

Thus it was not fortuitous that the salvation of the independent peasantry and the cancellation of debt bondage were promptly followed by a novel and steep increase in the use of slave-labour, both in the towns and countryside of classical Greece. For once the extremes of social polarization were blocked within the Hellenic communities, recourse to slave imports was logical to solve labour shortages for the dominant class. The price of slaves – mostly Thracian, Phrygians and Syrians – was extremely low, not much more than the cost of a year’s upkeep;¹¹ and so their employment became generalized throughout native Greek society, until even the humblest artisans or small farmers might often possess them. This economic development, too, had first been anticipated in Sparta; for it was the previous creation of mass rural helotry in Laconia and Messenia that had permitted the bonded fraternity of the Spartiates to emerge, the first major slave population of pre-classical Greece and the first hoplite franchise. But here as elsewhere, early Spartan priority arrested further evolution: helotry remained an ‘undeveloped form of slavery,¹² since helots could not be bought, sold or manumitted, and were collective rather than individual property. Full commodity slavery, governed by market exchange, was ushered into Greece in the city-states that were to be its rivals. By the 5th century, the apogee of the classical polis, Athens, Corinth, Aegina and virtually every other city of importance contained a voluminous slave population, frequently outnumbering the free citizenry. It was the establishment of this slave economy – in mining, agriculture and crafts – which permitted the sudden florescence of Greek urban civilization. Naturally, its impact – as was seen above was not simply economic. ‘Slavery, of course, was not merely an economic necessity, it was vital to the whole social and political life of the citizenry’.¹³ The classical polis was based on the new conceptual discovery of liberty, entrained by the systematic institution of slavery: the free citizen now stood out in full relief, against the background of slave labourers. The first ‘democratic’ institutions in classical Greece are recorded in Chios, during the mid 6th century: it was also Chios that tradition held to be the first Greek city to import slaves on a large scale from the barbarian East.¹⁴ In Athens, the reforms of Solon had been succeeded by a sharp increase in the slave population in the epoch of the tyranny; and this in turn was followed by a new constitution devised by Cleisthenes, which abolished the traditional tribal divisions of the population with their facilities for aristocratic clientage, reorganized the citizenry into local territorial ‘demes’, and instituted balloting by lot for an expanded Council of Five Hundred to preside over the affairs of the city, in combination with the popular Assembly. The 5th century saw the generalization of this ‘probouleutic’ political formula in the Greek city-states: a smaller Council proposed public decisions to a larger Assembly that voted on them, without rights of initiative (although in more popular states, the Assembly was later to gain these). The variations in the composition of the Council and Assembly, and in the election of the magistrates of the State who conducted its administration, defined the relative degree of ‘democracy’ or ‘oligarchy’ within each polis. The Spartan system, dominated by an authoritarian ephorate, was notoriously antipodal to the Athenian, which came to be centred in the full Assembly of citizens. But the essential line of demarcation did not pass within the constituent citizenry of the polis, however it was organized or stratified: it divided the citizenry – whether the 8,000 Spartiates or 45,000 Athenians – from the non-citizens and unfree beneath them. The community of the classical polis, no matter how internally class-divided, was erected above an enslaved workforce which underlay its whole shape and substance.

These city-states of classical Greece were engaged in constant rivalry and aggression against each other: their typical path of expansion, after the colonization process had come to an end in the late 6th century, was military conquest and tribute. With the expulsion of Persian forces from Greece in the early 5th century, Athens gradually achieved preeminent power among the competing cities of the Aegean basin. The Athenian Empire that was built up in the generation from Themistocles to Pericles appeared to contain the promise, or threat, of the political unification of Greece under the rule of a single polis. Its material basis was provided by the peculiar profile and situation of Athens itself, territorially and demographically the largest Hellenic city-state – although only some 1,000 square miles in extent and perhaps 250,000 in population. The Attic agrarian system exemplified the general pattern of the time, perhaps in a particularly pronounced form. By Hellenic standards, big landed property was an estate of 100–200 acres.¹⁵ In Attica, there were few large estates, even wealthy landowners possessing a number of small farms rather than concentrated latifundia. Holdings of 70 or even 45 acres were above average, while the smallest plots were probably not much more than 5 acres; three-quarters of the free citizenry owned some rural property down to the end of the 5th century.¹⁶ Slaves provided domestic service, field labour – where they typically tilled the home farms of the rich – and artisanal work; they were probably outnumbered by free labour in agriculture and perhaps in the crafts, but constituted a much larger group than the total citizenry. In the 5th century, there were perhaps some 80–100,000 slaves in Athens, to some 30–40,000 citizens.¹⁷ A third of the free population lived in the city itself. Most of the rest were settled in villages in the immediate hinterland. The bulk of the citizenry were formed by the ‘hoplite’ and ‘thee’ classes, in respective proportions of perhaps 1:2, the latter being the poorest section of the population, which was incapable of equipping itself for heavy infantry duty. The division between hoplites and thetes was technically one of income, not occupation or residence: hoplites might be urban craftsmen, while perhaps half the thetes were poor peasants. Above these two rank-and-file classes were two much smaller orders of richer citizens, the elite of which formed an apex of some 300 wealthy families at the summit of Athenian society.¹⁸ This social structure, with its acknowledged stratification but absence of dramatic crevasses within the citizen body, provided the foundation of Athenian political democracy.

By the mid 5th century, the Council of Five Hundred which supervised the administration of Athens was selected from the whole citizenry by sortition, to avoid the dangers of autocratic predominance and clientage associated with elections. The only major elective posts in the State were ten military generalships, which accordingly went as a rule to the upper stratum of the city. The Council no longer presented controversial resolutions to the Assembly of Citizenry, which by now concentrated full sovereignty and political initiative within itself, merely preparing its agenda and submitting key issues for its decision. The Assembly itself held a minimum of 40 sessions a year, at which average attendance was probably well over 5,000 citizens: a quorum of 6,000 was necessary for deliberations on even many routine matters. All important political questions were directly debated and determined by it. The judicial system which flanked the legislative centre of the polis was composed of jurors selected by lot from the citizenry and paid for their duties, to enable the poor to serve, as were councillors; a principle extended in the 4th century to attendance at the Assembly itself. There was virtually no permanent officialdom whatever, administrative positions being distributed by sortition among councillors, while the diminutive police-force was composed of Scythian slaves. In practice, of course, the direct popular democracy of the Athenian constitution was diluted by the informal dominance of professional politicians over the Assembly, recruited from traditionally wealthy and well-born families in the city (or later from the newly rich). But this social dominance never became legally entrenched or solidified, and was always liable to upsets and challenges because of the demotic nature or the polity in which it had to be exercised. The contradiction between the two was basic to the structure of the Athenian polis, and found striking reflection in the unanimous condemnation of the city’s unprecedented democracy by the thinkers who incarnated its unexampled culture – Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, or Xenophon. Athens never produced any democratic political theory: virtually all Attic philosophers or historians of note were oligarchic by conviction.¹⁹ Aristotle condensed the quintessence of their outlook in his brief and pregnant proscription of all manual workers from the citizenry of the ideal State.²⁰ The slave mode of production which underlay Athenian civilization necessarily found its most pristine ideological expression in the privileged social stratum of the city, whose intellectual heights its surplus labour in the silent depths below the polis made possible.

The structure of the Athenian social formation, thus constituted, was not in itself sufficient to generate its imperial primacy in Greece. For this, two further and specific features of the Athenian economy and society, which set it apart from any other Hellenic city-state of the 5th century, were necessary. Firstly, Attica contained the richest silver mines in Greece, at Laureion. Worked mainly by massed gangs of slaves – some 30,000 or so – it was the ore of these mines that financed the construction of the Athenian fleet which triumphed over the Persian ships at Salamis. Athenian silver was from the beginning the condition of Athenian naval power. Moreover, it made possible an Attic currency which – alone among Greek coinages of the time – became widely accepted abroad, as a medium of interlocal trade, contributing greatly to the commercial prosperity of the city. This was further enhanced by the exceptional concentration of ‘metic’ foreigners in Athens, who were debarred from landownership but came to dominate trading and industrial enterprise in the city, making it the focal point of the Aegean. The maritime hegemony which thus accrued to Athens bore a functional relation to the political complexion of the city. The hoplite class of medium farmers which provided the infantry of the polis numbered some 13,000 – a third of the citizenry. The Athenian fleet, however, was manned by sailors recruited from the poorer class of thetes below them; rowers were paid money wages, and were on service eight months a year. Their numbers were virtually equal to those of the foot-soldiers (12,000), and it was their presence which helped to ensure the democratic breadth of the Athenian polity, in contrast to those Greek city-states where the hoplite category alone provided the social basis of the polis.²¹ It was the monetary and naval superiority of Athens which gave the edge to its imperialism; as it was also these which fostered its democracy. The citizenry of the city was largely exempt from any form of direct taxation: in particular, ownership of land which was legally confined to citizens – bore no fiscal burden whatever, a critical condition of peasant autonomy within the polis. Athenian public revenues at home were derived from state property, indirect taxes (such as harbour dues), and obligatory financial ‘liturgies’ offered to the city by the wealthy. This clement fiscality was complemented by public pay for jury service and ample naval employment, a combination which helped to ensure the notable degree of civic peace which marked Athenian political life.²² The economic costs of this popular harmony were displaced into Athenian expansion abroad.

The Athenian Empire which emerged in the wake of the Persian Wars was essentially a marine system, designed for the coercive subjugation of the Greek city-states of the Aegean. Settlement proper played a secondary if by no means negligible role in its structure. It is significant that Athens was the only Greek state to create a special class of overseas citizens or ‘cleruchs’, who were given colonial lands confiscated from rebellious allies abroad and yet – unlike all other Hellenic colonists – retained full juridical rights in the mother city itself. The steady plantation of cleruchies and colonies overseas in the course of the 5th century enabled the city to promote more than 10,000 Athenians from there to hoplite condition, by endowment of lands abroad, thereby greatly strengthening its military power at the same stroke. The brunt of Athenian imperialism, however, did not lie with these settlements. The ascent of Athenian power in the Aegean created a political order whose real function was to coordinate and exploit already urbanized coasts and islands, by a system of monetary tribute levied for the maintenance of a permanent navy, nominally the common defender of Greek liberty against Oriental menaces, in fact the central instrument of imperial oppression by Athens over its ‘allies’. In 454 the central treasury of the Delian League, originally created to fight Persia, had been transferred to Athens; in 450, Athenian refusal to permit the dissolution of the League after peace with Persia converted it into a de facto Empire. At its height in the 440’s, the Athenian imperial system embraced some 150 – mainly Ionian – cities, which paid an annual cash sum to the central treasury in Athens, and were prevented from keeping fleets themselves. The total tribute from the Empire was actually reckoned to be 50 per cent larger than Attic internal revenues, and undoubtedly financed the civic and cultural superabundance of the Periclean polis.²³ At home, the navy for which it paid provided stable employment for the most numerous and least well-off class of citizens, and the public works which it funded were the most signal embellishments of the city, among them the Parthenon. Abroad, Athenian squadrons policed Aegean waters, while political residents, military commanders and itinerant commissioners ensured docile magistracies in the subject states. Athenian courts exercised powers of judicial repression over citizens of allied cities suspected of disloyalty.²⁴

But the limits of Athenian external power were soon reached. It probably stimulated trade and manufactures in the Aegean, where use of Attic coinage was extended by decree and piracy was suppressed, although the major profits from commercial growth accrued to the metic community in Athens itself. The imperial system also enjoyed the sympathy of the poorer classes of the allied cities, because Athenian tutelage generally meant the installation of democratic regimes locally, congruent with those of the imperial city itself, while the financial burden of tribute fell on the upper classes.²⁵ But it was incapable of achieving an institutional inclusion of these allies into a unified political system. Athenian citizenship was so wide at home that it was impracticable ever to extend it abroad to non-Athenians, for to do so would have functionally contradicted the direct residential democracy of the mass Assembly, only feasible within a very small geographical compass. Thus, despite the popular overtones of Athenian rule, the ‘democratic’ domestic foundation of Periclean imperialism necessarily generated ‘dictatorial’ exploitation of its Ionian allies, who inevitably tended to be thrust rapaciously downwards into colonial servitude: there was no basis for equality or federation, such as a more oligarchic constitution might have permitted. At the same time, however, the democratic nature of the Athenian polis – whose principle was direct participation, not representation – precluded the creation of a bureaucratic machinery that could have held down an extended territorial empire by administrative coercion. There was scarcely any separate or professional State apparatus in the city, whose political structure was essentially defined by its rejection of specialized bodies of officials – civilian or military apart from the ordinary citizenry: Athenian democracy signified, precisely, the refusal of any such division between ‘state’ and ‘society’.²⁶ There was thus no basis for an imperial bureaucracy either. Athenian expansionism consequently broke down relatively soon, both because of the contradictions of its own structure, and because of the resistance, thereby facilitated to it, from the more oligarchic cities of mainland Greece, led by Sparta. The Spartan League possessed the converse advantages of Athenian liabilities: a confederation of oligarchies, whose strength was based squarely on hoplite proprietors rather than an admixture with demotic sailors, and whose unity did not therefore involve either monetary tribute or a military monopoly by the hegemon city of Sparta itself, whose power was therefore always intrinsically less of a threat to the other Greek cities than that of Athens. The lack of any substantial hinterland rendered Athenian military power – both in recruitment and resources – too thin to resist a coalition of terrestrial rivals.²⁷ The Peloponnesian War joined the attack of its peers to the revolt of its subjects, whose propertied classes rallied to the mainland oligarchies once it had started. Even so, however, Persian gold was necessary to finance a Spartan fleet capable of ending Athenian mastery of the sea, before the Athenian Empire was finally broken on land by Lysander. Thereafter there was no chance of the Hellenic cities generating a unified imperial state from within their midst, despite their relatively rapid economic recovery from the effects of the long Peloponnesian War: the very parity and multiplicity of urban centres in Greece neutralized them collectively for external expansion. The Greek cities of the 4th century sank into exhaustion, as the classical polis experienced increasing difficulties of finance and conscription, symptoms of impending anachronism.

1. A. Andrewes, Greek Society, London 1967, pp. 76–82.

2. See the arguments in William McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago 1963, pp. 201, 273.

3. W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, London 1966, pp. 55, 150–6, who emphasizes the new economic growth in the countryside; A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, London 1956, pp. 80–1, who stresses the social depression of the small farmer class.

4. It is uncertain whether the poor peasantry in Attica were tenants or owners of their farms before Solon’s reforms. Andrewes argues that they may have been the former (Greek Society, pp. 106–7), but subsequent generations had no memory of an actual redistribution of land by Solon, so this seems improbable.

5. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks, London 1963, p. 33, regards Peisistratus’s policies as more important for the economic independence of the Attic peasantry than Solon’s reforms.

6. The reality of an original land division, or even a later inalienability of the kleroi, has been doubted: for example, see A. H. M. Jones, Sparta, Oxford 1967, pp. 40–3. Andrewes, although cautious, accords more credit to Greek beliefs: Greek Society, pp. 94–5.

7. The size of the kleroi which underpinned Spartan social solidarity has been much debated, with estimates varying from 20 to 90 acres of arable: see P. Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems, Amsterdam-Prague 1971, pp. 51–2.

8. For the structure of the constitution, see Jones, Sparta, pp. 13–43.

9. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, pp. 75–6.

10. Andrewes, Greek Society, p. 133. Compare V. Ehrenburg, The Greek State, London 1969, p. 96: ‘Without metics or slaves, the polis could hardly have existed at all’.

11. Andrewes, Greek Society, p. 135.

12. Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems, pp. 43–4. Helots also possessed their own families and were on occasion used for military duties.

13. Victor Ehrenburg, The Greek State, p. 97.

14. Finley, The Ancient Greeks, p. 36.

15. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, p. 46.

16. M. I. Finley, Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens 500–200 B.C., New Brunswick, pp. 58–9.

17. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9.

18. A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy, Oxford 1957, pp. 79–91.

19. Jones, Athenian Democracy, pp. 41–72, documents this divergence, but fails to see its implications for the structure of Athenian civilization as a whole, contenting himself with defending the democracy of the polis against the thinkers of the city.

20. Politics, III, iv, 2, cited above.

21. Tradition held that it was the sailors victory at Salamis that had rendered the demands of the thetes for political rights irresistible, much as the soldiers’ campaigns against Messenia had once probably gained the Spartan hoplites their franchise.

22. M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, London 1973, pp. 45, 48–9; see also his remarks in The Ancient Economy, pp. 96, 573.

23. R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire, Oxford 1972, pp. 152, 258–60.

24. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire, pp. 171–4, 205–7, 215–16, 220–33.

25. This sympathy is convincingly demonstrated by G. E. M. De Ste Croix, ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, Historia, Bd. III, 1954–5, pp. 1–41. There were some oligarchic allies in the Delian League – Mytilene, Chios or Samos – and Athens did not intervene systematically in its constituent cities; but local conflicts were typically used as opportunities for the forcible establishment of popular systems.

26. For Ehrenburg, this was its great weakness. The identity of State and Society was necessarily a contradiction, because the state had to be single while society always remained plural, because divided into classes. Hence either the State could reproduce these social divisions (oligarchy) or society could absorb the state (democracy): neither solution respected an institutional distinction that was for him unalterable, and hence both bore the seed of destruction within them: The Greek State, p. 89. It was, of course, for Marx and Engels just in this structural refusal that the greatness of Athenian democracy lay.

27. In general, the lines of division between ‘oligarchy’ and ‘democracy’ correlated fairly closely with maritime vs. mainland orientations in classical Greece; the same seaward factors which obtained in Athens were present in its Ionian zone of influence, while most of Sparta’s allies in the Peloponnese and Boeotia were more narrowly rooted in the soil. The main exception, of course, was Corinth, the traditional commercial rival of Athens.