Читать книгу Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism - Perry Anderson - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe second major cycle of colonial conquest thus derived from the rural northern periphery of Greek civilization, with its greater demographic and peasant reserves. The Macedonian Empire was in origin a tribal monarchy of the mountainous interior, a backward zone which had preserved many of the social relations of post-Mycenaean Greece. The Macedonian royal state, precisely because it was morphologically much more primitive than the city-states of the South, was not subject to their impasse and so proved able to overleap their limits in the new epoch of their decline. Its territorial and political basis permitted an integrated international expansion, once it was allied to the far more developed civilization of Greece proper. Macedonian kingship was hereditary, yet subject to confirmation by a military assembly of the warriors of the realm. All land was technically the property of the monarch, but in practice a tribal nobility held estates from and claimed kinship with him, forming an entourage of royal ‘companions’ which provided his counsellors and governors. The majority of the population were free tenant peasants, and there was relatively little slavery.1 Urbanization was minimal, the capital of Pella itself a recent and slender foundation. The ascent of Macedonian power in the Balkans in the reign of Philip II acquired an early and decisive thrust with the annexation of the Thracian gold mines – the bullion equivalent of the Attic silver mines in the previous century – which provided Macedonia with the indispensable finance for external aggression.2 The success of Philip’s armies in over-running the Greek city-states and unifying the Hellenic peninsula was essentially due to its military innovations, which reflected the distinct social composition of the tribal interior of Northern Greece. Cavalry – an aristocratic arm always previously subordinated to hoplites in Greece – was renovated and linked elastically to infantry, while infantry shed some of its heavy hoplite armour for greater mobility and the massed use of the long lance in battle. The result was the famous Macedonian phalanx, flanked by horse, victorious from Thebes to Kabul. Macedonian expansion, of course, was not merely due to the skills of its commanders and soldiers, or its initial access to precious metals. The precondition of its eruption into Asia was its prior absorption of Greece itself. The Macedonian monarchy consolidated its advances in the peninsula by creating new citizens from Greeks and others in the conquered regions, and urbanizing its own rural hinterland – demonstrating its capacity for extended territorial administration. It was the political and cultural impetus it acquired from the integration of the most advanced city centres of the epoch that then enabled it to accomplish in a few years the lightning conquest of the whole of the Near East, under Alexander. Symbolically, the irreplaceable fleet which transported and supplied the invincible troops in Asia was always Greek. The unitary Macedonian Empire which emerged after Gaugamela, stretching from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean, did not survive Alexander himself, who died before any coherent institutional framework could be given to it. The social and administrative problems it posed could already be glimpsed from his attempts to fuse Macedonian and Persian nobilities by official intermarriage: but it was left to his successors to provide solutions to them. The internecine struggles of these contending Macedonian generals – the Diadochi – ended with the partition of the Empire into four main zones, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Asia Minor and Greece, the first three henceforward generally outclassing the last in political and economic importance. The Seleucid dynasty ruled Syria and Mesopotamia; Ptolemy founded the Lagid realm in Egypt; and half a century later, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamum became the dominant power in Western Asia Minor. Hellenistic civilization was essentially the product of these new Greek monarchies of the East.
The Hellenistic States were hybrid creations, which nevertheless shaped the whole historical pattern of the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries thereafter. On the one hand, they presided over the most imposing surge of city-foundations than hitherto seen in classical Antiquity: major Greek cities sprang up, by spontaneous initiative or royal patronage, throughout the Near East, making it henceforward the most densely urbanized region of the Ancient World, and durably hellenizing the local ruling classes everywhere they were planted.3 If the number of these foundations was less than that of Archaic Greek colonization, their size was infinitely greater. The largest city of classical Greece was Athens, with a total population of some 80,000 in the 5th century B.C. The three greatest urban centres of the Hellenistic world – Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia – may have had up to of 500,000 inhabitants. The distribution of the new foundations was uneven, since the centralized Lagid State in Egypt was suspicious of any polis autonomy and did not sponsor many new cities, while the Seleucid State actively multiplied them, and in Asia Minor the local gentry created its own cities in imitation of Hellenic example elsewhere.4 Everywhere, these new urban foundations were settled with Greek and Macedonian soldiers, administrators, and merchants, who arrived to furnish the dominant social stratum in the epigone monarchies of the Diadochi. The proliferation of Greek cities in the East was accompanied by an upswing of international trade and commercial prosperity. Alexander had dethesaurized Persian royal bullion, releasing accumulated Achaemenid hoards into the exchange system of the Near East, and thereby financing a steep increase in the volume of market transactions in the Mediterranean. The Attic monetary standard was now generalized throughout the Hellenistic world, with the exception of Ptolemaic Egypt, facilitating international trade and shipping.5 The triangular sea-way between Rhodes, Antioch and Alexandria became the axis of the new mercantile space created by the Hellenistic East. Banking was developed to levels of sophistication never later surpassed in Antiquity, by the Lagid administration in Egypt. The urban pattern of the Eastern Mediterranean was thus successfully set by Greek emigration and example.
Yet at the same time, the anterior Near Eastern social formations with their very different economic and political traditions – imperviously resisted Greek patterns in the countryside. Thus slave-labour notably failed to spread to the rural interior of the Hellenistic East. Contrary to popular legend, the Alexandrine campaigns had not been accompanied by mass enslavements, and the proportion of the slave population does not seem to have risen appreciably in the path of Macedonian conquests.6 Agrarian relations of production were consequently left relatively unaffected by Greek rule. The traditional agricultural systems of the great riverine cultures of the Near East had combined landlords, dependent tenants and peasant proprietors with ultimate or immediate royal property of the soil. Rural slavery had never been economically very important. Regal claims to a monopoly of land were centuries old. The new Hellenistic States inherited this pattern, quite alien to that of the Greek homelands, and preserved it with little alteration. The main variations between them concerned the degree to which royal property over the land was actually enforced by the dynasties of each realm. The Lagid State in Egypt – the wealthiest and most rigidly centralized of the new monarchies – exacted its claims to a legal monopoly of land, outside the boundaries of the few poleis, to the full. The Lagid rulers leased out virtually all land in small plots on short-term leases to a miserable peasantry, rack-rented directly by the State, without any security of tenure and subject to forced labour for irrigation works.7 The Seleucid dynasty in Mesopotamia and Syria, which presided over a much larger and more rambling territorial complex, never attempted such a rigorous control of agrarian exploitation. Royal lands were granted to nobles or administrators in the provinces, and autonomous villages of peasant proprietors were tolerated, side by side with the dependent laoi tenants who formed the bulk of the rural population. Significantly, it was only in Attalid Pergamum, the most westerly of the new Hellenistic States, which lay immediately across the Aegean from Greece itself, that agricultural slave-labour was used on royal and aristocratic estates.8 The geographical limits of the mode of production pioneered in classical Greece were those of the adjacent regions of Asia Minor.
If the towns were Greek in model, while the countryside remained Oriental in pattern, the structure of the States which integrated the two was inevitably syncretic, a mixture of Hellenic and Asian forms in which the secular legacy of the latter was unmistakeably predominant. The Hellenistic rulers inherited the overwhelmingly autocratic traditions of the riverine civilizations of the Near East. The Diadochi monarchs enjoyed unlimited personal power, as had their Oriental predecessors before them. Indeed, the new Greek dynasties introduced an ideological surcharge on the pre-existent weight of royal authority in the region, with the establishment of officially decreed worship of rulers. The divinity of kings had never been a doctrine of the Persian Empire which Alexander had overthrown: it was a Macedonian innovation, first instituted by Ptolemy in Egypt, where age-long cult of the Pharaohs had existed prior to Persian absorption, and which therefore naturally provided fecund soil for ruler-worship. The divinization of monarchs soon became a general ideological norm throughout the Hellenistic world. The typical administrative mould of the new royal States revealed a similar development – a fundamentally Oriental structure refined by Greek improvements. The leading military and civilian personnel of the State were recruited from Macedonian or Greek emigrants, and their descendants. There was no attempt to achieve an ethnic fusion with the indigenous aristocracies of the type that Alexander had briefly envisaged.9 A considerable bureaucracy – the imperial instrument that classical Greece had so completely lacked, was created, often with ambitious administrative tasks allocated to it – above all in Lagid Egypt, where management of much of the whole rural and urban economy devolved on it. The Seleucid realm was always more loosely integrated, and its administration comprised a larger proportion of non-Greeks than the Attalid or Lagid bureaucracies:10 it was also more military in character, as befitted its far-flung extent, by contrast with the scribal functionaries of Pergamum or Egypt. But in all these States, the existence of centralized royal bureaucracies was accompanied by the absence of any developed legal systems to stabilize or universalize their functions. No impersonal law could emerge where the arbitrary will of the ruler was the sole source of all public decisions. Hellenistic administration in the Near East never achieved unitary legal codes, merely improvizing with coexistent systems of Greek and local provenance, all subject to the personal interference of the monarch.11 By the same token, the bureaucratic machinery of the State was itself condemned to a formless and random summit of the ‘king’s friends’, the shifting group of courtiers and commanders who made up the immediate entourage of the ruler. The ultimate amorphousness of Hellenistic state-systems was reflected in their lack of any territorial appellations: they were simply the lands of the dynasty that exploited them, which provided their only designation.
In these conditions, there could be no question of genuine political independence for the cities of the Hellenistic East: the days of the classical polis were now long past. The municipal liberties of the Greek cities of the East were not negligible, compared with the despotic outer framework into which they were inserted. But these new foundations were lodged in an environment very dissimilar to that of their homelands, and consequently never acquired the autonomy or vitality of their originals. The countryside below and the State above them formed a milieu which checked their dynamic and adapted them to the secular ways of the region. Their fate is perhaps best exemplified by Alexandria, which became the new maritime capital of Lagid Egypt, and within a few generations the greatest and most flourishing Greek city in the Ancient World: the economic and intellectual pivot of the Eastern Mediterranean. But the wealth and culture of Alexandria under its Ptolemaic rulers was gained at a price. No free citizenry could emerge amidst a countryside peopled by dependent peasant laoi, or a kingdom dominated by an omnipresent royal bureaucracy. Even in the city itself, financial and industrial activities – once the domain of metics in classical Athens – were not correspondingly released by the disappearance of the old polis structure. For most of the main urban manufactures – oil, textiles, papyrus, or beer – were royal monopolies. Taxes were farmed to private entrepreneurs, but tinder strict State control. The characteristic conceptual polarization of liberty and slavery, which had defined the cities of the classical Greek epoch, was thus fundamentally absent from Alexandria. Suggestively, the Lagid capital was simultaneously the scene of the most fecund episode in the history of Ancient technology: the Alexandrine Museum was the progenitor of most of the few significant innovations of the classical world, and its pensionary Ctesibius one of the rare notable inventors of Antiquity. But even here, the main royal motive in founding the Museum and promoting its research, was the quest for military and engineering improvements, not economic or labour-saving devices, and most of its work reflected this characteristic emphasis. The Hellenistic Empires – eclectic compounds of Greek and Oriental forms – extended the space of the urban civilization of classical Antiquity by diluting its substance, but by the same token they were unable to surmount its indigenous limits.12 From 200 B.C. onwards, Roman imperial power was advancing eastwards at their expense, and by the middle of the 2nd century its legions had trampled down all serious barriers of resistance in the East. Symbolically, Pergamum was the first Hellenistic realm to be incorporated into the new Roman Empire, when its last Attalid ruler disposed of it in his will as a personal bequest to the Eternal City.
1. N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., Oxford 1959, pp. 535–6.
2. The income yielded by the Thracian gold mines was greater than that of the Laureion silver mines in Attica; Arnaldo Momigliano, Filippo Il Macedone, Florence 1934, pp. 49–53 – the most lucid study of the early phase of Macedonian expansion, which in general has attracted comparatively little modern research.
3. The majority of the new cities were created from below, by the local land-owners; but the largest and most important were, of course, official foundations of the new Macedonian rulers. A. H. M. Jones, The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian, Oxford 1940, pp. 27–50.
4. For the contrast between Lagid and Seleucid policies, see M. Rostovtsev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Oxford 1941, Vol. I, pp. 476 ff.
5. F. M. Heichelheim, An Ancient Economic History, Leyden 1970, Vol. III, p.10.
6. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, pp. 28–31.
7. For descriptions of this system, see Rostovtsev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Vol. I, pp. 274–300; there is an analytic survey of the various forms of labour usage in Lagid Egypt in K. K. Zel’in, M. K. Trofimova, Formy Zavisimosti v Vostochnom Sredizemnomor’e Ellenisticheskovo Perioda, Moscow 1969, pp. 57–102.
8. Rostovtsev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Vol. II, pp. 806, 1106, 1158, 1161. Slaves were also widely employed in the royal mines and industries of Pergamum. Rostovtsev thought that there continued to be an abundance of slaves in the Greek homelands themselves during the Hellenistic epoch (op. cit., pp. 625–6, 1127).
9. Alexander’s own cosmopolitanism has often been exaggerated, on slender evidence; for an effective critique of the claims made for it, see E. Badian, ‘Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind’, in G. T. Griffith, Alexander the Great: the Main Problems, Cambridge 1966, pp. 287–306.
10. Iranians may have outnumbered Greeks and Macedonians in the Seleucid State institutions, in fact; C. Bradford Welles, Alexander and the Hellenistic World, Toronto 1970, p. 87.
11. P. Petit, La Civilisation Hellénistique, Paris 1962, p. 9; V. Ehrenburg, The Greek State, pp. 214–17.
12. The syncretism of the Hellenistic States scarcely warrants the dithyrambs of Heichelheim, for whom they represent ‘miracles of economic and administrative organization’ whose unconscionable destruction by a barbarian Rome arrested history for the next millennium and a half. See An Ancient Economic History, Vol. III, pp. 185–6, 206–7. Rostovtsev is somewhat more temperate, but he too ventured the judgment that Roman conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean was a regrettable disaster which disintegrated and ‘de-hellenized’ it, while ‘unnaturally’ compromising the integrity of Roman civilization itself: The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Vol. II, pp. 70–3. The remote ancestry of such attitudes goes back, of course, as far as Winckelmann and the Graecian cult of the German Enlightenment, when they were of some intellectual importance.
