Peasant-Citizen and Slave

The Foundations of Athenian Democracy

Ellen Meiksins Wood

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784781026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784781989
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia europea

The controversial thesis at the center of this study is that, despite the importance of slavery in Athenian society, the most distinctive characteristic of Athenian democracy was the unprecedented prominence it gave to free labor. Wood argues that the emergence of the peasant as citizen, juridically and politically independent, accounts for much that is remarkable in Athenian political institutions and culture.

From a survey of historical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of which distorted later debates, Wood goes on to take issue with recent arguments, such as those of G.E.M. de Ste Croix, about the importance of slavery in agricultural production. The social, political and cultural influence of the peasant-citizen is explored in a way which questions some of the most cherished conventions of Marxist and non-Marxist historiography.

Notes

Chapter I

1. M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), p. 20.

2. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), p. 235.

3. Ibid., p. 46. On the number of slaves, see p. 21 note e. Montesquieu is here relying, like many other writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the figures given by Athenaeus, according to whom Demetrius of Phalerum numbered slaves at 400,000 in the late fourth century BC. This figure is now generally regarded as vastly inflated. As we shall see in the next chapter, even the highest estimates proposed by scholars today come nowhere near this figure. Estimates now tend to range between a somewhat implausibly low 20,000 to a perhaps excessively high 110,000; and a frequently cited maximum for peak periods is 60–80,000.

4. Ibid., p. 38 and note z.

5. Ibid., p. 46.

6. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1912), p. 332.

7. Ibid., p. 336.

8. James Harrington, ‘The Commonwealth of Oceana’ in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 259–60. For a discussion of attitudes to Sparta throughout European history, see Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); on Harrington (and his preference for ‘the leadership of the nobility and gentry’), pp. 190–95.

9. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Paperbacks, 1978), p. 185.

10. Ibid., p. 187.

11. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, eds R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. 2, p. 684. See also, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), p. 411.

12. Ferguson, pp. 184–5.

13. See M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Chapter 1, for a brief account of the evolution of the modern interest in slavery.

14. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 192.

15. Ibid., p. 194.

16. See A.D. Momigliano, ‘George Grote and the Study of Greek History’ in Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Weidenfeld Goldbacks, 1969), esp. pp. 64–5, on the neglect of Greek history on the Continent. This article also contains some illuminating remarks on Gillies and Mitford.

17. William Mitford, The History of Greece (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1814), IV 342.

18. Ibid., V 131.

19. Ibid., IV 354–9.

20. Ibid., V 7–8.

21. Ibid., V 34–5.

22. Ibid., V 16.

23. Ibid., V 38–9.

24. Turner, p. 204.

25. Ibid., pp. 208–9.

26. Ibid., p. 204.

27. Momigliano, p. 65.

28. Turner, p. 248.

29. August Boeckh, The Public Economy of Athens (1842), pp. 611–14.

30. Ibid., pp. 226–7.

31. Ibid., p. 217.

32. Ibid., p. 119.

33. Ibid., p. 117.

34. Ibid., p. 45.

35. Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, ed. Rudolf Marx (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1929), pp. 258–9.

36. Ibid., I 221.

37. Ibid., 1 232.

38. Ibid., I 254–5.

39. Ibid., III 109.

40. Ibid., III 55.

41. Ibid., III 65–6.

42. Ibid., III 128–30.

43. Ibid., III 209.

44. Ibid., III 182.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., III 130.

47. Ibid., III 206.

48. Ibid., III 91.

49. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, ‘Le colonat romain’ in Recherches sur quelques problèmes d’histoire (Paris: 1885), p. 3, quoted in Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, p. 67.

50. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, n.d.), p. 11.

51. Nicole Loraux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘La formation de l’Athènes bourgeoise: Essai d’historiographie 1750–1850’ in Classical Influences on Western Thought: A.D. 1650–1870, ed. R.R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 170.

52. Fustel, The Ancient City, p. 67.

53. Ibid., pp. 60–61.

54. Ibid., p. 224.

55. Ibid., p. 251.

56. Ibid., p. 259.

57. Ibid., p. 264.

58. Ibid., p. 273.

59. Ibid., pp. 324–5.

60. Ibid., pp. 318–19.

61. Ibid., p. 325.

62. Ibid., p. 328.

63. Ibid., p. 337.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., pp. 337–8.

66. Ibid., p. 338.

67. Ibid., p. 340.

68. Ibid., p. 340, n. 8.

69. Ibid., pp. 334–6.

70. M.I. Finley, ‘Was Greek Civilisation Based on Slave Labour?’ in Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), p. 111.

71. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, pp. 11ff.

72. Finley, ‘Was Greek Civilisation …?’, p. 111.

73. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), p. 213.

74. Ibid., pp. 413–14.

75. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), pp. 180–81. Here is the clearest example of Engels’ tendency to exaggerate the importance of ‘commerce and industry’, his inflation of the slave ‘manufactories’, and his repetition of Smith’s argument concerning the competition between free craftsmen and slaves. In this passage he also takes for granted an impossibly high estimate of slaves in Athens, suggesting that there were 365,000 slaves, or 18 slaves to every male adult citizen.

76. Ibid., p. 231.

77. Benjamin Farrington, The Civilisation of Greece and Rome (London: Victor Gollancz, Left Book Club Edition, 1938), p. 47.

78. Ibid., p. 91.

79. G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, and London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 52.

80. Ibid.

81. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974), pp. 18–52.

82. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 73 and 323 n.7.

83. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 136.

84. Finley, ‘Was Greek Civilisation …?’, p. 112.

Chapter II

1. This chapter, which deals with especially contentious issues and spells out at length many of the premises on which the other chapters are based, contains more detailed discussions of evidence than the others; but I have relegated some of the more laborious discussions to the two Appendices.

2. A.H.M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), pp. 76–9; A.W. Gomme, The Population of Athens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933). Gomme’s figures have come under criticism in recent years, especially as the field of historical demography in general has made great advances. For example, on the basis of recent scholarship in this field, M.H. Hansen has questioned one of Gomme’s fundamental assumptions, namely that peace and prosperity must lead to a rapid growth of population; that hence the population of Athens in the fourth century BC, after the devastations of war and the plague in the previous century, could not have been static; and that the figures for the late fourth century must therefore be higher than those proposed, for instance, by Jones. M.H. Hansen, ‘Demographic Reflections on the Number of Athenian Citizens 451–309 BC,’ American Journal of Ancient History, 7:2 (1982). (Hansen had already, in an earlier article, cast doubt on Gomme’s figures for the fifth century.) It must, however, be emphasized that my object in what follows is not to engage in this demographic debate but rather to examine the best case that can be made for agricultural slavery by proceeding from a generous estimate of the ratio of slaves to citizens, such as that proposed by Gomme.

3. S. Lauffer, Die Bergwerksslaven von Laureion (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaft und Literatur, 1955–6), II 904–16. See also Robin Osborne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 111 and 242 n. 2, where other estimates are cited, one by C. Conophagos (1980), who suggests that 11,000 slaves were employed in the mines, and another recent calculation by H. Kalcyk (1982), suggesting that there were 54,100 slaves per year in the fifth century and 22,100 in the fourth. (Osborne appears to have corrected a mistake in addition in one of Kalcyk’s tables.)

4. Diog. Laert. V 11–16 and 69–74.

5. Diog. Laert. III 41–3.

6. For example, M.I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), p. 102.

7. See below, pp. 70–71.

8. The evidence in this paragraph is drawn from the following passages in Demosthenes (and ps.-Dem.): XXI 156; XXVII 46; XXIX 25, 38, 56; XXX 35; XXXIII 8–13, 18; XXXIV 8, 28–9, 41; XXXV 33; XXXVI 14, 28–30, 45; XXXVII 4, 22–6, 28–9, 40–44, 50; XL 14–15; XL 51; XLI 8, 22; XLV 28, 61, 71; XLVI 21; XLVII 4ff., 35–40, 47, 51–3, 55–6...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. The Myth of the Idle Mob
• II. Slavery and the Peasant-Citizen
• III. The Polis and the Peasant-Citizen
• IV. Athenian Democracy: A Peasant Culture?
• Appendix I: Textual Evidence Concerning Slavery
• Appendix II: Some Considerations on the Evidence for Tenancy
• Notes
• Index