Library:The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests
The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests
	Cover of the first edition
Author	G. E. M. de Ste. Croix
Publisher	Duckworth Books (United Kingdom); Cornell University Press (United States)
First published	1981; London (United Kingdom); Ithaca, New York (United States)
Type	Book
ISBN	0-8014-1442-3 (hardcover); 0-8014-9597-0 (paperback)
Source	https://archive.org/details/classstruggleina0000dest

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests is a book by British ancient historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, first published in 1981 by Duckworth Books in Britain and Cornell University Press in the United States. The seminal work attempts to provide a historical materialist analysis of Ancient Greece.

To Margaret

Preface

PART ONE

Introduction

The plan of this book

'The Ancient Greek World': its extent in space and time

The relevance of Marx for the study of ancient history

Class, Exploitation, and Class Struggle

The nature of class society

'Class', 'exploitation', and 'the class struggle' defined

Exploitation and the class struggle

Aristotle's sociology of Greek politics

Alternatives to class (status etc.)

Women

Property and the Propertied

The conditions of production: land and unfree labour

The propertied class (or classes)

Land, as the principal source of wealth

Slavery and other forms of unfree labour

Freedmen

Hired labour

Forms of Exploitation in the Ancient Greek World, and the Small Independent Producer

'Direct individual' and 'indirect collective' exploitation

The peasantry and their villages

From slave to colonus

The military factor

'Feudalism' (and serfdom)

Other independent producers

PART TWO

The Class Struggle in Greek History on the Political Plane

The 'age of the tyrants'

The fifth and fourth centuries B.C.

The destruction of Greek democracy

Rome the Suzerain

'The queen and mistress of the world'

The 'conflict of the Orders'

The developed Republic

The Roman conquest of the Greek world

From Republic to Principate

The Principate, the emperor, and the upper classes

The Class Struggle on the Ideological Plane

Terror, and propaganda

The theory of 'natural slavery'

The standard Hellenistic, Roman and Christian attitude to slavery

The attitudes to property of the Graeco-Roman world, of Jesus, and of the Christian churches

The ideology of the victims of the class struggle

The 'Decline and Fall' of the Roman Empire: an Explanation

Intensified political subjection and economic exploitation of the lower classes during the early centuries of the Christian era

Pressure on the curial class

Defection to the 'barbarians', peasant revolts, and indifference to the disintegration of the Roman empire

The collapse of much of the Roman empire in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries

APPENDICES

The contrast between slave and wage-labourer in Marx's theory of capital

Some evidence for slavery (especially agricultural) in the Classical and Hellenistic periods

The settlement of 'barbarians' within the Roman empire

The destruction of Greek democracy in the Roman period

Notes