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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
The main text of this book is intended not only for ancient historians and Classical scholars but also in particular for historians of other periods, sociologists, political theorists, and students of Marx, as well as for 'the general reader'. The use of Greek text and of anything in Latin beyond very brief quotations is reserved for the Notes and Appendices.
As far as I am aware, it is the first book in English, or in any other language I can read, which begins by explaining the central features of Marx's historical method and defining the concepts and categories involved, and then proceeds to demonstrate how these instruments of analysis may be used in practice to explain the main events, processes, institutions and ideas that prevailed at various times over a long period of history – here, the thirteen or fourteen hundred years of my 'ancient Greek world' (for which see I.ii below). This arrangement involves rather frequent cross-referencing. Some of those who are interested primarily in the methodology and the more 'theoretical', synchronic treatment of concepts and institutions (contained mainly in Part One) may wish for specific references to those passages that are of most concern to themselves, occurring either in other sections of Part One or in the more diachronic treatment in Part Two. Similarly, practising historians whose interests are confined to a limited part of the whole period will sometimes need references to a particular 'theoretical' portion in Part One that is specially relevant. (This will, I think, be clear to anyone who compares II.iv with V.ii-iii, for instance, I.iii with IV.ii, or III.iv with Appendix II and IV.iii.)
The book originated in the J.H. Gray Lectures for 1972/73 (three in number), which I delivered at Cambridge University in February 1973 at the invitation of the Board of the Faculty of Classics. I am particularly grateful to J. S. Morrison, President of Wolfson College, then Chairman of the Faculty, and to M. I. (now Sir Moses) Finley, Professor of Ancient History, for their kindness to me and the trouble they took to make the experiences a delightful one for me and to ensure a large audience at all three lectures.
The J. H. Gray lectures were founded by the Rev. Canon Joseph Henry ('Joey') Gray, M.A. (Cantab.), J.P., born on 26 July 1856, Fellow and Classical Lecturer of Queens' College Cambridge for no fewer than 52 years before his death on 23 March 1932, at the age of 75. His devotion to his College (of which he wrote and published a history), to the Anglican Church, and to Freemasonry (he became Provincial Grand Master of Cambridgeshire in 1914) was equalled only by his athletic interests, in rowing, cricket, and above all Rugby football. From 1895 until his death he was President of the Cambridge University Rugby Football Club; and when that club, in appreciation of his presidency, presented him with a sum of no less than £1,000, he used the money to endow a special lectureship in Classics at Cambridge – 'thus making the gladiators of the football field into patrons of the humaner letters', to quote the admiring and affectionate obituary in The Dial (Queens' College Magazine) no.71, Easter Term 1932. The obituary refers to Gray's 'vigorous Conservative politics' and characterises him as 'an almost perfect incarnation of John Bull in cap and gown'. I am afraid he would have disapproved strongly of my lectures, and of this book; but I am comforted by another passage in the same obituary which speaks of his 'hearty goodwill to all men, even to individual socialists and foreigners'.
This book represents of course a very considerable expansion of the lectures, and it incorporates, almost in their entirety, two other papers, given in 1974: a lecture on 'Karl Marx and the history of Classical antiquity', to the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in London on 21 March 1974, published in an expanded form in Arethusa 8 (1975) 7–41 (here cited as 'KMHCA'); and another lecture, on 'Early Christian attitudes to property and slavery', delivered to the Conference of the Ecclesiastical History Society at York on 25 July 1974, also subsequently expanded and published, in Studies in Church History 12 (1975) 1–38 (here cited as 'ECAPS'). Parts of this book have also been delivered in lecture form at various universities, not only in this country but also in Poland (in June 1977), at Warsaw; and in the Netherlands (in April-May 1978), at Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden. I have many friends to thank for their kindness to me during my visits to those cities, in particular Professors Iza Bieżuńska-Małowist of the University of Warsaw and Jan-Maarten Bremer of the University of Amsterdam.
I had intended to publish the Gray Lectures almost in their original form, with little more than references added. However, the comments received from most of those to whom I showed drafts convinced me that owing to the extreme ignorance of Marx's thought which prevails throughout most of the West, especially perhaps among ancient historians (in the English-speaking world at least as much as anywhere), I would have to write the book on an altogether different scale. As I did so my opinions developed, and I often changed my mind.
Friends and colleagues have given me some useful criticisms of the many successive drafts of chapters of this book. I have thanked them individually but now refrain from doing so again, because most of them are not Marxists and might not be happy at finding themselves named here, and partly because I do not wish to debar them from being asked to write reviews, as usually happens to those to whom an author makes a general acknowledgment.
I have incorporated very many essential brief references (especially to source material) in the text itself, placing them as far as possible at the ends of sentences. This, I believe, is preferable, in a work not intended primarily for scholars, to the use of footnotes, since the eye travels much more easily over a short passage in brackets than down to the foot of the page and back again. (Longer notes, intended principally for scholars, will be found at the end of the book.) I give this as a reply to those friends who, out of sheer Oxonian conservatism, have objected to the abbreviation of titles by initial letters – e.g. 'Jones, LRE', for A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284-602 – while themselves habitually using such abbreviations for various categories of references, including periodicals, collections of inscriptions and papyri, and so forth, e.g. JRS, CIL, ILS, PSI, BGU. For me, the only alternatives still allowing the use of references in the actual text itself would have been to abbreviate with date or serial number, e.g. 'Jones, 1964' or 'Jones (1)'; but initial letters are as a rule far more likely to convey the necessary information to a reader who already either knows of the existence of the work in question or has looked it up in my bibliography (pp. - below), where all abbreviations are explained. I should perhaps add that titles abbreviated by initials represent books when italicised, articles when not.
My reading for this book, while concentrated above all on the ancient sources and the writings of Marx, has necessarily been very wide; but there are some 'obvious' works which I have refrained from citing – in particular, books which are specifically philosophical in character and which concern themselves primarily with abstract concepts rather than with the actual historical 'events, processes, institutions and ideas' (cf. above) that are the subject-matter of the practising historian. One example is G. A. Cohen's book, Karl Marx's Theory of History, A Defence, based on much greater philosophical expertise than I can command, but which I find congenial; another is the massive work in three volumes by Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, which seems to me to have been vastly overpraised, however accurately it may delineate some of the disastrous developments of Marx's thought by many of his followers.
In an interview printed in The Guardian on 22 September 1970 the released Nazi war criminal Albert Speer said that in the Third Reich 'Each Minister was responsible for his own department, and for that only. Your conscience was quiet if you were educated to see things only in your field; this was convenient for everybody.' Our educational system also tends to produce people who 'see things only in their field'. One of the techniques contributing to this is the strict separation of 'ancient history' from the contemporary world. This book, on the contrary, is an attempt to see the ancient Greek world in very close relation with our own and is inspired by the belief that we can learn much about each by careful study of the other.
The dedication of this book expresses the greatest of all my debts: to my wife, in particular for the perfect good-humour and patience with which she accepted my concentration on it for some years, to the neglect of almost everything else. I also wish to record my gratitude to my son Julian for his valuable assistance in correcting the proofs, and to Colin Haycraft for agreeing to publish the book and accomplishing the task with all possible tact and efficiency.
SEPTEMBER 1980
G.E.M.S.C.
PART ONE
I - Introduction
(i) - The plan of this book
My general aim in this book is first (in Part One) to explain, and then (in Part Two) to illustrate, the value of Marx's general analysis of society in relation to the ancient Greek world (as defined in Section ii of this chapter). Marx and Engels made a number of different contributions to historical methodology and supplied a series of tools which can be profitably used by the historian and the sociologist; but I shall concentrate largely on one such tool, which I believe to be much the most important and the most fruitful for actual use in understanding and explaining particular historical events and processes: namely, the concept of class, and of class struggle.
In Section ii of this first chapter, I state how I interpret the expression 'the ancient Greek world', and explain the meaning of the terms I shall be using for the periods (between about 700 B.C. and the mid-seventh century C.E.) into which the history of my 'Greek world' may conveniently be divided. In Section iii I go on to describe the fundamental division between polis and chōra (city and countryside) that plays such a vital role in Greek history after the 'Classical' period (ending at about the close of the fourth century B.C.) which – absurdly enough – is all that many people have in mind when they speak of 'Greek history'. In Section iv I give a brief account of Marx as a Classical scholar and emphasise the almost total lack of interest in Marxist ideas that is unfortunately characteristic of the great majority of scholars in the English-speaking world who concern themselves with Classical antiquity. I also try to dispel some common misconceptions about Marx's attitude to history; and in doing so I compare the attitude of Marx with that of Thucydides.
Chapter II deals with 'class, exploitation, and class struggle'. In Section i I explain the nature and origin of class society, as I understand that term. I also state what I regard as the two fundamental features which most distinguish ancient Greek society from the contemporary world: they can be identified respectively within the field of what Marx called 'the forces of production' and 'the relations of production'. In Section ii I define 'class' (as essentially a relationship, the social embodiment of the fact of exploitation), and I also define 'exploitation' and 'class struggle'. In Section iii I show that the meaning I attach to the expression 'class struggle' represents the fundamental thought of Marx himself: the essence of class struggle is exploitation or resistance to it; there need not necessarily be any class consciousness or any political element. I also explain the criteria which lead me to define Greek (and Roman) society as 'a slave economy': this expression has regard, not so much to the way in which the bulk of production was done (for at most times in most areas in antiquity it was free peasants and artisans who had the largest share in production), but to the fact that the propertied classes derived their surplus above all through the exploitation of unfree labour. (With this section goes Appendix I, dealing with the technical question of the contrast between slave and wage-labourer in Marx's theory of capital.) In Section iv I demonstrate that a Marxist analysis in terms of class, far from being the imposition upon the ancient Greek world of inappropriate and anachronistic categories suited only to the study of the modern capitalist world, is actually in some essentials much the same type of analysis as that employed by Aristotle, the greatest of ancient sociologists and political thinkers. In Section v I consider some types of historical method different from that which I employ, and the alternatives which some sociologists and historians have preferred to the concept of class; and I demonstrate (with reference to Max Weber and M. I. Finley) that 'status' in particular is inferior as an instrument of analysis, since statuses altogether lack the organic relationship which is the hallmark of classes and can rarely if ever provide explanations, especially of social change. In Section vi I consider women as a class in the technical Marxist sense, and I give a brief treatment of the early Christian attitude to women and marriage, compared with its Hellenistic, Roman, and Jewish counterparts.
Chapter III is entitled 'Property and the propertied'. In Section i I begin with the fact that in antiquity by far the most important 'conditions of production' were land and unfree labour: these, then, were what the propertied class needed to control and did control. In Section ii I explain how I use the expression 'the propertied class': for those who were able to live without needing a significant proportion of their time working for their living. (I speak of 'the propertied classes', in the plural, where it is necessary to notice class divisions within the propertied class as a whole.) In Section iii I emphasise that land was always the principal means of production in antiquity. In Section iv I discuss slavery and other forms of unfree labour (debt bondage, and serfdom), accepting definitions of each of these types of unfreedom which now have world-wide official currency. (Appendix II adds some evidence for slave labour, especially in agriculture, in Classical and Hellenistic times.) In Section v I deal with freedmen (an 'order' and not a 'class' in my sense), and in Section iv I discuss hired labour, showing that it played an incomparably smaller part in the pre-capitalist world than it does today and was regarded by members of the propertied class in antiquity (and by many of the poor) as only a little better than slavery.
In Chapter IV I discuss 'Forms of exploitation in the ancient Greek world, and the small independent producer'. In Section i I distinguish between 'direct individual' and 'indirect collective' exploitation, in such a way as to make it possible to regard even many peasant freeholders as members of an exploited class, subject to taxation, conscription and forced services, imposed by the State and its organs. I also explain that those whom I describe as 'small independent producers' (mainly peasants, also artisans and traders) were sometimes not severely exploited themselves and equally did not exploit the labour of others to any substantial degree, but lived by their own efforts on or near the subsistence level. At most periods (before the Later Roman Empire) and in most areas these people were very numerous and must have been responsible for the largest share in production, both in agriculture and in handicrafts. In Section ii I speak specifically of the peasantry and the villages in which they mainly lived. In Section iii ('From slave to colonus') I describe and explain the change in the forms of exploitation in the Greek and Roman world during the early centuries of the Christian era, where the propertied class, which had earlier relied to a great extent on slaves to produce its surplus, came more and more to rely on letting to tenants (coloni), most of whom at about the end of the third century became serfs. Most working freehold peasants were also brought into the same kind of subjection, being tied to the villages of which they were members: I call such people 'quasi-serfs'. (An Appendix, III, gives a large quantity of evidence for the settlement of 'barbarians' within the Roman empire, the significance of which is discussed in Section iii of Chapter IV.) In Section iv ('The military factor') I point out that in the face of external military threat it may be necessary for the ruling class of a society consisting mainly of peasants to allow the peasantry a higher standard of life than it would otherwise have attained, in order to provide a sufficiently strong army; and that the failure of the Later Roman Empire to make this concession induced in the peasantry as a whole an attitude of indifference to the fate of the Empire, which did not begin to be remedied before the seventh century, by which time much of the empire had disintegrated. In Section v I have something to say about the use of the terms 'feudalism' and 'serfdom', insisting that serfdom (as defined in III.iv) can exist quite independently of anything that can properly be called 'feudalism', and ending with a few words on the Marxist concept of the 'feudal mode of production'. In Section vi I recognise briefly the role of small 'independent producers' other than peasants. That completes Part One of this book.
In Part One, then, I am occupied largely with conceptual and methodological problems, in the attempt to establish and clarify the concepts and categories which seem to me to be the most useful in studying the ancient Greek world, above all the process of change which is so obvious when we look at Greek society over the period of thirteen to fourteen hundred years with which this book is concerned.
In Part Two I seek to illustrate the usefulness of the concepts and methodology I have outlined in Part One in explaining not only a series of historical situations and developments but also the ideas – social, economic, political, religious – which grew out of the historical process. In Chapter V ('The class struggle in Greek history on the political plane') I show how the application of a class analysis to Greek history can illuminate the processes of political and social change. In Section i I deal with the Archaic period (before the fifth century B.C.) and demonstrate how the so-called 'tyrants' played an essential role in the transition from hereditary aristocracy, which existed everywhere in the Greek world down to the seventh century, to more 'open' societies ruled either by oligarchies of wealth or by democracies. In Section ii I make a number of observations on the political class struggle (greatly mitigated by democracy, where that form of government existed) in the fifth and fourth centuries, showing how even at Athens, where democracy was strongest, bitter class struggle broke out in the political plane on two occasions, in 411 and 404. In Section iii I explain how Greek democracy was gradually destroyed, between the fourth century B.C. and the third century of the Christian era, by the joint efforts of the Greek propertied class, the Macedonians, and ultimately the Romans. (The details of this process in the Roman period are described in greater detail in Appendix IV.)
Since the whole Greek world came by degrees under Roman rule, I am obliged to say a good deal about 'Rome the suzerain', the title of Chapter VI. After some brief remarks in Section i on Rome as 'The queen and mistress of the world', I give in Section ii a sketch of the so-called 'Conflict of the Orders' in the early Roman Republic, intended mainly to show that although it was indeed technically a conflict between two 'orders' (two juridically distinct groups), namely Patricians and Plebeians, yet strong elements of class struggle were involved in it. In Section iii I notice some aspects of the political situation in the developed Republic (roughly the last three centuries B.C.). In Section iv I briefly describe the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean world and its consequences. In Section v I explain the change of political regime 'From Republic to Principate', and in Section vi I sketch the nature of the Principate as an institution which continued under the 'Later Roman Empire' from the late third century onwards. In my picture of the Later Empire there is much less emphasis than usual upon a supposed change from 'Principate' to 'Dominate'; far more important, for me, is a major intensification of the forms of exploitation: the reduction to serfdom of most of the working agricultural population, a great increase in taxation, and more conscription. I give a characterisation of the position of the emperor in the Principate and the Later Empire and an outline sketch of the Roman upper classes, not forgetting the changes that took place in the fourth century.
Chapter VII is a discussion of 'The class struggle on the ideological plane'. After taking up some general issues in Section i ('Terror, and propaganda'), I proceed in Section ii to discuss the theory of 'natural slavery', and in Section iii the body of thought which largely replaced that theory in the Hellenistic period and continued throughout Roman times, appearing in Christian thought in an almost identical form. Section iv deals with the attitudes to property of the Graeco-Roman world, of Jesus, and of the Christian Church – or rather, churches, for I insist that the term 'the Christian Church' is not a historical but a strictly theological expression. Jesus is seen as a figure belonging entirely to the Jewish chōra, who may never even have entered a Greek polis, and whose thought-world was thoroughly alien to Graeco-Roman civilisation. The chapter concludes with Section v, which attempts a reconstruction of part of the ideology of the victims of the class struggle (and of Roman imperialism), with some attention to 'Resistance literature' (mainly Jewish) and Christian apocalyptic. The best example that has survived is the fable, which is explicitly said by one of its practitioners to have been invented to enable slaves to express their opinions in a disguised form which would not expose them to punishment, although some of the examples turn out to speak not merely for slaves but for the lowly in general, and of course the fable could also be utilised by members of a ruling class to reinforce their position.
The final chapter, VIII, seeks to explain the 'decline and fall' of much of the Roman empire, leading ultimately to the loss of Britain, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa in the fifth century, part of Italy and much of the Balkans in the sixth, and the whole of Egypt and Syria in the seventh – not to mention the Arab conquest of the rest of North Africa and much of Spain in the later seventh and the early eighth century. Section i shows how the ever-increasing exploitation of the vast majority of the population of the Graeco-Roman world by the all-powerful wealthy classes (a tiny minority) first depressed the political and legal status of nearly all those who were not members of my 'propertied class', almost to the slave level. Section ii describes the way in which, from just after the middle of the second century, the fiscal screw was tightened further up the social scale, on the 'curial class', the richer members of the local communities, who were in theory an 'order', consisting of the town councillors and their families, but in practice were virtually a hereditary class, consisting of all those owning property above a certain level who were not members of the imperial aristocracy of senators and equestrians. Section iii is a largely descriptive account of defection to the 'barbarians', assistance given to them, peasant revolts, and indifference to the disintegration of the Roman empire on the part of the vast majority of its subjects. The last section, iv, explains how the merciless exploitation of a great majority for the benefit of a very few finally led to the collapse of much of the empire – a process too often described as if it were something that 'just happened' naturally – whereas in fact it was due to the deliberate actions of a ruling class that monopolised both wealth and political power and governed solely for its own advantage. I show that a Marxist class analysis can provide a satisfactory explanation of this extraordinary process, which proceeded inexorably despite the heroic efforts of a remarkably able series of emperors from the late third century to near the end of the fourth.
The fact that the whole Greek world eventually came under the rule of Rome has often obliged me to look at the Roman empire as a whole, and on occasion at the Latin West alone, or even some part of it. For example, in Chapter VIII 'barbarian' invasions, internal revolts, the defection of peasants and others, and similar manifestations of insecurity and decline have to be noticed whether they happened in the East or in the West, as they all contributed towards the ultimate disintegration of a large part of the empire. Even the settlements of 'barbarians' within the Graeco-Roman world – on a far greater scale than most historians, perhaps, have realised – need to be recorded (for the reasons discussed in IV.iii), although they occurred on a far greater scale in the Latin West than in the Greek East.