by Will Durant
Nevertheless the Athenian conscience is disturbed by the existence of slavery, and the philosophers who defend it reveal almost as clearly as those who denounce it that the moral development of the nation has outrun its institutions. Plato condemns the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, but for the rest accepts slavery on the ground that some people have underprivileged minds.42 Aristotle looks upon the slave as an animate tool, and thinks that slavery will continue in some form until all menial work can be done by self-operating machines.43 The average Greek, though kind to his slaves, has no notion of how a cultured society can get along without slavery; to abolish slavery, he feels, it would be necessary to abolish Athens. Others are more radical. The Cynic philosophers condemn slavery outright; their successors, the Stoics, will condemn it more politely; Euripides again and again stirs his audiences by sympathetic pictures of war-captured slaves; and the sophist Alcidamas goes about Greece preaching, unmolested, the doctrine of Rousseau almost in the words of Rousseau: “God has sent all men into the world free, and nature has made no man a slave.”44 But slavery goes on.
V. THE WAR OF THE CLASSES
The exploitation of man by man is less severe in Athens and Thebes than in Sparta or Rome, but it is adequate to the purpose. There are no castes among the freemen in Athens, and a man may by resolute ability rise to anything but citizenship; hence, in part, the fever and turbulence of Athenian life. There is no tense class distinction between employer and employee except in the mines; usually the master works beside his men, and personal acquaintance dulls the edge of exploitation. The wage of nearly all artisans, of whatever class, is a drachma for each actual day of work;45 but unskilled workers may get as low as three obols (50 cents) a day.46 Piecework tends to replace timework as the factory system develops; and wages begin to vary more widely. A contractor may hire slaves from their owner for a rental of one to four obols a day.47 We may estimate the buying power of these wages by comparing Greek prices with our own. In 414 a house and estate in Attica cost twelve hundred drachmas; a medimnus, or 1½ bushels, of barley costs a drachma in the sixth century, two at the close of the fifth, three in the fourth, five in the time of Alexander; a sheep costs a drachma in Solon’s day, ten to twenty at the end of the fifth century;48 in Athens as elsewhere currency tends to increase faster than goods, and prices rise. At the close of the fourth century prices are five times as high as at the opening of the sixth; they double from 480 to 404, and again from 404 to 330.49
A single man lives comfortably on 120 drachmas ($120) a month;50 we may judge from this the condition of the worker who earns thirty drachmas per month, and has a family. It is true that the state comes to his relief in times of great stress, and then distributes corn at a nominal price. But he observes that the goddess of liberty is no friend to the goddess of equality, and that under the free laws of Athens the strong grow stronger, the rich richer, while the poor remain poor.*51 Individualism stimulates the able, and degrades the simple; it creates wealth magnificently, and concentrates it dangerously. In Athens, as in other states, cleverness gets all that it can, and mediocrity gets the rest. The landowner profits from the rising value of his land; the merchant does his best, despite a hundred laws, to secure corners and monopolies; the speculator reaps, through the high rate of interest on loans, the lion’s share of the proceeds of industry and trade. Demagogues arise who point out to the poor the inequality of human possessions, and conceal from them the inequality of human economic ability; the poor man, face to face with wealth, becomes conscious of his poverty, broods over his unrewarded merits, and dreams of perfect states. Bitterer than the war of Greece with Persia, or of Athens with Sparta, is, in all the Greek states, the war of class with class.
In Attica it begins with the conflict between the new rich and the landed aristocracy. The ancient families still love the soil, and live for the greater part on their estates. Division of the patrimony through many generations has made the average holding small53 (the rich Alcibiades has only seventy acres), and the squire in most cases labors personally on the soil, or in the management of his property. But though the aristocrat is not rich, he is proud; he adds his father’s name to his own as a title of nobility, and he remains aloof as long as he can from the mercantile bourgeoisie which is capturing the wealth of Athens’ growing trade. His wife, however, cries for a city home and the varied life and opportunities of the metropolis; his daughters wish to live in Athens and snare rich husbands; his sons hope to find hetairai there and to give gay parties in the style of the nouveaux riches. As the aristocrat cannot compete in luxury with the merchants and manufacturers, he accepts them, or their children, as sons-in-law or daughters-in-law; they are anxious to climb, and willing to pay. The upshot is a union of the rich in land with the rich in money, and the formation of an upper class of oligarchs, envied and hated by the poor, angry at the excesses and extravagance of democracy, and fearful of revolution.
It is the insolence of the new wealth that brings on the second phase of the class war—the struggle of the poorer citizens against the rich. Many of the bourgeoisie flaunt their wealth like Alcibiades, but few others can so charm the “mechanic multitude” by dramatic audacity and elegance of person or speech. Young men conscious of ability and frustrated with poverty translate their personal need for opportunity and place into a general gospel of revolt; and intellectuals eager for new ideas and the applause of the oppressed formulate for them the aims of their rebellion.54 They call not for the socialization of industry and trade but for the abolition of debts and the redistribution of the land—among the citizens; for the radical movement in fifth-century Athens is confined to the poorer voters, and never dreams, at this stage, of liberating the slaves, or letting the metics in on the reallotment of the soil. The leaders talk of a golden past in which all men were equal in possessions, but they do not wish to be taken too literally when they speak of restoring that paradise. It is an aristocratic communism that they have in mind—not a nationalization of the land by the state, but an equal sharing of it by the citizens. They point out how unreal is the equality of the franchise in the face of mounting economic inequality; but they are resolved to use the political power of the poorer citizenry to persuade the Assembly to sluice into the pockets of the needy—by fines liturgies, confiscations, and public works55—some of the concentrated wealth of the rich.56 And to give a lead to future rebels they adopt red as the symbolic color of their revolt.57
In the face of this threat the rich band themselves in secret organizations pledged to take common action against what Plato, despite his communism, will call the “monstrous beast” of the aroused and hungry mob.58 The free workers also organize—have at least since Solon organized—themselves into clubs (eranoi, thiasoi) of stonemasons, marble cutters, woodworkers, ivory-workers, potters, fishermen, actors, etc.; Socrates is a member of a sculptor’s thiasos.*59 But these groups are not so much trade-unions as mutual benefit societies: they come together in meeting places called synods or synagogues, have banquets and games, and worship a patron deity; they make payments to sick members, and contract collectively for specific enterprises; but they do not enter visibly into the Athenian class war. The battle is fought on the fields of literature and politics. Pamphleteers like the “Old Oligarch” issue denunciations or defenses of democracy. The comic poets, since their plays require rich men to finance their production, are on the side of the drachmas, and pour ridicule upon the radical leaders and their utopias. In the Ecclesiazusae (392) Aristophanes introduces us to the lady communist Praxagora, who makes an oration as follows:
I want all to have a share of everything, and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; no longer shall we see one man harvesting vast tracts of land, while another has not ground enough to be buried in. . . . I intend that there shall only be one and the same condition of life for all. . . . I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. . . . Women shall belong to all men in comm
on.61
“But who,” asks Blepyrus, “will do the work?” “The slaves,” is her reply. In another comedy, the Plutus (408), Aristophanes allows Poverty, who is threatened with extinction, to defend herself as the necessary goad to human toil and enterprise:
I am the sole cause of all your blessings, and your safety depends upon me alone. . . . Who would wish to hammer iron, build ships, sew, turn, cut up leather, bake bricks, bleach linen, tan hides, or break up the soil with the plow and garner the gifts of Demeter if he could live in idleness and free from all this work? . . . If your system [communism] is applied . . . you will not be able to sleep in a bed, for no more will ever be manufactured; nor on carpets, for who would weave them if he had gold?62
The reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles are the first achievement of the democratic revolt. Pericles is a man of judgment and moderation; he does not wish to destroy the rich but to preserve them and their enterprise by easing the condition of the poor; but after his death (429) the democracy becomes so radical that the oligarchic party conspires again with Sparta, and makes in 411, and once more in 404, a rich man’s revolution. Nevertheless, because wealth is great in Athens and trickles down to many, and because fear of a slave uprising gives the citizenry pause, the class war in Athens is milder, and sooner reaches a working compromise, than in Greek states where the middle class is not strong enough to mediate between rich and poor. At Samos, in 412, the radicals seize the government, execute two hundred aristocrats, banish four hundred more, divide up the lands and houses among themselves,63 and develop another society like that which they have overthrown. At Leontini, in 422, the commoners expel the oligarchs, but soon afterward take to flight. At Corcyra, in 427, the oligarchs assassinate sixty leaders of the popular party; the democrats seize the government, imprison four hundred aristocrats, try fifty of them before a kind of Committee of Public Safety, and execute all fifty at once; seeing which a considerable number of the surviving prisoners slay one another, others kill themselves, and the rest are walled up in the temple in which they have sought sanctuary, and are starved to death. Thucydides describes the class war in Greece in a timeless passage:
During seven days the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies; and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the monies owed to them. Death thus raged in every shape, and as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain upon it. . . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places where it arrived last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions . . . and the atrocity of their reprisals. . . . Corcyra gave the first example of these crimes . . . of the revenge exacted by the governed—who had never experienced equitable treatment, or, indeed, aught but violence from their rulers—when their hour came; of the iniquitous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed poverty, and ardently coveted their neighbors’ goods; and the savage and pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the struggle not in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their passions. . . . In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority. . . . Reckless audacity came now to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability to act on any. . . .
The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition. . . . The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of the political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish; and, recoiling from no means in their struggle for ascendancy, engaged in the direst excesses. . . . Religion was in honor with neither party, but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. . . . The ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down, and disappeared; and society became divided into Camps in which no man trusted his fellow. . . . Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape. . . . The whole Hellenic world was convulsed.64
Athens survives this turbulence because every Athenian is at heart an individualist, and loves private property; and because the Athenian government finds a practicable medium between socialism and individualism in a moderate regulation of business and wealth. The state is not afraid to regulate: it sets a limit upon the size of dowries, the cost of funerals, and the dress of women;65 it taxes and supervises trade, enforces fair weights and measures and honest quality so far as the ingenuity of human rascality permits;66 it limits the export of food, and enacts sharp laws to govern and chasten the practices of merchants and tradesmen. It watches the grain trade carefully, and legislates severely against corners—even to the death penalty—by forbidding the purchase of more than seventy-five bushels of wheat at a time; it interdicts loans on outgoing cargoes unless the return shipment is to bring grain to the Piraeus; it requires that all corn loaded by vessels owned in Athens shall be brought to the Piraeus; and it prohibits the export of more than a third of any corn cargo that reaches that port.67 By keeping a reserve of grain in state-owned storehouses, and pouring this upon the market when prices rise too rapidly, Athens sees to it that the price of bread shall never be exorbitant, that millionaires shall not be created out of the hunger of the people, and that no Athenian shall starve.68 The state regulates wealth through taxation and liturgies, and persuades or compels rich men to supply funds for the fleet, the drama, and the theoric payments that enable the poor to attend the plays and the games. For the rest Athens protects freedom of trade, private property, and the opportunity to profit, deeming them the necessary implements of human liberty, and the most powerful stimuli to industry, commerce, and prosperity.
Under this system of economic individualism tempered with socialistic regulation, wealth accumulates in Athens, and spreads sufficiently to prevent a radical revolution; to the end of ancient Athens private property remains secure. The number of citizens with a comfortable income doubles between 480 and 431;69 the public revenue grows, public expenditures rise, and yet the treasury is full beyond any precedent in Greek history. The economic basis of Athenian freedom, enterprise, art, and thought is firmly laid, and will bear without strain every extravagance of the Golden Age except the war by which all Greece will be ruined.
CHAPTER XIII
The Morals and Manners of the Athenians
I. CHILDHOOD
EVERY Athenian citizen is expected to have children, and all the forces of religion, property, and the state unite to discountenance childlessness. Where no offspring comes, adoption is the rule, and high prices are paid for prepossessing orphans. At the same time law and public opinion accept infanticide as a legitimate safeguard against excess population and a pauperizing fragmentation of the land; any father may expose a newborn child to death either as doubtfully his, or as weak or deformed. The children of slaves are seldom allowed to live. Girls are more subject to exposure than boys, for every daughter has to be provided with a dowry, and at marriage she passes from the home and service of those who have reared her into the service of those who have not. Exposure is effected by leaving the infant in a large earthenware vessel within the precincts of a temple or in some other place where it can soon be rescued if any wish to adopt it. The parental right to expose permits a rough eugenics, and co-operates with a rigorous natural selection by hardship and competition to make the Greeks a strong and healthy p
eople. The philosophers almost unanimously approve of family limitation: Plato will call for the exposure of all feeble children, and of those born of base or elderly parents;1 and Aristotle will defend abortion as preferable to infanticide.2 The Hippocratic code of medical ethics will not allow the physician to effect abortion, but the Greek midwife is an experienced hand in this field, and no law impedes her.*3
On or before the tenth day after birth the child is formally accepted into the family with a religious ritual around the hearth, and receives presents and a name. Usually a Greek has but one name, like Socrates or Archimedes; but since it is customary to call the eldest son after the paternal grandfather, repetition is frequent, and Greek history is confounded with a multiplicity of Xenophons, Aeschineses, Thucydideses, Diogeneses, and Zenos. To avoid ambiguity the father’s name or the place of birth may be added, as with Kimon Miltiadou—Cimon son of Miltiades—or Diodorus Siculus—Diodorus of Sicily; or the problem may be solved by some jolly nickname, like Callimedon—The Crab.5
