EUPATRID ATHENS

D. Morgan Pierce

BASILEUS

The Egyptian and Mesopotamian monarchs appointed their nobles and administrators through a fog of religious ceremony. This nobility/priesthood was subservient to royal kinship; the members were unequivocally subordinate to the monarch. Absolute slavery, applying to every subject under the god-king, was indispensable for oriental monarchy. Why had the Greeks not adopted the idea, considering that the oriental monarchies were virtually the only cultural source from which ideas could be imported? Archaic Greece, an immediate offspring of European nomadic culture, did not have a tradition of slavery. Distinctions of wealth and prestige from livestock possession, on which tribal organization is based, preserved a relative egalitarianism because distinctions of property were vague. Only relatively immoveable distinctions of wealth such as land could enable lasting distinctions of wealth. A minor corvée tradition obligated pagani (georgoi) to labor for the anax, but there was no serfdom, and what slavery existed consisted not of agricultural labor but female domestics. Although artisans in classical Greece were slaves, in archaic Greece they had been freemen.1

1 The craftsmen were freemen, never slaves as in classical Greece. Peasants may in emergency be conscripted to labor for the King, but we do not hear of serfs bound to the soil. Slaves are not numerous, nor is their position degraded; they are mostly female domestics, and occupy a position in effect as high as that of household servants today, except that they are bought and sold for long terms instead of for precariously brief engagements. On occasion, they are brutally treated; normally they are accepted as

－29－ D. Morgan Pierce

In the early 8th century BC the basileus still combined in himself both government and religion, as did the pharaoh and the Mesopotamian king. Religion and government had not yet bifurcated. Symbols and rituals, by making people gather, witness, and do the same things, endow them with a sense of social unity; the person in charge of the ritual becomes the center of such a fabricated unity. At the start of the Iron Age, the Hellenic basileus partially retired from religious ritual. The agora had previously been the porch of the basileus' dwelling, where he made pronouncements, and where his personage as chief priest was indubitable. Afterwards ceremony was conducted in temples erected apart from the dwelling of the basileus,2 and the agora was removed to a separate location. How could this catastrophic demotion of the basileia (kingship) have occurred? How could the basileus have continued to preside over religious ceremony, but have abruptly surrendered the overwhelming power which the priestly function had signified? How could a distinction of secular and religious authority have become discernible, and what force inclined the Basileia to religious authority? Stationary settlement produced a surplus, an issue with which the prior nomadic tribes had been unfamiliar. Nomadic tribes did not fight for land occupation; members of the family, are cared for in illness or depression or old age, and may develop a humane relation of affection with master or mistress. Nausicaa helps her bond women to wash the family linen in the stream, plays ball with them, and altogether treats them as companions. If a slave woman bears a son to her master, the child is usually free. Any man, however, may become a slave, through capture in battle or in tyrannical raids. Cf. Durant, Will; The Life of Greece, MJF Books, New York, 1966, p. 46. 2 Archaeological evidence shows that during the Early Iron Age the house of the local ruler served certain cult purposes. Especially in the eighth century these chieftain’s dwellings were replaced by or transformed into sacred buildings, presumably when the ruler lost control of the community’s religious affairs. Particularly during the latter half of that century there was a tendency towards clearer separation and distinction of religious space. All over the Aegean shrines or temples were erected for patron deities protecting the polis; some of these represent the first examples of post-Late Bronze Age monumental architecture. Cf. Crielaard. Jan Paul; "Cities," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 365.

－30－ EUPATRID ATHENS

It was more economical to avoid confrontation than to subjugate, because tribes had no fixed assets. Tribal warfare therefore consisted of light invasive skirmishes. Stationary pastoral and arable agriculture produced fixed assets, surplus, and attracted invasion. Severe loss that would now result from non-confrontation compelled resolute belligerency; settlement necessitated militarization.3 Development of "capital-intensive" agriculture was the immediate cause of aristocracy, a class of people bearing leadership in defense.4 The basileus straddled the two periods; leadership in the nomadic era did not require distinction of priest and king, but the new warfare entailed by settlement rendered the distinction efficacious. Patrimonialism was the first organization of sedentary militarism. Patriarchy was the genetic organization of the family, in which the father governed the family; patrimonialism extended beyond the genetic order in the family. It was, like patriarchy, still natural, in that the extended family composed of all families in a village were blood relatives, and of whom presumably the oldest male would be the village leader. Such a leader would be both king and priest. The small family number was the condition for efficiency of the combination of family head and family priest in patriarchy. Such diffusion through blood relations is orderly and unambiguous in a village in which every member is a blood-relative, for so long as the population is small. Primitive Greek religion was separate from family to family; the rituals of one family were kept strictly secret from other families. Patriarchal structure

3 The greater the surplus generated, the more desirable it was predatory to preying outsiders. And the greater the fixity of investment, the greater the tendency to defend rather than to flee from attack. Cf. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 48*. 4 Gilman, A.; "The Development of Social Stratification in Bronze Age Europe," in Current Anthropology, 1981. In Bronze Age Europe capital-intensive subsistence techniques (the plow, Mediterranean polyculture of olives and grain, irrigation, and offshore fishing) preceded and caused the emergence of a “hereditary elite class.” Their assets needed permanent defense and leadership.

－31－ D. Morgan Pierce consisted of the diffusion of original authority from one patriarch through his relatives and progeny. Even if a population remains genetically unmixed, population growth dilutes genetic social cohesion because a human can maintain intimate relations with no more than 500 people. The Hellenic agricultural-aristocratic class adopted roles that might have constituted a centralized religion. When the genetic order loses strength due to expansion of village population, a village priest serves to amplify familial cohesion of the village. A plurality of priests, who are neither chosen nor organized according to immediate genetic association, can extend familial intimacy between the original priest-king and demos (people) when the king's blood-relation to the demos has become too diaphanous. A public religion developed in Greece subsequently to the primitive family religion, but its concern was the cognate unity of the families, not religion within the family, and was less virulent than private religion. The stringent dependence of oriental population on irrigation presupposed centralization, compounding all powers in one ruler. A village could not develop irrigation without cooperative irrigation development in neighboring villages. The imperative collaboration entailed a transcendent supervisor. Ubiquitous dependence on irrigation extended the oriental king’s will into the smallest local contexts.5 An Oriental king did not negotiate; the Pharaoh acted in an absence of political contention, because the blood-lineage of the King or Pharaoh was kept separate from the lineage of the priests. The authority of such a priest derives from the charisma of the patriarch. Priesthood sustains the genetic order, but when it is not

5 A supreme despot, say a monarch whose claim to divinity is generally accepted (as in Egypt or China throughout much of their imperial histories) can thus attempt virtually any action without “principled” opposition. Infrastructural power refers to the capacity to actually penetrate society and to implement logistically political decisions. What should be immediately obvious about the despots of historic empires is the weakness of their infrastructural powers and their dependence upon the class of aristocrats for such infrastructure as they possessed. Cf. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 170.

－32－ EUPATRID ATHENS formed from cognate relation to the king, it is not itself genetically ordered. The Egyptian monarchy was structured by kinship, but the retinue, i.e. the priests and nobility, were united not by kinship, but by office; kinship, pertinent only to the Pharaoh, categorically excluded the priest and noble from the position of Pharaoh. Whether priesthood remained gentilician or became political may have depended on the extended family of the patriarch; the Egyptian priesthood was stable perhaps because it was political. The disaggregation of the Hellenic priests may have derived from the gentilician order of Hellenic priests; the possibility of a priest-class may have failed from the incompatible conditions (1) that consanguineal relation was sustained as a qualifying property and (2) due to effects of population growth priests ceased to be blood relatives of the Basileus. Irrigation helped oriental society to surpass the gentilician principle of blood relationship; oriental priests could unify in a priesthood on a political rather than genetic order because of the imperative force of irrigation. The Hellenic priests were not possessed of a univocal natural force by which to organize politically rather than genealogically. The Hellenic priests competed by reference to diverse natural forces; the jealousies of the Hellenic gods against each other reflect the rivalry of priests who claimed their priority from different natural forces. Hieratic organization failed because claims to authority were too disparate diversity of claims to divine sources may have stalled monarchical centralization as well. Recourse to piracy, predation, and other resources of prestige in the place of just one, irrigation, dissipated the potentialities of monarchical authority.6 Disaggregation of divine reference deprived the basileus of the symbols with which to centralize, so that no force countervailed the geographic atomization

6 In Homeric Greece, on the other hand, as opposed to Israel and Iran, an assimilation of the royal office and the public finances to an Ancient Oriental pattern was inconceivable in post-Mycenaean Greece from economic, social, and political grounds. The Greek kings were therefore compelled to keep up their economic strength by taking continuous recourse to robbery and war, this feature not being lacking in the development of Israel, Iran, and Rome either. Cf. Heichelheim, Fritz; An Ancient Economic History, Volume 1, A.W. Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., Leiden 1958, p. 277

－33－ D. Morgan Pierce of small poleis in mountains and valleys. Village populations having exceeded 500, a representative system must eventually have had to substitute for blood-relation. The priesthood of the oriental societies provided unitary representation necessary for cohesion, but in Hellas the nepotistic diffusion of authority was less flexible than the representative power of a relatively impersonal priesthood. From the 9th and 8th centuries B.C. the Basileus lost power as the polis came into existence. Was the polis the primary cause of the disintegration of the basileia? What was the nature of monarchical power?

SYNOEKOISMOS

The decline of the basileus seems to have been a consequence of the unification of Attica in Athens. Genetic monarchy was appropriate for a clan, but inept for unification of kinship groups.7 The basileia (monarchy of the basileus) had been stable prior to synoekismos, when subjects were universally blood-relatives of the basileus. The basileus descended from the blood-line of his clan, but only obliquely from that of the other tribes combining in the polis. Synoekismos united clans politically under one basileus, but did not disband the disparate blood lineage. The subdued persistence of kinship was incompatible. If each village retained its separate basileus, plausibly the basileus could have continued to emerge from the genetic pattern of the village population. The characteristic of patriarchy is the origination of power from one that proliferates in many; proliferate signifies that the plurality unifies in a single origin. An authority that is contractually constructed on the other hand is a plurality that does not originate from a unity. The power of the

7 That union need not be older than the ninth century, and it is possible that the same republican movement which led to the downfall of the old royal house of the Acropolis, led to the synoecism of Attica. The political union of a country demands a system of organization; and the statesmen who united Attica sought their method of organization from one of those cities of Ionia, which Athens came to look upon as her own daughters. All the inhabitants were distributed into four tribes, which were borrowed from Miletus. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 170.

－34－ EUPATRID ATHENS gentilician patriarch is absolute because authority is not contractually constructed. But there was one basileus for each village in archaic Greece; since the basileus was a consanguineal property, one basileus could not have genetic primacy in distinct settlements. Athens became the capital of Attica by a progression of voluntary amalgamations of two villages into one. Several of the aristoi had been basileis prior to unification of the clans. ... The internal competition within the aristocracy would destabilize the authority of the basileus, since several of the aristoi would claim divine descent equal to that of the basileus. Patriarchal authority was a natural product of kinship society; the boastfulness of the warlords in the Iliad evidence that power was personally rather than officially possessed. When synoekismos brought forth conflicting claims to authority, aristoi had no recourse but to demonstrate personal primacy, in things like battle.8 Personal competition resulting from conflicting claims to authority was a profound weakness of the basileia; boastfulness suggests that the individual had to demonstrate his capacity to perform the role. If inadequate individuals assume leadership, society will collapse; it is imperative for some device to plant adequately talented individuals in leadership. But the basileia was a hereditary monarchy; how could such a device exist? Inheritance cannot help but disregard ability to the degree that it insists on genetic purity; how could lineage continue to be valued over ability? The notion of ability conflicted not only with genetic succession, but also with would have conflicted with xenophobia; until a capacity to identify with non-relatives became possible, only succession by a close relative would signify the perpetuation of the group. If not contract, then a priesthood, being impersonal,

8 The Iliad looks back to an idealized Dark Age of meritocracy where the best warrior is acknowledged as worthy of the best prizes and highest status in a process conceived as ultimately controlled by the community of fellow warriors (“the sons of the Achaians”). Cf. Rose, Peter W.; "Class," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 475.

－35－ D. Morgan Pierce could have more accurately winnowed the individuals whom God loved. Hellenic authority was neither hieratic nor contractually constructed. Patrimonialism, being consanguineal, was the optimal precaution against defection; the family of the Basileus manages in the instance of personal inadequacy, and the familial organization around the basileus should sustain solidarity. Hellenic preference for the hereditary monarch signifies that the greatest jeopardy of government was disaggregation. Though essential to patrimonialism, consanguineal delegation eventually disintegrates the underlying patriarchy. Descent from Zeus subtly subverted the priority of genealogical precedence. A nomadic tribe is economically close to egalitarianism; its emphasis on birth is the only viable distinction. Class prestige was an overwhelmingly powerful reason for the viability of religion. Lineage was the sole criterion by which a Greek could assert preeminence.9 The ultimate qualification for a person’s noble status was his lineage from a god or hero; noble status was due not to great land ownership, or achievement, or leadership, but to being the great great grandson of Zeus, etc. If in the train of synoekismos various aristocratic families claimed status of basileus and resorted to the strongest possible authority, descent from Zeus, only two solutions followed. Either descent from Zeus might be disqualified, advocating another standard to replace it, or, as the Eupatridae priests had resolved it, to distinguish Zeus into several persons; Zeus of Athens, Zeus of Aegenita, etc. This was ultimately absurd not because all of these Zeuses resolved into only one Zeus; one could not argue that my Zeus Athena is bigger than your Zeus Aeginita and insist that both Zeuses are one and the same Zeus. However, by coining a patronymic Zeus it was possible to preserve the authority of God, although each patronymic

9 Since there were no hereditary titles in ancient Greece, aristocrats could identify themselves only on the basis of lineage; but landed wealth was also an important requirement. Seventh century archons at Athens were chosen on birth and wealth. Cf. Starr, C.G.; Economic and Social Conditions in the Greek World, in The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries B.C., edited by Boardman, John, F.B.A., and Hammond, N.G.L., F.B.A., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.438.

－36－ EUPATRID ATHENS

Zeus would oddly favor his own locality over the locality of another patronymic Zeus. Institution of office, in the place of consanguineal inheritance, might have deterred this type of splintering. Personal appointment of relatives sustains fidelity but limits the scope of those eligible; official appointment is more likely to generate perfidy, but provides competent selection. If representation, such as a priesthood, does not suffice to sustain cohesion, nobility may consolidate the unresponsive fragment as an independent entity, but reproduce in that fragment the original paradigm of representation; this was the pattern of Greek colonization, as in the case of Aeginita. Decentralization ensues, absent forces that counteract the secondary autonomy; one might notice that the Peloponnesian War started from a dispute between Athens and one of the colonies she founded.10 Demographic

10 Weber distinguished patrimonialism and feudalism as the predominant types of political regime in preindustrial civilized societies. Patrimonialism adapts an earlier, simpler form of patriarchal authority within the household to the conditions of larger empires. Under it, government offices originate in the ruler’s own household. This continues to provide the model even where the official function has little connection with the household. For example, the cavalry commander is often given a title, like “marshal,” which originally denoted supervision of the ruler’s stables. Similarly the patrimonial ruler shows a preference for appointing members of his own household, kinsmen or dependents, as government officers. The ensuing rule is autocratic: The ruler’s authoritative commands assign rights and duties to other persons and households. Sometimes associations of persons and households are designated by the ruler as collectively responsible for rights and duties. By contrast, feudalism expresses a contract between near equals. Independent, aristocratic warriors freely agree to exchange rights and duties. The contract assigns one of the parties over all political rule, but he is restrained by the terms of the contract and he is no autocrat. Weber distinguishes these two forms of rule as ideal types and then proceeds in his characteristic fashion to elaborate the logical consequences and subdivisions of each. But he also notes that in reality ideal types become blurred and transform one into the other. In particular he acknowledged the logistical impossibility in pre-industrial conditions of a “pure” patrimonialism. The extension of patrimonial rule necessarily decentralizes and sets in motion a continuous struggle between the ruler and his agents, now become local notables with an autonomous power base. Cf. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.171.

－37－ D. Morgan Pierce growth had not destabilized the Pharaoh or the Mesopotamian kings; why should the polis have been incompatible with the basileia? The hierarchical nature of priesthood could have prevented degeneration of the basileia, if only the priests had formed a collegial organization. The sole legitimacy of the basileus was conformity to kinship structure; during the ethné stage, the subjects were exclusively relatives in an extended family that composed the village. Legitimate autocracy could not survive the merging of villages in synoekismos; the genetic structure of kinship could have supported the basileus only if (1) the population of the other village were in the same blood-lineage or (2) if the new population were segregated and subjugated. Neither was the case; the two populations of synoekismos had the same rights. Hegemony, in which the population of the other villages was segregated, was a third solution. Oriental society never faced this problem. By replacing kinship with bureaucracy, genealogical inconsistencies could not disrupt the eligibility of an individual to priesthood or nobility. Whereas inheritance elided proof of ability, office could specify abilities. A pharaoh-like monarch could maintain autocracy over a population too large for personal representation. The oriental societies had happily supplanted kinship with office. Unlike hereditary selection, office can compel proof of ability at every new generation. But the Hellenic basileus consolidated with other monarchs who were also heads of clans on a genetic paradigm, resulting in confusions of priority because office had not displaced kinship precedence. Social structure would dissolve without reference to divine ancestry; claims to divine lineage generated contradiction. The members of the oligarchy claimed descent from Zeus, Apollo, etc. to substantiate their priority to rule. Other aristocrats who were not part of the inner circle disputed the divine descent, and became prototypes of those who would agitate for tyranny or democracy.11 Diversity of

11 A narrow group of wealthy men and women developed an "elitist" ideology, claiming special power through privileged links to the gods, the past, and the rulers of the East. "Middling" aristocrats who grounded authority in the local community resisted them at

－38－ EUPATRID ATHENS blood-lines challenged the supremacy of the clan to which the basileus belonged; the number of basileis gradually condensed. Reduction of the number of basileis could ensue neither by a claim of genetic precedence of one basileus over another, nor by the eschewal of the genetic principle. The non-consanguineal presidency of one basileus over several communities would suggest some quid pro quo, of which the land grant seems to have been the only possibility, suggesting a process of land transaction, perhaps some limited form of infeudation, in which several aristoi received their positions through homage to a basileus. But the legitimacy of the concept of basileus was an immediate product of the kinship social structure, not civil government (i.e. the basileus did not develop from homage: exchange of loyalty for a land-grant). Genetic legitimacy was tightly connected to land possession. The kinship system distributed land allotments to each clan member. Land ownership was a criterion of membership in a clan; to be a clan member was a criterion of land ownership. Since the coalescence of population did not engender bureaucracy, aristocracy gradually supplanted the basileus.12 In this interval the archaic Eupatrid monarchy had tried to restore its preeminence by refurbishing religious authority; it imitated the splendor of the oriental courts, but inherent features of Greek culture defeated all points, representing elitists as would-be tyrants. Cf. Morris, Ian; "Early Iron Age Greece," It hardly made sense for the members of the upper classes to invest part of their wealth in large-scale enterprises for commercial production: the chances of obtaining high returns from craft-based production were clearly lower than in agriculture or in money lending. Cf. Morris, Ian; Early Iron Age Greece, Ch.8, in Scheidel, Walter, Morris, Ian, and Saller, Richard; The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.238. 12 Henceforth the Greek king shared power not only with his lieges but also with members of great clans, like himself owning castles and lands, living in the same city, and serving in war at their own costs. These clans therefore had the right to advise the King and Council, share in the booty, and participate in the exercise of political authority over the masses. Hence the ancient aristocracy of the royal council became more important in Greece, whereas in the Near East it disappeared and was replaced by bureaucrats and priests. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p. 160

－39－ D. Morgan Pierce the attempt. Divine lineage successfully obliged the laos (people) to exalt and serve the aristoi who claimed direct descent, thus forming a structure similar to that of the earliest oriental societies. Divine genealogy entrenched the primacy of the aristoi, as emphasized through funeral rites etc. that consumed great amounts of wealth.13 However, monarchy lacked the wealth to maintain the pretense, and forbearance from bureaucracy on the model of the oriental priesthood favored persistent aristocratic rivalry instead of a healthy development towards taxation.14 Food is the most powerful device for control of a population. Oriental societies had developed a continuous system of redistribution from primitive village society that grew to encompass the entire population of the Egyptian state. What conditions facilitated the continuance of redistribution in the Egyptian state, although the redistribution that had given organization to the primitive Greek ethné society failed to survive the transition from Greek ethné society to the polis? Overpopulation does not account for discontinuation of redistribution in Greece, for it had continued within the much larger population growth of the Egyptian state. How could alimentary redistribution have been overlooked as a possible control of polis society?

13 At the same time we find significant material evidence of the worship of actual or imagined Mycenaean shrines of heroes claimed as legitimating ancestors of the self- styled aristoi. This would entail an ideological juggling act that in various forms will characterize the first of the archaic period: on the one hand, asserting through religion the ties that bind the poorest peasant to the richest landowner; on the other, insisting on the genealogically based superiority and therefore “legitimacy” of the ruling elite. Forgoing displays of wealth in burials in the interest of communal solidarity would then be balanced by cult rituals that affirm the special links with divinity of the “best” families. Cf. Rose, Peter W.; "Class," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 474. 14 The economic decline of Greek monarchy was made manifest by the disappearance of Near Eastern magnificence. This meant that Kings' revenues could not develop into royal bureaucracies, and so the first steps towards formation of large states were never taken. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p.159.

－40－ EUPATRID ATHENS

The monumentalism of oriental courts derived from the conception of the king as a god-king; universal taxation developed without interruption from a religious impulse to self-prostration before the god. It was the continuous mutation of religious sacrifice into taxation, uninterruptedly administered by a priesthood, that achieved popular cooperation. The aesthenic Hellenic priest class could not counter the romanticism that the aristocracy attributed to piracy, which perhaps infused the bawdy, comical description the Greeks made of their gods. A predominant priest class might have portrayed the gods as boringly august as in the oriental societies.15 The Greek quality of being a great warrior, like Agamemnon, was not divine, merely human. While the early Basileia may have been modest, for instance limitation to temporary leadership in battle, the later pretension of divinity might have been repugnant to the instincts which composed the formation of the basileia; grandeur would not impress unless its underpinning derived from the ethnic instincts of the laos. Unless there had been a very strong control over distribution of food, the laos could not have been persuaded from the divinity of the basileus to sacrifice one's last penny in taxation for his divine glory. The Hellenic population never developed the oriental posture of prostrate dependence on the basileus. Formation of a state, in itself distasteful to archaic Greek values, could not have developed without an elaborate system of taxation apparently reliant upon irrigation- dependent land.16 The Hellenic laos violently bridled against excessive taxation: it is possibly significant that the same culture that diminished the gods to human

15 In the Hellenic world of the ninth and eighth centuries powerful priesthoods were lacking, and the kings were usually set aside as the machinery of the polis was consolidated. The galvanizing factor, accordingly, in economic growth was produced by the upper classes as a whole. Overseas contacts were stimulated by the desires of this group for foreign goods; the search for disposable wealth was much intensified. Booty gained by war and piracy continued to be an important source, but new avenues were opened. Cf. Starr, C.G.; Economic and Social Conditions in the Greek World, in The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries B.C., edited by Boardman, John, F.B.A., and Hammond, N.G.L., F.B.A., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.421. 16 The economic decline of Greek monarchy was made manifest by the disappearance of

－41－ D. Morgan Pierce proportions was the same culture that hated taxation, a concept of religious origin. Pretentiousness that encroached on the tradition of smallholding would have incited stasis between the laos and aristocracy. Grandeur was at a disadvantage because it was not an autochthonous value. It was distasteful to observe the basileus enhanced in semi-divine magnificence with the subliminal suggestion that his subjects were slaves. Without irrigation there was no device to constrain the demos with taxation. Revenue was insufficient for the pretense of oriental splendor or for an exacting bureaucracy.17 The exorbitantly expensive funerals were substituted with cult rituals. If not derogation of aristocracy, what was the point of the change? The rituals equally promulgated the direct lineage between the gods and the aristoi. Expenditure shifted from private to public wealth. Private expenditure on funerals consolidated aristocrats and asserted legitimate superiority over the laos; a shift to public expenditure prioritized solidarity of the whole population. It was a compromise that appeased the aristoi by its fidelity to their claim of divine lineage.

....SYNOEKISMOS

How could synoekismos or the like have ensued? The basileus was an amalgamating motor whose vitality diminished in proportion to the energy it expended on amalgamation. The primacy of the basileus deteriorated as rural society unified in the polis, which did not originate from the requirements of irrigation, but from consolidation of nobility out of disparate clans. The capacity

Near Eastern magnificence. This meant that Kings' revenues could not develop into royal bureaucracies, and so the first steps towards formation of large states were never taken. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p. 159 17 The economic decline of Greek monarchy was made manifest by the disappearance of Near Eastern magnificence. This meant that Kings' revenues could not develop into royal bureaucracies, and so the first steps towards formation of large states were never taken. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p.159.

－42－ EUPATRID ATHENS of different clans to join in common habitation is itself a surprising mystery. Centralization in a consolidated aristocracy produced military, judicial, and economic functions that primarily benefitted the aristoi. The mere fact of virtually doubling a population must have entailed a demotion of the social ranking of the aristoi, since an aristos in the ethné society must either have been a basileus or a close relative of one. The polis government, inclusive of the basileus, had from inception been aristocratic. What might have been the advantages that attracted the aristoi to the formation of a polis? The polis was not a village on a riverside whose population absent-mindedly increased; it could result only from decision. Could the aristoi have Been able to foresee emergent privileges that the polis would generate? How might society as a whole have been able to discern that a future polis-society might improve over the heretofore ethné organization? 18 The nobility had been carefully organized by kinship priority before polis organization and by subordination under a metropolitan basileus. The aristoi pre-existed the basileus, they were not creatures of the basileus. The temporal priority of the nobility to the divine lineage of the basileus disrupted the natural organization of precedence: genetic unity. A village basileus could not account for his demotion to a noble by genetic subordination, because synoekismos had broken the unity of the genetic tree, by which subordination could be measurable. If the pretender's genealogy did not secure a place in royal heritage, there was no longer a cogent ground to honor rights given from consanguinity. It initially appears that the nobility could not have accepted non-genealogical subordination. The basileus

18 States exist because they are functional for social life beyond a fairly simple level. It is more relevant to the present issue that they provide something that is useful to the aristocratic class. This is territorial centralization. A number of activities, such as judicial rule, law making and enforcement, military organization, and economic redistribution, were usually more efficiently performed at this level of historical development if centralized. This central place is the state. Thus any autonomous power that the state can acquire derives from its ability to exploit its centrality. Cf. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.170.

－43－ D. Morgan Pierce however did not gain his status by violence, and synoekismos proceeded peacefully. The nobility endorsed only genetic priority, and the inability of any individual to qualify by genetic precedence rendered the tradition of royal succession inoperable. Greek territory did not consolidate from wars of land annexation, apart from the Spartan conquest of Messenia. How, then, did basileis of different clans consent to the ascendancy of fewer basileis and a general demotion of precedence for most? War had induced the nobility, once the village basileis, to consent to a bastardized system of kinship. The village aristoi could either unify under a basileus, or risk absorption into the hegemony of a rival polity. Synoekismos did not occur in the Ionian-Aegean poleis, although these carried the identical ethnic tribal culture; they were islands, and therefore naturally protected from hegemony. War in the period of polis-formation had given the basileus priority over the aristocratic elements, for the aristoi could not have survived the belligerence except by unification under the basileus. Accordingly, the basileus resulting from synoekismos could not persist after hegemonic threat had desisted. It was aristocracy, not a commercial class or the laos, that subsequently expedited demotion of the basileus. The land redistribution transpiring in the process of synoekismos vitiated traditional land transmission through cognate inheritance. The dignity of the basileus depended on inheritance by blood-relation. The aristoi of synoekismos were however not relatives; lineage could not legitimate property that was not founded upon blood-line. The basileus being the linchpin of legitimate inheritance, he would have to disappear if his authority over legitimate land-transfer should be disregarded. The types of land-transfer between non- cognate aristoi amounted to devastating detraction of genealogical inheritance and the dignity of the basileus. The decline of cognate inheritance amounted to the replacement of the basileus with aristocracy. But the order of inheritance according to blood line did not alter. Heritability depended on blood-relation, and the non- cognate land transfers of the aristoi persisted. Cognate inheritance persisted because the stability of a polity depended on heritability; the "office" of basileus

－44－ EUPATRID ATHENS was permanently removed from aristoi who were equally as strong as the basileus, because inheritance continued through natural lineage. This however engendered the chief instability of the basileus. Exactly because of non-cognate land exchange, the heritability of the basileia could not remain indifferent to personal ability; aristocratic families might challenge the right to monarchy on the ground of competence.19 But the counteractive force of inheritance was an equally strong and universal interest, on which the integrity of the polity depended; if one family managed to usurp the basileia, it would, inconsistently, revert to the permanent possession of the office on the ground of lineage. The land transfers ingredient in synoekismos disrupted transmission through lineage. Given that synoekismos threatened inheritance by bloodline, what conditions could have overborne the reluctance of independent Greek villages to merge? In the 7th century BC, an archaic oligarchy ruling through a degenerated basileia still depended on reference, deeply embedded in the kinship organization, to the hereditary right of the basileus, in which an endogamous family formed a hereditary government possessed of all power. Political office had previously rotated within the ruling family, although other aristocratic families had been allowed participation in order to achieve broader support. The royal family monopolized the best land of the polis, and, when new forms of wealth emerged, they typically controlled external trade, taxed commercial exchange and taxed export goods.

19 Above the demos were those it entrusted with political counsel, military command, and the administration of justice. In the Homeric epics it is clear that the authority of the basileis is “achieved” rather than “ascribed.” That is, authority derives not from the office one holds but from one’s own charisma and ability to persuade, manifested through the demonstration of military prowess and conspicuous generosity. Typically, achieved statuses are highly unstable and the hereditary transmission of such authority is seldom guaranteed. Cf. Hall, Jonathan F.; "Polis, Community, and Ethnic Identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 48.

－45－ D. Morgan Pierce

Commercial practices might have been distasteful to them, and the motive might not have been wealth, but if they could not extirpate commercial wealth, they could at least preempt challenges to their ascendancy by tapping its surplus.20 Other aristocratic families had to feel persuaded that the ruling endogamy was rightfully governing according to kinship order. This was a confusion of two orders, in that the polis organization would shortly begin to supplant kinship, but in the incipient formation of the polis, kinship order was the only imaginable ground. Prior to office-holding a multiplicity of functions developed from personal appointment, which however rapidly concentrated power in one person. The basileus prior to the polis had a Boulé (Council), composed of aristoi.21 The Boulé was thus composed of the heads of clans who did not continue as village basileis; it was thus ordered politically rather than genetically, to reconcile and equalize power among the nobles. Office-holding mitigated the rivalry for social position between several families of comparable power. Because centralization through irrigation did not apply to Greece, invention of office-holding came too late to preserve monarchical structure. The transitional formation of the Boulé was not an

20 The epoch of archaic tyranny began with the rule of Cypselus over Corinth. In 660 he overthrew the ruling Bacchiads and assumed sole power. The Bacchiads formed a hereditary, closed aristocracy who sought to preserve their monopoly of power through endogamy. They owned the best land in the territory of Corinth. According to Strabo, they controlled foreign trade and imposed fees both on the exchange of goods and the export of agricultural products. The Bacchiads had ruled collectively by monopolizing all political privileges and rotating the highest political office annually among members of their group. Obviously, there were other families as well who in a broad sense belonged to an elite upper class. Many of them apparently were of pre-Dorian origin. Cf. Stein-Höleskamp, Elke; "The Tyrants," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 102. 21 The Boule or Council was the political organization through which the nobles cried out, at Athens as elsewhere, for the gradual abolition of monarchy. This council of Elders, a part as we saw of the Aryan inheritance of the Greeks- came afterwards to be called at Athens the Council of the Areopagus, to distinguish it from other councils of later growth. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 172.

－46－ EUPATRID ATHENS institution of office, like the Egyptian priests, but more like a group of contractual retainers. The holder of an office exerts power by the rules constituting his office, rather than by personal attractiveness, whereas holders of appointment depend on charisma. As the distinction between office and kinship did not put a similar barrier between nobility and basileus, the Hellenic nobility were not beholden to the lineal transmission from basileus to his progeny. His contenders had previously been basileis, and had also claimed direct lineage for Zeus, inadvertently destroying the utility of lineage. The aristoi had been the social leaders in the Dark Ages, between the collapse of Mycenaean civilization and the rise of the polis; they were the descendants of the gods, the passage of power was hereditary, and aristocracy conformed to kinship. It was a period of meritocracy but not of office. Meritocracy originated in Greece; why had this concept developed only in Greece? Office is legally regulated, whereas merit is asserted individualistically. What forces had suppressed prior germination in the Orient? The Greek meritocracy was a hybrid of lineage and ability; the Greek boasted of his ability, but he always associated it with his lineage. Possibly the stronger social regimentation necessary in an oriental society precluded the value of self-advertisement ingredient in meritocracy. In place of office, which originated in the orient, meritocracy was the ordering principle of the social hierarchy at the root of the Greek version of redistribution. The basileus was the receiver of plunder from predation, but his position depended on its subsequent distribution to the demos. More succinctly, the Greeks suffered a king only because his aggressiveness or other preeminence was instrumental to a greater common good. This custom is the root of the liturgy that emerged centuries later; the wealthy man was tolerated, but under obligation to use his wealth for the common good. Meritocracy metamorphosed into timocracy, in which the aristos no longer has opportunity or obligation to exhibit himself in battle, but keeps his fortunate position according to the degree of his grandiose generosity; honor shifted from battle valor to largesse. The dominant feature, honor, was common to both values, but the attribution of

－47－ D. Morgan Pierce honor changed when the conditions of common benefit changed. Upon emergence of a new circumstance the previous custom persists, but an element that has become unremunerative recedes before a new element that satisfies current need. Since nobility did not first exist by appointment, the basileus was never stronger than the collective power of the nobility. The archaic military was in this limited respect feudalistic; the lieges and nobles occupied forts and lands independently, paying their own military expenses when they supported the basileus in war. The basileus, being strongly in their debt, had to allow participation in royal court (Boulé) and shares in war booty; this was an abrupt departure from the customs of consanguinity. In the oriental theocracies, in which nobility was official rather than feudalistic, the nobility shared in, rather than shared with, the king; they became a hierarchic priest class. Embodiment of the king or Pharaoh as the apex of the hierarchic priest class protected the positions of the priest- nobility better than if there were no Pharaoh, because they existed as such by royal appointment. The priest class never became a political magnitude in Greece because the nobility could maintain prerogatives better as war lords. The relative independence of nobility underlay the diminution of the basileus qua chief priest. A Boulé of near-equals developed in the Greek monarchical structure, whereas the Egyptian priesthood changed into a bureaucracy; the Greek nobility always threatened to usurp the basileus, whereas the Egyptian priests, instead of usurping, surreptitiously made the pharaoh a puppet.22 The near equality of war lords with the basileus was a result of the religious weakness of the basileus, providing a step in the direction of the idea of democracy, whereas

22 Henceforth the Greek king shared power not only with his lieges but also with members of great clans, like himself owning castles and lands, living in the same city, and serving in war at their own costs. These clans therefore had the right to advise the King and Council, share in the booty, and participate in the exercise of political authority over the masses. Hence the ancient aristocracy of the royal council became more important in Greece, whereas in the Near East it disappeared and was replaced by bureaucrats and priests. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p.160.

－48－ EUPATRID ATHENS the Egyptian priests accumulated their power more effectively in their pretension as devout servants of the pharaoh. Unlike Zeus on Mount Olympus, the basileus could not beat the nobility in a tug of war. An embracing religion neither endowed the aristocrats with their nobility nor obligated them to serve the basileus. The preeminence of a basileia could never extend over the communities of the aristoi nearly as strongly as in its paradigm: control over the blood-related subjects of its own community.23 Aristocracy defected from the basileus. Internal stress subsided when, instead of a basileus, the aristocrats of different tribes, all of whom claimed divine descent, jointly conducted government.24 Indispensable dependence on the overlords to rule the population raised the vulnerability of the basileus; the overlord would naturally rule the part of the population in proxy for the basileus that had been his own clan. Kinship priority had not been replaced by office. In important contrast with bureaucracy, overlords retained kinship positions as rulers of their own clans.25 In the nomadic period the prime economic value of livestock enabled

23 Gradually the nobles increased in power although the Kings were so near to them, and finally they became equals in social stature to the kings themselves, the royal clan, if it survived, being reduced to the rank of other aristocratic families. Cf. Heichelheim, Fritz; An Ancient Economic History, Volume 1, A.W. Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., Leiden 1958, p.279. 24 Moreover, in a city those who were ill-pleased with the king’s rule were more tempted to murmur together, and were able more easily to conspire. Considerations like these may help us to imagine how it came about that throughout the greater part of Greece in the eight century the monarchies were declining and disappearing, republics were taking their place. Where the monarchy was abolished, the government passed into the hands of those who had done away with it, the noble families of the state. The distinction of the nobles from the rest of the people is, as we have seen, an ultimate fact with which we have to start. When the nobles assume the government and become the rulers, an aristocratic republic arises. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 74. 25 One has to imagine a gradual process in which the inheritance of wealth and status by warriors, bigmen or chiefs eventually consolidates more and more power in fewer hands, which in turn depend more and more on the support of allied lesser chiefs to maintain domination over a peasant majority. The relative security achieved over time would

－49－ D. Morgan Pierce the basileus to control his lieges with gift-giving. Livestock accumulation would not be able to unbalance power relations; a basileus could replenish livestock he lost. Synoekismos however occurred during the transition from pastoralism to agriculture, in which land possession became the principle of wealth. The basileis and nobility had continued to preserve cohesion by an elaborate ritual of gift-giving and guest-friendship. Land as a basis of wealth was treacherous; the landholder could not replenish himself with subsequent land-acquisition. The land-grant would make the overlord stronger and the basileus weaker. It is therefore remarkable that synoekismos never motivated territorial expansion; the land-holder ought to have come across the idea of replenishing landed property with territorial conquest. The Boulé under the basileus was the source of aristocratic ascendancy. Members of the Boulé, being nearly equal in power with a basileus, would naturally seek power commensurate with their relative landholdings. Aristocratic rivalry under the basileus had a peculiar outcome. Instead of overthrowing the basileus and replacing him with another one, the basileus was demoted and his power was shared. The subsequent form of the basileus was not primary holder of power, but a holder of honor with relatively little power. The religious aspect of the basileus ought to have been the greatest power, but it was not. It was unsafe to abolish seem to have encouraged a gradual but decisive shift in the mix of animal husbandry and agriculture in favor of agriculture, which lead to an overall increase in the level of surplus produce by the society. The Homeric poems speak of many raids to steal cattle but no wars over the possession of land, and it is precisely in the latter half of the eighth century that we first hear of such wars. Since the primary source of value in an increasingly agricultural society is land, the donation of land by the chiefs to their most crucial supporters eventually puts them on a more and more equal footing with those supporters, who demand an equal share in power. The result is the system of alternating annual magistracies shared out among an elite. But at the same time the institution of citizenship is somehow tied to a notion of some sort of ownership of what at that time constituted at least the minimum amount of land (a kleros- literally an allotment) to sustain a family. Cf. Rose, Peter W.; "Class," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 473.

－50－ EUPATRID ATHENS the basileus; some force in the social structure counteracted both extinction of the basileus and his replacement with another of the same power. The award of supreme religious authority gave the basileus the appearance of great power, but in reality he had none. The monarchic rule of the basileus covertly changed into an oligarchic rule, with rotation and other forms of power sharing. Social classes could not begin to supplant kinship until rural communities had coalesced into poleis in the 8th century, to the disadvantage of internal identity-formation (religion), but to the advantage of defense against neighboring nascent poleis. The warrior was the aristos; the density of war during polis-formation made warriors the prime social component. Dominance arising from martial indispensability made the early polis society more feudalistic than the society of the basileus prior to the polis. The appearance of the archonship immediately succeeding the monarchy of the basileus signifies that the aristocracy, not a commercial class nor the laos, subverted the basileus. An authentic aristocracy, based on kinship, had failed under the basileus and was about to fail a second time as the stationary community was changing into a polis. Why? Kinship persisted beyond the basileus in the form of clan rivalry in the aristocratic families. The idea of a basileus was strong enough to stimulate internecine rivalry, but too weak to resolve into a monarch. Aristocracy inherited what had been royal functions, but the instability arising from internal hostility created vulnerability to smallholding agriculture. The inveterate acculturation to redistribution may have made the demos initially tolerant of aristocratic land accumulation. The promachoi customarily received the wealth from piracy, predation, etc., but also distributed it. Synoekismos, internecine war, mixture with sedentary aliens and territorial definition may have depreciated the idea of redistribution within the concept of private property, because unequal distribution of wealth recommended unequal distribution of political rights. The relative security of great land-holding allowed apathy towards agricultural improvement and smallholders. Though plantation labor may have depended on technological

－51－ D. Morgan Pierce improvement and labor coordination, neither coordinated with organization of the chattel-slave mentality.26 This configuration promoted alimentary supplementation from commerce in the place of agricultural intensification.27 The demotion of the basileus removed from aristocracy a unifying power by which rivalry was subdued.28 Aristocratic rivalry was more ferocious than in oriental society because the prior power of the Basileus was inferior to that of the oriental potentates. Oriental aristocracy was composed of a harmonious unity with kings and pharaohs; the absolute genetic impossibility for a priest or noble to become Pharaoh effectively reduced palace rivalry. A natural force such as irrigation

26 Thus we are told that it was impossible to use slaves for large-scale grain cultivation, because of its high labor intensity and xxx Antiquity. Indeed, large-scale use of slave labor was in general really profitable only when the land was fertile and the market price of slaves was low. Hence slave labor was normally xxx not used for extensive agriculture. Further, a still more important consequence, this characteristic of slave labor injured both technological advance and also that precise coordination of differentiated operations which constitutes-rather than simply the number of workers involved-the essential characteristics of modern industrial production. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p. 55. 27 In most periods they were absentee urban-dwellers, who left the management and operation of their estates either to tenants or to slaves and slave bailiffs. In either case their psychology was that of the rentier, and hence neither their material circumstances nor their attitudes were favorable to innovation. Cf. Finley, M. I.; Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, Viking Press, New York,1982, p.188. 28 The Homeric King still had formed a certain focus for society, similar to the kings of the Ancient Orient, in spite of the reduced extent of his power and crown possessions. The King could interfere in the passing of laws although that was mainly a prerogative of the people. But the nobles began to increase in power and to weaken further the few central and traditional state institutions which still remained. The rise of the aristocracy to the supreme power brought often real destruction and chaos to the state, finally the nobles controlling everything both theoretically and in fact. All the literary sources for this time agree on this point, Hesiod, the lyric poets, and the historians. Thus came the end of the economic system of the primitive Greek states. Individual and egotistical use of the situation by competing noble clans followed. Cf. Heichelheim, Fritz; An Ancient Economic History, Volume 1, A.W. Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., Leiden 1958, p.281.

－52－ EUPATRID ATHENS would have irresistibly stacked the Hellenic aristoi into a rational hierarchy of ordinate positions such as governors in a centralized monarchy.29 The equality and independence of the aristoi destabilized the sovereignty that the prior basileia had achieved; uneven distribution of the objective power within the aristocracy encouraged one aristocratic clan to overpower another. The aristoi had attempted to establish their priority by exotic possessions, extensive landholding, and exorbitant funeral ceremonies, and thereby to stabilize ascendancy with respect to each other. At the apogee of the basileus, government proceeded by consensus; the basileus had to accommodate a Boulé. Following Solon, legislation became the prerogative of the demos (Ekklesia), quite opposite to oriental society. Nothing had broken the original clan-structure with which the polis had begun. The segregation of the clans living in the same polis impelled egotistical struggles for power. The aristoi appealed to the prior and more powerful solidarity of their segregated clan, while abortive attempts to achieve predominance would result in disaggregation of the clans and dissolution of the polis. This circumstance was due to failure upon inception of the polis to have dissolved the separate clans by merging them in the same residence. In consequence the demos retained stronger faith and loyalty to their clans than to their polis. Gentilician (kinship) organization confined power to aristoi who made alliances, marriages, and compromises to distribute amongst themselves the apposite offices. Aristocratic leadership of the kinship groups of gene and phratries assembled the demos behind the proposals of the leading family. Strife thus located between rather than within the assembled clans. Gentilician organization of conflict made any noble family that had opposed the configuration that eventually took shape vulnerable

29 The economic surplus of the ancient city-and this applies to the Near East as well as to the archaic polis of the Mediterranean lands-always had its original basis in the rents which the landed princes and noble clans derived from their estates and from levies on their dependants. Cf. Weber, Max; The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, Verso, London, 1988, p. 48.

－53－ D. Morgan Pierce to persecution by the family that occupied government. Instability resulting from aristocratic stasis could not terminate because one group that sought to displace another group from ascendancy still needed the group it replaced to aid in its own claim to priority; no group could cleanly disassociate itself from the other group without losing every chance of prevalence.

OFFICE

The prima facie motivation for this alteration was replacement of royal with aristocratic power, but the substantive change was replacement of personal rule with the institution of office. Genetic tribal organization failed when kinship relations became scrambled, within which three factors motivated the peculiar transformation of the basileus. First, taxation or other sources of revenue necessary for a polis would fail if revenue collection ceased to be relatively indiscernible from the foregoing practice. Second, the indispensable organization of armies entailed a degree of willingness from those conscripted. War had always been conducted in the order of kinship; when the clans organized in the polis, kinship military organization was not disbanded. Consequently the aristoi, as the former leaders of the military clans, were still necessary in order to achieve popular cooperation. The basileus was still necessary for cohesion between clans; abolition of the basileus risked dissolution of clan unity back into separate clan autonomies. Third, personal appointment presupposes direct knowledge of the candidate; a basileus in charge of a much larger and alien population would not have the cognitive capacity for personal appointment. Delegation of royal powers to the aristocrats was necessary to maintain cohesion of an excessively large population. Civic law seems to have stabilized the basileus, but the conditionality imported by civic law debilitated the basileia. More stable would have been an advanced evolutionary form of ascribed status immune to challenge. Irregular struggle to become basileus had been too ruinous. If the basileia were depotentiated, and if contestants agreed to rotate the office for fixed periods, the ambition to become

－54－ EUPATRID ATHENS basileus would become less reckless. The idea of rotation shifted society from a tribal to a civic structure. The instatement of the basileus was no longer due to personal prestige but to a stable pattern of office-holding. Harmony among the rivalrous aristoi in Athens had percolated from bureaucratic organization. Rotation of office was equivalent to a diachronic equality that resolved strife. Necessarily there would be inequality between holders and contenders if there were fewer offices than candidates; rotation had explosive potential in an early society in which every candidate's claim was passionately based upon clan membership. If however occupancy frequently changed, then equality would neutralize every moment of inequality; it was a step towards atrophy of kinship. The divergence of rotation from the Spartan tactic engendered the realization that government might be distributed to wider numbers of people.30 The basileia was kept in permanency, but not the individual invested with the office. The basileia might as easily have been abolished; the survival of the basileus and division of nine archons exhibits the persistence of the great power of kinship and separate clan identities. On the contrary, oligarchic government in the place of the basileus exhibited the prevalence of polis unity despite division of power. Survival of this distribution would depend on whether the individual aristos would identify more with outgroup aristoi or with his clan. Submergence of the basileia led to multiple leadership in government and lifelong tenure for members in the Areopagus. From 650 BC the basileus retained religious office but lost virtually all political power. Substantial power was shared

30 At a certain point, however, ascribed status became important- *meaning that emphasis was given to the office itself, rather than the person who held it. And once offices are fixed and regularly filled by a succession of candidates, one can talk of a basic administrative machinery that distinguishes states from chiefdoms or stateless societies. One indication for this shift from achieved to ascribed status may be found in references to the establishment of annually rotating, named magistracies in place of the more generic term basileis. Cf. Hall, Jonathan F.; "Polis, Community, and Ethnic Identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 49.

－55－ D. Morgan Pierce between the polemarch and the Archon.31 The invention of office multiplied the number of aristoi who might participate in government in the place of the few who had been eligible by cognate appointment. The demotion of the basileus dissipated power from one principal family to many; the prior subordination of clan- leadership changed into a distributive embodiment of power directly between the clans. In the place of kinship lineage, executive government and the Araeopagus made office available for all aristocratic families. The installation of the nine archons preserved the basileus, but he was no longer commander of the army; the polemarch (commander) was a separate appointee. The appointment of the basileus to chief priest instead of commander prevented backsliding; the decision suggests apprehension that a popular basileus might attempt to reclaim autocracy. A third archon, "the Archon," represented judiciary power. The remaining six archons, the thesmothetae, were lesser judges.32 In the 7th century, the Athenian archons were chosen according to birth, primarily, and land ownership. The Athenian stratification resulting from the earliest surplus brought about a stratification of eupatridae (aristocrats), georgoi (smallholders), and demiourgoi (artisans).33 Solon in the 6th century converted

31 The king, who had once been the head of the administration, gradually began, from about 650 B.C., to lose all political importance, retaining only his religious functions. Power was concentrated almost entirely in the hands of the polemarch and archon. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Michael; A History of the Ancient World, Volume I, p. 216 32 The rulers of the community, chosen from among the members of the ruling aristocracy, were three in number; first, the king who was also the chief priest; secondly, the polemarch who commanded the armed forces of the kingdom; and, thirdly, the archon, the representative of civil authority. With these were associated six junior archons, called thesmothetae, as judges and guardians of the law. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Michael; A History of the Ancient World, Volume I, p. 216. 33 Under the rule of the kings and the aristocracies, the free population fell into three classes: the Eupatridae or nobles; the Georgi or peasants who cultivated their own farms; and the Demiurgoi (public workers), those who lived by trade or commerce. The eupatrids originally lived in the country, and many Attic places were called from their families, such as Paeonidae or Butadae. After the synoecism, many of them came to live in the city. Cf.

－56－ EUPATRID ATHENS eligibility for office to land ownership alone.34 The alteration was subtly clever. The aristoi were the only great landholders, were fully qualified by a new and ad hoc exclusive criterion, and the only alternative source of great wealth, commerce, was categorically excluded from political participation. Thus The aristoi could think that Removal of lineage from candidacy was innocuous; they were nevertheless the only candidates who could qualify. What could have motivated this revision? The conversion from a criterion of birth to one of wealth was nevertheless momentous; it signified the moment from which wealth came to an equal footing with lineage. So soon as an emergent surplus makes possible unequal distribution, wealth rivals noble birth as a distinction of priority because of its greater utilitarian potential.35 Social structure will survive surplus if aristocracy either (1) monopolizes the surplus, or (2) destroys the new source of wealth. The second option connotes the extermination or banishment of an emergent social class. Because lineage had thus far stabilized social order, hereditary office could have continued from the tradition set by lineage. But, oddly, Athens did not institute hereditary office. The eupatridae had been the small warlords who presided over an expanse of land. They were partially responsible for the emergence of the polis; when villages coalesced from synoekismos, the aristos could not retain his prestige if he continued to live in a remote country estate. He was compelled to live as a rentier in the emergent polis because his eminence came to depended on ruling in concert with the other aristoi who had likewise given up their village rule in the favor of an enlarged synoekismos. Genealogy having been greatly contaminated

Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 174. 34 Aristotle, Athenaion Politeia, Book 3. 35 The middle of the seventh century is marked by a further constitutional change, which is the result of various social changes The aristocracy of birth is forced to widen into an aristocracy of wealth. The general causes of this change are to be found in the new economical conditions which have already been already pointed out as affecting the whole Greek world in the seventh century. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 173

－57－ D. Morgan Pierce by synoekismos, if aristoi were to convene, it could not have been on the basis of kinship. The rural great land-owners convened in the polis to become the first joint governing body: political instead of consanguineal unity. The transition from birth to wealth might have started with this small step. The wealth of the aristos came into close community and comparison with that of other aristoi. The earliest egalitarian structures of polis government reconciled the conflicting interests of members within the aristocracy, as yet unthreatened by popular demands. Hellenic aristocracy contrived an "equality" that subdued factionalism by assuaging envy. During the eupatrid period the aristoi were the natural leaders of the clans, constituted of laoi (the common people) with whom they identified in clan membership. This identity was viable because the lower members of the clan were their source of power when in rivalry with other aristocrats of the same polis, but of different clans. However, the communication of the aristoi together with the segregation of the clans induced faster consolidation of the aristocracy than the demos. The aristoi identified more in their agnate fraternity with out-group aristoi than in their cognate identity as the leaders of their own clan. Search for advantage in factional rivalry prompted identification and collusion with aristoi of other clans in preference to association with the demos of their own clan. Eupatridae identified themselves as a class apart from the demos, rather than to identify themselves as the clan leaders for the demos. It became requisite for an aristos to marry an aristocratic woman, whereas formerly the aristos had been obligated to marry a woman from his own clan. Wealth was not the motivation of identification with agnate aristoi; collaboration in the polis engendered greater utility from intimacy with out-of-clan aristoi than with the demos of their own clan. The massive intermarriage between non-clan members during the process of synoekismos, when out-of-clan marriage enabled land acquisition, accentuated divided loyalty; only aristoi intermarried. Aristoi occupied governing offices of the nascent polis by collegial bargaining; whether polis government should be aristocratic or popular was still far from having become an articulate question. The

－58－ EUPATRID ATHENS laos, or demos, had immemorially been ruled by aristoi; they could not have been alarmed that aristoi, though now of mixed lineage, ruled the polis. However, the class distinction between aristos and demotes grew sharper as distribution became uneven. The identity constituting the unity of urban aristoi pulled in the opposite direction of the identity an aristos needed to sustain unity with his clansmen. The aristocracy, having formed from the clan leadership of the original kinship organization, enjoyed its greatest power in the early period of the polis. Social order was tightly associated with religion; each aristocratic family founded its prestige upon divine lineage.36 The earliest military organization embodied the religious pretension: the military was divided into phratries according to blood-relation. Political position in the early polis strengthened the collegial identity of the higher order while the non-kinship identity of the demos remained fragmented due to peripheral distinctions such as property-holding, vocation, and residence. Conception of one's station in an office rather than membership in a clan accelerated the trend towards a cosmopolitan instead of kinship aristocracy. The aristoi, living in the polis, occupied new positions of interaction with a multitude of new people, while their demotic clansmen for the most part remained segregated with their clansmen. It seems inconsistent that whereas aristocratic leadership rested upon its spokesman-ship for its kinship group, aristocracy, its preeminence occurred

36 The ruling element in all Greek cities of the Homeric Age is the aristocracy, embodied in certain families which play the leading part in the life of each clan. Each of these families traces its descent to a single founder- a god or hero; and to one of them belongs the king who directs the clan in war and peace. Each family is subdivided into groups- phratries or brotherhoods- mainly of a military and religious nature. Next to these families comes the inhabiting general population, divided from one another by occupation, place of residence, and social position. Some members of this plebeian class or demos own land, others, as tenants or serfs, till the land of the masters, others hire out their labor to employers, and others live in the city as artisans. There are also slaves, as is natural in a society where war is constant and clans are forever shifting from place to place. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Michael; A History of the Ancient World, Volume I, p. 183.

－59－ D. Morgan Pierce following its estrangement from kinship identity. It was inconsistent that the demos should not have claimed descent from the gods while the aristocrats did, as the divine descent had been the property of the entire clan. Demotion of the common people from strong clan-inclusion guided by their aristocratic leaders, to a nondescript demos of lesser blood-claims, is possibly due to the mixture of the aristoi with the original elite of the Mycenaean civilization, and to the inter- clan marriages of aristocrats during the process of synoekismos. The aristoi of the Greek tribes had accepted and shared social rankings of the sedentary Mycenaean elite or of alien clans, instead of repressing the Myceneans like the Spartan helots. Although the blood-linkage of the aristoi with their own clan dissipated, aristoi retained the pretense of divine descent. The demos did not intermarry with the demos of other clans. Members of the previous Mycenaean civilization had no kinship with the incoming Greek tribes.37 The obfuscation of the clan lineage among the Mycenaean and Hellenic aristoi vitiated the claim of blood loyalty. Clan rivalry stimulated the cohesion of demos and aristos, but in absence of crisis clan solidarity hibernated. The laos exercised no influence on the relations between their own aristoi and those of another clan or polis. Zero- sum confrontations almost never persist if it is less costly to palliate opposition; opponents find it cheaper to diversify benefits for both rather than to eliminate the opponent. If the privileges of the embattled aristocracy could be saved by conciliating with an alien aristocracy, abbreviation of the demotic privileges would be preferable to contesting the privileges claimed by their collegial opponents. The commonality of wealth, rather than of blood, generated affinities of aristocrats

37 A considerable part of these myths was inherited by the Greeks from the and Graeco- Aegeans who preceded them. This suggests that the aristocracy of Homeric Greece was composite- consisting partly of the military chiefs who led their clans to conquer Greece, and partly of the ruling families in the conquered kingdoms. So the lower classes also belonged partly to the conquering stock, and partly to the original population of the conquered country. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Michael; A History of the Ancient World, Volume I, p. 184.

－60－ EUPATRID ATHENS with those of alien poleis, a source of identity and cooperative purpose that allowed aristocrats to segregate themselves from the kinsmen-laos, 1) on whom they depended for their strength, but 2) who forced confrontation. Inter-polis relations originated from the friendships between out-of-state aristoi. Informal associations would lead to formation of aristocratic cabals against native government, secretly supported by hostile foreign poleis.38 Aristocratic discourse split in two; the aristoi spoke as the patriarchal relatives by blood to family-like members of their own clans, and spoke as representatives of their clans to people other than those of their own clan when they acted in the polis. Decisions emerged by negotiation with out- of clan aristoi, rather than from deliberation with groups internal to their own clan. Transition to polis organization engendered a novel polarity of wealth and poverty that had not existed in the prior tribal organization; conjoined with the spread of debt-bondage, polarity portended civil strife. The exclusion of non-citizens from the constitution of the polis succeeded better in Sparta than in Athens. The ostentation of the aristoi, comprising expensive dress, symposia, exclusive religious cults, and highly expensive funeral and marriage ceremonies, had not been intended to make a conspicuous distinction between the aristoi and the demos. It was an effort of the aristoi to assert their status within the aristocracy. The rivalry for prestige between aristocratic families had inadvertently accentuated their invidious distinction from the demos. Aristotle expounded that although laborers are essential to society, they should not be

38 Aristocratic culture dominated political life and interstate relations in the archaic age. Aristocrats maintained in large measure the relations between states. Their intermarriages – one thinks of the famous wedding contest for Agariste, daughter of the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon – guest–friendships, missions to supra-local sanctuaries, and their attendance or participation in the great games all served to strengthen a network of personal relationships that could have impact in the political sphere as well. By the same token, personal obligations and personal conflicts between aristocratic members of different communities could trigger war or military intervention by their poleis. Cf. Singor, Henk; "War and International Relations," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-laoBlackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 599.

－61－ D. Morgan Pierce citizens nor be considered a part of society; their status under employment and command rendered them insufficiently independent to participate in political deliberation.39 The Athenian aristocracy had similarly to Sparta accentuated its separation from the demos, in order to consolidate the identity by which it could claim privilege. This tactic twisted badly because the Athenian aristocracy could not as easily distance itself from the remainder within its citizen-class. The Spartan underclass was a group subjugated by brute force, without common ethnicity, so that segregation caused no internal stress within the Spartan self-conception. The Athenian split between aristocracy and demos was a split within a genetically unified group rather than between aliens. The class formation of the aristocracy fueled popular resentment from the demos, who as blood relatives and clan members had legitimate claims to recognition of some form of identity equality from their aristocratic relatives. To mollify resentment, aristoi subsequently subdued ostentation.40 Athens might either have interdicted non-aristoi from emulating any aristocratic ostentation, or it could have forbidden ostentation altogether. At inception of

39 Aristotle, Politeia, Book 2. 40 Another, much more radical but generally less successful, strategy to reduce competition for wealth was to curb private expenditures: one has less incentive to accumulate wealth when one is not allowed to display it. From the late seventh century onwards, we hear of sumptuary laws limiting various uses of cloth and gold. Costly funerary practices were restricted, while maximum prices for the hire of female entertainers inhibited the display of wealth at symposia, as did the imposition of double fines for offenses committed while drunk. Radical sumptuary legislation is attributed to Periander of Corinth who, as part of a general drive against “luxury” around 600 BC, “forbade the citizens to acquire slaves and live in leisure”, and set up a board of magistrates to monitor excessive private spending- a role also associated with the Areopagus Council in Athens. A different but equally radical approach was adopted in Sparta where a sixth-century reform prescribed a life of leisure for all male citizens but imposed a uniform life style which allowed no conspicuous consumption which could reveal differences of wealth among them. Cf. Van Wees, Hans; "The Economy," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 462.

－62－ EUPATRID ATHENS the seventh century, aristocratic possession of prestigious or exotic figurines disappears, but at the same time an increase in the number of ostentatious funerals suggests Athenian deference to democratic pressure. Allowance of non- aristocratic extravagance blurred the aristocratic distinction; Athenian aristoi and the demoteis of the classical age were not conspicuously different.41 Land holding was contained and regulated, higher public office was not reserved to the aristos, and the liturgy had stifled aristocratic arrogance. Athenians of whatever social class wore the same clothing. Non-aristocrats were allowed to emulate the aristocratic funeral ceremonies etc. Why did Athens not rigidify class distinction?Instead of concealing obvious class differences, Athens might have interdicted expensive clothing, ostentatious ceremony, and office holding for non-citizens. But ostentation was outlawed for all Athenians. The Greeks did not insist on conspicuous class distinction, such as the Egyptian system of redistribution relentlessly refreshed. Egyptian wealth was distributed deliberately to entrench higher and lower classes in stationary positions; social rank predetermined a posteriori wealth distribution for the purpose of maintaining status relations. The new law seems to have been revolutionary. Traditional Athenian aristocracy maintained an apparent equality amongst themselves in places where envy would have fractured solidarity; maintenance of equality within a social class entailed conspicuous inequality with other social classes. Aristocratic equality had conversely accentuated the distinction of aristocracy from others. The potential

41 Beyond temples walls and shrines, major changes in burial practices about 700 suggest significant shifts in the social symbols by which the elite celebrated its exalted status: horse figurines disappear; wealthy graves in general seem to disappear at the same time that there is a dramatic increase in the overall number of graves. This has been interpreted either as a change in the condition of admission to burial to permit previously excluded lower-status persons or a sign of a dramatic increase in population, a phenomenon inferred already from the massive “colonization” process occurring in the same period. Cf. Rose, Peter W.; "Class," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 472.

－63－ D. Morgan Pierce envy of individual economic difference among the aristoi had been successfully blinded by their collective difference from the slave, artisan, and agricultural classes.42 The emergence of georgos, slave, and artisan as discernible classes resulted from polis formation. The population of Athens was about 120,000 at the time of Pericles (235,000 for Attica), of which 35,000 men and women were in the citizen class.43 The Athenian aristocracy was pulled in opposite directions; the ideology behind the equality of the aristocracy within pits own class was the opposite of the ideology behind universal equality. Aristocratic distance aggravated popular resentment in a time when the democratic idea had already germinated, but aristoi could not keep their privilege without asserting their distinction. Athens, unlike Sparta, had not made all of the descendants of the tribal stem into "aristoi;" the confused distinction of demos and aristocracy mutated from a fixed status society into a liquid commercial society; gradually, wealth was successfully competing against lineage in determination of social rank. Greece remained agrarian, but because it was not hieratic it could not stabilize the posteriority of wealth to social rank. Both wealth and office began to take precedence over

42 The truth is that, in mainland Greece at any rate, there was no such wide separation as the epic tale leads our northern imagination to suppose between the nobles and the people. Except in the sphere of law and government, the old patriarchal equality lived on, in spite of all the new influences of wealth and rank. In Lacadaemon, where Helen and Menelaus held high state, there are hardly any traces of aristocracy surviving in our records at all. The institutions of Lycurgus well-nigh blotted it out of Spartiate life. Attica had its Whig families, its Philaids and Alcmaeonids, with all their pride of descent. Yet the medieval period laid the foundations for the fabric of fifth-century democracy, which could never have been erected over a chasm of classes. Cf. Zimmern, Alfred Eckard; The Greek Commonwealth; The Modern Library, New York, p.85. 43 Die Bevölkerung können nur ganz annähernd bestimmt werden, da entsprechennde statistische Angabenn fehlen. Die Bevölkerung Athens hat man im Zeitalter des Perikles auf etwa 105 000 bis 120 000 Seelenn berechnet, wovon aber nur etwa 35 000 Bürger waren die Gesamtbevölkerung Attiks wird auf 210 000 – 235 000 Menschen geschätzt (De Sanctis). Cf. Hermann Bengtson, hrsg.; Griechen und Perser Die Mittelmeerwelt im Altertum I, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, p.108.

－64－ EUPATRID ATHENS lineage.44 It was chaotic, if not hypocritical, to form a compromise of social equality and economic inequality. Aristocratic landholding was a fait accompli. Sumptuary laws superficially enforced equality, but, very tellingly, did not set legal limits on how much land or other wealth any individual might possess. The only effective stricture was the liability of confiscation if the individual did not cultivate land to its proper yield. The Spartan aristocracy was composed of all tribal Spartans (Spartiates), whereas the non-noble population was composed of the prior non-Dorian inhabitants. There were large differences in wealth among the Spartan aristoi, but sumptuary laws and institutions of artificial equality such as commensality smothered apparent differences in order to improve solidarity against the non- citizens. Classical Sparta had 200,000 people, of which 4,000-5,000 were full citizens; there were 40,000 helots and 120,000 perioeki.45 The “nobility” however were formally equal, without different rights corresponding to wealth differentials. An oriental society would have used economic differentials to fixate distinct classes.46 Need for collegial equality among Spartan but not oriental nobles perhaps originated from the voluntary nature of polis-formation; oriental aristocracy was

44 The second variable was the degree of status rigidity between aristocracy and freeborn people. In Greece this was low. Although descent was significant, and was reinforced by aristocratic norms, it never amounted to caste or estate consciousness. From the earliest times we can perceive a tension between birth and wealth. Wealth easily upset distinctions constituted by birth. Cf. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.197. 45 Für Sparta ist man auf mehr als 200 000 Seelen, davon aber nur etwa 4-5000 Vollbürger, gekommen. Dieser kleinen Schar von Spartiaten standen nach den neueren Berechnungen etwa 40 000 Periöken und nicht weniger als 150 000 Heloten gegenüber. Cf. Hermann Bengtson, hrsg.; Griechen und Perser Die Mittelmeerwelt im Altertum I, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991, S.109. 46 The Helots outnumbered the Spartiates, perhaps several times over (in contrast to Athens, where the proportion of slaves to free was probably of the order of 1:4, of slaves to citizens less than 1:1). Cf. Finley, M. I.; Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, Viking Press, New York,1982, p.123

－65－ D. Morgan Pierce less fractious because of its formation from regimentation rather than voluntarism. Difference of wealth did occasionally foment disturbance within the Spartan polity, especially prior to Lycurgus, but equality, collegial rather than economic, was called for to pacify strife within the aristocracy, not between aristocracy and demos. Commensalism and lifelong military conscription diverted jealousy into innocuous athletic and martial competition. The requisite harmony within Spartan aristocracy was achieved by the appellation of the aristocrats as "homoioi". The Spartiates, the "homoioi" were of necessity "equals" by virtue of the helots; in order to maintain the vanquished people in subjugation, it was necessary to prevent factionalism in the ruling class, which would otherwise have been too disunited to overbear popular insurrection. The homoioi were neither amongst themselves economically nor socially equal, but it was imperative to enforce this myth. The training of every Spartiate as a soldier served repression of the helots, but it also regimented the equality of the aristoi so that envy would not degenerate into rivalry.47 Until Lysander Sparta never had an epitome of egotistical rivalry such as Alcibiades. Despite the real economic inequality of the Spartiates, consolidation in a unified military force submerged class differentiation. Otherwise, some aristocrats would have instigated a popular opposition to other aristocratic factions by enlisting the helots and perioeki, just as tyranny had flourished in other poleis. The insurmountable class exclusion separated Spartiates on the one hand and helots and Perioeki on the other, for

47 In such conflicts one turned naturally to full hoplites. It was these elite “professionals” who put their mark on the nature of fighting in general, conveying many of the norms and ideals of heroic promachoi to a wider citizen levy, imbuing it to some extent with an aristocratic ethos, while at the same time hardening the boundaries between those considered fit to join in such an honorable force and those excluded. This would explain why in the archaic age the class of citizens liable to serve as hoplites only gradually expanded and never incorporated all free men – Sparta constitutiong the great exception, thanks to the labors of its helots, whch made it possible for all citizens to become hoplites. Cf. Singor, Henk; "War and International Relations," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 592.

－66－ EUPATRID ATHENS intermarriage would have impaired the will of the Spartiate to suppress the others. Athenian class differentiation within the class of citizens quickly crystallized along economic categories because not all citizens were absorbed in the military force. Athenian citizens were able to differentiate into hippeis, hoplites, pelateis, and non- soldiers because they were not needed to repress slaves. Athens passed through a political metamorphosis typical to Hellenic poleis: war first necessitated government by basileis; then an oligarchy of land-holding nobility; finally a tenuous shift to democracy, but never amalgamation into a panhellenic nation-state.48 Although Athens never instituted a structure like Spartan communism, Athenian taxation and expenditure constricted a demotic dispersal of private wealth. The Athenian allowance for individual initiative generated gradations of wealth, but the growth of personal wealth was contained in order to avert stasis.49 Fundamentally, development of a concept of political equality, in the midst of real economic inequality, served to prevent the gap between rich and poor from becoming schismatic. The civil insurrections of Athens never became so dramatic as those of Republican Rome. The success of the democratic upsurge in Athens and its failure in Rome accounts for the largest differences in the evolution of the cognate societies.

SOCIALISM

Plausibly landed property enabled aristocratic ascendancy over the basileus, but it was also the primordial force that compelled aristocratic concession to the demos. A kleros, i.e. a guaranteed smallholding, may have enabled the demos

48 Like most of the Ionian cities, Athenians submitted at first to kings who led them in war, then to aristocrats who owned the land, then to tyrants representing the middle-class. Cf. Durant, Will; The Life of Greece, MJF Books, New York, 1966, p. 134. 49 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. Cf. Durant, Will; The Life of Greece, MJF Books, New York, 1966, p. 286.

－67－ D. Morgan Pierce to cooperate in synoekismos. The kleros was to identify the smallholder as a "citizen" vis-à-vis the overlord. The Athenian ideal of social equality had been formulated during the period of the debt slavery crisis, specifically as the call of the underclasses for land redistribution was threatening dispossession of the aristoi. Sparta had socialized much of its land and all of its slavery in an effort to obviate class stress within the citizen class. The whole tribal stem of the Athenian population had not become the aristocracy as it had in Sparta; it divided into aristocracy and demos. The equality based upon land-holding in Athens reaffirmed the unity of demos and aristocracy. Athens might have achieved the same solidarity between demos and aristocracy by socializing the land, but did not.50 Why did the idea of socialism fail to germinate? Aristoi would oppose communist property because their claim to preeminence against each other depended on landholding. Inheritance, necessary for aristocratic society, could not coexist with communal property. If on the other hand there were private property, then the aristoi could first corner the surplus and then perpetuate their ascendancy by taxing the demos. Recalling that smallholders vigorously demanded land redistribution, however, why would the smallholders have failed to consider socialized land holding? A large part of the explanation relates to an absence: taxation. Usually the demand for socialized property is more candidly a demand for abolition of taxation. Private property would inevitably entail taxation, but the smallholders were as yet innocent of taxation, and therefore recognized socialized property as an escape from inequality rather than as escape from taxation. Without primogeniture, a family fortune could not consolidate across

50 If the State played so large a part, not only politically but economically, not only by the public work which it commanded but by the wealth which it possessed, in the life of its citizens, why did it not extend a fuller control over their working activities? Why did it not secure for itself and directly administer, as in a democratic state it must surely have been tempted to do, all the private wealth within its borders? Why did not Athens, like her rival Venice in later days, set the world an example of municipal socialism? Cf. Horatio Brown, Cambridge Modern History, Volume 1, p.277.

－68－ EUPATRID ATHENS generations. The aristocracy would oppose communal property because of rivalry between clans, and, more fundamentally, for the sake of inheritance. Succession of landed property was essential to preserve social hierarchy. Partible inheritance ought to have averted the aristocratic accumulation that the georgoi feared; it would atomize land into small holdings of which the owners would be the cultivators. Smallholders, preferring ownership to tenancy, insisted on subdivision, which had to be strenuously maintained against the natural and incessant trend to land accumulation and slavery under aristocratic landholders. The high mortality rate might have made partible inheritance appear to be a better insurance for persistence of the family than primogeniture, but partible inheritance through male progeny could not in any permutation have been anything but a logical failure.51 Ineluctably, land morcellized by partible inheritance compelled recurrence to debt, dependency, and land alienation. Land scarcity resulting from partible inheritance was an immediate consequence of the rejection of communistic property. The natural trend, without human intervention, was towards great landholding; the enervation of classical Greece was a retrogression to great landholding. Partible inheritance averted aristocratic accumulation, but aristocratic resurgence in the Hellenistic period seized on inheritance as soon as law became too weak to avert land accumulation.52 Partible inheritance and smallholding obstructed resort to

51 The overwhelming majority of the Greek States, like Athens from Solon’s day onwards, were cultivated by freeholders. They worked the land with their households, dividing up the estate at death among their sons. This acted, as it does in France, as a check on the population, at any rate until new outlets were provided for a livelihood. Nearly every citizen in an ordinary Greek State was a landowner, whether the piece he owned was large or small, enough to live on or only to starve on. Cf. Zimmern, Alfred Eckard; The Greek Commonwealth; The Modern Library, New York, p.237. 52 The overwhelming majority of the Greek States, like Athens from Solon’s day onwards, were cultivated by freeholders. They worked the land with their households, dividing up the estate at death among their sons. This acted, as it does in France, as a check on the population, at any rate until new outlets were provided for a livelihood. Nearly every citizen in an ordinary Greek State was a landowner, whether the piece he owned was large

－69－ D. Morgan Pierce slave labor, but inevitably made small-holding non-viable. The smallholder class (georgos) could not have have come into existence if there had been taxation. The oriental city arose from absolute necessity; without irrigation the region could not support habitation. The Greek polis was not exigent; habitation and agriculture had prospered for centuries prior to the polis. Taxation did not emerge immediately because landholding did not presuppose irrigation. The clans that composed the polis did not dissolve upon formation of the polis, but remained intact. The clans achieved security by retaining capacity to withdraw from the polis if they found it disagreeable. Communal revenue might conceivably have gone either to the clan or to the polis. The eupatridae who composed polis government were rivalrous; their personal power was anchored in their status as heads of clans, and as such would prefer communal wealth to accumulate in the clan. Taxation would have vitiated the tribal basis of the aristocrat's power in polis government by eroding the reliance between the eupatridae and smallholders within the clan.53 The episode of debt-slavery took place in the 6th century B.C., or small, enough to live on or only to starve on. Cf. Zimmern, Alfred Eckard; The Greek Commonwealth; The Modern Library, New York, p.237. 53 The major development lay rather in the reduction of the smaller farmers to the status of peasants, i.e. no longer self-sufficient farmers but producers dependent on a secondary group which used their surpluses on itself and other non-farming elements. This evolution was the product of changes in many aspects of Hellenic society. The rise of the polis found its citizens together more fully, though down to the sixth century the Greek state made only limited demands on their production. The polis had initially a weak structure of government, manned almost entirely by unpaid officials; from the early seventh century its army consisted of serried infantry hoplites who provided their own armor and food; only if the state tried to support a navy was any extensive financial organization required.; Transfer payment existed at this time mainly in the provision of public meals and gifts to victorious athletes. Greek state relied on harbor tolls, market dues, rent of public lands and a variety of indirect taxes; landowners could resist taxation to such a degree that only under tyrants do we hear of direct levies on agricultural production. Cf. Starr, C.G.; Economic and Social Conditions in the Greek World, in The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries B.C., edited by Boardman, John, F.B.A., and Hammond, N.G.L., F.B.A., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.424.

－70－ EUPATRID ATHENS after the residual clan divisions had relaxed and the intramural aristocratic rivalry had lost much of its point. It was inapposite for the Athenians to have apprehended that socialized property would be equivalent to bondage; the centuries-long evolution from ethné to polis had been one of increasing amalgamation. But this moment was contemporaneous with debt-bondage. Socialized property might have portended dependence, since those who were losing their private property were being made sharecroppers or slaves. The Spartiate owned neither the land nor slaves allotted to him; his military regimentation might be conceived as a form of employment in the place of private property. The Athenian population might by analogy have imagined that dependent labor, i.e. employment, would be a forfeiture of independence. Had a conception of private property displaced an earlier concept of collective property? What forces might have induced preference for private over communal property? "Primitive communism" in kinship society was contained within the oikos; the oikoi had been independent of each other. Smallholders had not been property of the nobility; the village had not been a personal property within the aristocrat's estate. The demotes was independent within his own oikos, and the mutual independence of oikoi constituted the aristocrat's non-ownership of the demoteis. Because wealth of the emergent polis was exclusively land, aristocratic monopoly over the polis was embodied in landed property. The obvious remedy against excessive aristocratic power would have been reversion to the island- community, the oikos. Debt bondage aggravated the prepossession that private property was the only bulwark against aristoi. Social equality, particularly in its early emergence as isegoria, served as a political security to protect the economic independence of the oikos. Equality was not inspired from a conception of the identity of humanity in all its forms. Athens heralded liberty, equality, and democracy, but Athens was a slave society. It is an apparent contradiction that is not contradictory. The Greek concept of democracy was not predicated on a concept of humanity, for otherwise

－71－ D. Morgan Pierce slavery would have appeared contradictory to the Greeks. Aristotle approaches a resolution by his distinction of naturally inferior and superior ability, but does not deny slaves social existence on the ground that slaves are not human. The idea that it was unjust for a person, qua human, to be a slave, was not a Greek idea. The Greek conception of freedom was civic, rather than natural; to define a human as free meant nothing more than that certain rights and duties of civic participation were attributed to him. What was the basis on which freedom and democracy were considered rights, and what concept of slavery made it possible to regard slavery as consistent within the same reasoning? Athenians sensed no contradiction between individual freedom and subordination of their individual desires to those of the polis. The ideology of individualism was grafted on to an idea of personal dedication; the Persian War propelled a feeling of superiority to the Persians on the ground of personal freedom, but at the same time war glorified self-sacrifice to the common good. Greece never constructed a plausible contradiction between individualism and conformity. The individualistic character of the citizen was good because of dedication to the ideals of the polis; the slave was bad because his individualism would turn to self-centered, lowly interests that brought no benefit to the polis. It is significant that one way in which a slave might become free was to exhibit great bravery and sacrifice for the polis. As the Athenians conceived personal freedom to be a product of the freedom of the polis, the perceived contradiction between freedom and socialized property remains somewhat quizzical. The individual devotion to the polis in the Athenian psyche appears rather exaggerated, somewhat like the oriental denizen's devotion to God. How was the ideal of equality consistent with slavery?Perhaps every idea is posterior to a question, and perhaps only the concrete conditions for resolution articulate what the contents of the idea could be. The demos, both smallholders and metics, relied on private property to mitigate kinship aristocracy. Socialization might have made debt-bondage impossible, but it seemed to remove the only

－72－ EUPATRID ATHENS condition that prevented debt-bondage. Adoption or abolition of slavery was not immediately relevant for resistance to aristocratic resurgence, but private property was. Aristocratic survival depended on the reluctance of the demos to abolish private property as a means to abolish great landholding. The idea of democracy resulted from default. The idea did not appear in a glorious halo at inception, such that not anyone but a troglodyte could resist the sheer beauty of its idealistic humanism. It was an alternative, an escape-solution from a choice between aristocratic predominance or forfeiture of private property. The distribution of political power was not instituted afterwards, but at the inception of the polis. Identity-formation in religion was a formidable factor, for the adoption of a god had previously functioned exactly to separate one community from another. Synoekismos, ingredient to polis-formation, thus militated against the identities of the different clans now being made to identify with one another. The costs of amalgamation necessitated reduction of internal rivalry; necessary resources could not be acquired unless the costs were distributed in a way that compromised all members.54 The minor aristoi could extract cooperation from the demos in exchange for a primitive guarantee of property rights, securing for the demos land possession and immunity from slavery.55 The Ekklesia, not the

54 North D.C.; Structure and Economic Change in Economic History; New York and London; 1981, pp.20-32. 55 The leaders of these formative states faced competitive and transaction-cost constraints: they had to prevent rival rulers from emerging (or from conquering their polis from outside), and to generate the revenues they needed for military and religious goods. The trade-offs that began in the eight century reduced elite feuding, presumably lowered and distributed more fairly the costs of security and religion, and clarified property rights. As usually happens, the price of the alliance between middling aristocrats and poor free men was a reallocation of property rights. Beginning in the late eighth century, new ideas of citizenship formed, guaranteeing free local-born men rights in their own bodies and land. Cf. Morris, Ian; Early Iron Age Greece, in The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Scheidel, Walter, Morris, Ian, & Saller, Richard, editors; Cambridge University Press, p.238.

－73－ D. Morgan Pierce assembly only of the demos, but of all citizens, inclusive of the aristoi, exercised final decision for all proposals. The Ekklesia was however demotic in that the aristoi were only a small minority, and the voting-power of an aristos and a demotes was equal. For the exception of the Ekklesia, power was distributed only amongst the aristocracy. The term aristos, hence aristocracy, had been synonymous with the warrior (Ares), but subsequently denoted large landholders, regardless of whether they were warriors. All magistrates were aristoi, and the Areopagus, a combination of executive council and supreme court, was composed of aristoi who had previously served as one of the nine archons. Army membership had been the qualification for membership in the Ekklesia; precedence was narrowly focused on civic service rather than financial classification or kinship.56 During the gestation of the polis from the previous social organization, law articulated what powers were vested in an office, and dissociated individual obligation from the individual's genetic relation to the basileus, etc. The introduction of impersonality into the law enhanced reliable cooperation, making interdependence a possibility, but this new relation was highly combustible. Previous cooperation in group activity had been based on personal relation and kinship; institution of office and impersonal relations would have collided violently with their traditional mode of kinship loyalty. Perhaps the element of autonomy embodied in the idea of an Ekklesia had assuaged their recalcitrance.

56 The magistrates were elected, laws were passed, and perhaps decisions on war and peace were taken, by the ecclesia or popular assembly, which consisted of all citizens with full rights, that is, all those who formed part of the citizen army and fought in defense of the country and together with the magistrates there acted as a council of elders, the chief body of the state for political, religious, and judicial business; it was called the Areopagus after the hill on which is meetings were generally held, and was filled by representatives of the noblest families and, probably, by ex-magistrates. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Michael; A History of the Ancient World, Volume I, p. 216.

－74－ EUPATRID ATHENS

EUPATRID AGRICULTURE

The early polis was less egalitarian than tribal society in that land ownership enhanced distinction. The eupatridae, the early aristocracy constituting the early polis government, were great landholders. Although land-holding was an accurate measure of prestige, it was, in more extreme form than livestock, incapable of solitary management. Nomadic Hellenes had not needed slavery for livestock, the prior basis of prestige. Prior to the tyrannies and the classical period, the citizen classes divided into nobles, free smallholders, and landless citizens. Slavery had a minuscule existence in the nomadic tribal period, and remained undeveloped due to its uselessness during the ethné period. Stationary existence reduced the capacity for livestock; landholding took its place as the criterion of prestige. From this emerges an oddity. In the Greek mentality dependent labor was a disgrace, and slave labor was used principally for domestic service. Why? The profitability of slaveholding would increase in direct proportion to the amount of slave-holding, and the market price of a slave would descend with the prevalence of slavery. The existence of slavery from tribal migration would suggest evolution into agricultural slavery; slavery having been installed in domestic, artisanal, and commercial labor, it should a fortiori have been installed where it would have been most profitable of all: agriculture. Ceteris paribus, slavery ought to have first occupied agriculture, then artisanal labor, then domestic service, because this would have been the progression from the most profitable to the least profitable use. But the progression was the opposite. What force impeded the natural development of slavery? Chattel slavery appears to be ideal for plantation agriculture, where it was not initially applied. Agricultural labor is the most profitable use of slavery, because it is the one occupation in which the whip is an adequate incentive. In any other sector of labor the inner consent of the slave becomes increasingly requisite, and domestic service made blackmail, poisoning, malingering, vandalism, etc. available countermeasures against the master.

－75－ D. Morgan Pierce

Slavery would have most apposite under the conditions of high soil fertility and low market price for slaves. The first condition appears irrelevant because soil fertility is equally advantageous for smallholding as for plantation labor, and the soil fertility of Greece was ubiquitously poor. Nevertheless, poor soil advantaged the aristoi. Dependence of the smallholders on direct sale of the harvest made them vulnerable to drought, blight, flood, predation, etc. Great land-holding remained immune to natural vicissitudes because it received invariant fixed rents, quotas, etc.57 Impedance derived from the second condition. Inheritance was the final determinant of aristocracy. The aristocracy could not grow stronger from natural increase because excessive progeny would have divided the estate. On the other hand, a family might go extinct if its children died in battle. If sharecropping failed as a compromise for the confrontation of demos and aristocracy, the aristoi would once again have had no alternative but to expand slavery. In the succeeding period great landholding was recessive; land divided into small holdings cultivated by the owners. Land accumulation did not occur because of the perennial popular demand for redivision of excessive landholding. Latifundia did not predominate until slavery replaced share cropping in the Hellenistic period.58 It was not until aristocracy had again, and finally, eliminated democracy, and again concentrated land in the aristocratic warlords, that plantation sharecropping predominated.59

57 There was never a time when the large landholders of antiquity did not prosper as a class. Agrarian crisis was chronic among the little men, but even in the worst days of the third century, or the fifth, the magnates drew large rents and profits from their estates. Cf. Finley, M. I.; The Ancient Economy, 1985, London. 58 Davies, J. K.; Wealth and the Power of Wealth in Classical Athens, Salem, New Hampshire and New York, 1981, p. 36. 59 A family farm with a cultivable area of about 6 ha afforded, even under a system of bare fallow, subsistence for a family of five. Farms of this size are among the smallest. Most farms had significantly more than 6 ha of land, and there is no evidence of farms operating below subsistence level. In the second half of the fourth century there seems to have been a noticeable increase in elaborate farms, possibly reflecting concentration of land in

－76－ EUPATRID ATHENS

But this does not address the question of why the Hellenes had not originally deployed slavery. Why was agricultural labor free ab initio? Aristotle suggests that the smallholder could not afford to purchase a slave; slavery was the prerogative of the aristos. A farm of less than 6 hectares would not provide subsistence.60 A normal smallholding of 6 hectares could support five people.61 Land stringency foreclosed support of more than a nuclear family. If extra seasonal labor was needed, the smallholder would hire a day-laborer (thes). This account circumvents a more penetrating question; if land had been the property of the eupatrids, then slave labor ought to have prevailed. The demotic antipathy against dependent labor ought, in concert with aristocratic great land-holding, to have compelled adoption of slave labor. Only if smallholders predominated could slave labor have been recessive. If aristoi occupied government of the early polis, how could smallholding have predominated over latifundia?62 If agricultural slavery were to develop it would have to be on aristocratic latifundia. In principle, aristocracy could not exist without slavery; the demotes (the free commoner) would accept neither employment nor tenancy, and large landholding would be barren without a corresponding labor force. the hands of fewer, richer citizens. Cf. Von Reden, Sitta; Classical Greece: Consumption, Ch.14, in in Scheidel, Walter, Morris, Ian, and Saller, Richard; The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.401. 60 Lohmann, H.; Atene. Forschungen Zur Siedlungs- und Wirtschaftstrktur des klassischen Attiika, Köln, Weimar, und Wien, 1993]. 61 Gallant, T. W.; Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy, Stanford, 1991, p. 86. 62 Although rural slavery existed, there is no evidence to suggest that freeholders were widely replaced by slaves in the Archaic period. Even alter Aristotle observed that ‘the poor man, not having slaves, is compelled to use his wife and children’, and the farmer of only four hectares could scarcely have had either the capital to buy a slave or the surplus food to feed him day by day. For casual labor the landowners relied on the pool of landless thetes, who amounted to something like half the population of Attica. Cf. Starr, C.G.; Economic and Social Conditions in the Greek World, in The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries B.C., edited by Boardman, John, F.B.A., and Hammond, N.G.L., F.B.A., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.423.

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The economy possible from slavery had the potentiality to drive smallholding into bankruptcy, but smallholding was already maximally valued as the only possible escape from dependence. Smallholders opposed the institution of slavery because of liability to fall into slavery; plantations would thrive if supplied with slaves, and plantations were more efficient, later more profitable per unit, than small holdings. As long as smallholding predominated over plantation, slave labor could not become as profitable as it was in potentiality. Latifundia could not function without slave labor, and smallholding could not coexist with slave labor. Scarce Latifundia and scarce slavery were a mutual entailment. Aboriginal Hellenic tribalism impeded a useful social domination of nobility over smallholders such as obtained in theocratic class societies. The organization of theteis as virtual slaves in sharecropping and day-labor was a highly precarious solution, because using a kinsman as a slave, disguised or not, violated the fundamental order of kinship, which would certainly have prescribed slavery instead of kinsmen. Land accumulation entrenched the individual placement within the aristocracy. Because land was the only stable form of wealth, land alone had potentiality to guide political movement.63 The demos, abhorring latifundia, did not accept tenant farming. Tenancy would have very quickly hardened a class society, which the demos in its vigilance over citizen equality opposed. The Greeks typically avoided contract relations because contracts, of which tenancy is an example, foment class oppression.64 Plantation agriculture would displace independent labor because

63 If a Greek citizen owned what seemed a disproportionately large amount of the land of the community, the public opinion of the market place clamored that it should be taken away from him and “redivided.” If a trader or a craftsman was over-wealthy nobody complained, and perhaps nobody knew. At any rate his being rich did not appear to make others poorer. But in a small City State, where land was visibly limited in amount, every additional acre to the large proprietor seemed clearly to mean an acre less for the small men. Cf. Zimmern, Alfred Eckard; The Greek Commonwealth; The Modern Library, New York, p.234.

－78－ EUPATRID ATHENS agriculture was the primary instance of independent labor. To remain independent the smallholders had to compel smallholding in place of latifundia.65 This was an immediate effect of democratic élan and of the democratic constitution which enforced the demand of the georgoi for isonomia, legal equality. However; what force in the archaic period could possibly have compelled the aristocracy to concede to demotic force? Agriculture having been the only secure form of wealth, prestige entailed landholding as well as martial leadership. Property in land would provide a much wider spectrum of personal wealth than livestock, but labor scarcity would have cancelled the potential advantage. The far greater labor force required for agriculture rather than pastoralism could have paralyzed the social advantage of landholding; there was overwhelming pressure to use slavery for agriculture. Without an extra labor resource nothing could divide the lives of aristos and demotes. Failure of agricultural slavery, combined with great labor demand required for private property, catalyzed the explicit distinction of aristos and demos in the Bronze Age; the incipient class division, in the place of kinship categories of elders and dependents, distinguished who would or would not perform agricultural labor. Great landholdings could not be cultivated by the owner; smallholdings could be cultivated by the owner and did not entail extended labor. Only the smallholders were capable. Aristoi migrated into the administrative requirements of polis society. If aristoi did not perform the agricultural labor, slavery was undeveloped, freemen disdained employment, and great landholding without labor was quite worthless, how could

64 Out of the numerous inscriptions preserved which deal, in one way or another, with land, there are only “a very small number of contracts made between individuals.” Cf. Zimmern, Alfred Eckard; The Greek Commonwealth; The Modern Library, New York, p.238. 65 To whom did the land belong and by what tenure was it held? Nearly all of it in the normal Greek State was in the hands of small proprietors, who worked the soil themselves. Cf. Zimmern, Alfred Eckard; The Greek Commonwealth; The Modern Library, New York, p.237.

－79－ D. Morgan Pierce landed aristocracy prevail? Efforts of the aristoi to preserve themselves against each other ought to have recurred to demotic exploitation. Debt-bondage and extinction of small-holding should have resulted, were it not for the unresolved vulnerability: land was worth nothing if there were no labor to utilize it. Some members of the polis society did not own land, but were free, and were kinsmen; these were the theteis, the day-laborers. The use of theteis as dependent labor happily expedited the problem of one's landless relatives. The kleros of the smallholder could last longer if sharecropping provided a vent for superfluous sibling. Dependent labor was dishonorable for a citizen; a thes was not a citizen, but was a clan member; he was not a slave, but was a dependent laborer. The eupatridae could elude introduction of agricultural slavery, because the smallholder- in-kinship provided as great a resource for labor as slavery would have. The combination of the ideas of partible inheritance and redistribution engendered disaster for the interests of the smallholders. If a georgos believed in the possibility of land distribution, he could believe that new land would be conferred on his sons if the partible inheritance left them with too little. The demos incessantly demanded land redistribution, but never to substantial effect; the georgos did not appreciate that redistribution was impossible because there was no territorial expansion. Smallholding inheritance not only delayed the average age of land inheritance, but systematically generated theteis, landless clan members stranded by the parsimony of partible inheritance. The flow of theteis from the community of smallholders provided the dependent labor necessary to animate aristocratic landholding, and indurate the Hellenic revulsion at dependent labor. The available form of labor was share-cropping, which disguised the deeply painful humiliation of working in the employment of another person. It was a great threat to aristocratic landholding that the theteis, though not citizens, were nevertheless clan members. The formulation that a land-holder was a citizen, apparently uplifting and democratic, was quite different from the prior kinship formula, that every tribal member should own land. The new formulation made the

－80－ EUPATRID ATHENS landless tribal member into a non-citizen, ushering further degradation. The kinship rule would instead have insisted on providing the thes with land. Kinship prohibited enslavement of a clan member, but the office of sharecropping adequately disguised the reality that the hektemeros, the abandoned blood-relative, was a slave. The hektemeros, i.e. the sharecropper, gave 5/6 of his crop to the landlord, keeping for himself 1/6th. The necessary equilibrium between the generation of theteis and the amount of aristocratic plantation naturally limited the growth of aristocracy. Primogeniture did not prevail in archaic Greece; partible inheritance had been the principle of Hellenic private property. It is characteristic of primogeniture that the sibling excluded from inheritance abandon agriculture and migrate, whereas partible inheritance induces progeny to remain in agriculture. Under the circumstances of the early polis, kinship supported partible inheritance; private property secured greater progeny. Communal property, primogeniture, or bequeathal to non-relatives would have reduced procreation, whereas filial inheritance generated a maximum number of soldiers.66 Composition of the army in accordance with economic rather than genetic order superficially continued the hierarchical organization that reserved the highest ranking for the aristoi and provided a larger army, but ultimately undermined the principle supporting the primacy of aristocracy.67

66 Inheritances were or might be transmitted undivided in practice, but there was no law that they must be. In Homeric and Hesiodic society there was not only private, but individual, property. Cf. Toutain, Jules; The Economic Life of the Ancient World, Alfred A. Knopf, 1930, p.16. 67 Together with these gradual changes in the system of government there grew up a new political and social division of the population. The ancient division into four tribes, phratries, and families was retained; but a further redistribution was made into three social and economic groups. The first of these contained the large landowners, the second the traders and artisans who lived in the city, and the third the smallholders. At the same time the political rights and military duties of each citizen began to be reckoned not by his birth but by his property and income. The aristocracy became a timocracy. The necessity of creating a larger and stronger army was probably the cause of this innovation. The land-

－81－ D. Morgan Pierce

Legislation against land aggrandizement resulted in a greater plurality of holdings that would generate for military conscription. It was these smallholders for the sake of whom land holding was made a requisite of citizenship; but what was the advantage of excluding non-landholders from citizenship?68 The non land-owners were not allowed to be citizens, and non-citizens could not own land. Non-citizen ownership of land would diminish the land on which soldiers could be generated, and the progeny of non-citizens could not be soldiers because they were not citizens. Why, then, should non-landowners (theteis) upon coming to ownership of land be denied citizenship? Absolute shortage of land was the reason that free non- citizens existed in the first place. Equation of land-owning and citizenship secured a dynastic effect of producing new soldiers every generation, whereas land occupation by non-citizens would diminish the opportunity of citizens to produce progeny. Athens legislated against land aggrandizement because greater plurality of holdings would generate a greater number for military eligibility. It was these smallholders for the sake of whom land holding was made a requisite of citizenship; but what was the advantage of excluding non-citizen landholders from citizenship?69 This seems owning aristocracy, who had originally borne the whole burden of defending the country, was inclined to shift a part of this burden to the shoulders of other well-to-do citizens, and to concede to them in return a part of their own political rights. Cf. Rostovtzeff, Michael; A History of the Ancient World, Volume I, p. 217. 68 Hence land ownership was closely regulated, partly to sustain land rights and partly to ensure that a maximum number of able-bodied hoplites would be available. In short, the polis pursued policies designed to preserve its yeomanry. Expansion of estate holding was blocked by both direct and indirect means; e.g. limits were set of the quantity of land or number of slaves a citizen might possess, and old dead laws were repealed. Along with this one other efforts to reduce distinctions within the citizen body and to promote a civil economy. Cf. Finley, M. I; Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, London, 1980, p. 67. 69 Hence land ownership was closely regulated, partly to sustain land rights and partly to ensure that a maximum number of able-bodied hoplites would be available. In short, the polis pursued policies designed to preserve its yeomanry. Expansion of estate holding was blocked by both direct and indirect means; e.g. limits were set of the quantity of land or number of slaves a citizen might possess, and xxx old dead laws were repealed. Along with

－82－ EUPATRID ATHENS circular. Non land-owners were denied citizenship, and non-citizens could not own land.

Land possession by non-citizens would have diminished the land from which soldiers could be generated; the progeny of non-citizens could not be soldiers because they were not citizens. Why, then, should non-landowners be denied citizenship? The absolute shortage of land was the reason for the existence of free non-citizens in the first place. Equation of land-owning and citizenship secured a dynastic effect of producing new soldiers every generation, whereas land occupation by non-citizens would diminish the opportunity of citizens to produce progeny. Illogicality emerges in the circumstance that there would be no means to replenish the population of citizen land-owner as it eroded from natural depletion. Since the theteis were original tribal members there was no reason from the structure of kinship to exclude them from citizenship. Then why not classify a non-citizen as a citizen if he obtained land, or why should non-land owners be excluded from acquiring land? Theteis were free radicals; there could be no reliance on them as soldiers, because they had nothing to lose, but they were a labor resource for the aristocracy, and their social exclusion constituted the obverse of the smallholder's privilege in citizenship. The outstanding principle of citizenship was assurance of sufficient military force. Of the non-citizens, slaves, theteis, and metics, only the metics were liable to military duty, on the ground that their stake in Athenian commerce would motivate loyalty. The division of citizenship into aristoi, georgoi, and theteis was a factor in the germination of democracy; use of free non-landholders (theteis) rather than slaves perhaps initiated the conflict between aristocracy and demos. The acknowledgement that a thes was a clansman, together with denial that he could be a citizen, highlighted the incompatibility of kinship and civic order. The failure of a this one other efforts to reduce distinctions within the citizen body and to promote a civil economy. Xxx 75

－83－ D. Morgan Pierce smallholding did not adversely affect the aristos, who might thereby acquire more land; the dispossessed smallholder, however, was now on the verge of becoming a thes; any smallholder was in jeopardy. In self-protection the demos raised a demand for equal land distribution.70 Some aristoi sought security in collegial identification with other aristoi from different clans, thus forming a united class identity vis-à-vis the demos. Rule by aristocracy was fully supported by religious tradition, whereas democratic demand was innovative, artificial, and contrary. Democratic movement would invoke against itself reverence for the past. Parochial aristoi resorted to kinship tradition, consolidating with the demos of their own clan to find harmony. The cosmopolitan aristoi however sought security by consolidating with other aristoi of other clans against the demos; the cosmopolitan aristocracy would have pointed in the direction of national amalgamation, whereas the parochial aristoi suggested decomposition of the polis unity into separate clans; thus the aristocracy was impaired by an internal opposition. Parochial aristoi who had been marginalized, availing themselves of the disaffection of the demos, proposed the demands of the smallholders.71 Popular opposition culminated in demand for equal land distribution and isonomia. Superficially isonomia meant to the demos equal legal rights, but to the aristocracy it foreboded the end of aristocracy. The traditional leadership of aristoi in government promoted legislation in favor of the aristocracy; a principle of majoritarian suffrage would award legislative predominance to the demos. The confrontation could have ended in the dissolution of the polis back into its several clans, as the more traditional aristoi probably wanted. The result that saved the polis was a definition of "citizen" that guaranteed property and legal rights.72 Great landholders and smallholders had solidified into the proto-citizen class; land ownership qualified the holders as citizens This was evidently a compromise. Consensus to merge aristocrats and

70 Aristotle, Politeia, 1323a. 71 Finley, M. I; Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, London, 1980, p. 67. 72 McGlew, J.; Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece, Ithaca, New York, 1993.

－84－ EUPATRID ATHENS smallholders into one class, citizens, could have ensued only if the smallholders were too formidable for the aristocracy to disrespect. The chief quality of protocitizenship was entitlement to attend the Ekklesia; "freedom" was essentially conceived as participation in legislation.73 The archaic demos everywhere pressed for equality, while aristoi fought to maintain predominance.74 The Marxist idea that social change stems from change in the means of production cuts both ways. Also the failure of social change is contingent on whether the ascendant social group retains an advantage in the means of production. On what did aristocratic

73 But besides these classes of citizens, who had the right of attending the Assembly, there was a mass of freemen who were not citizens. Among these we can distinguish the agricultural laborers, who, having no land of their own, cultivated the estates of the nobles. In return for their labor they retained one-sixth of the produce and were hence called “Sixth-parters” (hektemoroi). There were also the craftsmen who were employed and paid by the Demiurgi, and doubtless small retail dealers and others. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 174. 74 In many cases the legislation was accompanied by political concessions to the people, and it was part of the lawgiver’s task to modify the constitution. But for the most part this was only the beginning of a long political conflict; the people striving for freedom and equality, the privileged classes struggling to retain their exclusive rights. The social distress, touched on in a previous chapter, was the sharp spur which drove the people on in this effort towards popular government. The struggle was in some cases to end in the establishment of a democracy; in many cases, the oligarchy succeeded in maintaining itself and keeping the people down; in most cases, perhaps, the result was a perpetual oscillation between oligarchy and democracy- an endless series of revolutions, too often sullied by violence. But though democracy was not everywhere victorious - though even the states in which it was most firmly established were exposed to the danger of oligarchic conspiracies- yet everywhere the people aspired to it; and we may say that the chief feature of the domestic history of most Greek cities, from the end of the seventh century forward, is an endeavor, there successful, yonder frustrated, to establish or maintain popular government. In this sense then we have now reached a period in which the Greek world is striving and tending to pass from the aristocratic to the democratic commonwealth. The movement passed by some states, like Thessaly, just as there had been some exceptions, like Argos, to the general fall of the monarchies; while remote kingdoms like Macedonia and Molossa were not affected. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 145.

－85－ D. Morgan Pierce predominance depend? In the 7th century the basileus and the nobility had still been able to reconcile the opposition of the smallholders and the free but landless. It appeared in the 6th century that the aristocracy still monopolized power, being not only natural leaders of kinship organization but also, by virtue thereof, the earliest office-holders of civic government. The aristocratic government deriving from kinship could prevail because the aristocracy defended the community. The smallholders nevertheless had objective power that was not yet reflected in social organization. Tyranny appeared in poleis where aristocracy underestimated the demos. Why had citizenship been equated with landholding? As larger populations accumulated in polis-formations, neighboring poleis at the same stage of development threatened the burgeoning polis. Kinship limited soldiers to aristocrats; defense required greater numbers than existed in an aristocratic army.75 Selection of warriors by genetic rank failed to function; the aristocracy, which had been originally defined by its function of protecting the community, could not produce enough soldiers.76 But any citizen (civic) was liable to military service; the coalescence of aristocracy and smallholder provided a sufficient resource of military power. Expansion of the army to comprise non-aristocrats violated the kinship order; non-aristocrats could not be selected by kinship ranking. A new hierarchical order was instituted to substitute for selection based on kinship: income brackets. The hoplites, the resultant non-aristocratic military class, proved

75 Aristotle; Politics 1297b:12. 76 The earliest form of constitution among the Greeks after the kingships consisted of those who were actually soldiers, the original form consisting of the cavalry (for war had its strength and its pre-eminence in cavalry, since without orderly formation a hoplite force is useless, and the sciences and systems dealing with tactics did not exist among the men of old times, so that their strength lay in their cavalry); but as the states grew and the armed men had become stronger, more persons came to have a part in the government. Cf. Krentz, Peter; "Warfare and Hoplites," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 64.

－86－ EUPATRID ATHENS to be pivotal to military success. Incorporation into a military class gave the small- holders self-consciousness qua social group. The phalanx, the heavily armed infantry, were smallholders whereas the hippeis, the aristocratic cavalry, became relatively useless. The promachoi (aristocratic warriors of the previous kinship organization)) had not become absolutely weaker, but were weak relatively to the strength of the hoplites. The heroic form had been adequate for pre-polis warfare, but was irremediably useless for military confrontations of populations composing a polis. The polis would not have appointed Solon to be the lawgiver unless the polis had been awed by the potential power of the demos.77 The exigency of the hoplite compelled admission of the small holder to political participation, which eventually facilitated transition from aristocracy to tyranny and thence to democracy.78

77 We must infer from the sources about the Solonian crisis in the early sixth century that Athenian peasants exerted sufficient political pressure as a class to force those in control of Athenian society to have recourse to the expedient of appointing Solon as mediator with very broad powers. Thus the distinction between “hidden” and “open” class warfare corresponds roughly to the distinction often drawn between a “class-in-itself” and a “class- for-itself.” Cf. Rose, Peter W.; "Class," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 469. 78 The new aristocratic clans took the place of the Kings in most Greek areas, appropriating various legal rights for themselves. They governed the still agricultural states contending with each other in constant clan rivalry. They embarked in their own ships and on their own responsibility to seek adventure, conquest, piracy, to found colonies or occasionally to trade. Their semi-collective organizations took over in varying degree the political and economic functions of the Kings. But the supremacy of the nobles was only a transitory stage in the history of Greek social and constitutional development. The noble clans were much too particularistic to be able to maintain a permanent rule. From the eighth century B.C. onwards the free Hellenic small landowners, the next class after the nobles, began, under these circumstances, their steady climb upwards in many of the various states of Greece. Political concessions were first made to this class because their fighting strength had become an essential for the beginning Greek phalanx warfare, the phalanx being a unique type of heavily armed infantry formation of perhaps Assyrian or Urartaic origin, the Greek and Macedonian versions of which finally conquered the world under the leadership of Alexander the Great. Cf. Heichelheim, Fritz; An Ancient Economic History, Volume 1, A.W. Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., Leiden 1958, p.279.

－87－ D. Morgan Pierce

ARISTOCRACY

Diversification of social roles produced social classes, but what factor in the transition from ethné kinship inthe 7th century B.C. motivated the Hellenes to make the distinction an object of consciousness? What was the value, not of social classes but of consciousness of them? The distinction of agathos and kakos had been tribal; it long predated the emergence of the polis and social classes. The polis was an innovative organization to which the prior ethné order had attempted to adapt itself; plausibly the consciousness-formation of classes was an attempted adaptation, but civil society was discontinuous with the precedents available from kinship.79 Strong class differentiations cannot materialize in a kinship order; the tribal origins of early polis society had not produced conspicuous social gaps between smallholders and nobility as those between the contemporary classes of theocratic society. Neither an individual nor a group is capable of abandoning a self- identity unless there is a new identity to adopt in its place; wealth may distinguish

79 The four Ionian tribes were gentilician in structure, that is, they were kinship-based, dominated by old and distinguished families (gene), whose wealth, ownership of land, or control of important cults gave them that influence, each in its own locality, on which they could and did base their political power. On the most basic level, their control of the phratries will have ensured their authority to determine who was and who was not a citizen, an authoritiy which the diapsephismos following the end of the tyranny will only have served to confirm. In the government of Attica at large, these families, by commanding a following and by concluding alliances with other prominent families and their retainers, will have competed only with one another to secure the highest offices of state, to which they alone as members of the highest census-class were eligible. This had led to tyranny and disastrous consequences for those families who had fallen foul of the tyrant earlier in the sixth century, and a similar situation was threatening to develop again, unless dynastic rivalries were to be curbed. Cf. Ostwald, Martin; "The Reform of the Athenian State by Cleisthenes," in The Cambridge Ancient History, second edition, volume IV: Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean, c. 525 to 479 B.C., EDS. Boatman, John, Hammond, N.G.I., and Ostwald, M., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 310.

－88－ EUPATRID ATHENS groups, but not until there is consciousness of wealth per se. Differences of wealth may exist without existing as a criterion of difference. The allocation of wealth had been a factor in the oriental hierarchies, but oriental societies had evolved over a much longer period than class society, during which wealth could become a criterion for differences of class. The impetus of stationary settlement stimulated Greek polis-society to grow without further mediation out of its tribal ethné structure; within this interval consciousness of difference concentrated on blood-relations, not wealth. Perhaps the exigency of differentiation had impelled digression from the ethné organization; hostility between aristocracy and demos could not have existed prior to the polis. The demos of rural, ethné society had been just as univocally embedded in the traditions of kinship as the aristoi, who had been thoroughly identified with the demos because a cosmopolitan identity for themselves as a unified group separate from the demos had not yet formed; their prestigious identities were based on leadership within their separate clans. The polis induced aristocrats to form collegial identities with alien aristocrats, whereas formerly aristocratic groups had lived in isolation from other clans. Class consciousness was a mediation between kinship and class society; the distinction of agathos and kakos were embedded within kinship, inasmuch as an individual could not be agathos unless he had the blood lineage of the tribe or clan. The distinction had been tribal; it long predated the emergence of polis and social class. The substantive distinction is lucid, but what motivated the Hellenes to make the explicit linguistic distinction? From the 8th century synoekismos, internecine war, mixture with sedentary aliens, and territorial definition scrambled kinship during the formation of the polis. Defined, individual, landed property, alien to ethné society, newly constituting aristocracy and citizenship, had become the exclusive substantial criterion of prestige. New sources of wealth derived from war, indeed new wealth of any form, was transformed into land ownership.80 The

80 Impossible as it is to lump the whole of the ancient society into one generalization, it would not be far wrong to say that from the Homeric world to Justinian great wealth was

－89－ D. Morgan Pierce prior prestige of lineage was not dependent on landed property, but had absorbed landed prestige into the lineage system; Zeus Aeginitos simultaneously combined landed property and lineage in prestige, for instance. Landed property had not destabilized the distribution of wealth because whatever had been acquired in war belonged a priori to the warlord. There had been as yet no concept of private property; the right of the warlord to the spoils was founded upon the kinship concept of redistribution. The warlord could persist only if he distributed the spoils to the ordinary warriors; redistribution obscured the notion of private property. The subsequent metamorphosis of land as the new basis of prestige distinguished agathos-kakos into large and small landholding, a precursor of social classes, which were posterior to the polis. The distinction mutated into the distinction aristos and demos, exfoliating into social classes. An agathos, dependent as the term was on blood lineage, could not marry a kakos, which would contaminate the noble blood lineage; the woman also had to fit the distinction agathos-kakos. Female membership to the agathoi had to be a precondition, not a result, of aristocratic marriage. Since property inheritance depended on a strong distinction of wife from concubine, the blood lineage of the wife was essential. The polis had first been formed from the kinship system, thus the eupatridae, but engendered structures of civil society that could not harmonize with the preconceptions of kinship.81 The germinal idea of democracy appeared only at the end of the 6th century, when slavery catalyzed a popular ideology discrepant with the prior aristocratic landed wealth, that new wealth came from war and politics (including such by-products as tax-farming), not from enterprise and that whatever was available for investment found its way into the land as quickly as it could. Cf. Finley, M. I.; Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, Viking Press, New York,1982, p.188. 81 The phenomenon of archaic tyranny proves the best illustration of the profound polarity between the aristocratic individual and the polis community, a polarity that must be considered one of the basic structural patterns of the cultural and political life of the archaic Greek city-states. Cf. Stein-Höleskamp, Elke; "The Tyrants," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 112.

－90－ EUPATRID ATHENS ideology.82 Classes developed due to differential accumulations of wealth, but the present question is why wealth-accumulation should be a cause of social stratification. Might strict class division have served to protect wealth? Assets are unequally distributed the more they increase; one might precipitately infer that this occurs because the beneficiary takes measures to perpetuate its advantage. But this is anachronistic, in suggesting that interest in wealth instigates deliberate class-formation. It would be too vague to infer that formation of a ruling class is an immediate result of a distinction of land or livestock. Deliberate accumulation of wealth depends on conditions of social evolution that appear in later stages.

It might be conjectured that formation of any ruling class is founded upon an instinctual imperative to keep control of the mass of the population; greed, lust, land, wealth, office etc. might be variations of instinctual imperative. Class formation served a purpose independently of wealth preservation. The leading soldiers of the archaic military, the promachoi, were land-holding aristocrats. The archaic poleis restricted religious rites according to social class; at puberty the male child was incorporated into the adult community by religious ceremony, but this ceremony was exclusively for aristocratic children. Although the term social class is proleptic,, it may convey that despite rough economic equality of nomadic society, the structure of landed property introduced impassable distinctions within clan membership.83 The demos gathered in the agora, but only members of the Boulé,

82 As a reaction, epic and lyric poets formulated an “elitist ideology” that sought to elide distinctions between Greeks and non-Greeks, males and females, and mortals and divinities, in order to highlight a basic division between elites and nonelites. When, however, the elitist ideology collapsed in the final quarter of the sixth century, the middling ideology provided firm foundations for a “strong principle of equality” that would eventually make democracy “thinkable.” Cf. Hall, Jonathan F.; "Polis, Community, and Ethnic Identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 45. 83 The rites were also generally class-specific, open often only to the elite classes. This fact is significant, as it says something about the way Archaic poleis defined their boundaries:

－91－ D. Morgan Pierce i.e. only aristocrats, made proposals and debated. The demos could not participate in discussion, although it could passively ratify by verbal assent the proposals formulated.84 Demoteis did not speak because too many voices would result in bedlam; the higher part of the hierarchy solidifies the resulting structure in order to maintain cohesion. Solidification of hierarchy at the inception of the polis was a heritage from the era in which the basileus made proposals from his porch, to which the demos could only consent or dissent, without deliberation. Originally the aristoi disputed and resolved a policy which they subsequently proposed to the assembly of the demos. The demos possessed solely the power of ratification. Possibly the Ekklesia had been the original structure of aristocracy prior to stationary settlement and land- holding. If a group were too large, freedom to discuss, debate, and modify proposals would be chaotic; limitation of deliberation to "aristoi" was probably based upon the idea that aristoi "represented" the ideas of the demos in a smaller number; the original division of aristocrat and non-aristocrat was innocuously based upon the idea that the aristos represented his people, rather than on the idea that he was a better type of human whose ideas commanded the idea of a common person. In this earlier period the value of the aristos consisted solely in his genetic order within the whereas every child obviously underwent physical puberty, many poleis chose to mark the social puberty- the incorporation into an adult community- only of their aristocratic youth. Cf. Kammen, Deborah; "The Life Cycle in Archaic Greece," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.90. 84 Rather than egalitarianism, then, the key concept is the sense of belonging to a political community by participating in it and recognizing the authority of those entrusted with overseeing it. This was largely achieved through the convening of an assembly, originally termed an agora (from the verb agorein [to gather together]). In the Homeric epics, the assembly is generally presided over by a council of elders. Most of the discussion takes place among the councilors, but it is clear that the larger assembly was expected to ratify by verbal assent the proposals put before it. Cf. Hall, Jonathan F.; "Polis, Community, and Ethnic Identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 46.

－92－ EUPATRID ATHENS clan. Genetic ordination accounts for the amenability of the demos to the limitation of ratification, restriction to silent approval, and to the vehement importance of isegoria. Property in land might have overturned this more sympathetic conception of the aristos as the head of the clan. The aristocratic form of deliberation prior to settlement and land-holding persisted as the form of the Ekklesia following polis-formation. Proposals in the Ekklesia were similarly voiced by the aristoi, and the assembly was similarly limited to ratification. Topics for the Ekklesia could not be introduced in the Ekklesia; the members of the Probouleuma, exclusively aristoi, predetermined what topics could be presented. All legislation was oriented to the aristocracy. Aristocratic discourse bifurcated. The "aristos" of the ethné social organization spoke directly to the whole of his clan, and there was no other reference for him to take; once the polis materialized, the aristos, presumably speaking in behalf of his clan, was addressing a group different from the clan, and therefore aristocratic primacy produced different effects. The power behind isegoria seems to have been resentment of preclusion of the demos from the political process; isegoria was a legal innovation that allowed demotic assembly members to speak in the Ekklesia.85 Any bureaucracy, whether appointed or elected, inclines to egocentricity rather than altruism for its extended membership; a council empowered with final authority may overpower the constituency for the sake of which it exists. Rotation of office was a partial correction. The Athenians resolved this with three further measures. First, every person within the jurisdiction of a council was entitled to an equal vote in the nomination of an official: universal suffrage eliminated the liability of control by a ruling clique.86 Second, councils were formed within a context as

85 Isegoria meant free speech, not in our modern negative sense of freedom from censorship, but in the active sense of right and duty to speak out in assemblies of citizens. Cf. Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.210. 86 We find holders of established posts, small bodies (councils) essentially engaged in deliberation and preparation, and finally actual general assemblies of the community,

－93－ D. Morgan Pierce small and local as possible, so that officials would not condense into a self-interested group isolated from the constituency of their jurisdiction. Finally, the committee did not confer immunity on its members; the individuals of the jurisdiction could prosecute any action or individual of the committee, and indictment was equally potent after office tenancy. Aristocratic organization inadvertently generated factions seeking alliance or conspiracy with kinship out-groups in other poleis. The problem of the internal enemy, the fifth column, frequently dominated Athens, where factional politics flourished, whereas factionalism never afflicted Sparta. Due to ambivalence of aristocratic identity between kinship and social class, the pressures for and against democracy never abated. When the laos had initiated democracy, i.e. partial political equality, aristoi perennially formed powerful conspiracies and alliances with aristocratic poleis that drew on the prior energy with which poleis tried to dominate each other; the ethnic aristocracy constantly built new threats of palace revolt from alliances with alien aristocracies. Even through the end of the Peloponnesian War the struggle between aristocracy and democracy remained the fundamental issue.

LAND SCARCITY

Ironically, private property tightened the aristocratic grip on society until the second challenge to aristocracy: commerce. A purely genealogical aristocracy is uninterested in wealth; it reacts only when commercial accumulation threatens its in which all citizens were entitled to participate and vote and where usually each vote counted equally. Their decisions, which could have the form of law, were final, not least in dealing with actions of the officials and proposals of the council. In any case the people exercised some control over the officials, expressed in the fact that the citizens elected them and had the right to prosecute them. Cf. Gehrke, Hans-Joachim; "States," in A Companion to Archaic Greece, Eds. Raaflaub, Kurt A., and van Wees, Hans, Wiley- Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, p. 405.

－94－ EUPATRID ATHENS sovereignty. Class structure changes when a new source of wealth appears because the group concerned with the new source of wealth is usually wholly different from the prior wealth-holding group. Food shortage decisively foreclosed the option of perpetuating aristocracy by abolishing commerce. The ideal of citizen equality had an oddly negative effect on the double threat that commerce posed to aristocracy; if aristoi conducted commerce, divided interests would fragment aristocratic solidarity into ethnic and cosmopolitan aristoi or, if commerce were delegated to non- aristocrats, commerce might enable political ascendancy by a non-aristocratic class. Athens might have instituted a monopoly of commerce for the aristocracy on the ground that the first merchants had been aristoi. Possibly oversight of this tactic had been due to the fact that claim to aristocracy was divine lineage, which originated from land; endorsement of commerce might have discredited the prestige of divine descent. Inhibition of income distribution had similarly failed due to kinship ideology during the previous episode of great land-holding. Anxious rivalry between aristoi and georgoi had focused power in the polis; the burgeoning democracy had again reduced wealth to a secondary role because it wasn't allowed to translate into political participation. Athens furthermore refrained from canceling the threat by monopolizing commerce to the aristocracy; it was too non-aristocratic for a gentilian aristocracy to participate in commerce. Anxiety rivalry between aristoi and georgoi focused on power in the polis. In the present situation of burgeoning democracy wealth was again of secondary importance because it was not allowed to translate into political participation. Did the aristoi condemn commerce because it would create inequality within themselves, or because of possible class enmity? The non-aristocratic citizens, demoteis, adopted neither dependent labor nor commerce; the early demotes citizen was a smallholder, although in later development metics and demoteis did dominate commerce. Private property together with stigmatization of commerce prolonged aristocratic ascendancy; the denigration of commerce expressly reserved political power exclusively to landholding. Athens reserved commercial activity for

－95－ D. Morgan Pierce the metics, again in order to reserve political power exclusively to the aristocracy. Commerce was indispensable, but by making it the exclusive preserve of metics, i.e. foreigners, the georgoi would applaud the exclusion of metics from political power, instead of noticing the surreptitious limitation of their own potential power. Metics by definition and principle could not participate in politics. Secure grain importation answered to food shortage, and separated native demoteis from commerce. The measure was aimed not at the metics (merchants) but the demos. The demoteis, who did have citizenship, had a right to political participation, but reservation of commerce to the metics conveniently separated them from accumulating commercial wealth, the most likely means by which the demos might supplant aristocratic government. Given overpopulation vis-à-vis technological deficiency, the polis of an agrarian population that exceeds alimentary capacity might (1) impose taxes, (2) expand its territory, (3) redistribute land, or (4) colonize. Taxation from the basileus, prior to Athenian oligarchy, consisted of the themistes, a regular harvest tax, and the dotinai, a word etymologically derivative from the word for gift; the earliest taxation was formulated in the concept of a gift. This manner of taxation, dispensing with calculation of individual capacity to pay, bore properties from the lingering kinship system and the immaturity of the concept of private property, when individual economic differences were insubstantial. Dotinai taxation was irregular and arbitrary. Neither tax was adjusted to individual income capacity; a whole area, or a whole clan, was assigned a fixed tax obligation. The earliest market taxation reflects the kinship mentality; such taxes had the form of a gift to the king or clan elder who provided allowance for an outsider to sell in the market.87 Taxes

87 The King's subjects had to pay two kinds of direct tax, themistes, a customary regular payment with which the so-called "King's harvest" in Israel at harvest time is to be connected also; and dotinai which again were not only found in Greece alone, but correspond to Latin and Hebrew terms "gifts". The latter tax consisted in fact of occasional payments to the Kings which are mentioned in the Bible. Both taxes were much more primitive than the direct taxes of the Ancient Orient. For they had not been adjusted to the

－96－ EUPATRID ATHENS were probably used not only for war but for rectifying balances of power amidst competing aristocrats. Such taxation, arbitrarily collected and irregularly spent on interests proper to the aristocracy, were unpopular.88 The gift-conception of a tax made it acceptable because it detailed with the prior tradition of donation to the temple, but the conception of tax as a gift would aggravate contention as time went on. Such donations, though given to the gods, were stored in the temple ineptly and permanently under the family's name, but were not used by the temple or the donor.

Forbearance from taxation in the early oligarchies seems to have been a side-effect strife internal to the oligarchy. Any aristos might be expelled from the oligarchy on a pretext of some infraction. The constitution of an oligarchy carefully changing individual income, but were paid by whole areas and clans in traditional amounts. Solomon was the first King in Israel to go over to the Ancient Oriental system of tithe, centrally planned royal granaries, storage houses, and villeinage, the change bringing no benefit to people or state in the long run. The market tax was one of the indirect taxes in Homeric Greece, levied in Israel from before the time of King Solomon also. That is to say, foreign merchants bought here the King's permission to trade within the state by offering him valuable gifts of a traditionally fixed amount. Cf. Heichelheim, Fritz; An Ancient Economic History, Volume 1, A.W. Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., Leiden 1958, p.276. 88 Along similar lines, it is corruption and injustice rather than the principle of aristocratic rule that lie behind Hesiod’s criticism (Works and Days 36-41) of the “bribe-devouring basileis”, and the fable of the hawk and the nightingale (202-212) appears to be an utterly unapologetic assertion that the vice-like rule of the community’s leaders conforms to the rule of nature. In light of this, the emergence, in the late sixth and early fifth centuries of more democratic governments in poleis such as Athens, Naxos, Kos, and Syracuse is better viewed not so much as the fulfillment of a latent egalitarianism but as a veritable revolution whereby the demos (a word that now signified “masses” or “nonelites”) wrested control of the state away from the aristocracy. It is hardly accidental that the word that would be chosen to define this new political order was not isonomia (“equality before the law”) but demokratia (“the rule of the masses”). Cf. Hall, Jonathan F.; "Polis, Community, and Ethnic Identity," in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, Ed. Shapiro, H.A., Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 46.

－97－ D. Morgan Pierce stipulated what offices could be held, and for how long, so that the aristoi could preserve themselves from social demotion. The aristocratic oligarchy was precluded from powers of taxation, which would have given overpowering advantage to the aristocratic branch vested with office. Popular resentment of the arbitrary dotinai debilitated the previous basileus-autocracy; any aristocratic family that advocated dotinai would lose support of both the demos and the aristocracy. The distribution of government benefits preempted recalcitrance or defection by aristocratic families.89 Finance of aristocratic oligarchy consequently depended on rental of public land and charges on the commerce of the harbor and market-place.90 Such taxes were indirect, so as not to antagonize the demos, but were not sufficient for a strong polis.91 (2) Territorial expansion would have been an alternative solution, but this was not undertaken. Perhaps the unique Hellenic pride in the independence of one's polis precluded this most normal reaction. Territorial expansion would have entailed

89 Hölleskamp, K-J.; "Zwischen Agon und Argumentation," in C. Neumeister und W. Räck, eds.: Rede und Redner: Bewertungen und Darstellung in den antiken Kulturen, S. 17-43, Möhnsee, 2000. 90 Andreades, M.; A History of Greek Public Finance, Cambridge, 1933. 91 A major outcome of the eighth-/seventh-century turmoil was the creation of aristocratic colleges, or oligarchies, governing small city states. These groups submitted to common rules, setting up offices and taking turns to exercise different dimensions of leadership. Much early Greek law is procedural, regulating who may hold which office, for how long, and establishing penalties for infringements. These formative state offices held little real power. They could not impose land, poll, or income taxes. Archaic states organized wars with other states (which, using hoplites, where remarkably cheap), and provided some religious goods (especially temples and communal festivals). They paid for these through indirect taxes, especially harbor and market dues, and revenues from communally owned land and minerals. Cf. Morris, Ian; "Early Iron Age Greece," It hardly made sense for the members of the upper classes to invest part of their wealth in large-scale enterprises for commercial production: the chances of obtaining high returns from craft-based production were clearly lower than in agriculture or in money lending. Cf. Morris, Ian; Early Iron Age Greece, Ch.8, in Scheidel, Walter, Morris, Ian, and Saller, Richard; The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.238.

－98－ EUPATRID ATHENS national organization. The poleis usually fought each other, but unified as friends and allies in the instance of a greater threat, such as the Persian war; when such a threat terminated, they reverted to fighting each other. A further factor in the failure to achieve national organization was the Greek pattern of hegemony. Greek poleis typically absorbed or conquered a weaker polis and then exploited it, instead of merging. The result would be extreme anger at subjugation and virulent efforts to regain independence, but this posteriori development does not explain why a polis deferred association or merging in the first place; it might be supposed that "love of independence" is an indecipherable surd that requires no further elucidation, but that would be a bit Pollyanna. Extermination would have been uneconomical as a loss of labor power, and enslavement might have required more military power than the victor could afford. The levy of manpower and taxation would allow the vanquished polis to continue existing in poverty, while the victorious polis would vampirize its total surplus. Abortive retaliation would continue for innumerable years and accounts for the characteristic development of fifth columns in all of the poleis. Presentation of freedom as an ethereal ideal, requiring no proof beyond self- evidence, might obfuscate the operative conditions. Any polis or village that was absorbed into hegemony was collectively enslaved; enslavement was not that of the individual, but terms were so harsh that the hegemonized village barely subsisted. (3) Overpopulation might have been resolved by redistribution of the great land holdings to the common people, as would have been very beneficial for its effect on military conscription. Aristocracy did not want land equalization, and aristocracy was the government. This had devastating consequences. The consolidation of citizenship into smallholders induced conversion to chattel slavery, since the "citizens" were now sufficiently secure in their land holdings to refuse dependent labor.92 Slave labor could not generate conscription for a military force, and the

92 The leaders of these formative states faced competitive and transaction-cost constraints: they had to prevent rival rulers from merging (or from conquering their polis from outside), and to generate the revenues they needed for military and religious goods. The

－99－ D. Morgan Pierce demos, supplanted by slave labor, would diminish too much to produce progeny sufficient for military conscription. Athens would have had enough manpower for conscription only if not slaves, but paid citizens, had labored on plantations. Pericles' strategy, that Athens should sustain, rather than confront Spartan attack in the Peloponnesian War was due to conditions inherited from the labor policy; there could not have been sufficient soldiers because of the prior admittance of slave labor. (4)Possibly colonization functioned to allay popular hostility against great land holding. Mothers and children passively shared the status of the father. Why? Immediately one might conjecture a legacy from tribal property rights; class- formation might have adopted this quality directly from kinship organization. On the other hand, kinship had enforced ties with all of one's relatives. How was it possible for aristocracy to have separated from the mass of common families, to which they had been heavily obligated as relatives? The landless theteis were members of the demos, not the aristocracy, but their membership in distinct clans may have endowed them with some residual rights. Land scarcity induced stasis, politically motivated rioting. The aristocratic clan possessing power might club the ordinary citizens whom they encountered in the streets.93 Instead of overpopulation dividing trade-offs that began in the eighth century reduced elite feuding, presumably lowered and distributed more fairly the costs of security and religion, and clarified property rights. As usually happens, the price of the alliance between middling aristocrats and poorer freemen was a reallocation of property rights. Beginning in the late eighth century, new ideas of citizenship formed, guaranteeing free local-born man rights in their own bodies and land. The logical consequence of the strengthening of citizenship was the development of chattel slavery, since free citizens working their own land had few incentives to labor for wages. Cf. Morris, Ian; Early Iron Age Greece, Ch.8, in Scheidel, Walter, Morris, Ian, and Saller, Richard; The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.239. 93 Sometimes a king was formally at the head, but he was really no more than the first of peers; body of nobles was the true master. Sometimes there was an aristocracy within an aristocracy; or a large clan, like the Bacchiads at Corinth, held the power. In all cases the distinction between the members of the ruling class and the mass of free citizens

－ 100 － EUPATRID ATHENS clans against each other, as previously, aristocracy divided in opposition against the demos. The landless theteis were members of the demos, not of the aristocracy, but their membership in distinct clans may have empowered them with some residual rights. Colonization might be perceived as a compromise solution. In extremis the aristocracy might have subjugated the demos, as intimated from random beatings of commoners in the street. This would have involved a complete repudiation of kinship in regard to commoners who were blood relatives. If aristocrats had committed themselves to support of their kinsmen, they would have tried to reinstate the precarious position of their landless kinsmen, but solidarity of the aristocratic class would have correspondingly fragmented. Colonization would not destroy, but would undermine, kinship unity; it would expel turbulent population, but sustain the dignity of the aristocracy vis-à-vis the demos. Because categories of wealth, usually paramount in a class structure, were not instituted in the oriental manner in Greece, the growth of social class was indiscriminate. Colonization strengthened class structure but weakened kinship structure, because kinship depends on linear continuity but class formation does not. Colonization attenuated kinship in favor of agnate class privilege, by draining only the younger generation from the kinship order, thus deracinating them from ancestral solidarity. Kinship ought to have impeded colonization because the landless youth, nevertheless the children of citizens, ought to have occupied the land of their ancestors, although land had become too scarce. As separate classes the aristos was widened and deepened. It was the tendency of the rulers to govern in their own interest and oppress the multitude, and they cared little to disguise their contempt for the mass of the people. At Mytilene things went so far that the Penthilids, who had secured the chief power, went about in the streets, armed with clubs, and knocked down citizens whom they disliked. Under these conditions there were strong inducements for men to leave their native city where they were of little account and had to endure the slights, if nothing worse, of their rules, and to join in the foundation of a new polis where they might themselves rule. Cf. Bury, J.B., A History of Greece, London, 1906, p. 87.

－ 101 － D. Morgan Pierce could regard distant relatives as strangers to whom they had no obligation, but as kinsmen the aristos had to regard distant relations as a personal duty. As aristocracy derived its distinction from blood-relation, it ought to have been impossible to repudiate blood relations without thereby repudiating the basis of its aristocratic pretension. It is highly significant that only young citizens, never young theteis, were expelled to colonies; the theteis were cheap labor which displaced citizens, and only the young citizens, having kinship rights to land inheritance, posed a threat of stasis. The sons who ought to have inherited land where instead sent to colonies. Kinship order in the colony effectively ceased because it was deprived of the continuity from the ancestry. Kinship unity was not strong enough to maintain strong ties between the metropolis and the colonists, whose claim on the ground of kinship was basically abandoned.

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