Ancient History & Civilisation

II. THE STRUGGLE FOR WEALTH

Athenaeus, who is as reliable as any gossip, tells us that Demetrius of Phalerum, about 310, took a census of Athens, and reported 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics or aliens, and 400,000 slaves.8 The last figure is incredible, but we know nothing that contradicts it. Very probably the number of rural slaves had grown; estates were becoming larger, and were being worked more and more by slaves under a slave overseer managing for an absentee landlord.9 Under this system a more scientific agriculture developed; Varro knew fifty Greek manuals of the art. But the processes of erosion and deforestation had already gutted much of the land. Even in the fourth century Plato had expressed the belief that rain and flood, in the flow of time, had carried away much of the arable surface of Attica; the surviving hills, in his metaphor, were a skeleton from which the flesh had been washed away.10 Many areas of Attica were in the third century so denuded of topsoil that their ancient farms were abandoned. The forests of Greece were vanishing, and timber, like food, had to be brought in from abroad.11 The mines at Laurium were worn out and almost deserted; silver could be gotten more cheaply from Spain; and the gold mines of Thrace, which had once poured their wealth into Athens, now enriched the treasury and beautified the coinage of Macedon.

While the source of a virile and independent citizenry was drying up in the villages, industry and the class war were progressing in the towns. Small factories, and the slaves in them, were growing in number at Athens, as in all the larger cities of the Hellenistic world. Slave dealers accompanied the armies, bought unransomed captives, and sold them at three or four minas ($ 150 or $200) a head in the great slave markets of Delos and Rhodes. Some scruples, moral or economic, were felt about this ancient institution. A humanitarian sentiment arose as a by-product of philosophy; the cosmopolitan spirit of the age was negligent of racial distinctions; and casual hired labor, which could be thrown upon public relief whenever it ceased to be privately profitable, was in many circumstances cheaper than slave labor that had to be continuously maintained.12Towards the close of this period there was a substantial rise in manumissions.

Commerce languished in the older cities, but flourished in the new. The Greek ports of Asia and Egypt grew at the expense of the Piraeus; and even on the mainland it was Chalcis and Corinth that caught the swelling currents of Hellenistic trade. Through these strategically situated and wellequipped centers, as through Antioch, Seleucia, Rhodes, Alexandria, and Syracuse, a busy stream of merchants flowed, spreading a cosmopolitan and skeptical point of view. Bankers multiplied, and lent not only to traders and proprietors but to cities and governments.13 Some cities, like Delos and Byzantium, had public or national banks holding government funds and managed by state officials.14 In 324 Antimenes of Rhodes organized the first known system of insurance by guaranteeing owners, for a premium of eight per cent, against loss from the flight of their slaves.15The release of Persian accumulations and the quickened circulation of capital reduced the rate of interest to ten per cent in the third century and seven per cent in the second. Speculation was widespread, but not organized. Some manipulators sought to raise prices by limiting production; there were advocates of restricting crops to keep up the purchasing power of the farming community.16 Prices in general were high, again because of the Achaemenid treasuries that Alexander had poured into the currency of the world; but at the same time, and partly by the same cause, trade was facilitated, production was stimulated, and prices gradually fell back to a normal range. The wealth of the wealthy grew beyond any precedent in Greek history. Homes became palaces, furniture and carriages more sumptuous, servants more numerous; dinners became orgies, and women became show windows of their husbands’ prosperity.17

Wages lagged behind rising prices, and rapidly followed their fall. They could support a single man only, and made for celibacy, pauperism, and depopulation; they left a diminishing economic distance between free worker and slave. Employment was irregular, and thousands of men abandoned the mainland cities for mercenary soldiering abroad, or to hide their poverty in rural isolation.18 The Athenian government relieved the destitute with grants of corn; the rich amused them with free tickets to celebrations and games. The wealthy stinted in wages but were generous in charity; often they lent money to their cities without interest, or rescued them from bankruptcy with large gifts, or built public works out of their private funds, or endowed temples or universities, or paid handsomely for the statues or the poems that published their features or their largess. The poor organized themselves into unions for mutual aid, but they could do little against the power and cleverness of the rich, the conservatism of the peasants, and the readiness of otherwise rival governments and leagues to exchange armed assistance in suppressing revolts.19 The freedom of unequal ability to accumulate or starve brought on again, as in Solon’s days, an extreme concentration of wealth. The poor lent readier ear to socialistic gospels; their spokesmen called for the cancellation of debts, the redivision of the land, and the confiscation of large fortunes; the boldest now and then proposed the liberation of the slaves.20

The decay of religious belief promoted the growth of compensatory utopias: Zeno the Stoic described an ideal communism in his Republic (ca. 300), and his follower Iambulus (ca. 250) inspired Greek rebels with a romance in which he described a Blessed Isle in the Indian Ocean (perhaps Ceylon); there, he reported, all men were equal, not only in rights but in ability and intelligence; all worked equally, and shared equally in the product; all took equal part, turn by turn, in administering the government; neither wealth nor poverty existed there, nor any war of the classes; nature produced fruit abundantly of her own accord, and men lived in harmony and universal love.20a

Some governments nationalized certain industries: Priene took over the saltworks, Miletus the textile factories, Rhodes and Cnidus the potteries; but the governments paid as low wages as the private employer, and squeezed all possible profit from the labor of their slaves. The gulf between rich and poor widened;21 the class war became bitterer than before. Every city, young or old, echoed with the hatred of class for class, with uprisings, massacres, suppressions, banishments, and the destruction of property and life. When one faction won it exiled the other and confiscated its goods; when the exiles returned to power they revenged themselves in kind, and slaughtered their enemies; imagine the stability of an economic system subject to such decerebrations and disturbances. Some ancient Greek cities were so devastated by class strife that industry and men fled from them, grass grew in the streets, cattle came there to graze.22 Polybius, writing about 150 B.C., describes certain timeless phases of the war from the viewpoint of a rich conservative:

When they (the radical leaders) have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has found a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, . . . produces a reign of violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land.23

It was war and class war that weakened mainland Greece to the point of being easily overcome by Rome. The bitter ruthlessness of the victors—the destruction of crops, vineyards, and orchards, the razing of farmhouses, the selling of captives into slavery—ruined one locality after another, and left an empty shell for the ultimate enemy. A land so wasted by strife, by erosion, deforestation, and the listless tillage of impoverished tenants or slaves, could not compete with the alluvial plains of the Orontes, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. The northern cities were no longer on the great routes of trade; they had lost their navies, and could not control the sources and avenues of the grain supply that Athens and Sparta had mastered in their imperial days. The centers of power, even of literary and artistic creation, passed back again to Asia and Egypt, from which, a thousand years before, Greece had humbly learned her letters and her arts.

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