2. Athens under the Oligarchs

These towns of Attica were not only the background but the members of Athens. We have seen how, according to Greek belief, Theseus with a benevolent “synoecism” had brought the people of Attica into one political organization, with one capital,† Five miles from the Piraeus, and in a nest of hills—Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes—Athens grew around the old Mycenaean acropolis; and all the landowners of Attica were its citizens. The oldest families, and those with the largest holdings, wielded the balance of power; they had tolerated the kingship when disorder threatened, but when quiet and stability returned they reasserted their feudal domination of the central government. After King Codrus had died in heroic self-sacrifice against the invading Dorians,‡ they announced (so the story went) that no one was good enough to succeed him, and replaced the king with an archon chosen for life. In 752 they limited the tenure of the archonship to ten years, and in 683 to one. On the latter occasion they divided the powers of the office among nine archons: an archon eponymos, who gave his name to the year as a means of dating events; an archon basileus, who bore the name of king but was merely head of the state religion; a polemarchos, or military commander; and sixthesmothetai, or lawmakers. As in Sparta and Rome, so in Athens the overthrow of the monarchy represented not a victory for the commons, or any intentional advance towards democracy, but a recapture of mastery by a feudal aristocracy—one more swing of the pendulum in the historical alternation between localized and centralized authority. By this piecemeal revolution the royal office was shorn of all its powers, and its holder was confined to the functions of a priest. The word king remained in the Athenian constitution to the end of its ancient history, but the reality was never restored. Institutions may with impunity be altered or destroyed from above if their names are left unchanged.

The Eupatrid oligarchs—i.e., the well-born ruling few—continued to govern Attica for almost five centuries. Under their rule the population was divided into three political ranks: the hippes, or knights, who owned horses* and could serve as cavalry; thezeugitai, who owned a yoke of oxen and could equip themselves to fight as hoplites or heavy-armed troops; and the thetes, hired laborers who fought as light-armed infantry. Only the first two were accounted citizens; and only the knights could serve as archons, judges, or priests. After completing their term of office the archons, if no scandal had tarnished them, became automatically and for life members of the boule or Council that met in the cool of the evening on the Areopagus, or Ares’ hill, chose the archons, and ruled the state. Even under the monarchy this Senate of the Areopagus had limited the authority of the king; now, under the oligarchy, it was as supreme as its counterpart in Rome.³⁶

Economically the population fell again into three groups. At the top were the Eupatrids, who lived in relative luxury in the towns while slaves and hired men tilled their holdings in the country, or merchants made profits for them on their loans. Next in wealth were the demiurgoi, or public workmen—i.e., professional men, craftsmen, traders, and free laborers. As colonization opened up new markets, and coinage liberated trade, the rising power of this class became the explosive force that under Solon and Peisistratus won for it a share in the government, and under Cleisthenes and Pericles raised it to the zenith of its influence. Most of the laborers were freemen; slaves were as yet in the minority, even in the lower classes.³⁷—Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peasants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of moneylenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a bit of the earth.

Some of these peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously individual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious, many peasants sold their lands—despite the fine and disfranchisement that punished such sales—and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders or craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of ownership, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or “share-croppers” who kept a part of the produce as their pay.³⁸ Still others struggled on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest, were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab announcing this ownership.³⁹ Small holdings became smaller, free peasants fewer, great holdings greater. “A few proprietors,” says Aristotle, “owned all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable to be sold as slaves,” even into foreign parts, “on failure to pay their rent” or their debts.⁴⁰ Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coinage, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured articles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers, and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attica became so great that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer mouths would have to be fed.⁴¹

Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with slaves.⁴² Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen. The landowners, jealous of the growing wealth of the merchant class, sold abroad the corn that their tenants needed for food, and at last, under the law of debt, sold the Athenians themselves.⁴³

For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these evils. About 620 this thesmothete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to codify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would restore order in Attica. So far as we know, the essential advances of his code were a moderate extension, among the newly rich, of eligibility to the archonship, and the replacement of feud vengeance with law: here after the Senate of the Areopagus was to try all cases of homicide. The last was a basic and progressive change; but to enforce it, indeed to persuade vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own revenge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his legislation had been superseded by Solon’s he was remembered for his punishments rather than for his laws. Draco’s code congealed the cruel customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws and issues affecting their interests.⁴⁴ The owners of property were protected more zealously than ever before; petty theft, even idleness, was punished in the case of citizens with disfranchisement, in the case of others with death.*⁴⁵

As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. “The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor,” says Plutarch, “had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances . . . seemed possible but a despotic power.”⁴⁶ The poor, finding their situation worse with each year—the government and the army in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them⁴⁷—began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth.⁴⁸ The rich, unable any longer to collect the debts legally due them, and angry at the challenge to their savings and their property, invoked ancient laws,⁴⁹ and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all civilization.