Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
the tyrant’s substance by one’s toil’.
This brief dramatic interlude may do little to advance the action of the play, but it nicely sums up the issues at stake in Athenian political theory. It also tells us much about the polis and the social conditions that gave rise to political theory. Contained in the conception of freedom exalted by Theseus are certain basic principles that the Athenians, and other Greeks, regarded as uniquely theirs, defining the essence of their distinctive state. The Greek word for freedom, eleutheria, and, for that matter, even the more restricted and elitist Latin libertas – in reference to both individuals and states – have no precise equivalent in any ancient language of the Near East or Asia, for instance in Babylonian or classical Chinese; nor can the Greek and Roman notions of a ‘free man’ be translated into those languages.1 In Greek, these concepts appear again and again, in everything from historical writing to drama, as the defining characteristics of Athens.
So, for instance, when the historian Herodotus offers his explanation for the Athenian defeat of Persia, he attributes their strength to the fact that they had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. When they were living under tyrannical oppression, ‘they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master . . .’ 2 Now that they were free, they had become ‘the first of all’. Similarly, the tragedian, Aeschylus, in The Persians, tells us that – in contrast to subjects of the Persian king, Xerxes – to be an Athenian citizen is to be masterless, a servant to no mortal man.
It would, of course, be possible to attribute the Greeks’ clear delineation of ‘freedom’ to the prevalence of chattel slavery, which entailed an unusually sharp conceptual and legal distinction between freedom and bondage. The growth of slavery certainly did clarify and sharpen the distinction. But the distinctive Greek conception of autonomy and self-sufficiency owes its origin to something else, and the uncompromising definition of servitude is a consequence of that conception more than its cause.
The distinguished medieval historian, Rodney Hilton, once remarked that ‘the concept of the freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord is one of the most important if intangible legacies of medieval peasants to the modern world.’3 If Hilton was right to trace this concept to the peasantry, he was surely wrong not to give the credit for it to the ancient Greeks. It was the liberation of Greek peasants from any form of servitude or tribute to lord or state, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, that produced a new conception of freedom and the free man. This conception was increasingly associated with democracy – so much so that an anti-democrat like Plato (who, as we shall see, thought that anyone engaged in necessary labour should be legally or politically dependent) sought to subvert the concept of eleutheria by equating it with licence. At the same time, the liberation of the peasantry wiped out a whole spectrum of dependence and left behind the stark dichotomy of freedom and slavery, the one an attribute of citizens, the other a condition to which no citizen could be reduced.
Although a leisurely life was no doubt a cultural ideal, the Greek conception of eleutheria has at its heart a freedom from the necessity to work for another – not freedom from labour but the freedom of labour. This applies not only to the masterless individual but also to the polis governed by a citizen body and one that owes no tribute to another state. In its emphasis on autonomous labour and self-sufficiency, this concept of freedom reflects the unique reality of a state in which producers were citizens, a state in which a civic community that combined appropriating and producing classes ruled out relations of lordship and dependence between them, whether as masters and servants or as rulers and subjects. That civic community, which was most highly developed in democratic Athens, was the decisive condition for the emergence of Greek political theory.
In the previous chapter, we outlined some of the ways in which the polis, and especially the democracy, generated a new mode of thinking, a systematic application of critical reason to interrogate the very foundations of political right. This mode of thinking was, it was suggested, rooted in a new kind of practice, which had less to do with relations between rulers and subjects than with transactions and conflicts among citizens, united in their civic identity yet still divided by class. The self-governing civic community and the practice of politics – action in the public sphere of the polis, a community of citizens – reached its apogee in democratic Athens, which was also home to the classic tradition of Greek political theory.
The Rise of the Democracy
The evolution of the democracy can be traced by following the development of the civic or political principle, the notion of citizenship and the gradual elevation of the polis, civic law and civic identity at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, household, birth and blood. To put it another way, the processes of politicization and democratization went hand in hand, and the most democratic polis was the one in which the political principle was most completely developed. The historic events commonly identified as the milestones in Athenian political development can all be understood in these terms. In each case, the strengthening of the political principle at the same time represented an advance in popular power and a reconfiguration of relations between classes.
Archaeology and the decipherment of Linear B, the script that preceded the Greek alphabet, have revealed much about the states that existed in Greece before the emergence of the polis. They were, as has already been suggested, analogous to other ancient states, albeit on a smaller scale, in which a bureaucratic power at the centre controlled land and labour, appropriating tax or tribute from subordinate peasant communities. Little is known about how this state-form disappeared or what intervened between its demise and the rise of the polis. Much of what is known about Greek society on the eve of the polis depends on the Homeric epics, which certainly do not describe the Mycenean civilization that is supposed to be their theme. Invoking myths and legends from an earlier time, they depict a social structure and social values of a later age. The Homeric poems may not exactly describe any society that ever existed in Greece; but, in general outline, they remain our best source of information about the aristocratic society that preceded the polis, a society already coming to an end when the poet(s) memorialized it. The epics at least allow us some access to the social and political arrangements that gave way to the polis.
The principal social and economic unit of ‘Homeric’ society is the oikos, the household, and especially the aristocratic household, dominated by a lord who is surrounded by his kin and retainers and supported by the labour of dependents. There is scarcely any ‘public’ sphere: duties and rights are primarily to household, kin and friends; and various social functions, such as the disposal of property and the punishment of crime, are dictated by the customary rules of kinship, while jurisdiction, such as it is, belongs exclusively to lords.
Yet when the epics were written, household and kinship ties were already being displaced by different principles. There were ties of territoriality, around an urban centre, while the bonds and conflicts of class were at work in relations between master and servant, or lord and peasant, and in the class alliances of lordship. ‘Homeric’ lords had become an aristocracy of property, bound together by common interests as appropriators, though often in vicious rivalry with one another, and increasingly isolated from their producing compatriots.
The aristocracy used its non-economic powers, especially its judicial functions, to appropriate the labour of subordinate producers. In that respect, it still had something in common with the ancient bureaucratic state, in which the state and state office were the principal means of appropriation. The status of lords may even have been a remnant of the old bureaucratic state and its system of state-controlled appropriation. But the critical difference is that there was, in post-Mycenean Greece, effectively no state, no powerful apparatus of rule to sustain the power of appropriators over producers. Property was held by individuals and households, and the aristocracy of property had to face its subordinates not as a well organized ruling force but as a fairly loose collection of such individuals and households, often engaged in fierce conflict with each other, and distinguished from their non-aristocratic compatriots less by superior power than by superior property and noble birth. Their relations with peasant producers were further complicated by the community’s growing military reliance on the peasantry.
By the time we reach the first relatively well-documented moment in the evolution of Athenian democracy,