Blood and Money. David McNally
contacts created. With these came an upsurge in raiding and communal warfare, the first records of which date from the late eighth century.45 All of this drove a series of socioeconomic transformations, culminating in the political revolutions that would usher in both the classical polis and coinage.
While historians continue to debate the scale of the demographic takeoff in the archaic era, there is little doubt that crucial changes in diet and metallurgy propelled population growth, which in turn sent land-hungry people in search of colonies.46 Fueled though it may have been by a desire for agricultural land, colonization also fostered slaving and market exchange. The capture of women as unfree wives and concubines was nothing new, of course, as the disputes charging the drama of the Iliad indicate. And in the Odyssey, King Nestor remarks that on leaving Troy, “we stowed our plunder, our sashed and lovely women” (3.170). Recounting his sacking of Ismarus, Odysseus further claims that he “killed the men, but as for the wives and plunder, that rich haul we dragged away from the place” (9.45–47). As colonists established households on land they had occupied, there is little doubt that they also seized local women. But not all the women and children captured would necessarily be incorporated into the household. There was increasingly an option to sell them. Recalling one battle against the Trojans, Achilles brags that he took “droves” of women, whom he “auctioned off as slaves” (Iliad, 21.99). And Thucydides, writing in a later period, describes Greek soldiers killing the Corcyraen men they had defeated, while “all the women taken in the stronghold were sold as slaves” (IV.48.4). Later in his History, Thucydides narrates a Spartan invasion of Iasus that led to the capture of “a very great booty.” The Spartans, he says, turned the town over to Tissaphernes along with “all the captives,” who were relinquished for “the stipulated price of one Doric stater a head” (VIII.28.4). These multiple references to the sale of enslaved persons mesh with historical evidence suggesting that early Greek colonists, at least on the Black Sea coast, collaborated with local chieftains in the slave trade.47 Conquest of land involved not just capture of persons, but also the sale of some as human commodities.
Colonization additionally involved establishment of Greek trading posts. For instance, the early colonial settlement of Pithecusae was founded as a trading station, and the commercial colony at al-Mina served as the base of Greek trade to the East for two centuries (roughly 800 to 600 BCE). To be sure, agricultural produce comprised a considerable part of what Greek colonists sent to these markets. But shares of the booty claimed by raiding parties—from precious metal goods to enslaved people—would have played no small part. The fruits of this plunder were often exchanged for manufactured goods from the East, such as iron, fabrics, metal objects, and precious ornaments. Indeed, Greeks may well have deliberately increased their slaving activities to enhance trade with the East. In the Old Testament, Ezekiel specifically mentions enslaved people “as a typical Greek commodity.”48 Yet, while colonization and raiding opened up new market-oriented activities bound up with slaving, we should not assume this involved the rise of a new merchant class. On the contrary, raiding was a preeminently aristocratic activity. It was wealthy nobles (aristoi) who had the resources to build or purchase boats and equip them with both rowers and weapons, and the epics clearly depict them as leaders of raiding parties. In particular, younger sons of aristocratic families were often raiders, just as they were among the most numerous of colonizers. The distinction between warriors and traders is thus a fluid one, revolving on “little but an ideological hairline.”49 So widely accepted was the image of the seafaring noble that Odysseus pronounces, “Most men risk the seas to trade with other men” (Odyssey, 9.141), and the whole of his epic tale pivots on maritime misadventures.
Whether heads of households or younger sons, aristocratic warrior-traders propelled the geographic expansion that opened new horizons for raiding, the booty from which fired exchange for Eastern luxuries. Yet, this patrician activity significantly altered traditional aristocratic society, in large measure because goods acquired through raiding (and related trading activity) did not originate in the households (oikoi) in which the plunderers had been born. Pillaged goods from new territories could thus readily be treated as treasure acquired outside the networks of obligation that defined the household and its agricultural wealth. This may not have been especially significant when slaving and trading were more sporadic activities. But the sustained wave of colonization, which created new settlements and trading centers, removed the young men of the colonies from traditional spaces of aristocratic reciprocity. At sea for extended periods and no longer living alongside the old noble families, colonists and traders advanced more in the world by piling up personal wealth than by relying on customary networks of obligation. Indeed, when establishing constitutions for new poleis, they marked their novel status with more egalitarian laws, at least for those deemed citizens.50 As a result, the colonies often contributed to the growth of an anti-aristocratic ethos that became increasingly potent after about 700.51 As new fortunes were made in the nexus of raiding, slaving, and trading, a new fluidity entered the order of rank and power, with lesser lords sometimes acquiring fortunes exceeding those of their former superiors. At the same time, craftsmen and soldiers increasingly entered into market transactions. Throughout Greek society, older noble values and settled hierarchies jostled with new modes of accumulation via warrior-trading. Aristocratic poets of the era can be found complaining that wealth now mattered more than birth.
With these changes came the cultural transformations associated with “the orientalizing revolution.” Luxury goods from the East entered the lives of Greek aristocrats on a growing scale, and both traders and migrant craftsmen established new cultural contacts. The myths, rituals, and household goods of the nobility increasingly reflected admiration of Eastern societies, their art, and their highly stratified social orders.52 Although they were excluded from some of these cultural shifts, particularly the aristocratic symposia, the common folk were not unaffected by the changing patterns of social life. In the words of one historian,
The man who draws his boat down into the sea and sails it is no longer tied to the man
who had
previously ordered his life across the boundary of his fields…. The potter who sells his
vases by
the docks must make what the foreigner wants, not what the basileus [lord] used to demand….
The mercenary must learn to take orders from any general set over him, not just from the commander of his phratry [extended kinship group]. 53
This was not, of course, a market society in any modern sense of the term, never mind a capitalist one. The vast majority of people were peasants producing most of their own subsistence goods through the labors of their households. Nonetheless, more members of all social classes, including peasant farmers, did enter markets, and the wealth and sensibilities generated there disrupted older patterns of social life, putting considerable strain on traditional forms of reciprocity. Wealth derived at a spatial distance from the community augmented the social distances between its members. Distancing, as we have already observed, was fundamental to negative reciprocity. It permitted unbalanced transactions, including violent ones. And as colonization, slaving, and the growth of trade networks all developed, wealth based on negative reciprocity began to have ever more profound impacts within traditional Greek communities.
Perhaps most significant, these new dynamics of accumulation shook up long-standing relations between rich and poor. To begin with, it seems clear that private ownership of land became more entrenched during this period, and that land was increasingly alienable.54 Moreover, the general direction of land transfers was from the poor to the rich, implying both growing dispossession, on the one hand, and increased concentration of landed wealth, on the other. Concomitantly, the practice of smallholders honoring the nobility with “gifts” was being displaced by regular payment of rents.55 By 600 BCE substantial numbers of small peasant farmers were classified as hektemoroi, tenants who probably turned over one-sixth of their produce to a lord. These rents had lost all semblance of gifts by the time of Draco’s legal codes (probably 621 BCE), which harshly punished the poor for transgressions of the law, including