The origin of the family, private property, and the state

by Friedrich Engels

During the next eighty years the Athenian society gradually drifted into the course on which it further developed in the following centuries. The outrageous land speculation of the time before Solon had been fettered, likewise the excessive concentration of property in land. Commerce, trades and artisan handicrafts, which were carried on in an ever larger scale as slave labor increased, became the ruling factors in gaining a living. Public enlightenment advanced. Instead of exploiting their own fellow citizens in the old brutal style, the Athenians now exploited mainly the slaves and the customers outside. Movable property, wealth in money, slaves and ships, increased more and more. But instead of being a simple means for the purchase of land, as in the old stupid times, it had now become an end in itself. The new class of industrial and commercial owners of wealth now waged a victorious competition against the old nobility. The remnants of the old gentile constitution lost their last hold. The gentes, phratries and tribes, the members of which now were dispersed all over Attica and completely intermixed, had thus become unavailable as political groups. A great many citizens of Athens did not belong to any gens. They were immigrants who had been adopted into citizenship, but not into any of the old groups of kinship. Besides, there was a steadily increasing number of foreign immigrants who were only protected by traditional sufferance.

Meanwhile the struggles of the parties proceeded. The nobility tried to regain their former privileges and for a short time recovered their supremacy, until the revolution of Kleisthenes (509 B. C.) brought their final downfall and completed the ruin of gentile law.

In his new constitution, Kleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded on the gentes and phratries. Their place was taken by an entirely new organization based on the recently attempted division of the citizens into naukrariai according to residence. No longer was membership in a group of kindred the dominant fact, but simply local residence. Not the nation, but the territory was now divided; the inhabitants became mere political fixtures of the territory.

The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts, so-called demoi, every one of which was autonomous. The citizens living in a demos (demotoi) elected their official head (demarchos), treasurer and thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor cases. They also received their own temple and divine guardian or heros, whose priest they elected. The control of the demos was in the hands of the council of demotoì. This is, as Morgan correctly remarks, the prototype of the autonomous American township. The modern state in its highest development ended in the same unit with which the rising state began its career in Athens.

Ten of these units (demoi) formed a tribe, which, however, was now designated as local tribe in order to distinguish it from the old sex tribe. The local tribe was not only an autonomous political, but also a military group. It elected the phylarchos or tribal head who commanded the horsemen, the taxiarchos commanding the infantry and the strategic leader, who was in command of the entire contingent raised in the tribal territory by conscription. The local tribe furthermore furnished, equipped and fully manned five war vessels. It was designated by the name of the Attic hero who was its guardian deity. It elected fifty councilmen into the council of Athens.

Thus we arrive at the Athenian state, governed by a council of five hundred elected by and representing the ten tribes and subject to the vote of the public meeting, where every citizen could enter and vote. Archons and other officials attended to the different departments of administration and justice.

By this new constitution and by the admission of a large number of aliens, partly freed slaves, partly immigrants, the organs of gentile constitution were displaced in public affairs. They became mere private and religious clubs. But their moral influence, the traditional conceptions and views of the old gentile period, survived for a long time and expired only gradually. This was evident in another state institution.

We have seen that an essential mark of the state consists in a public power of coërcion divorced from the mass of the people. Athens possessed at that time only a militia and a navy equipped and manned directly by the people. These afforded protection against external enemies and held the slaves in check, who at that time already made up the large majority of the population. For the citizens, this coërcive power at first only existed in the shape of the police, which is as old as the state. The innocent Frenchmen of the 18th century, therefore, had the habit of speaking not of civilized, but of policed nations (nations policées). The Athenians, then, provided for a police in their new state, a veritable "force" of bowmen on foot and horseback. This police force consisted—of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service. That was still a sign of the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without a police, but as yet it was too young and did not command sufficient moral respect to give prestige to an occupation that necessarily appeared ignominious to the old gentiles.

How well this state, now completed in its main outlines, suited the social condition of the Athenians was apparent by the rapid growth of wealth, commerce and industry. The distinction of classes on which the social and political institutions are resting was no longer between nobility and common people, but between slaves and freemen, aliens and citizens. At the time of the greatest prosperity the whole number of free Athenian citizens, women and children included, amounted to about 90,000; the slaves of both sexes numbered 365,000 and the aliens—foreigners and freed slaves—45,000. Per capita of each adult citizen there were, therefore, at least eighteen slaves and more than two aliens. The great number of slaves is explained by the fact that many of them worked together in large factories under supervision. The development of commerce and industry brought about an accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands. The mass of the free citizens were impoverished and had to face the choice of either competing with their own labor against slave labor, which was considered ignoble and vile, besides promising little success, or to be ruined. Under the prevailing circumstances they necessarily chose the latter course and being in the majority they ruined the whole Attic state. Not democracy caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery ostracizing the labor of the free citizen.

The origin of the state among the Athenians presents a very typical form of state organization. For it took place without any marring external interference or internal obstruction—the usurpation of Pisistratos left no trace of its short duration. It shows the direct rise of a highly developed form of a state, the democratic republic, out of gentile society. And finally, we are sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details of the process.