For the purposes of such a generalisation, we may rank the Greek communities under two classes: (1) those whose incomes, down through the historic period, continued to come from land-owning, whether with slave or free labour, as Sparta; and (2) those which latterly flourished chiefly by commerce, whether with or without military domination, as Athens and Corinth. In both species alike, in all ages, though in different degrees as regards both time and place, there were steep divisions of lot between rich and poor, even among the free. Nowhere, not even in early "Lycurgean" Sparta, was there any system aiming at the methodical prevention of large estates, or the prevention of poverty, though the primitive basis was one of military communism, and though certain sumptuary laws and a common discipline were long maintained.
Grote's examination (pt. ii, ch. vi; ed. cited, ii, 308-30) of Thirlwall's hypothesis (ch. viii; 1st ed. i, 301, 326) as to an equal division of lands by Lycurgus, seems to prove that, as regards rich and poor, the legendary legislator "took no pains either to restrain the enrichment of the former or to prevent the impoverishment of the latter"—this even as regards born Spartans. As to the early military communism of Sparta and Crete, see Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, § 210; and as to the economic process see Fustel de Coulanges, Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problèmes d'histoire, 1891, pp. 99-118.
Athens, on the other hand, was so situated as to become a place of industry and commerce; and from about the time of her great land-crisis, solved by Solon, her industrial and commercial interests determined her economic development. It follows from the success of Peisistratos that the mass of the people, blind to the importance of the political rights conferred upon them, were conscious of no such betterment from Solon's "shaking-off-of-burdens" as could make them averse to the rule of a "tyrant" who even laid upon them a new tax. The solution may perhaps lie in points of fiscal policy to which we have now no clear clue. Of Solon it is recorded[235] that he made a law against the export of any food produce of Attica save oil—the yield of the olive. This implied that of that product only was there in his opinion a redundancy; and we have it from the same source that he "saw that the soil was so poor that it could only suffice for the farmers," and so "gave great honour to trade," and "made a law that a son was not obliged to support his father if his father had not taught him a trade."[236] Himself a travelled merchant, he further recognised that "merchants are unwilling to despatch cargoes to a country which has nothing to export"; and we are led to infer that he encouraged on the one hand the export of manufactures, plus oil, and on the other the importation of corn and other food. In point of fact, grain was already being imported in increasing quantity from the recently colonised lands of Sicily and the Crimea;[237] and if the imports were free or lightly taxed the inland cultivators would have a local grievance in the depression of the prices of their produce.
The town and coast-dwellers, on the other hand, found their account in the carriage and development of manufactures—vases, weapons, objects of art—which, with the oil, and latterly the wine export, bought them their food from afar. Athens could thus go on growing in a fashion impossible to an agricultural community on the same soil; and could so escape that fate of shrinkage in the free class which ultimately fell upon purely agricultural Sparta. The upshot was that, after as before Solon, Athens had commercial interests among her pretexts for war, and so widened the sphere of her hostilities, escaping the worst forms of "stasis" in virtue of the expansibility of commerce and the openings for new colonisation which commerce provided and widened. But colonisation there had to be. Precisely by reason of her progressiveness, her openness to the alien, her trade and her enterprise, Attica increased in population at a rate which enforced emigration, while the lot of the rural population did not economically improve, and the probable change from corn-growing to olive-culture[238] would lessen the number of people employed on the land. Even apart from the fact of the popular discontent which welcomed the tyrannis of Peisistratos, we cannot doubt that Solon's plans had soon failed to exclude the old phenomena of poverty. The very encouragement he gave to artisans to immigrate,[239] while it made for the democratic development and naval strength of Athens, was a means of quickening the approach of a new economic crisis. And yet he seems to have recognised the crux of population. The traditional permission given by the sage to parents to expose infants, implicitly avows the insoluble problem—the "cursed fraction" in the equation, which will not disappear; and in the years of the approach of Peisistratos to power we find Athens sending to Salamis (about 570) its first kleruchie, or civic colony-settlement on subject territory—this by way of providing for landless and needy citizens.[240] It was the easiest compromise; and nothing beyond compromise was dreamt of.
[The statement that Solon by law permitted the exposure of infants is made by Malthus, who gives no authority, but is followed by Lecky. The law in question is not mentioned by Plutarch, and I do not find it noticed by any of the historians. It is stated, however, by Sextus Empiricus (Hypotyp. iii, 24) that Solon made a law by which a parent could put his child to death; and this passage, which is cited by Hume in his Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, is doubtless Malthus's authority. Nothing nearer to the purpose is cited by Meursius in his monograph on Solon; but this could very well stand as a permission of infanticide, especially seeing that the practice is presumptively prehistoric. Petit writes: "Quemadmodum liberos tollere in patris erat positum potestate, ita etiam necare et exponere, idque, meo judicio, non tam moribus quam lege receptum fuit Athenis" (Leges Atticæ, fol. 219, ed. Wesseling, 1742). Grote (ii, 470, note) pronounces that the statement of Sextus "cannot be true, and must be copied from some untrustworthy authority," seeing that Dionysius the Halicarnassian (ii, 26) contrasts the large scope of the patria potestas among the Romans with the restrictions which all the Greek legislators, Solon included, either found or introduced. Dr. Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 165) believes "the notion of exposing infants from economical motives not to have prevailed till later times" than the seventh century B.C., but he gives no reason for fixing any date. We may take it as certain that while the laws of Lycurgus, like the Roman Twelve Tables, enjoined or permitted the destruction of sickly or deformed infants, the general Greek usage allowed exposure. The express prohibition of it at Thebes (Ælian, Var. Hist. ii, 7) implies its previous normality there and elsewhere (cp. however, Aristotle, Pol. vii, 16); and the sale of children by their (free) parents was further permitted, except in Attica (Ingram, History of Slavery, p. 16); while even there a freeman's children by a slave concubine were slaves.]
On the other hand, the laws even of Sparta, framed with a view to the military strength of the State considered as the small free population, were ultimately evaded in the interests of property-holding, till the number of "pure Spartans" dwindled to a handful.[241] Under a system of primogeniture, with a rigid severance between the upper class and the lower, there could in fact be no other outcome. Here, apart from the revolts of the helots and the chronic massacres of these by their lords, which put such a stamp of atrocity on Spartan history,[242] the stress of class strife seems to have been limited among the aristocracy, not only by systematic infanticide, but by the survival of polyandry, several brothers often having one wife in common.[243] Whether owing to infanticide, or to in-breeding, or to preventives, families of three and four were uncommon and considered large, and special privileges offered to the fathers.[244] As always, such devices failed against the pressures of the main social conditions. All the while, of course, the perioikoi and the enslaved helots multiplied freely; hence the policy of specially thinning down the latter by over-toil[245] as well as massacre. In other States, where the polity was more civilised, many observers perceived that the two essential conditions of stability were (a) absolute or approximate equality of property, and (b) restraint of population, the latter principle being a notable reaction of reason against the normal practice of encouraging or compelling marriage.[246] Aristotle said in so many words that to let procreation go unchecked "is to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil";[247] and he cites previous publicists who had sought to solve the problem. Socrates and Plato had partly contemplated it; and the idealist, as usual, had proposed the more brutal methods;[248] but Aristotle, seeing more clearly the population difficulty, perhaps on that account is the less disposed towards communism.
As medical knowledge advanced, it seems certain, the practice of abortion must have been generally added to that of infanticide in Greece, as later in Rome. See Aristotle, Politics, vii, 16; Plutarch, Lycurgus, c. 3; and Plato, Theætetus, p. 149 (Jowett's trans. iv, 202), as to the normal resort to abortion. The Greeks must have communicated to the Romans the knowledge of the arts of abortion, as they did those of medicine generally. But it does not appear that with all these checks population really fell off in Greece until after the time of Alexander. Before that time it may very well have fallen off in Athens when she lost her position as sovereign and tribute-drawing State. The tribute would tend to maintain a population in excess of the natural amount. Dr. Mahaffy (Rambles and Studies in Greece, 4th ed. p. 11—a passage not squared with the data in Greek Life and Thought, pp. 328, 558) accepts the old view of a general and inexplicable depopulation. One of the loci classici on that head, in the treatise On the Cessation of Oracles (viii) attributed to Plutarch but probably not by him, is searchingly examined by Hume at the close of his essay Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations, and the critic comes to the conclusion that the extreme decay there asserted cannot have taken place. He was in all probability right in arguing that the number of slaves in Attica had been enormously exaggerated in the figures of Athenæus (cp. Cunningham, Western Civilisation, i, 109, note). There is reason to conclude, however, that Hume was unduly incredulous on some points. Strabo (refs. in Thirlwall, viii, 460) had found an immense decay of population in Greece more than a century before Plutarch; and his details prove a process of shrinkage which must have lasted long. In any case, a relative depopulation took place after the conquests of Alexander, from the operation of socio-economic causes, which are indicated by Finlay (History of Greece, Tozer's ed. i, 15; cp. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, p. 328, and The Greek World under Roman Sway, 1890, p. 218). Broadly speaking, the Greeks went to lands where wealth was more easily acquired than in their own. Further depopulation took place under the Romans, partly from direct violence and deportation, partly from fiscal pressure, partly from the economic causes already noted.
Thirlwall, in his closing survey, proceeding on Polybius,[249] confidently decides that the main cause of depopulation was domestic and moral. Such a theory cannot be sustained. Polybius evidently had no clear idea of the facts, since he asserts that "in our time" and "rapidly" there took place in Greece a "failure of offspring" (or "dearth of children"), which left cities desolate and land waste; and goes on to ascribe it to habits of luxury, which either kept men from marrying or made them refuse to rear more than a few of their children. The whole theorem is haphazard. Cities and lands could not have been so depopulated.[250] There must have been, in addition to slaughter, a drain of population to lands where the conditions were more advantageous. Nor is there any good reason for believing that child-exposure had suddenly and immensely increased. Thirlwall says that marriages were "unfruitful"; but this is not the statement of Polybius. It is true that pæderasty would count for much in lowering character; but it had been common in Greece centuries before the time of Polybius, and had not affected fecundity. As we have seen,[251] fecundity fell in Sparta for other reasons.
As between Sparta and Athens, the main difference was that Athenian life was for a long period more or less expansive, while that of Sparta, even in the period of special vigour, was steadily contractive, as regarded quantity and quality of "good life." At Sparta, as above noted, the normal play of self-interest in the governing class brought about a continuous shrinkage in the number of enfranchised citizens and of those holding land, till there were only 700 of the former and 100 of the latter—this when there were still 4,500 adult Spartans of "pure" descent, and 15,000 Laconians capable of military service. Even of the hundred landowners many were women, the estates having thus evidently aggregated by descent through heiresses.[252] It mattered little that this inner ring of rich became, after the triumph over Athens and in the post-Alexandrian period, as luxurious as the rest of Greece:[253] the evil lay not in the mode of their expenditure, but in the mode of their revenue. Agis IV and his successor Cleomenes thought to put the community on a sound footing by abolition of debts and forcible division of the land; but even had Agis triumphed at home or Cleomenes maintained himself abroad, the expedient could have availed only for a time. Accumulation would instantly recommence in the absence of a scientific and permanent system.
Schemes for promoting equality had been mooted in Greece from an early period (see Aristotle, Politics, ii, 6, 7, 8). Thus, "Pheidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest of legislators, thought that the families and number of citizens ought to continue the same." Phaleas of Chalcedon proposed to keep fortunes and culture equal; and Hippodamus the Milesian had a system of equality for a State of 10,000 persons. Some States, too, put restraints on the accumulation of land. But, save for transient successes, such as that of Solon at Athens, and of the compromise at Tarentum (see Aristotle, v, 5; and Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 184-86), there was no adequate adjustment of means to ends, as indeed there could not be. Aristotle's own practical suggestions show the hopelessness of the problem.