The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

In the commercial cities, where industry was encouraged and wealth tended to take the form of invested capital, it could not readily get into so few hands; and as commerce developed and the investments were more and more in that direction, there would arise an idle rich class which could be best got at by way of taxation. In such communities, though the division and hostility of rich and poor were as unalterable as in Sparta, there was more elasticity of adjustment; so that we see maritime and trading communities like Heracleia and Rhodes maintaining their oligarchic government, with vicissitudes, down into the Roman period,[254] somewhat as Venice in a later age outlasted the other chief republics of Italy. The ruin of Corinth, though indirectly promoted by class strifes,[255] need not have occurred but for the Roman overthrow.[256]

As regards Athens, it is necessary to guard against some misconceptions concerning the life conditions even of the Periclean period. Public buildings apart, it was not a rich or rich-looking city; on the contrary, partly by reason of the force of democratic sentiment, its houses were mostly mean, the well-to-do people presumably having their better houses in the country, where the land was now mostly owned by them. After the destruction of the city by Xerxes (480 B.C.), the first need was felt to be its refortification on a larger scale, even sepulchres as well as the remains of private houses being made to yield materials for the walls.[257] At the same time the Piræus and Munychia were walled on a still greater scale—the whole constituting a public work of extraordinary scope, rapidly carried through by the co-operation of the whole of the citizens. The further gradual rebuilding of the city, as well as the fresh flocking of the foreign trading population to the now safe Piræus, would help, with the public works of Pericles, to set up the conditions of general prosperity which prevailed before the Peloponnesian war.[258] According to Demosthenes, the public men of the generation of Salamis had houses indistinguishable from those of ordinary people, whereas in the orator's own day the statesmen had houses actually finer than the public buildings.[259] This would be the natural result of the control of the confederate treasure resulting from the Athenian supremacy. But Dicæarchus belongs to the same period, and his account represents the mass of the city as poor in appearance, the houses small and with projecting stairways, and the streets crooked.[260] We know further from Xenophon that there were many empty spaces, some of them doubtless made by the customary destruction of the houses of those ostracised. There was thus a considerable approach to a rather straitened equality among the mass of the town-dwelling free citizens, who, despite the meanness of their houses, had luxuries in the form of the public baths and gymnasia.

Before Salamis, again, the revenue drawn from the leases of the silver mines of Laurium had been equally divided among the enfranchised citizens—an arrangement which had yielded only a small sum to each, but which represented a notable adumbration of a communal system, with the fatal implication of a basis in slavery.[261] The devotion of this fund[262] to the building of a navy was the making of the Athenian maritime power; whence in turn came the ability of Athens to extort tribute from the allied States, and therewith to achieve relatively the greatest and most effective expenditure on public works[263] ever attempted by any government. It was this specially created demand for and endowment of the arts and the drama that raised Athens to the artistic and literary supremacy of the ancient world, and, by so creating a special intellectual soil, prepared the ensuing supremacy of Athenian philosophy.[264] But the Periclean policy of endowment went far beyond even the employment of labour by the State on the largest scale; it set up the principle of supplying something like an income to multitudes of poorer free citizens—an experiment unique in history. The main features of the system were: (1) Payments for service to the members of the Council of Five Hundred; (2) payments to all jurors, an order numbering some six thousand; (3) the theorikon or allowance of theatre money to all the poorer citizens; (4) regular payments to the soldiers and sailors; (5) largesses of corn, or sales at reduced prices; (6) sacrificial banquets, shared in by the common people; (7) the sending out of "kleruchies," or bodies of quasi-colonists, who were billeted on the confederate cities, to the number of five or six thousand in ten years. Without taking the a priori hostile view of the aristocratic faction, who bitterly opposed all this—a view endorsed later by Plato and Socrates—the common-sense politician must note the utter insecurity of the whole development, depending as it did absolutely on military predominance.[265] The mere cessation of the expenditure on public works at the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian war was bound to affect class relations seriously; and parties, already bitter, were henceforth more decisively so divided.[266]

In the second period of Athenian ascendency, after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants and of Sparta, when the virtual pensioning of citizens begun by Pericles had been carried to still further lengths,[267] we find Xenophon, the typical Greek of culture and military experience, proposing a financial plan[268] whereby Athens, instead of keeping up the renewed practice of oppressing the confederate cities in order to pay pensions to its own poorer citizens, should derive a sufficient revenue from other sources. In particular he proposed (1) the encouraging of foreigners to settle in the city in larger numbers, by exempting them from military service and from all forms of public stigma, and by giving them the waste grounds to build on. The taxes they would have to pay as aliens would serve as revenue to maintain the citizens proper. (2) A fund should be established for the encouragement of trade which in some unexplained way should yield a high interest, paid by the State, to all investors. (3) The State should build inns, shops, warehouses, and exchanges, chiefly for the use of the foreigners, and so further increase its revenue. (4) It should build ships for the merchant trade, and charter them out upon good security. (5) Above all, it should develop by slave labour the silver mines of Laurium, to the yield of which there was no limit. The public, in fact, might there employ thrice as many slaves as the number of citizens; and it should further set about finding new mines.

We have here the measure of the Athenian faculty to solve the democratic problem as then recognised. The polity of Pericles was bound to perish, alike because it negated international ethics and because it had no true economic basis. The comparatively well-meaning plan of Xenophon could not even be set in motion, so purely fanciful is its structure. The income of the poorer citizens is to come from the taxes and rents paid by foreigners, and from mines worked by slave labour; the necessary army of slaves has to be bought as a State investment. It is as if the Boers of the Transvaal had proposed to live idly in perpetuity on the dues paid by the immigrants, all the while owning all the mines and drawing all the profits. It is hardly necessary to say, with Boeckh,[269] that the thesis as to the yield of the mines was a pure delusion; and that the idea of living on the taxation of foreigners was suicidal.[270] The old method, supplemented perforce by some regular taxation of the taxable citizens, and by the special exaction of "liturgies" or payments for the religious festival drama and other public services from the rich, was maintained as long as might be; industry tending gradually to decay, though the carrying trade and the resumed concourse of foreigners for a time kept Athens a leading city. Never very rich agriculturally, the middle and upper classes had for the rest only their manufactures and their commerce as sources of income; and as the manufactures were mostly carried on by slave labour, and were largely dependent on the State's control of the confederate treasure, the case of the poorer free citizens must necessarily worsen when that control ceased. About 400 B.C. the Athenians had still a virtual monopoly of the corn trade of Bosporus, on which basis they could develop an extensive shipping, which was a source of many incomes; but even these would necessarily be affected by the new regimen which began with the Macedonian conquest.

The attempt of Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) to confute the ordinary view as to the poverty of the Attic soil cannot be maintained. (See above, p. 99.) Niebuhr (Lectures on Roman History, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 264) doubtless goes to the other extreme in calling the Greeks bad husbandmen. Compare the contrary view of Cox, General History, 2nd ed. p. 4. But even good husbandry on a poor soil could not compete with the output of Bosporus and Egypt. And in the Peloponnesian war Attic agriculture sank to a low level (Curtius' History, Eng. tr. iv, 71; bk. v, ch. ii).

As to the incomes made in the Bosporus corn-trade, cp. Grote, x, 410, 412, 413. When it became possible thus to draw a revenue from investment, the Athenian publicists rapidly developed the capitalist view that the lending of money capital is the support of trade. See Demosthenes, as cited by Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix.

§ 2

In the economic readjustments, finally, which followed on the rise and subdivision of the empire of Alexander, Greece as a whole took a secondary place in the Hellenistic world, though Macedonia kept much of its newly acquired wealth. While commerce passed with industry and population to the new eastern cities, the remaining wealth of Greece proper would tend to pass into fewer hands,[271] thus pro tanto narrowing more than ever the free and cultured class, and relatively enlarging that of the slaves.

[Boeckh (bk. i, ch. viii) dwells on the variety of manufactures, and here gives a juster view than does Dr. Mahaffy, who (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 406) oddly speaks of the lack of machinery as making "any large employment of hands in manufacture impossible." But the main manufacture, that of arms, was peculiarly dependent on the Athenian command of the confederate treasure; and it does not appear that the other manufactures were a source of much revenue till just before the period of political decline, when other causes combined to check Athenian trade. By that time the aristocratic class had weakened in their old prejudice against all forms of commerce (Mahaffy, as cited; Boeckh, as cited), which had hitherto kept it largely in the hands of aliens, this long after the time when, at Corinth and other ports, the ruling class had been constituted of the rich traders; and after the special efforts of Solon to encourage and enforce industry. Apart from this prejudice, which in many States put a political disability on traders, commerce had always been hampered by war and bad policy. Dr. Mahaffy (Social Life, p. 405) somewhat over-confidently follows Heeren and Boeckh in deciding that none of the Greek trade laws were in the interests of particular trades or traders; but even if they were not, they none the less hampered all commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, ch. ix. As Hume observed, the high rates of profit and interest prevailing in Greece show an early stage of commerce. Cp. Boeckh, bk. i, chs. ix, xxii.]