Marxism and Ancient Greece: How Anti-Democratic Views Shaped Historical Understanding

Marxism and Ancient Greece
Author(s): Ellen Wood

Source: History Workshop, No. 11 (Spring, 1981), pp. 3-22
Published by: Oxford University Press
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ARTICLESAND ESSAYS
'A Grecian Scene.' Illustration from The Iconographic Encyclopaedia of Science, Literatureand
Art, originally published in 1851
Marxismand ancient Greece'

by Ellen Wood
Historical studies reveal as much about their authors' contemporary world, its social
conflicts and political controversies, as they do about their purported subject; but
histories of the ancient world, of Greece in particular, and especially of democratic
Athens, have perhaps served more often than most as ideological vehicles. The
modern tradition of classical historiography evolved just as the spectre of mass
democracy and revolution were beginning to haunt the ruling classes of Europe. It was
only natural that the political history of the society which first articulated the concept
of democracy should attract an especially keen interest. Unfortunately, although the
idealization of Greek art and literature reached new heights, the most influential
historical accounts were imbued with varying degrees of hostility to democracy; and
ancient history has to this day not completely freed itself of the myths spawned by that
hostility. The consequences have been far-reaching and are of more than simply
antiquarian interest. Perhaps the most significant illustration is to be found not in the
work of any reactionary historian but rather in Marxist thought, where the factual
distortions produced by a counter-revolutionary bias have been absorbed into a theory
with a very different perspective. These distortions have affected not only the Marxist
understanding of classical antiquity but also the general Marxist theory of 'laws of
development' and the origin of classes and the state.

History WorkshopJournal
THE ANTI-DEMOCRA TIC TRADITION

In the late 18th century and throughout most of the 19th, the ancient world occupied a
special place in historiography, and attracted the most influential and passionately
political historical scholars. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
era, two modern preoccupations in particular found their way into classical scholarship: the questions of nationhood and of mass democracy. The former was, not
surprisingly, a matter of special and passionate interest to German scholars; and the
effect was often to turn their attention away from Greece and towards Rome.2 Mass
democracy was a more universal concern; and here the example of classical Greece
took centre stage.
For Radicals in early 19th century England, Athenian democracy was a shining
ideal, 'the state that had come closest to political perfection', as Richard Jenkyns
writes in his recent study, The Victorians and Ancient Greece3. And yet, Jenkyns
continues, 'This belief was not shared by contemporary historians'. Thus, if moral
judgments against Athenian democracy were challenged by liberal literati such as
Byron or J.S. Mill, the historiographical apparatus supporting these judgments
remained surprisingly unscathed. The Tory William Mitford, whose influential
history was full of explicitly dire warnings about the dangers of democracy exemplified
by Athens, could be attacked by Byron for 'his great pleasure in praising tyrants' and
yet be lauded as 'perhaps the greatest of all modern historians'.4 Even George Grote,
whose great history was the most sympathetic to Athenian democracy and who wrote
in direct response to Mitford, continued, like his opponent, rather uncritically to
venerate (as did his friend, Mill) the most ardent of Greek anti-democrats, notably
Plato. Admiration for Athenian democracy was no guarantee of a questioning
attitude toward the historical authority of witnesses whose interpretation of Athenian
society was inspired by anti-democratic zeal.
The air of sanctity, the mystique surrounding ancient Greece is not surprising in
light of the very special place occupied by the classical heritage in the culture and
education of the ruling classes. No one needs reminding of the role assigned to the
classics in English public schools or Oxford and Cambridge. At least as early as the
16th century, when the humanist John Cheke introduced young Edward VI to
Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the value of the classics as handbooks for gentlemen
was perceived by educators.5 It was always clear that the classical education was meant
to be the special preserve of gentlemen, setting them apart from the vulgar multitude;
and by the late 18th century it played a central role in the self-image of England's
governing elite.
The aristocratic ideal was perpetuated in the 19th century, while at the same time
the notion of 'gentleman' was extended, via the Public Schools, further down the
social scale. The notion of a 'liberal' education, in which classics was the centrepiece,
was framed in a similar sense, that is, it was an education designed for men not bound
to material necessity by the need to engage in menial labour or vulgar trade, and therefore not requiring the crudely utilitarian occupational training reserved for the
multitude. The 'liberal' of 'liberal education' was originally conceived in precisely the
same spirit that prompted Plato and Aristotle to contrast the freedom of the noble soul
to the spiritual bondage of the 'banausic' - base, menial, and 'mechanical' - classes.
The Greek philosophers thus spoke quite clearly and directly to the gentleman of 19th
century England. It is not surprising that when ancient history was added to the
syllabus of Oxford in 1830 and Cambridge in 1851 (to supplement the earlier largely

literary and linguistic classical education), this innovation occurred under the
influence of educational reformers like Thomas Arnold-headmaster of Rugby,
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and one of the most influential
educators of his time - who at the time of the Reform Bill crisis of 1832had argued that
Greek and Roman history showed the danger of premature concessions to
democracy.6
The historians of the early 19th century did not hesitate to state clearly that their
object was to teach their contemporaries political lessons about their own world more often than not, anti-democratic lessons. There was, of course, a spectrum of
political views represented among the most eminent historians of the time; but certain
dominant themes, reflecting certain common commitments, recur throughout the
spectrum. The writersvary from 'liberals' to 'conservatives'; accordingly, they vary in
their preferences for certain periods of Athenian history, in relation to the degree of
democracy that prevailed at the time. The more liberal tend to accept the Periclean
'Golden Age', in which the 'mob' voluntarily deferred to its 'betters' (this is a popular
tendency among 'liberal' classicists, even today7); among these might, for example, be
included Fustel de Coulanges, who treated the early democracy - perhaps up to the
Periclean Age - as a kind of incipient bourgeois - liberal state dominated by a new
'bourgeois aristocracy', which was unfortunately nipped in the bud by the final
triumph of the demos. The more conservative historians prefer the age of the Persian
Wars, when Athenians were still honourable, dignified, and patriotic, still infused
with the noble values of their aristocratic past, instead of greedy, selfish and
materialistic. The most conservative - such as William Mitford or Jacob Burckhardtcondemn the whole of the democracy from beginning to end. Virtually all the most
influential historians, with the notable exception of George Grote, agree that the postPericlean era was a period of profound moral decline and corruption, that is, a period
of 'mob-rule', in which the 'masses' were led by men 'of their own stamp'. What these
accounts have in common, above all, is contempt for and fear of the 'mob'. Seldom
has ostensibly scholarly writing been so punctuated by intemperate and colourfully
libellous language as the typical accounts of Athenian democracy and the 'proof' it
was supposed to afford of the fundamentally 'greedy, fickle, vicious, indolent, cruel,
reckless' character of the demos, the 'twenty-thousand-headed hydra'.
Perhaps the most far-reachingeffects of the anti-democratic legacy, however, have
been more subtle - in the creation of impressions and the conjuring up of images. The
very language of an historian can contribute to the making of myths; and the hostility
to the 'mob' which has informed so much of ancient history has left a very effective
residue of historical impressions. One common myth in particular has confused the
historical record and obscured the nature of class and state in Athens. This myth
depicts an Athenian citizen-body to a great extent freed from labour - by slaves and,
particularly in the case of the poor, by public payments for the civic duties and
amusements which allegedly occupied most of the citizen's time. This is the myth
which in its original anti-democratic form referred a great deal to the 'idleness' of the
citizenry, meaning specifically the poor citizens for whom public payments were a
necessary condition for participation in politics. The corollary of this myth was usually
a particular view of Athenian democracy as simply a scheme for self-enrichment for
the 'idle' and 'greedy' poor, an instrument for plundering the rich - never, of course,
as a necessary safeguard against certain forms of exploitation of the poor by the rich.
More recent scholarship, to a great extent based on evidence available to and even used
by the myth-makers of the 19th century, has proved as conclusively as possible that the

basic premises of these myths are false - above all because the majority of Athenian
citizens earned their livelihoods by labour and, more particularly, because there was
no clear division of labour between citizens and non-citizens or even between citizens
and slaves. The discrepancy between the myth and the reality, as far as it can be
responsibly ascertained, is at first puzzling; but a close scrutiny of the most important
histories of Greece written in the late 18th century and thereafter reveals the ideological bases of the discrepancy, and sometimes even reveals the truth lurking behind the
myth.
An example from William Mitford may serve to illustrate how historians who were
not unaware of the part played by free labour in Athenian society might still leave their
readers with the impression of an 'idle mob'. On the one hand, Mitford speaks of '. . .
citizens without property, without industry, and perhaps without objects for industry'
whose perversion of the body politic was made possible by the public payments which
maintained them in 'idleness'.8 On the other hand, and apparently without being
aware of any contradiction he writes of the 'imperious "crowd of fullers, shoemakers
[sic], carpenters, braziers"' (quoting Xenophon) who controlled the democracy,
oppressed men of rank and property, and thereby brought Athens to ruin.9 A
resolution of this apparent contradiction is, however, suggested in Mitford's general
diagnosis of Athens' ills. In sharp contrast to modern England, which possessed a
superbly successful mechanism for 'harmonizing ranks' and for creating 'a general
private interest in the support of the existing order':
under circumstances then such as those of the Athenian republic, the rich and the
poor evidently could not live in harmony... In fact, the balances of Solon's
constitution were no sooner overthrown, and sovereign power become absolute in
the hands of those without property, or rather in the hands of any demagogue who
could, for the moment, lead them, than the interests of all who had property placed
them necessarily in the situation of conspirators against the existing government.
Indeed, throughout Greece, the noble and wealthy, served by their slaves, not only
as domestics, but as husbandmen and manufacturers, had little connection with
the poorer Many, but to command them in oligarchical states, and in the
democratical, to fear, flatter, solicit, and either deceive, or be commanded by
them. No common interest, or scarcely any, united the two descriptions of men; so
that, for maintaining civil order and holding the state together, flattery and bribes
alone could persuade the multitude, and the only alternative was violence. Hence
that impossibility of lasting harmony, and that readiness for extreme discord which
the Grecian republics so strikingly exhibit. '0
In other words, the ruination of Athens lay not in the fact that the poorer Many did not
labour, but that they did not labour for the 'noble and wealthy'.
Much the same sleight of hand was performed by other scholars. Decades later, the
distinguished historian Jacob Burckhardt for example, was still arguing, on the one
hand, that Athens was ruined by triumph of the 'banausic' mob of tradesmen, craftsmen and their demagogic spokesmen II,and on the other hand, that
the chief evil was that democracy had been pervaded by the strong anti-banausic
attitude, and equality of right was associated with an aversion to work, as a result
of which idlers used the right to vote and judicial proceedings as a permanentthreat
to the propertied.'2

citizens were obviously unsettled by the many popular

It appears that ...the
assemblies and court sessions. . . because most of them lacked the calming effect of
daily work' 13; but, again, on closer scrutinythe real problem seems to be the absence of
the 'calming effect' produced by labour 'which the wealthy needed done and the poor
could have done for pay.' 14
It would seem, then, that the indignation ostensibly directed against the 'idleness'
of the Athenian poor in fact refers to their relative independence: not to the fact that
they did not labour but that they often did not serve. The almost universal conviction
of the anti-democrats turns out to be that dependence of the poor on the rich, in the
form of the one labouring for the other, creates a 'common interest' which alone can
ensure civic order and protect the interests of the propertied classes. For these historians, then, the crime of Athens was not really that her citizens were 'idle' and
'greedy', but that her free producing class was too independent and that she therefore
lacked, at least in relations among citizens, the 'interdependence' between classes
which is the basis of social order and peace.
THEMARXIST TRADITION
Ironically, this ambiguous language - the age-old idiom of the 'civilized' classes complaining about the laziness of those whose labour sustains them - has contributed a
great deal to the traditional Marxist image of Athenian society as a society which lived
on the labour of slaves; whose class structurewas unusually transparentbecause of the
clear division, explicitly defined in law, between appropriating citizens and producing
slaves, so that the relationship of exploitation stood out in stark relief; where the state
unambiguously represented 'an association against a subjected producing class' 5; and
where slavery inhibited technological progress, in particular by making labour in
general degrading and contemptible.
Engels' account of the Athenian state in the Origins of the Family, Private
Property and the State presents this image in its most unambiguous form. He appears
to have no doubts that the slave population massively outnumbered the citizen
population (at least eighteen slaves to every adult male citizen!); that large manufactories employing sizeable slave-gangs were typical of Athenian production; and,
above all, that slavery 'banned the labour of free citizens', not only by making it
uncompetitive, but by degrading labour to the point that a poor citizen would choose
to become 'social scrap' rather than debase himself by productive work. In Anti
Duihring,Engels elaborates on the effects of the slave mode of production:
Wherever slavery is the main form of production it turns labour into seFvile
activity, consequently makes it dishonourable for freemen. Thus the way out of
such a mode of production is barred, while on the other hand slavery is an impediment to more developed production, which urgently requires its removal...
Greece too perished on account of slavery, Aristotle having already said that intercourse with slaves was demoralizing the citizens, not to mention the fact that
slavery makes work impossible for the latter.'6
If Engels' account was modified in later versions to accommodate revised information
about the numbers of slaves and the role of free producers in Athens, the essentials of
his argument survived. For example, this is how Benjamin Farrington -quoting
another socialist historian - summed up his judgement of classical antiquity in The

Civilization of Greece and Rome:

'The more I have studied the life of antiquity' writes Max Beer, 'the clearer it has
become to me that the moral and political collapse of the old world was due chiefly
to slavery - to unfree labour, to the despising of productive activity, and the resulting stagnation of the technology of labour'. This is the important element of truth
to which antiquity was blind, and to which many seem content to remain blind
today. 17
Similararguments are used by V. Gordon Childe, though in a more complicated form,
since he goes further in acknowledging the divisions and conflicts within the citizen
body between, on the one hand, wealthy slaveowners and landlords and, on the other,
'vulgar mechanics'. While he sometimes refers to these divisions as class oppositions,
he does not extend this acknowledgment to his analysis of technological progress. Like
his predecessors, he does not go beyond slavery and the relations between slaveowners
and slaves to find an explanation for the lack of technical invention, emphasizing (as
does Farrington)the effects of the separation between science and practical life and the
contempt for 'banausic' craftmanship. The significant point is that, while he correctly
attributes this contempt to the leisured propertied classes and makes no claims about
the universality of such attitudes, he does not attempt to refine the analysis by
considering the effects on technology produced by the many - indeed, the majority of
the population - who were neither wealthy, leisured proprietors nor slaves. 17A
The essential problem in the traditional Marxist view of ancient Greece - and of
classical antiquity generally - is not so much that it attaches excessive importance to
slavery but that it fails to take sufficient account of free labour and its role in shaping
society. The concept of a 'slave mode of production' is itself a blunt instrument which
can do justice neither to free labour, nor to slavery, nor to the complex interaction
between the two. Furthermore, it tends to distort the analysis of class relations, to the
extent that it implies a clear social division of labour between citizens (or free men
generally) and slaves, and glosses over class oppositions within the citizen body.'8
Finally, all this acts as an obstacle to the interpretation of the cultural and ideological
products of Athenian society. For example, Marxists have consistently treated Greek
anti-democrats like Plato and Aristotle as spokesmen for the citizen community as a
whole or as reflections of the slave mode of production, instead of stressing their role
in expressing antagonisms within that community between the leisured few and the
labouring many. Thus, the aristocratic contempt expressed by these philosophers for
'banausic' citizens and for the excessively high status accorded to free labourers by the
democracy is taken to represent nothing more than the general degradation of labour
by slave production. In all these respects, the legacy of the anti-democratic historians,
who for reasons of their own obscured the position of free labour in Athenian society,
has left its mark. More recent Marxist scholarship has had to come to terms in various
ways with the historical evidence concerning the role of free producers; but there has
often been a great reluctance to abandon the basic framework of the original analysis
and its fundamental premise that the essential class division was between citizens and
slaves.
Short of reconsidering this class-analysis altogether, there are essentially two ways
of dealing with free labour while preserving the basic outline of the original Marxist
view: the first is to acknowledge the major role of free labour in Athenian production
and even the importance of social divisions within the citizen body, but neverthelessto

retain the basic structure of Marx's class-analysis by the simple device of placing most
free producers outside the system of class altogether, so that the citizen/slave
antithesis is replaced by the opposition slaveowner/slave and a large proportion of the
citizenry is excluded from any class-analysis. 9 The other possibility is to recognize the
role of free labour but to play down its significance and still maintain the citizen/slave
antithesis almost intact. This requires an emphasis on ideological factors and what
might be called the hegemonic effects of the 'slave mode of production', so that the
consequence of free labour and of class divisions within the citizen body can be
submerged in the bathing light of slavery. The latter view, which suggests that the
influence of slavery impregnated the whole fabric of Athenian society so thoroughly
that it reduced to insignificance the effects of free labour and its place in the class
structure, is the one which, as we shall see, emerges from Perry Anderson's analysis of
the ancient world.
Before considering this very recent Marxist account, let us critically re-examine
each of the fundamental assumptions in the traditional analysis: that there was a
dominant 'slave mode of production'; that this implied a social division of labour
between slaves and free men sufficiently clear-cut to be the basis of a class-division;
that this was the only class division of major consequence; that the association of
labour with slavery degraded all labour and produced a widespread contempt for it;
and that this social and ideological devaluation of labour acted as a hindrance to
technical inventiveness and the development of productive forces.
THE 'SLA VE MODE OF PRODUCTION'
In the original Marxist notion of production in Greece, as exemplified by Engels, not
only is the extent of slave-labour grossly overestimated but its nature is misrepresented.20 Above all, there was in Athens no clear social division of labour between
citizens and slaves in the 5th-and4th centuries B.C., the period at issue. The majority
of citizens laboured for a livelihood, most at productive tasks (as many as 90 per cent
or more), many of these in the handicrafts (possibly from about one-third in the 5th
century B.C. to almost half in the 4th century). At the same time, slaves engaged in
virtually every occupation, from mineworker to domestic servant, from craftsman to
business manager or banker, civil servant or policeman. Production for the market
remained undeveloped, and individual craft-production remained the rule, among
slaves as well as free workers. Even in the few 'workshops' where many slaves owned
by a single master worked under one roof the division and integration of labour
appears to have been minimal. In agriculture, where slave-labour was less important possibly even negligible - the rule also was small production. Properties were small;
even wealthy landowners usually owned several separated small-holdings, and there
were no slave-gangs of the type that worked the later Roman latifundia. Most land was
apparently worked by independent peasant-proprietors, tenant farmers, and to some
extent hired - usually casual - labourers. The typical productive unit - agricultural
and 'industrial' - was the individual who produced and sold his wares. Thus, if slaves
and citizens were not clearly opposed as a class of non-producing appropriators and a
class of direct producers, neither did they compete as two clearly distinct forms of
labour with different degrees of productivity.
Furthermore, not only did slaves perform a wide range of economic roles,
productive and non-productive, they also occupied a wide range of defacto positions
along the continuum from bondage to freedom of choice and movement, from the

10
profoundly oppressed mineworker to the skilled craftsman living and working on his
own and paying a kind of rent to his master, or the slave-banker, the civil servant, and
the policeman who was authorized to arrest free citizens. Citizens - often working
side-by-side with slaves - ranged from the most menial of casual hired labourers to the
wealthy rentier slaveowner; paradoxically, the citizens' independence often took the
form of rejecting 'non-productive' managerial positions in favour of manual labour
on the grounds that the former, as long-term salaried employment, constituted a
dependent condition.
The relation between citizens and slaves, then, is difficult to characterize as a
simple class relation based on a social division of labour. The citizen-body itself was
from the beginning internally divided in ways which cannot be dismissed as merely a
division between rich and poor. It can be argued that the Athenian state, the polis,
developed in response to an internal class opposition between two agrarianclasses - an
aristocracy of noble landholders and a producing class of peasant proprietors; and
while the internal class struggle was transformed by both the development of slavery
and the growth of free urban producing classes, it never ceased to play a central role in
the social life of the Athenianpolis. Indeed, the class conflict among citizens is in many
respects the essential fact of Athenian political history. Even though it was the surplus
labour of slaves more than that of poor but free producers that was appropriated by
wealthy citizens, the opposition between rich and poor took a particularly definite
form in Athenian eyes as the opposition between citizens who were compelled to
labour for a livelihood and citizens who, by virtue of their property, were able to live
on the labour of others. This opposition figured prominently in philosophical
speculations, playing an essential role in the theories of Plato and Aristotle. Above all,
the division between two kinds of citizens expressed itself in political conflicts. These
political struggles cannot be dismissed as merely political, as oppositions peripheralto
the basic relations of production within a fundamentally united ruling class. In precapitalist societies which still rely on 'extra-economic' modes of surplus-extractionby means of direct legal, political, or military coercion - the political struggles of the
poor, even poor proprietors, may represent resistance to economic exploitation. In
this sense, the conflicts between democrats and oligarchs in Athens cannot be fully
understood without reference to class oppositions within the citizen body.
In all these respects, the concept of the 'slave mode of production' and the transparent social relations it implies is put in question by the facts of Athenian social
history. If one further considers the differences between Greece and Rome, the notion
of the slave mode of production becomes even more problematic. It should be noted,
in the first place, that this 'mode of production' is usually so conceived that it covers a
time-span of more than a millenium. This is a considerable slice of historical time,
whose magnitude may be judged by comparing it to a period which in modern Europe
encompassed all the historical transformations from early feudalism to industrial
capitalism. The rate of epochal change in classical antiquity may not have been quite so
dramatic, but this period does cover the rather significant transformations which
separate the early Greekpolis from the later Roman Empire, and the peasant economy
of Attica from the 'senatorial' economy of the late Roman Republic or the latifundial
production of the Western Empire.
If one essential form of production binds together these very different 'social
formations', it is arguablypeasant production ratherthan slavery. While it can be said
more or less categorically that in both Athens and Rome large-scale enterprises, urban
and rural, were dominated by slave-labour, it must also be said that especially in

11
Athens there were few such enterprises.2' In particular, the 'fully-developed' slave
mode of production, based on large estates worked by slave-gangs, was never
characteristic of Greece at any time, and existed - let alone predominated - in Rome
for only part of the period concerned and even then in only part of the Empire, in the
West and particularly in Italy and Sicily. Even then, at the height of latifundial slave
production, the majority of the population were peasants, who were arguably still the
productive backbone of the Empire. Indeed, it is only by keeping this fact in mind that
the continuities in the transition from antiquity to feudalism can be understood.22
The concept of 'slave mode of production' is questionable even if its essential
characteristics are reduced to the existence of a 'juridically pure' condition of chattel
slavery (in contrast to the 'mixed types of servitude ... in an amorphous continuum of
dependence and unfreedom' which characterized slavery elsewhere in the ancient
world23)and the systematic use of this juridical category as the dominant type of
surplus extraction. The seeming precision of this criterion dissolves when one
considers the widely divergent forms of slave-utilization, the profoundly different
labour-processes [that is, literally, modes of production] into which this juridical
category was inserted, and the different locations of slaves in the economies of Greece
and Rome. It is also questionable whether one can speak of slavery as a single type of
'surplus extraction' or, for that matter, as a 'pure', 'absolute' condition, if one
considers the 'continuum of unfreedom' which separates slaves in the Attic silver
mines or the plartai;ions of imperial Rome from the slave-craftsmen of Athens, living
and working independently and paying a kind of rent to their owners, or slaves in
managerial or civil service functions including the police force of Athens.
Above all, the role of free labour, its relation to slavery and its position in the class
structure, cannot simply be excluded from an analysis of the dominant mode of
production and relegated to the periphery as a secondary characteristicof an 'impure'
'social formation'.24 It is not so easy to determine whether it is the position of slavery
or that of free labour which acts as the 'general illumination which bathes all the other
colours' of the social formation.
The presumption in favour of slavery as the 'dominant mode of production'
probably has less to do with the actual preponderance of slaves over free labourers,
either in numbers or in their relative importance to the economy, than with the fact
that especially from the vantage point of the modern world and the predominance of
juridically free labour, it is slavery alone which seems extraordinary. It is true that
Graeco-Roman civilization employed, systematically and on a large scale, slaves who
were clearly defined in law as chattels; and it would be absurd to deny the significance
of this fact. On the other hand, it can be argued that at least as remarkableand extraordinary as slavery in the ancient world was the position of free labour, peasants and
craftsmen, especially in Athens. Their juridical, civic and political status was unique;
and in social formations where 'extra-economic' forms of surplus extraction predominated, this was a matter of no small consequence.
It is necessary not only to acknowledge the central role of free labour in the
productive systems of Greece and Rome, but to consider the ways in which the particular nature of free labour in each of these cases 'bathed all the colours' of these social
formations. For example, one might speculate on the effects of internal class struggles
on the development of slavery: not only the possibility that in both Athens and Rome
the early struggles between two agrarianclasses which reduced the availability of poor
citizens as dependent labour may have acted as an incentive to the subjection of
aliens25,but also the fact that the different outcomes of class conflicts in Athens and

12
Rome resulted in different forms of slave-production. In neither case was internal class
conflict resolved in the formation of a united citizen ruling class. In Athens, however,
the victory of the dominant landed class was thwarted to the extent of obstructing mass
expropriation and the concentration of property. In Rome, on the other hand, where
the victory of large landed proprietors was more complete, much of the small
peasantry was expropriated and land concentrated, giving rise to the 'senatorial'
economy and an aristocratic - eventually imperial - state quite different from the
Athenian polis. Only in the Roman case did the conditions exist for the 'fully
developed slave mode of production' exemplified by the slave latifundia.
THE GREEK A TTITUDE TO WARD LABOUR
If the 'slave mode of production' has a somewhat shaky identity as a mode of
production - dominant or otherwise - can its integrity be salvaged by stressing the
pervasive cultural and ideological effects of slavery? In particular, can it be said that, if
slavery did not preclude other forms of production or reduce them to insignificance, it
nevertheless cast its shadow over them by degrading all labour? There has been a long
tradition of socialist historiography which has accepted almost as an article of dogma
the conviction that Greeks and Romans generally held labour in contempt. And yet,
that tradition relies on some rather ambiguous evidence - which is particularly
questionable in the case of Athens and which perhaps owes too much to those thinkers
- like Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon - whose attacks on the democracy were directed
against the political status it conferred on the 'Banausic' classes who were morally
and intellectually degraded by a life of drudgeryand bondage to the world of material
necessity.
The issue of attitudes toward labour is undoubtedly a complex and ambiguous one.
In the first place, it is not always clear what is meant by 'contempt' for labour, since a
variety of conflicting attitudes are often lumped together under this rubric. It is, for
example, possible to praise labour and its products in the abstract, while denigrating
the labourer, or to glorify a life of labour precisely in order to keep the labourer in his
place, quietly subordinate. It is also worth noting that the high ideological status
apparently accorded to labour at certain stages in the history of modern Europe has
had less to do with labour than with the 'productivity' of the entrepreneurial
bourgeoisie asserting itself against the values of an 'unproductive' rentieraristocracy.
On the other hand, labourers themselves are likely to be unromantically frank about
the nastiness of drudgery while showing a healthy respect for labour and the worker's
right to self-determination. The ideological structure of ancient Greece was no less
ambiguous and no less in need of critical scrutiny - which it seldom gets.
There are several attitudes toward labour revealed in Greek sources which might be
labelled as 'contemptuous' or 'disdainful'. First, there is the rejection of the
dependence associated with certain kinds of labour. Often, critics of Greek democracy
speak of a contempt for labour as such when they have in mind this unwillingness to be
bound to a master. The confusion is, of course, a convenient one, and quite natural,
given the conviction that labour should always be dependent and servile. Second, there
is the theme of the misery of toil and the failure positively to glorify a life of labour, as
certain more modern doctrines have done. Third, there is the actual condemnation of
labour as corrupting to the soul and to the moral worth of the labourer, and hence to
his political capacity. The first of these attitudes may have been universalenough to be
regarded as a cultural norm; and the second was undoubtedly widespread. These atti

13
tudes are, however, rather different from the kind of contempt that an antidemocratic historian like Burckhardt wants to ascribe to the Greeks, or that Engels,
for example, suggests in his account of the Athenian state. Indeed, the first attitude
seems even to have had the effect of sometimes compelling a citizen to choose manual
labour. Free men apparently preferredto be not only independent producers but even
casual wage-earners, rather than accept steady salaried -and hence 'dependent' employment as managers or civil servants, often leaving such non-productive labour,
including police-functions, to slaves.
The third attitude, a genuine contempt for labour and labourers, is typical of critics
of the democracy, whose complaint against democracy is precisely that 'banausics'
had too much influence, and that their ethos, the mentality of labourers, had put its
stamp on the polis. This attitude can be regardedas a cultural norm only, if at all, in the
case of non-democratic states where citizens were often (as in the case of Sparta)
forbidden to engage in productive occupations; at least, in these states this attitude was
dominant as the ideology of the ruling class. The case of Athenian democracy was
quite different. The attitudes of writers like Plato and Aristotle, far from representing
an ideal expression of the Athenian democratic ethos and proving a prevalent
contempt for labour among Athenian citizens, if anything prove the opposite. These
critics of democracy are expressing an aristocratic attitude in the face of democratic
ideals, and they are motivated to do so precisely because their views are no longer
dominant. They are not expressing but attacking the dominant world-view.26
Certainly the ideology of the old ruling class survived to some extent even among
democrats: for example, a certain respect for the rentier-class appears even in
Demosthenes. Ruling ideologies are always tenacious; and Burckhardt is probably
right to the extent that he attributes such contempt for labour to a cultural legacy
derived from an earlierruling class, ratherthan simply to the institution of slavery. The
point, however, is precisely that a contrary ideology had emerged out of the new social
realities of the democracy, an ideology more specific to those realities and more
uniquely their own. Instead of a world-view surviving from an earliersocial formation,
or an ideology articulated by a class in revolt against new social conditions that no
longer favoured its dominance, there is a new ideology more specific to the Athenian
mode of production under democracy. This was a mode of production in which
slavery was not the only essential fact, in which the position of free labour was equally
formative in its effects on the nature of society and its ideological expressions.
The anti-banausic ideology of the aristocracy was, of course, most dramatically
opposed in practice in the political rights exercised by the peasants and craftsmen who
constituted the majority of the Athenian citizen-body. If the 'banausic' majority
understandably left no systematic ideological testimony to match that of its
aristocratic adversaries, the ideological expressions of their unique social status can
nevertheless be found in various forms - not least in the negative evidence of the critics
themselves but also in the ethic of craftsmanship symbolized, for example, by the fact
that the Greeks were the first to dispel the anonymity of craftsmen, in sharp contrast to
the advanced civilizations of the Near East, no longer regardingthem as appendages of
the patron they served27;or in the law prohibiting insulting references to a person's
trade; or in the philosophical arguments attributed by Plato to Protagoras, who in the
dialogue bearing his name defends the democracy against Socrates' attacks by arguing
that political virtue is necessarily a universal quality, belonging not to a select few but
to 'shoemakers and smiths', that is, to 'banausics' as well; or in the eulogies to the
practical arts in Protagoras' speech, Aeschylus' Prometheus, and Sophocles'

14
Antigone. Even the disdain for dependent labour, which was undoubtedly widespread
among Athenians, may in this historical context - no matter how 'petty bourgeois' it
may seem in the context of modern class relations - represent an advance in the ideological status of labour. It is in effect an assertion against the aristocratic view that all
labour for a livelihood is by its very nature base and servile. This attitude towards
dependent labour was the expression of a struggle for freedom from exploitation, and
of a political revolution of considerable significance, at least as much as it was the ideal
of a slave-owning society. In other words, it was an attitude based more on a desire for
the freedom of labour than freedom from labour.
In sum, the Athenians with their democratic ideal and their ethic of craftsmanship
were expressing the principle that labour, if not pleasant is also not degrading, that it
can be an object of pride, and that it need not be servile, need not imply subjection to a
master, whether that master be a private lord or an appropriating state. It is simply
perverse for Marxiststo overlook this aspect of the Greek legacy - although it is easy to
see why anti-democratic historians have done their best to obscure the picture by
exploiting the myth of Athenian 'indolence' and 'contempt' for labour.
TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS
What, then, can be said about the argument so often associated with the conviction
that Greeks and Romans held labour in contempt: that the devaluation of labour by its
association with slavery helps to account for the relatively low level of technological
development in.classical antiquity?
The first and most obvious objection to such arguments is that, if our model of
technological progress is the revolutionizing of productive forces that has marked the
evolution of capitalism, then it is an absence that is apparent in most societies throughout most of human history. It is the radical and rapid technological innovation which
the West has experienced since the feudal period that needs to be explained, not the
relative 'lack' of such innovation virtually everywhere else. Even if, however, one
chooses to regard the state of technology in Greece as something that requires
explanation, and even if one chooses to treat rapid technological change as somehow
so natural that its relative absence compels one to look for obstacles, any explanation
which rests on the alleged ideological effects of slavery must be regarded as unsatisfactory for many reasons. First, there is again the evidence which contradicts the view
that Greeks, and particularly Athenians, held labour in contempt. More fundamentally, one might well ask whether technological innovation on a grand scale has
normally been a result of pride in workmanship, or whether, in fact, the reverse has
been true; whether technological progress in the West has really been the result of a rise
in the status of labour, or rather the consequence of a new mode of exploiting labour
made possible - and, in a sense, necessary - by the gradual expropriation and proletarianization of free labour and the concentration of property. It is this process of
expropriation that has been at the heart of the division, specialization, and integration
of labour in the capitalist mode of production. Pride in workmanship may itself be an
obstacle to technological innovation. Certainly individual craft-production is inimical
to the kind of technological progress characteristic of the West. There is, too,
historical evidence that an abundance of skilled labour has worked against the
introduction of technical innovations.
It should perhaps be added that there are some curiously bourgeois assumptions
secreted in such analyses. The implication almost seems to be that human wants are

Marxism andAncient Greece
15
infinite (in the particular sense intended by conventional economic textbooks), that
therefore under 'normal' circumstances there is an acquisitiveness, a drive to improve
productivity - more particularly, by technological innovation - and that the absence
of a drive for ever-expanding surplus is somehow unnatural and needs to be explained
by some obstruction in the constitution of the society. Alternatively, the assumption
may be that the 'natural' form of production is commodity production, production of
exchange value, even the capitalist mode of production, which is in principle unlimited
in its need for surplus production. It would seem that there is something abnormal
about production that is limited in its objectives, its need for surplus, or its compulsion
to increase productivity by technological means. Such bourgeois and ahistorical views
accord rather badly with the basic principles of Marxist historiography, and yet the
arguments so often associated with the 'slave mode of production' seem to compel us
to accept these assumptions.
A more reasonable explanation of technological progress, or the lack of it, would
acknowledge that (whatever positive consequences technological progress may have
from a Marxist point of view) the drive for technological innovation has had something to do with the forms of surplus appropriation and the kinds of exploitation
inherent in a particularmode of production. Whatever else can be said about technological progress, expanding surplus-production has generally been associated with the
pressures of surplus-extraction and the needs of the extractor.28
In the light of these considerations, it becomes necessary to examine not only the
effects of slavery on technological development but also those of free labour. For
example, one might consider the consequences of a free producing class able to resist with at least partial success - exploitation and the compulsion to produce wealth for
others, to obstruct concentration of property, to endanger the stability of aristocratic
property by means of democratic political institutions, to uphold craft traditions. In
fact, it would be useful to consider the effects of an ideology which expressed not
contempt for labour but its opposite -an ideology which seems to have included, if
not respect for or glorification of labour, the rather subversive view that labour need
not by definition be servile or dependent.
7X,~
Cup decoration by the Carpenter Painter.

Athens, 6th Century.

16
PERR Y ANDERSON ON ANCIENT GREECE

In Perry Anderson's hands, the Marxist analysis of classical antiquity is modified to
incorporate historical evidence unavailable - for one reason or another - to Marx and
Engels; and the traditional view undergoes a number of insightful elaborations and
refinements. Nevertheless, his argument shares the essential premises of earlier
Marxist analyses about the existence and dominance of a 'slave mode of production',
the fundamental class opposition this implies, the devaluation of labour, and the
consequent obstruction of technological progress. His adherence to these premises in
the face of compromising historical evidence, which he scrupulously includes in his
account, produces some significant contradictions in his argument.
Anderson begins his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism with a general
introduction to what he calls 'the original matrix of the whole civilization of the classical world'29, in particular, the 'slave mode of production'. Here, at first, it appears
that Greece and Rome are to be classed together as essentially a single social type,
characterized by two fundamental qualities: the slave mode of production and a particular relation between town and country, an 'anomalous supremacy of town over
country, in an overwhelmingly rural economy'30. The condition of this urban
dominance, according to Anderson, was the existence of slavery in the countryside,
liberating the landowning class from its rural background and creating an urban
citizenry with wealth still based on the land. This argument is further supported by the
contention that 'the numerical bulk of slave-labour in classical antiquity was agrarian
labour' (although this proposition is qualified with the observation that this was true
only 'in aggregate' and was 'not so everywhere or always')31. The nature of that
agrarian slave-labour is described in terms of 'slave estates'-which in the 'fully
developed' slave mode of production took the form of latifundia worked by slavegangs - supporting a class of wealthy absentee landowners.
The purity of this picture, this unified image of the slave mode of production which seems so unequivocally to support the conception of a social formation based
on a clear class opposition between citizens and slaves - is, however, compromised by
a host of qualifications, asides, and parenthetical exceptions. These on consideration
prove to be rather significant. For example, one of the exceptions to the proposition
that 'in aggregate' most slave-labour was agrarian turns out to be Athens itself.
Furthermore, Anderson not only consistently uses Rome as evidence for the slave
mode of production generally, but is equally likely to skip among the centuries, citing
the example of later imperial Rome to make a point about this mode of production as a
whole. In fact, it can be argued that Anderson's general characterization of the slave
mode of production does not, and is probably not meant to, describe Greece -and
more particularly, Athens - at all, and may even be only slightly related to Rome
during much of its history.
That the general character of the slave mode of production is not general at all is
confirmed by the subsequent specific discussions of Greece and Rome separately.
Here, Anderson reveals an impressive grasp of historical fact, but does not permit
historical specifics to shake his general formula even when the two are patently in
contradiction. In the chapter on classical Greece, he makes it very clear that he understands the important differences between Greece and Rome, but he fails to point out
how they compromise his general picture. For example, he acknowledges the differences in political development between Greece and Rome, the 'deeply aristocratic'
character of the Roman constitution as compared not only to Greek democracies but

17
even to the polis in general32,and he shows how the unique political developments in
Athens assured 'the staunch survivalof small and medium farmers'. This development
he suggests, was probably common throughout Greece, though only documented in
Athens; and its 'inverse non-occurance was later to define the contrasting social
history of Rome'33. The survival of small property and the obstacles to the development of a large-landowning class in Athens implied a form of slave production quite
different from that which was to evolve in Rome. As Anderson points out, it was Rome
which invented slave-plantations, the large estates of latifundia worked by slave-gangs
(and that only relatively late, after Roman expansion); and the slave-estate was never
the basis of Athenian agriculturalproduction.
Anderson's historical analysis thus implicitly puts in question the existence of the
'slave mode of production'. Similarly, his account of historical specifics raises
questions about his own proposition that a slave mode of production - of any kind was dominant in classical antiquity. This is how Anderson formulates that proposition:
It was the Greek city-states that first rendered slavery absolute in form and
dominant in extent, thereby transforming it from an ancillary facility into a
systematic mode of production. The classic Hellenic world never, of course, rested
exclusively on the use of slave labour. Free peasants, dependent tenants, and urban
artisansalways coexisted with slaves, in varyingcombinations, in the different citystates of Greece. Their own internal or externaldevelopment, morever, could alter
the proportions between the two markedly from one century to the next: every
concrete social formation is always a specific combination of different modes of
production, and those of Antiquity were no exception. But the dominant mode of
production in classical Greece, which governed the complex articulation of each
local economy and gave its imprint to the whole civilization of the city-state, was
that of slavery. This was to be true of Rome as well. The Ancient World as a whole
was never continuously or ubiquitously marked by the predominance of slavelabour. But its great classical epochs, when the civilization of Antiquity flowered Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. and Rome from the 2nd century B.C. to
the 2nd century A.D. - were those in which slavery was massive and general,
amidst other labour systems.34
It should, however, be noted that these 'classical epochs' were nonetheless periods in
which 'other labour systems' at least equalled slavery in extent and arguably even in
their importance to the economy. For example, the 'Golden Age' of Periclean
democracy was a period in which the free population outnumbered slaves and the
majority of citizens were engaged in productive labour, urban and rural.
In fact, while Anderson does not acknowledge historical studies which suggest that
any form of slave labour was negligible in Attic agriculture, he does point out -if
somewhat in passing - that slaves 'were probably outnumbered by free labour in agricultureand perhaps in the crafts'35.He appearsto regardthis as insignificant, given the
number of slaves in the population as a whole;36but since he says little more about the
location of free producers in the economy, theirrelation to slaves or to non-producing
appropriators, it is never quite clear in what sense slavery was more 'dominant' than
any other 'mode of production', even during the 'classical epochs'.
Anderson's class-analysis necessarily suffers from this failure to locate free
producers in the economy or the social relations of production. He appears unwilling

18
to consider the importance of class divisions within the citizen body, for fear of compromising the purity of the 'slave mode of production', which seems to demand the
subordination of all social antagonisms in which slaves are not the primary participants. And yet, in a sense Anderson defies the logic of his own historical argument by
refusing to give adequate weight to internal class divisions, because, at least implicitly,
they figure prominently in his explanation of the evolution of the slave mode of
production. In his account of the evolution of Athenian political institutions there is
some suggestion that the motivating force was a struggle between exploiters and
exploited within the community, particularly in the form of resistance to debtbondage. He points out that the release of citizen-labour from such outright
dependence encouraged the growth of slave-labour. But the implications are not
pursued and nothing is permitted to affect the general characterization of the slave
mode of production or the general principle that the only class opposition of essential
significance to the nature of the polis is that which involves slaves as the exploited
class. Anderson does occasionally allude to class differences within the citizen
community, but only to dismiss their importance, quickly and without argument:
The community of the classical polis, no matter how internally class-divided, was
erected above an enslaved work-force which underlay its whole shape and
substance37
This social structure, with its acknowledged stratification but absence of dramatic
crevasses within the citizen body, provided the foundation of Athenian political
democracy.38
It is not easy to see on what basis this judgment about the 'absence of dramatic
crevasses' is made. First, it cannot refer to the absence of conflicts among groups of
citizens, even serious conflicts over the disposition of surplus product. Anderson's
analysis of Athenian history, in fact, proceeds without an account of the internal
conflicts which were the source of the most dramatic events in the history of the
democracy - for example, the oligarchic coups and the regime of the Thirty Tyrants,
not to mention the ongoing political strife between oligarchs and democrats.39It is not
even clear that Anderson's class-analysis has to do with relations of production at all.
When he refers to the 'structure of the Athenian social formation', he has less to say
about relations of production than about largely quantitative categories including the
income groups into which the Athenian citizenry was divided for certain political,
military, and administrative purposes.40 The 'dramatic crevasses' which are 'absent'
appear, on the whole, to be simply large disparities of income. If, therefore, neither
social conflicts nor relations of production - but rather spatial locations in a structure
of hierarchy or a spectrum of inequality - are the core of Anderson's analysis, what
seems to be at issue is not class, but 'stratification' in the mode of bourgeois sociology.
All this is particularlyremarkablesince an account of these class relations is demanded
by Anderson's description of the differences between Athens and Rome, and particularly his explanation of what turn out to be their different modes of slave production.
These differences appear to be based precisely on the divergent ways in which internal
class struggles evolved.
Having seriously compromised his own conception of the slave mode of
production, Anderson rescues its integrity and dominance by stressing the ideological
effects of slavery on 'the whole shape and substance' of Athenian society. In

19
particular, he invokes this ideology to explain the limited productivity and

technological development which he regards as a central fact of classical history. The
argument is essentially that 'once manual labour became deeply associated with loss of
liberty, there was no free social rationale for invention'; and so the 'social principle' of
slavery.. . subtly affected all forms of labour.'4' He makes it very clear that he is here
placing the ideological influences of slavery above its concrete economic effects:
The structuralconstraint of slavery on technology thus lay not so much in a direct
intra-economic causality, though this was important in its own right, as in the
mediate social ideology which enveloped the totality of manual work in the classical world, contaminating hired and even independent labour with the stigma of
debasement.42
It is this ideology, too, on which he ultimately relies to explain the 'disproportion'

between the 'cultural and superstructural vitality' of classical antiquity and its
'infrastructuralhebetude.4
Anderson's loyalty to the slave mode of production thus apparently forces him
implicitly to accept what he would certainly explicitly reject: those familiar capitalist
assumptions about the 'naturalness' of ever-expandingsurplus achieved by permanent
technological revolution; and it compels him to look for more or less psychological
obstacles to this natural drive. Like many before him, he is thus forced to rely on some
rather dubious evidence about contempt for labour in the classical world.
This is not to denigrate Anderson's emphasis on 'superstructural' factors. His
generally brilliant analyses of the ways in which the superstructurallegacy of one mode
of production enter into the constitution of subsequent modes - for example, the ways
in which the 'municipal' tradition of antiquity and Roman law affected the nature of
Western feudalism - are among the most exciting aspects of his work. In the case of
classical antiquity, however, the ideological superstructureis seen through a distorting
lens; and the picture could have been clarified by a more precise account of the underlying relations of production.
We have seen that questions must be raised about the wisdom of generalizing from
the views of anti-democrats like Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon, whose object in
expressing their contempt for 'banausic' labour was to oppose the prevailing
democratic values and the extension of political rights to producers. Anderson
generalizes in precisely this way when he argues that 'the slave mode of production
which underlay Athenian civilization found its most pristine ideological expression in
the privileged social stratum of the city, whose intellectual heights its surplus labour in
the silent depths below the polis made possible." This is his rather too subtle justification for appealing to writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon -all notable for
their aristocratic distaste for the democracy - as expressions of the prevailing culture,
when their object is precisely to condemn that culture, to oppose rather than reflect
prevailing attitudes. In a sense, their views on labour were not so much a comment on
slavery as on the position of free labour, attacking a democracy in which labour - or
an important segment of it - was too free. Their view of labour and labourers is an
ideology that is certainly not uniquely characteristicof the 'slave mode of production',
but has been common to aristocracies everywhere at various times, and has always
been most eloquently articulated precisely when the interests and the power of the
aristocracy have been challenged by classes engaged in the despised activities. It is
precisely in the attitude toward labour expressed by these anti-democratic philoso-

20
History Workshop Journal
phers that the class-antagonisms dividing the Athenian citizenry are most clearly
crystallized; and it is, again, Anderson's unwillingness to deal with the implications of
internal class divisions that makes possible his unsatisfactory formula concerning the
'ideological expression' of Athenian productive relations and its effects on
technology. The consequence is that Anderson makes little of the most fundamental
economic, social and political conditions in Greece that may actually have hindered (if
that is the right word) technological progress. Threats to the stability of property
inherent in the political situation, the particularnature of slave-propertywhich made it
unsuitable for the kind of exploitation that promoted technological innovation in
modern Europe, the configuration of class power which in Athens inhibited the expropriation of small producers and the concentration of property - all these, for example,
are factors that might have been carefully explored to account for the technological
'stagnation' of classical antiquity. Indeed, it would be worthwhile to pursue the
implications of Anderson's own suggestion that 'the major single advance in the
agrarian technology of classical Antiquity', the discovery of the rotary mill for grinding corn, seems to have occurred not in spite but because of slavery - or at least that it
issued from the slave latifundia of Imperial Rome, 'the slave mode of production fully
unleashed on the land, without constriction or impediment.45
The problem of epochal transitions - from antiquity to feudalism, from feudalism
to capitalism, and beyond -is at the heart of Marxist historiography, as is the
'specificity' of European experience in the development of capitalism. Few people
have done more to advance these questions than has Perry Anderson. A
reconsideration of certain assumptions that have acquired the status of conventional
wisdom among Marxists would not have subverted but enhanced his important
contribution to Marxist historiography. To identify and criticize the 'misjudgments'
and 'myths' in the writings of his Marxist predecessors, as Anderson himself has said,
'. . . is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it'46 - the more so when
those myths and misjudgments have their source in an anti-democratic tradition
completely alien to Marxism.
1 This essay is based on a book-length manuscript, now (I hope) in the final stages of
completion, which deals with both the modern anti-democratic and the Marxist traditions of
historiography on ancient Greece.
2 Theodore Mommsen is the most notable example of this trend.
3 Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford, 1980, p. 14.
4 Jenkyns, p.14.
5 For a detailed study of this educational tradition, see M.L.Clarke, Classical Education
in Britain, Cambridge, 1959.
6 Jenkyns, p.6Z
7 This spectrum ranges from the violently anti-democratic arguments of 19th century
conservatives like Jacob Burckhardtor the Tory William Mitford to the more 'bourgeois-liberal'
positions of Fustel de Coulanges or even Max Weber and contemporary writers like Maurice
Bowra and Victor Ehrenberg.
8 William Mitford, The History of Greece, London, 1818, Vol. V, p. 16.
9 Mitford, Vol. V, pp.38-9
10 Mitford, Vol. V, pp.34-5.
11 Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte ed. Rudolf Marx, Leipzig, 1929, Vol.
III, pp.91, 206.
12 Burckhardt, Vol. I, p.258-9.
13 Burckhardt, Vol. I, p.221.
14 Burckhardt, Vol. I, pp.254-5.
15 This is, for example, how Marx and Engels refer to the ancient state in the German
Ideology

21
16 Engels, Anti-Duhring, London, 1969, pp.413-4.

17 Benjamin Farrington, The Civilization of Greece and Rome, London, (The New
People's Library), 1938, p.91.
17A See, for example, V.Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, Harmondsworth,
1969, especially pp.213-39.
18 There is a fairly common tendency to confuse the issue by using 'slaveowner', 'citizen',
or 'free man' more or less interchangeably, as Engels sometimes does in the Origins.. .
19 See, for example, G.E.M.de Ste.Croix, 'Karl Marx and the History of Classical
Antiquity', Arethusa, 8, 1975, pp.7-41. This argument is considered in the above-mentioned
manuscript.
20 Estimates vary, but the mainstream of opinion certainly puts the number of slaves far
lower than Engels' impossibly high figure. One highly respected historian, A.H.M. Jones,
suggests a ratio as low as roughly one slave to one citizen household; several estimates suggest
that during the Periclean era slaves constituted about one-quarter to one-third of the total
population, so that they would still be out-numbered by members of the citizen class and considerably outnumbered by the free population including metics, although slaves would outnumber adult male citizens by between two or three to one - still a figure very far from Engels'
eighteen to one. As M.I.Finley has pointed out, however, numbers are not necessarily the
essential question in determining the role of slavery in any economy (Finley, The Ancient
Economy, Berkeley, 1973, pp.71-2. Even if we assume that the ratio of slaves to the total
population was approximately the same in democratic Athens as it was in the American south,
for example, the role of slavery was very different. One of the essential points is that in Athens,
slaves, like citizens, were found in every kind of work, from the most unskilled to the highly
skilled, including various administrative and managerial functions - a situation very unlike that
which prevailed in America. For discussions of the Athenian economy and social structure, see
also Finley's recent Ancient Slavery andModern Ideology, London, 1980; Finley, ed., Slavery in
ClassicalAntiquity, Cambridge, 1968; A.H.M.Jones, Athenian Democracy, Oxford, 1969; and
for the late 5th and 4th centuries B.C. in particular, Victor Ehrenberg, The People of
Aristophanes: A Sociology of Old Attic Comedy, 2nd ed., New York, 1962. Useful general
accounts of Athenian history and society are provided by Antony Andrewes, Greek Society,
Harmondsworth, 1967 and, more briefly W.G.Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy,
New York, 1966. For the early period, see also Chester Starr, The Economic and Social Growth
of Early Greece: 800-500 B.C., New York, 1977. The political life of Athenian democracy is
illuminated by W.Robert Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-century Athens, Princeton,
1971 and Finley, 'Athenian Demagogues' in Studies in Ancient Society, ed. Finley, London,
1974. On other particularproblems in Athenian history, see Alison Burford, Craftsmen in Greek
and Roman Society, London, 1972; Sarah B.Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves:
Women in Classical Antiquity, London, 1975; K.J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality, Oxford,
1974; W.K.Pritchett, The Greek State at War, Berkeley, 1974, 2 Vols.
21 Finley emphasizes the role of slaves in large enterprises in Ancient Slavery and Modern
Ideology, p.82. His designation of Greece and Rome as slave societies, incidentally, has certain
advantages over the 'slave mode of production' since it acknowledges the importance of slavery
without suggesting that the systematic use of chattel slaves necessarilyimplies a particularsystem
of production, or even appropriation.
22 Cf., for example, Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Cambridge, 1978; and
Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, London, 1973, p.10:
. . . there seems little doubt that peasantries were the basis of the ancient civilizations out of
which most European feudal societies grew; and that the class of slaves, though
economically and culturally of great significance at certain times and in certain sectors of the
ancient world, was numerically inferior and of less permanent importance than the peasant
producers. In fact, viewed from the standpoint of this most numerous class of rural society,
the difference between late Rome and early medieval civilization may not have been all that
easy to discern.
23 Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, London, 1974, p.21. Finley
also stresses the uniqueness of chattel slavery as a form of dependence. See, for example, Ancient
Slavery, pp.71-7, where he discusses the unique characteristics of slavery: 'the slave's property
status, the totality of power over him, his kinlessness' (p.77); and their consequences. It is clear
from Finley's account, however, that while the distinct juridical status of slaves had profound
consequences for their social condition and for their usefulness to their owners, it did not imply a

22
History Workshop Journal
particular form of labour, a particular location in the division of labour, or even a particular
form of surplus-extraction.
24 See, for example, Anderson, Passages, p.22.
25 See, for example, Finley's Ancient Slavery, pp.67-92, for an argument supporting the
view that the unique juridical and political status achieved by free producers was the impulse for
the development of 'slave societies' in Antiquity. While the existence of slavery has been
widespread, he argues, its systematic use on a large scale has been rare and requires a very
particular explanation which, in the Graeco-Roman case, he finds in the prior 'creation' of a new
type of free man. This view is apparently about to be challenged in a forthcoming book by
G.E.M.de Ste.Croix; but whatever the explanation for the origin of Greek and Roman 'slavesocieties', the particularnature of slavery in each of these cases is inextricably bound up with the
particular nature of free men and the internal class struggles which produced and sustained
them.
26 For a full discussion of Plato and Aristotle and their relation to the prevailing democratic ideology, see Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political
Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context, Oxford, 1978.
27 See Burford, Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society, pp. 20, 212.
28 Cf. Robert Brenner, 'The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of NeoSmithian Marxism', New Left Review, 104, pp.25-92.
29 Perry Anderson, Passages, p. 19.
30 Anderson, p.23.
31 Anderson, p.25.
32 Anderson, p.58.
33 Anderson, p.32.
34 Anderson, pp.21-2.
35 Anderson, p.38.
36 Anderson's apparent dismissal of the significance of free labour (despite the admission
that they 'probably outnumbered' slaves in production) on the grounds that slaves 'constituted a
much larger group than the total citizenry' is itself misleading. Numbers are, again, not necessarily decisive in determining the role of slavery, and estimates are, in any case, notoriously
variable. Nevertheless, even if we grant Anderson's premise and accept his figures as correct for their period - their contribution to his argument is doubtful. The 80-100,000 figure refers to
all slaves, not simply to adult males, while the 30-40,000 citizens refers to adult males only, not to
all members of the citizen 'class', let alone other free members of the population. The citizen
class alone, even without free resident aliens, outnumbered slaves. See note 20 above.
37 Anderson, p.37.
38 Anderson, p.38.
39 It is perhaps possible to conclude that these conflicts did not reflect class struggles; but
no class analysis can be considered adequate which does not somehow account for the major
social conflicts that divide a community and give it historical movement. A detailed argument in
favour of regarding the conflicts within the citizen body as class conflicts is contained in the
manuscript on which this essay is based and -to some extent and with many second thought
since publication - in Wood and Wood, Class Ideology, Ch. 2.
40 See, for example, Anderson, p.38.
41 Anderson, p.27.
42 Anderson, pp.26-7.
43 Anderson, p.26. Questions might, in any case, be raised about the very idea of a
'disproportion' between the level of intellectual activity and the degree of technological
progress. This seems to imply that there is some kind of natural and quantifiable fit between the
two, that the quality of, say, Plato's Republic is measurable against the sophistication of the
Attic oil press, and that if the latter fails to match the former, something is amiss.
44 Anderson, p.20.
45 Anderson, p.63.
46 Anderson, p.9.


Marxism and Ancient Greece: How Anti-Democratic Views Shaped Historical Understanding

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Marxism and Ancient Greece

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