Helotage

In a previous post  I wrote a bit about the Spartan Helots: the population enslaved by the Spartans to provide the agricultural labor for the Laconian state.  My conclusion was that they can be viewed as no different than slaves for the purpose of analyzing the structure of Spartan society.  This is broadly true, but upon further reading and consideration, I would like to be a bit more precise on the nature of Helotage.

Archaic leftovers

When studying classical antiquity, despite the intelligent voices of its literature and the very human faces staring at us from its lively statues and frescoes, one is encountering an alien world.  There is a comfortable familiarity that we tend to feel for the ancients, a familiarity that we do not share with, say, the strange humans of the middle ages, but this is due largely to the survival of many aspects of its art, literature, and philosophy within the framework of modern capitalist society.  These survivals are undoubtedly beautiful, showing a level of intelligence and culture not reached again for a thousand years or more, but they are fossils in a museum; if one were to meet an ancient Athenian or Alexandrian in their really-existing world, they would stand before an alien.  Those who proclaim (not infrequently with a moral tone or a sense of somber resignation) that human nature will never change are not men or women who are familiar with man's history.  Man has changed many times due to changing material circumstances, which bring him into differing relationships with both nature and his fellow man.  To paraphrase Marx: one can differentiate man from animal by whichever measure one likes - although it has become somewhat fashionable to not differentiate them at all (Stephen Jay Gould) - but ultimately, man has differentiated himself by the practice of changing and producing his own means of subsistence, changing the world around him.  The relations of production upon which the social relations of antiquity rested had no similarity with ours.  

Even before the Classical period ( roughly 500-300 BC), free labor as we know it was of marginal importance at best.  Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had words for labor, production, capital, or even economy, in the way that we use and think of them.  Many engaged in seasonal labor for a daily wage, helping farmers during the harvest usually, working as porters at the docks, etc, but there were no workers - wage laborers - as we know them.  Wage labor required two conceptual leaps: abstraction of man's labor from both his person and the product of his work, and a way to measure the labor that one has purchased for payment (Finley, 1973).  The latter requires a second abstraction of labor-time, as well as a regular method of measuring time generally.  All of this was beyond the ancient mind.  This was not due to any intellectual defect or cultural value, just the real activity of economics;  social and technological conditions were not developed to a point in which the need for the development of a capitalist model of labor was felt over the historical period.  Without a material base for the possibility of a development, there can be no idea expressing it.  

Greek society, despite being the world's first true urban culture, remained overwhelmingly agrarian; even in the most advanced cities, with the most developed division of labor, the majority of the population was connected with agriculture in some way.  This was especially true of the citizens, as the ability to own any land at all was generally restricted to full citizens.  The citizen ideal was to own land, trade and industry was largely left to resident foreigners.  At the height of antiquity, agricultural labor would become synonymous with chattel slavery on the giant Roman estates; even in the 5th century BC, a small landowner in Attica or Boeotia likely had at least one slave unless he were very impoverished.  Helotage, though, harks back to a more ancient time.  Slavery existed in the Greek world back to Mycenaean times, but it was of little economic importance.  Slaves in that period were mostly of the household variety, doing little productive labor; it was only in the 6th century BC that slavery effectively replaced other forms of productive labor. 

The the Greek states (as much as one could call them such) of the archaic period (roughly 800-500 BC) were ruled by hereditary aristocracies who owned much of the land.  Clientage, debt-bondage, and the like were the prevalent forms of labor; most productive labor was done by those tied to the land through one means or another, but they were not slaves.  Rather, they were similar to feudal serfs or late Roman coloni.  This older feudal period is the key to understanding the Helots.  

Sparta is most famous, but Helotage existed in many other places in the classical Greek world: Crete, Thessaly, Sicily, and in many of the Greek Colonies in the Danube basin and along the Hellespont and Black Sea.  M.I. Finley noted that Helots made up a rather large proportion or all Greek labor.  The Sicilian and Black Sea/ Hellespontine use of Helot labor was largely due to the settler populations coming across large native populations which made the large-scale importation of slaves unnecessary; the Black Sea Greeks were actually one of the main exporters of slaves to the mainland.  Aristotle's characterization of the Greeks as frogs around a pond was very appropriate, as the Greek world largely represented a frontier civilization.  They did not view the peoples they found in and around their colonies as potential citizens but as either potential labor or useful trading partners - although the two were not mutually exclusive.  The ideal of a "good life" to an ancient Hellene meant freedom from toil, and the settlers made use of the resources available, human and natural. 

For Sparta and the Thessalian states, many interesting parallels exist.  The geographies of Laconia and Thessaly are unique in having an abundance of arable land and being exceptions to most of Greece.  They also share the social distinction of never having ejected their aristocracies in favor of the rule of private property.  The battering ram of the latter was due to the growth of sea trade in geographically suited cities, which created conditions favorable for the growth of a class of wealthy non-nobles.  The use of money, due to the demands of sea trade, was also a social agitator since peasants had to borrow from nobles or wealthy merchants to gain access to it.  These flammable conditions, which led to class struggle and the reigns of Bonapartist tyrants in states like Athens, did not exist in Laconia or Thessaly until much later.  That does not mean that class struggle did not occur at all in these states, just that the social conditions of impasse - necessary for armed arbiters, the tyrants - did not develop.  Hellenistic Sparta would see its first tyrant, Nabis in 207 BC, as a consequence of acute class struggle.

 Land transportation, through the end of the Roman empire, remained prohibitively expensive and difficult, so it was the growth of sea trade, in the cities positioned to best engage in it, that allowed for the growth of large populations and wealthy ruling classes of slave owners.  But, Laconia and Thessaly were not compelled to reach to the sea like Athens; their land was rich enough to sustain large populations with little trouble.  It was only late in the 5th century that Sparta even developed a navy of any real size or skill.  

There is no mechanical "normal" development of the classical states, but Thessaly and Sparta are conspicuous in their deviance.  Both retained strong ruling aristocracies and their production rested upon older modes of bondage.  The Helot had access to every basic social institution, had their own culture and families.  This existence was in sharp contrast to the slave of other Greek states, who was an outsider shipped in.  Though the form was an ancient artifact in the age of slave agriculture and industry, the world had changed around these old hold-outs of aristocracy and feudalism.  Slave society only developed once in Greece, and once it did, it changed the world despite the Spartan warrior aristocrats' wishes.  They developed the tastes and general political aims of the Greek slave owning class.  In the same way that the Russian Czar and aristocracy of the old empire became investors in and owners of capitalist industry when faced with the realities of competition and power in a capitalist world, so the Spartan ruling class developed the interests of the chattel slave-owners as a means of maintaining themselves and their power in the world.  The famous 5th century admiral Lysander was the most prominent representative of a tendency within the Spartan ruling class who wished to break out of the insular economy and into the modern world of imperialism, trade, and property acquisition.  Xenophon, in his work Hellenika,  reported a conspiracy among non-Spartiate free men to overthrow the restrictive system of citizenship.  The same social forces eventually developed within closed Spartan society as had developed in other Greek states at earlier points in time.

Helotage is, in the last analysis, a transitional form of compulsory labor between serfdom/debt-bondage and chattel slavery.  Slavery developed due to the realities of class struggle and the incompatibility of forms of serfdom and debt-bondage with the social-material demands of the ancient economy.  The development of advanced and powerful slave states like Athens, with all the changes in culture and politics that came with them, changed the entirety of the Greek world through bringing a more advanced mode of production into being; all other states would now operate within its framework or at least against its background.  Helotage was a transitional, and not uncommon, mode of unfree labor; slavery with elements of serfdom top varying degrees.

Alexander as World-Historical Individual

Alexander as World-Historical Individual

We have examined the factors and conditions that allowed for Alexander to extend his rule over Asia, so it is now appropriate to consider his place in world history generally.  Much of this will overlap with my previous post on Alexander, but I find it necessary to expand on a few themes, and I would rather do it here in a new entry.  There is almost too much to dig into when discussing the particular state of Greek society at the time of Alexander, and a good deal of controversy in interpreting it.  I will not be dealing with that controversy here, in such a short entry, but even a cursory review of literature will give the curious reader a good idea of current and long-standing disagreements.  In some regards, this is a re-write of my earlier entry, but I'd like to think of it as an addition.  Anyway, if you have had enough of Alexander, you may consider skipping this one.  

History and trivia are often confused for one another.  It is a very common thing to meet someone who loves history and then proceeds to list off the particular time periods and countries that they are interested in.  These individuals can rattle off many facts and figures about their subject of choice, many of them will even recite commonplace "theories" about why things turned out the way they did.  But, this is not history, it's trivia.  The real importance of Alexander lies deeper than the facts of his life.

Appearance and truth

A recent historical trend has been to study of the lives of common folk.  This is admirable since the understanding of daily life for those who made up the majority of past societies is not nearly as developed as one may assume; for instance, our picture of the home life of a typical ancient Greek citizen is still somewhat foggy while we know a great many details about the lives of their kings and commanders.  But it also has the tendency to err too heavily towards post-modern conceptions of history.  In that conception, any "grand narrative" may be oppressive to those whose narrative gets blotted out by it.  That is to say, that there is no teleological "point" to history, only a number of individual narratives and world views.  

The history of human society is, of course, made up of innumerable specific facts about innumerable individual lives over a period of many thousands of years.  There is never a period during which humans are not interacting with the world, as men have not yet ceased to walk the earth, but history is more than the sum of particular facts made real by trillions of names.  There is meaning to human history and we can trace progress in the rise and fall of civilizations, but this meaning is found in the real demands of human activity, not in the self-realization of a divine plan.

These people all lived and died following their own individual interests and acting accordingly - it is easy to cite this is proof of the meaninglessness of history, but it is far more amazing to face the fact that out of the chaos of billions of lives with billions of aspirations comes any social organization at all.  But that is precisely what we find through human history: a series of forms of society, all organized in particular ways and following their own laws of operation and development.  This is true whether the participants are aware of it or not - and they have not been, generally.  The functioning of economy and production has compelled humanity to organize.  At first, it was in order to gain greater levels of mastery over the forces of nature.  It was not long before these productive forces developed to such a level that the participants were chained to them through a web of productive relations - or what we commonly call "society".  More specifically, I mean class society.  Once definite social relations develop out of the daily functioning of economy and the division of labor, society in turn confronts the individual who has been born into it as a force, one as mighty as nature.  That which arose to gain mastery over the environment gains mastery over its participants; the bodies and minds men are tied to the mode of production and the society resting upon it.

This does not mean - as some wise masters of common-sense never tire of saying - that "things never change."  On the contrary, one sees a never-ending process of change in society.  How else can one explain the fact that we no longer live as hunter-gatherers?  Nor can we passively accept the explanations for historical change provided to us by the chroniclers of their times.  Every epoch is captive to its ruling ideas to a greater or lesser extent, although in revolutionary times there are always those visionaries who see some of the truths exposed through the struggle of classes and nations.  Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hegel, and Marx were only able to express such sharp insight because they lived during times of great shifts in their societies.  Genius tends to cluster around dates, just as great events do.

Greek society during the first half of the 4th century was such a society: the destructive Peloponnesian War, an attempt by Greek powers, led by Sparta, to break open the markets and trade routes dominated by the Athenian Empire, had not solved the central contradictions facing Greek slave society, it only aggravated them.  Property became more concentrated in fewer hands than ever, which led to great wealth disparity; revolution and counter revolution was commonplace; destructive wars raged over the remains of the empire, although ultimately no state was strong enough to secure control.  The appearance of Athenian strength during the 4th century was in reality a "jobless recovery", during which certain layers of the Athenian ruling class gained at the expense of ruined small farmers and even large landowners following the war.  In the West, the Greek cities of Sicily and Italy were plagued by political revolution and wars with Carthage.  In this general state of impasse, Greek society was faced with the choice to either expand or face decline.  

Friedrich Engels wrote that a mode of society does not exit the scene until it has developed all of the means of production that it is good for, and so it was not yet the fate of slave society to pass from existence.   Slave labor was being utilized on a larger scale and in a more productive capacity than before, particularly in industry, but would not achieve the ultimate agricultural form of latifundia until the height of the Roman Republic.  Many of the most ingenious scientific and artistic achievements took place under the rule of Alexander's Successors.  It was, at the time, the most advanced mode of production in the world, and the ancient Persian and Egyptian modes of production - revolutionary and ascendant in their own time - continued on mostly due to the infancy of the Greek political form. 

 In that infancy, though, lies some of the eternal attraction that we feel - and indeed the Romans felt - for the Greece before Alexander.  Writing of the attraction we still feel for Greek art and culture, Marx wrote in The German Ideology:

An adult cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.  But does the naivete of the child not give him pleasure, and does not he himself endeavour to reproduce the child's veracity on a higher level?  Does not in every epoch the child represent the character of the period in its natural veracity?  Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that will never recur?

The Political Form and Content

Yet, the city-state had outlived its usefulness.  It had been a transitional form of the state that developed out of tribal society, but the realities of a more fully-developed classical economy proved to be beyond the political capacity of the polis.  The experience of the Athenian Empire had been the historical test; the city-state failed such a harsh exam.  Despite a relatively complex administration, employing hundreds of citizen magistrates, the imperial system remained little more than an enforced alliance.  Furthermore, Athenian democracy was unfit for the task of governing such a system, even as radical democracy was possible only through imperial tribute.   Democratic imperialism took the form of vampiric draining of allies for the sake of political stability at home and punitive measures to keep allies within orbit.  Naturally, the imperialism of all historic ruling classes displayed these traits, but there was none of the Roman sophistication - ideological or material - to crude Athenian rule.  

History is not mechanical, though.  Despite being outmoded by the practical economic and administrative demands of a matured Greek society, the polis continued to exist for centuries, proving that it had not ceased to be politically useful for the ruling class.  In fact, protection and patronage of the old city-states continued to be an important political asset for those Greek kings who ruled over the massive kingdoms in the East.  What the polis had lost was the power of independent action.

The political demands and ambitions of the Greek ruling class in the 5th and 4th centuries were the ideological expression of the material demands of the matured Greek economy.  The mode of production, especially in large trading centers like Athens and Corinth, had become quite sophisticated, with a relatively high division of labor, and it required more and more resources.  Likewise, the Greek ruling class developed a thirst for luxury products.  the food grown inside the limits of the states was not sufficient to meet the needs of a growing population; Athens had become reliant on grain imports from the Black Sea (Pontus) by the middle of the 5th century.  More people inhabited Greece and the Aegean isles during this period than would again until the 20th century.  A large proportion of them lived in cities.  

With the concentration of land into fewer and fewer hands came the ruin of the small landowners and political instability - the age saw countless revolutions and counter-revolutions.  Classes fought each other to a standstill and tyrants began to emerge once again throughout the Greek world.  The thirst for conquest of markets and land among the representatives of the ruling class was also partially driven by such social instability.  Such contradictions and forces were inherent in Greek slave society and were realizing themselves through time and human activity.  With the greatest achievements of Greece came also the threat of decline and instability.  

Particular events showcased the universal necessity as Greek states reached out toward the West and East.  Athenian rogue Alcibiades, the architect of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of 415, envisioned Sicily as a stepping stone to extend Athenian rule to Italy and North Africa.  Spartan king Agesilaus II launched an ambitious invasion of Asia minor in 396, anticipating Philip's plans by 60 years.  Timoleon of Corinth arrived in Sicily in 344 with a mercenary force which successfully overthrew the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius and subsequently resettled many Corinthians in that city.  Settlement was a common war-time practice in classical Greece, cutting across class conflict by shipping off surplus population.  Many tremors presaged the coming of Alexander.

As for the phenomenon of kingship returning to the Greek world after centuries of absence, it is a case of a dialectical cycle.  As discussed in the previous post, the Macedon of the 4th century was backward and barbarous.  Philip and his son were able to utilize all the cultural and military achievements of the advanced states, though without any of the political and economic difficulties of dealing with private interests; since Macedonia had not developed a complex web of entrenched class and political interests, Though both kings in name, there was nothing in common between Darius and Alexander.  The archaic kingship of Macedon was based on tribal social organization in which the king emerges from the traditional "front fighter" type of leader, answerable to the layer of tribal leaders and nobles who support him.  This was barbarism compared to the complex and cultured forms of Greek politics, but coupled with the successful conquest and utilization of nearby gold mines and new land, the king now played the part of a centralized will.  The kingship thus returned to Greece as a higher level of the previously negated form.   

Kingship under Philip and Alexander retained its social base in the aristocracy and tribal tradition, but there was a difference between their reigns and those of the Successors.  Like the governments of the tyrants, I believe that they represented Bonapartist regimes.  Bonapartism is the rule of the sword over society, a point at which the state holds itself above society by the force of arms.  The state is no empty place to be filled by different people and parties, but is born of particular societies, resting upon the dominant modes of production and social relations.  The need for a state at all is born of the wish to keep class struggle at bay, a fact implicit in the rise of the first wave of tyrants in the 7th and 6th centuries: such men were often "law givers" and architects of the classical Greek state as we know it, although not in a fully-formed manner, but at least in essence.  Their rise to power was due to intense class struggle, during which no contending class was able to gain a political upper hand; the situation was ripe for a strong man to step in and arbitrate, thus the first Bonapartist regimes came to the West.  

Tyrant regimes balanced themselves between classes - taxing or confiscating land from aristocrats and large slave owners, cancelling debts of small farmers, providing military employment for the landless poor -but they were not truly independent of society; no one is.  Their regimes, as those of the Successors, were still ultimately slave states, based upon the labor of slaves, and dominated socially by the class of large slave owners.  This broad social base did not stop the kings from levying taxes upon the ruling class, or disarming the citizenry, but their reigns are impossible to make sense of without viewing them as distorted representatives of the slave owners.  

In light of such an analysis, Alexander is a regime in the process of "becoming"; the past confronting past while being pulled into a novel future.  The form of regime wielded by him, burnt up in its use, much like the mind and body of its wielder.  

Alexander at the Siege of Tyre 332 BC

World Historical Individual

There have been certain personalities who have so dominated their world that their individual names came to represent the universal character of a whole epoch: Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon.  Historical biographers have never tired of exploring the personal quirks and mannerisms of these characters, as if some detail of their childhood might explain how they came to dominate their world.  Each had their own aims and their own particular way of achieving them, but through their particular actions they carried out the universal; their particularities and traits disappear in the face of their accomplishment, of which the former were only the means by which the latter realized itself.  Their personalities are burnt away by the fact of their accomplishments, and indeed only become interesting in light of them.  

Just as there are laws which govern nature and the cosmos, it has been shown that there are laws which govern the development of human society.  The major difference is that while the laws are nature exist whether we are there to witness them or not, the laws of social development function through the activities of individuals.  As new modes of production develop out of the old, the force of the future knocks against the shell of society.  The world-historical individual is caught between freedom and necessity; necessity will find an outlet to express the changes at the core of the world upon the surface - upon the state, culture, ideology.  Greek society had outgrown its bounds, geographically and politically, and under the leadership of Alexander, it would crush the ancient powers that once dominated it.  The Persian Empire and the might of Egypt, all that were once beacons of civilization, became unreal  and were negated in the wake of the Macedonian.  All of the old was swept into the waste basket of history.  

Alexander must, in my view, be recognized as the hero of his age; this cannot be tarnished by any exposure of personal traits, of violence or moral cries against conquest.  Such popular revisionism does nothing but make all history a meaningless march of cruelty and accident.  Like Alexander himself, who perished in carrying out his momentous task, all else burns up in the face of events and forces that were bigger than the man himself.  His successors attempted to copy his every trait and fashion, but it did not bring them any closer to achieving what he did - the material conditions were all lined up perfectly and the world only waited for someone to take up the task of embodying necessity, once accomplished, no one could force it through a second time.  Despite the genius of Ptolemy or the fierce martial skill of Pyrrhus, history only moves in one direction.  

Of course, the details are still pretty amazing too.

Suggested Readings

Hegel, "Reason in History"
Marx, "The German Ideology"
Arrian, "Anabasis Alexandri"

Hoplite Heresies: Accounting for the Spartans II

Given the serious consideration of Spartan property relations, using the existing evidence and some recent scholarship, that I undertook in the first part, it is time to draw out some conclusions.  Firstly, the fact that the Spartiate class owned their land as well as their Helots is significant enough to overturn the traditional view of Sparta on the whole.  This may seem like a rather large claim to make about one particular aspect of Spartan life, and it is, but the property relations of a society give us a look into the mode of production from which those relations developed out of, as well as determining the social structure that grows from them.  And, what the Spartan property relations show us is that Sparta was not fundamentally different from other Greek poleis.  Of course, this claim runs counter to the large body of literature claiming the unique structure of Spartan society, from property to governance.

The Spartan elite - Spartiates, full citizens - can be seen as being fundamentally the same as the Athenian or Theban.  Far from simply existing as the austere super-soldiers of the popular historical mind, they were members of the large slave-owning class who made up the ruling class in all of Greece; they were the owners of the productive property in Greek slave society: land and slaves.  Naturally, there were plenty of differences between the Spartan and Athenian slave owning classes - otherwise they would not have appeared as representatives of completely different societies - but, these differences are ultimately superficial.

One difference noted in the last part was that the Spartans were actually quite a bit more wealthy than many large landowners in other Greek states.  They owned very large holdings with very rich soil, allowing them to harvest twice a year.  A proof of this land-wealth is to be found in, interestingly enough, plow oxen.  Given that 80% of mainland Greece is covered by hills and mountains, large livestock were not widely bred; most arable land was used in farming, not for grazing.  Oxen for plowing constituted a significant expense for most Greek farming households, given that they needed to be bought from those with enough land to raise them.  Likewise, for the large landowner, the sale of oxen was quite lucrative.  There is evidence that oxen were bred both for use and sale in Sparta, meaning that the individual Spartiates owned some very large plots.

While we are on the topic of geography, an examination of Sparta's physical position in Greece is useful in understanding some of the peculiarities in its social development.  To Start with, it was not located on the coast; tucked away in the Southeast of the Peloponnese, it was naturally drawn towards the rich inland soil, a true rarity in rocky Greece.  This set it in sharp contrast to Athens, who faced the sea and the constellations of Aegean isles on one side and mountain ranges and hills inland; she was naturally drawn to the sea and to expand toward the rich trade routes to Asia and North Africa.  Sparta's wealth was in the land, and this can begin to explain some of the tendencies in its development.

With a ruling class invested completely in the land and the defense of that land, the city completely missed out on the period of overseas colonization and establishment of trade that cities like Athens, Corinth, and Megara went through. Hence, it never developed a navy to protect its settlers and traders, nor did it develop the large class of merchants and artisans attracted to trading towns.  This had many effects, but one of the more peculiar of them, and one often noted in text books, is that they did not develop coined money until very late - the 5th century!  Trade necessitated the development of money.  For a long period in the archaic period - the Greek dark ages - trade was mostly limited to that between nearby towns, and the goods were traded for their use-values, and so a mixture of bartering methods dominated.  However, the age in which the great poleis established broad networks of overseas trade, use value was superseded by the domination of commodity value.  Commodity value is not the value of an item as such, but in terms of how many other items could be exchanged for it - a abstracted "universal value" determined by the labor that went into it.  Now, a merchant with a ship full of wine mixing bowls could have theoretically determined how many bushels of grain were equivalent in trade for one bowl, but in practice it was impossible, and so a universal "commodity of commodities" - money - was born to act as the medium of exchange and value.

The Army

However, this stunted growth did not seem to keep them from becoming a power in the mainland, and then later, for a fleeting moment, throughout the Mediterranean.  They had their lauded army to make their will felt in the Peloponnese and beyond.  Xenophon recorded that many Greek forces facing the right wing of the Spartan phalanx would break and run before ever coming within spear-range, so frightful was their reputation.  It was the honor of all citizens of Greece to serve in the phalanx, but only the Spartans attained something close to the rank of professional soldiers, why?

Spartan Hoplites, late 5th century

Throughout the classical period, there is a dearth of slave revolts in the Greek world.  There is an exception in Sparta, though.  A common trait among Greek slave populations was that they represented a great mix of populations, speaking many mother tongues - although de ste Croix tells us that Thracians made up a sizable proportion.  The helots of Sparta, though, were very different in this regard.  They had served for generations on the very land that their ancestors once ruled; they shared a common culture, and were mostly left to live as they please as long as they continued their labor.  Furthermore, they vastly outnumbered their Spartan masters.  Rich states such as Athens and Corinth had slave populations that were larger than the number of citizens, yes, but it was not nearly to the same degree.  A ratio of around 10-to-1 is accepted for most of the 5th century, although that may be conservative.  Early in their history, the Spartans completely freed themselves from labor by their acquisition of Messena and their enslavement of its inhabitants.  However, this act which allowed for their freedom, also enslaved them to forever watch over a mass of explosive social material.

It was this that compelled them to create an efficient, well-trained military force.  It was not merely, as is often suggested, for the sake of keeping the helots in line, but primarily for keeping enemies out.  Sparta was neighbor to powerful states such as Argos and Corinth, and a successful invasion was likely to incite the helots to revolt, sealing the doom of the ruling class.  And Sparta's territory - Lakonia - was eyed greedily for its rich soils and fair climate.  So, the culture that arose was something akin to that of a besieged city.  Greek culture was generally martial, but that which developed in Sparta was first among others.  Citizens in other states generally did not receive any real military training , with the exception of the sons of the large landowners, until well into the 4th century.  The Spartans could train their soldiers because of the helots, and the needed to train their soldiers because of the helots.

The image of the Spartan army that has stuck with us for so long is that of the Spartan force at Platea in 479, fielding 10,000 full Spartiate warriors in a bristling phalanx against the rearguard of the retreating Persian invasion force.  Yet, this was a very different force than the Spartan army that would defeat the Athenians in 405 and gain hegemony over the Greek world.  Never again would there be so many Spartans on the field of battle.  The simple matter was that there just weren't enough of them to field.  The concentration of property by the ruling Spartiate class, mirroring a similar process in the rest of Greece, meant that the body of Spartiates was shrinking.

A great military reorganization took place somewhere between Platea and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 in which perioeki, or non-citizen residents of the city (artisans, resident aliens, traders, etc), as well as residents of neighboring Lakedaemonian towns, found their way into the phalanx alongside full Spartiates.  The citizen Spartan made up a smaller and smaller fraction of the battle line, and by at least the battle of Sphakteria in 425, the Spartans and non-Spartans were indistinguishable in the line (according to the record of Thucydides).  By the Corinthian and Theban Wars in the 4th century, mercenaries, and even enfranchised helots fought in the phalanx.  It was ultimately the cannibalistic impetuous of the large landowning class that undermined Spartan martial dominance.

Conclusions

We can make better sense of the role played by Sparta in the trajectory of Greek civilization now.  The uneven development of the state and its ruling  class led to deformities and peculiarities, but ultimately, the same material and class forces compelled it and its actions as the other Hellenic powers.  In the wake of the Persian Wars, the Greek world was not the same; a vacuum of power was left in the Aegean and the poleis scrambled to fill it.  The avenues to securing the rich trade routes to Asia, Africa, and beyond were open to the Greek ruling class, and they strove towards it.  Athens went on the offensive in the Aegean and grew powerful as it gained an empire.  The large landowning class of Sparta, the heroes of the Persian invasion, were also compelled to strive towards expanding toward that material base of power - especially since they were left somewhat behind in maritime development.  Ultimately, this brought the states into the massive collision of the Peloponnesian War.  In its wake, the Spartans invaded Persia, but were forced to retreat because of the beginning of a series of conflicts that would ultimately destroy the state.  No Greek state proved strong enough to consolidate power over the Aegean and the Greek peninsula until Philip and Alexander.  

The Spartans were not a unique development, just a state that developed along slightly different lines than the other "typical" slave states.  Just as there are different state structures among the capitalist powers, due to the forces of combined and uneven historical development, the same laws were at work in the Classical World.  What told, in the end, was the same class forces at the base of Spartan as well as Athenian society.

History and history

History and history

As most anyone who knows anything about history can tell you, the writing of history has undergone many changes over time.  The aim of Herodotus, the 5th century BC Greek "father of history", was much different than that of the modern historian, which is often to provide explanation for historical events and to analyse their relation to the present.  His aim was "to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples; and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict."  Here is the primary aim of the pioneers of history in classical antiquity: to preserve information so that events would not recede into the misty realm of legend.

The oral tradition of history is precisely the story of fact fading into legend and myth.  But, there is a real material base for these misty beginnings.  Writing was known in Mycenaean Greece, but the difficult "linear B" script appears to have been primarily used in the keeping of palace inventories and for the purposes of trade.  The latter is the root of the drive for written language generally; it is no accident that written language appears first around the coasts of the Mediterranean, and reaches darker Europe only in later ages.  The development of the Greek alphabet, through the adoption and adaptation of Phoenician written characters, was the first prerequisite for the writing of history.  The Phoenicians were a civilization that the Greeks had become very familiar with during this period through their colonial and trade expansion.  As Greek society expanded, it adopted many of the more advanced aspects of its neighbors.

Thus began the period of "primitive accumulation" in the keeping of history.  A second prerequisite was, naturally, events worth chronicling.  War is the natural starting point of history - the long seasons of peace were too uneventful to call out for a historian.  As 19th century American historian Theodore Ayrault Dodge beautifully wrote:

 "the greatest of poems would never have seen the light had not Homer been inspired by the warlike deeds of heroes; nor would Herodotus and Thucydides have penned their invaluable pages had not the stirring events of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars impelled them to the task.  Xenophon, Arrian, Caesar, are strictly military historians; and the works of the other great writers of ancient history contain only the rehearsal of wars held together by a network of political conditions influencing these struggles."

The ancient historians were primarily interested in preserving the events of importance, those outside of the mundane and usual; war was usually that break in normalcy.  But war alone was not enough - as Mr. Dodge suggested, war had long been the subject of oral legend and myth, but not necessarily history.  For the Greeks, real history begins with the Persian Wars, and this is important.  It is the event that thrust Greece into a qualitatively higher level of material and political importance.  The terrible menace of Xerxes' invasion marks the point where history in the West separates itself, definitively, from legend.

The task of the classical historians was to collect and preserve.  Herodotus, in his history of the Persian Wars, presents the reader with an incredibly broad range of information; this is quite unusual to the modern student, acclimated as he is to the rules of strict focus and depth of sources.  But, Herodotus was vigorously engaged in the primitive accumulation of historical knowledge; like the adventurers and conquistadors of the late middle ages, he collected and extracted wealth, but his wealth was made of words and stories; upon its base, modern history would one day be built.

The ability to distinguish between truth, legend (half-truth), and outright fabrication was difficult, given the nature of many of his sources, but he made honest attempts in this realm.  Indeed the nature of his work required that he be quite inventive and flexible in his methods of gathering material.

The modern historian is presented with an incredible amount of information and sources.  He will spend a great deal of his time pouring over them, separating and categorizing them.  This does not mean that the role of the chronicler has disappeared - far from it.  But, it is no longer the principle aim of history; explanation and analysis has taken on a very large role.  But, it was only possible because of the long period of accumulation undertaken by the classical historians, even though they may have no known they were doing it.

The higher stage of capitalism has no problem recording events.  High literacy rates (although they are not as high in some places as they once were) and high levels of production in recording instruments and media - from pens and paper to cell phone cameras and internet blogs - have ensured that events are captured from an overwhelming number of sources and views.  The historian has been freed from the chains of simple recording to concentrate on the more sophisticated work of analysis.  And the objective and subjective development of society has also unlocked the mysterious force that drives it, through a social structure simplified by the dominance of only two classes: the struggle of classes at the most basic level of productive and social relations has driven forward the massive shifts from slave society to feudalism to capitalism.

The historian is unfortunately tied to society as it exists.  As capitalism rots and we enter an age of revolution, history serves either one of the classes locked in combat; it is not, as some suppose, above the world it chronicles.  In order to make use of the advances in our understanding of history, it must be viewed in such a way to serve the interests of us workers, we who represent the future.  The way forward can be found in a serious analysis of the past, unlocking the laws of social development.  This is the task of the historian today, which has come full circle from Herodotus: from preservation of the past to a preservation of our future.

Hoplite Heresies: Accounting for the Spartans I/II

This may be the post that actually earns the title of "heresy".  I expect it to be somewhat controversial among the small handful of people who actually read any of this, so please feel free to leave feedback.  In some ways, Sparta is to ancient Greek history what WWII is to modern history - everyone who knows anything about it feels like a qualified expert.  So, I expect to ruffle some feathers merely by challenging the particular conception of the society that is familiar to many who know nothing else about the ancient Mediterannean.  The argument I will be making (briefly) is that the traditional view of Spartan society does not hold up to serious analysis from the standpoint of Historical Materialism.  Sparta was not subject to any different material or class forces than other Greek poleis.  It was not a unique historical entity that managed to stand apart from the core forces driving the rest of classical Greek slave society, while still taking a major role in shaping that world - such a conception cannot explain a thing about the role played by Sparta in the larger trajectory of the Hellenic world.  By relying on some recent scholarship, as well as the Marxist method of historical inquiry, we can demystify Sparta. 

If the average American can name two Greek city-states, they are most likely Athens and Sparta.  The two names have been etched onto the historical memory of the ages.  In popular culture, many know of Sparta and its soldiers from the recent movie "300" or even the many high school and college mascots that bear the name "Spartan".  But this is a rather strange phenomenon when one considers that Sparta has classically been considered an outlier among the Greek city-states; there was something different about the place and its mysterious regimented society.  I have written a few posts now on Greek warfare in which I have mentioned the state and its militant inhabitants many times, but despite their reputation for military excellence, the posts have not focused on them.  It is worthwhile to take a closer look at this city that still looms so large over history. 

In an attempt to keep my posts short, I will present this in two parts.  Anyone interested in my sources need only ask.

Land Ownership and the Land Owning Class

In order to understand anything about the Spartan military record, it is necessary to start with an examination of the social base.  I doubt there is anyone reading this who does not have at least some rudimentary knowledge of the Spartan agoge, or the strict military barracks system that served as both a system of public education and military training.  The tales of taking boys away from their homes, who received education (among other things) from older male lovers, and eating blood soup have remained in steady rotation in high school and college history courses.  So, there would be little point in dwelling on these facts themselves; if one is interested, they can find accounts of the agoge in numerous books and articles.  We are interested in the machinery that made the place what it was - the classes of Sparta and the social and productive relations that bound them.

Was Sparta an extreme outlier in history?  In order to attempt an answer, we will first look at the economic base of Sparta, which is supposed to be so radically different than other Greek poleis.  The productive property in Greece was primarily agricultural land, and the private ownership of this land, worked by slaves, made up the base upon which the large landowners - the ruling class of the Greek world - maintianed their social position of power.  This power extended over the class of small landowners (free peasants), who were engaged in class struggle with their superiors throughout antiquity.  The traditional view, which bases itself largely on the writings of the ancient Roman historians Plutarch and Polybius, holds that the land was equally distributed among Spartiates (full Spartan citizens) by the state.  Some who hold the traditional analysis also claim that the land was owned by the state, and the Spartiate acted as a steward.  This leaves us with an image of a radically egalitarian, even communistic, state with a strong bureaucratic government.  Yet, there are some major problems with this view.

The first issue is that the traditional view is based on evidence from historians writing centuries after the classical Greek period - they knew only what they heard or read in earlier writings.  Sparta traced many of its institutions back to the reforms of a king Lycurgus, who may or may not have been a real person.  Some of the institutions credited to his genius were the agoge, the oligarchic form of government, and the requirement of all Spartan males to eat in communal mess halls.  Most lauded among his reforms was a radical redistribution of land, said to have given each citizen an equal part.  The Spartans of the 5th and 4th centuries spoke of the reforms as a thing of the distant past, and it is likely that the Spartans of later centuries told the same tales about the 5th century.  For this phenomenon, there is some evidence from Athenian orators of the 4th century who spoke of how the "ancients" practiced the arts of war in a way more honorable and fitting of gentlemen - they were only speaking of the Athenians of the 5th century!

Furthermore, the evidence of equal or state owned land from classical Greek historians is slim.  Xenophon, an Athenian aristocrat most known for taking part in the expedition of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries into Persia in 401, was also a great admirer of Spartan society, and wrote a considerable amount about it.  It is noteworthy that in his work Polity of the Lakedaemonians, Xenophon does not mention land ownership a single time.  The work was meant, after all, to draw attention to the Lycurgan reforms that made Spartan social practices different than those of other Greek states.  His view was also that of an insider, not merely an Athenian visitor; he lived in Sparta for years and educated his sons along side those of the Spartiates.  One would assume that such an admirer would want to draw special attention to a system that effectively combats one of the great historical forces throughout the classical period: scarcity and concentration of arable land. 

There are other problems besides the trustworthiness of the historians.  One of these is that there is no evidence of the kind of state bureaucracy necessary for the level of control and record keeping necessary to doll out land and slaves (Hodkinson, 2000).  For instance, the Athens employed 700 magistrates throughout the Aegean and Asia Minor to administer its empire; when Sparta found itself at the head of a large land and overseas empire after the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, it left administration in the hands of a small number of regional governors who wielded a great deal of personal authority.  The empire quickly fell apart (see Xenophon's Hellenika).  This is hardly the picture of a well-oiled bureaucratic machine.

Secondly, and even more damning, is that the traditional model cannot account for the 5th century decline in the Spartiate population (Cartledge, 2009).  If land were doled out by the state and children were garaunteed economic security through such a program of land tenure, then what could explain such a demographic change?  Evidence from Thucydides and Xenophon shows great military reform during the 5th and 4th centuries (more on this in part II) in which non-citizens, mercenaries, and even enfranchized helots found their way into the phalanx alongside full Spartans - this is evidence of considerable social changes.  If there were enough trained citizens to fill the ranks, these reforms would hardly have been considered. 

It seems, rather, that freedom to buy and sell land, a right granted to citizens, resulted in a concentration of property (Hodkinson, 84).  The citizen had certain property requirements in order to retain his citizenship: he had to provide a certain amount of grain and produce to his communal dining mess.  If he were not able to provide his share, he could lose his rights to citizenship.  In fact, Xenophon famously wrote of a conspiracy by what  appears to be a group of former citizens or the children of former citizens to overthrow the Spartan state; of the Spartiates, the head conspirator said that they wished to "eat them raw".  Evidence of such vicious class conflict between large and small landowners is consistent with the class conflict that took place in other Greek poleis. 

Despite the image of the poor, austere Sparta, the Spartiate landowning class was likely very wealthy among the property owning classes of other Greek states.  Unlike Attica (the region dominated by Athens), with its poor and scarce farmland, Sparta ruled over a large dominion of very fertile land.  In fact, the soil likely allowed for two harvests a year.  In light of this, it is easy to understand how the Spartiates would gain great wealth at the expense of Helot labor, and how fierce struggle over land developed.  More on the social effects of this will be discussed in part II.

Another familiar aspect of Spartan society is the above-mentioned Helots, and they are worth considering in some detail.  The population known to us as helots would have called themselves (not too loudly) Messenians - and indeed they were; Sparta had conquered the region of Messenia, known for its fertile land in the late 8th century and subjugated the entire population.  They are commonly referred to as slaves in many history texts, but this label requires some qualification.  The institution of slavery existed in all Greek states, and their economies were largely driven by the employment of slave labor; some of the larger trading cities, such as Athens and Corinth, had slave populations that greatly outnumbered that of citizens. So, there is nothing out of the ordinary in slavery.  Slaves were the personal property of their owners, and productive property - "tools that speak".  There has been a great deal of disagreement regarding the nature of the Helots.  The famous "Marxist" historian de ste Croix considered them to be "state serfs", and others of a more traditional stripe have tended to see them as a type of mass of slaves owned by the state.

The ancient sources are not totally clear on the nature of the Helots.  A reason for the long-held belief that they were somehow property of the state lies, perhaps in Thucydides' and Xenophon's description of the state intervening in their lives and use during the Peloponnesian and Theban wars.  They were subject to use by the state without compensation to their masters, and numbers of them were granted freedom in exchange for military service during both conflicts (Hellenika and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War).  It should be noted that there was precedent for this in Athens, and no one would accuse the Athenian state of collective ownership over its slave population.

In light of the sale and concentration of landed property in Sparta, it would be better to assume that the Helots were the personal property of Spartiates, but subject to state intervention under the law (Hodkinson, 115).  Overall, in review of recent scholarship and ancient sources, and the system of property relations in Sparta is fairly unremarkable in relation to the economic bases of other Greek states.  My conclusions, as well as some further examination of the military and social relations, will be further examined in the next section!

Alexander the Great and the Materialist Method of History

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Classical Greeks did not produce many great generals.  But there was Alexander, who was probably the greatest captain in all of Western history.  After all, who can have claimed to do what he did?  Hannibal? Scipio?  Caesar?  Alexander had probably never even heard of a little Italian state called Rome when he was sitting on top of the vastness of Greece (minus Sparta, who was never included in his Greek conquest), Asia Minor, Egypt, and the expanse from the coasts of the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, and out to the Indus.  All while never having lost a pitched battle.

Heroes and Historical Materialism

A popular liberal reductionist mode of history, championed by people like Howard Zinn, attempts to fight the "big man" theory of history by taking the opposite stance- history was made by the masses of "small" people, and big men were just as brutal, potentially criminal and fallible as anyone else.  Very well; I doubt anyone can seriously disagree with this.  However, it also represents another form of one-sided theory that does not get us a step closer to the truth on its own.  History is still full of Alexanders, Caesars, Cromwells, Napoleons, etc- to write them all off as unimportant war criminals does not answer why they exist in the first place.  The fact of their deeds is more stubborn to do away with, and must be accounted for. 

Furthermore, to judge history by body count will not get one very far.  To write off conqueror as just a bloody killer is to get no further than to recognize part of the definition of a conqueror.  Moralism sounds very nice to many very nice people, but it is much more valuable to have the tools necessary to understand a phenomenon.  And of the book Alexander the Fabulous, reducing the entirety of his accomplishments to his supposed homosexuality...the less said the better.

I have, in a past post, outlined Historical Materialism, the Marxist method of historical inquiry, so I will only briefly outline some aspects of the approach as they affect our subject.  Historical Materialism, by recognizing that history is made, in the last analysis, by the struggle of different historical classes, blows the great man theory out of the water.  However, it does not end there.  There is no mechanical conception of poor vs. rich in some eternal struggle.  Nor does it reduce any political event to the mechanical reaction to economics.  The mode of production- the particular way that men and women interact with one another to reproduce society on a daily basis, like slave society, feudalism, capitalism, etc.- gives a particular character to the social relations that come of it, which helps to explain the sweep of historical events.  Historical materialism recognizes the roles of great men and women, but in a way that is divorced completely from the "great man" theory: as representatives of historical tendencies in times of great change.  

In other words: the characters do not make the changes in society, the changes already occurring in society produce the characters who carry them through.  Just as there are laws of nature, so there are laws of social development.  Although it is somewhat fashionable to take the postmodernist position that "reality is a social construct" and so there is no one objective reality, this represents a massive step backward in historical thought to the emptiness of mysticism and solipsism; we will not waste any time tangled in this bankrupt conception.  However, whereas the laws of nature confront humans as a force that exists with or without them, the laws of social development both confront the individual as a force alien to him (no man chooses the mode of production of the society that he is born into) and also as something that is enacted through the actions of human beings.  So, it is natural that in times where the contradictions at a society's base are causing great social upheaval and change, it is often great characters of history who fill the subjective place of representative of a much wider trend that has already developed.  

There were many men in Greece who were as intelligent, athletic, and wealthy as Alexander.  Likewise, there were many states with considerable military capability (Thebes, Athens, Syracuse)*.  Alexander the man and Macedonia the state were not special on their own, but only as representatives of the bearers of the historical ascendancy of Greek slaves society.  There were reasons that they were well-situated for the role that they would play, though.

Only a King

Macedonia was, to most Greeks, a backward state full semi-barbarous people- they still served a line of kings, after all!  They were scarcely higher on the scale of civilization than the warlike Thracians.  That they would be the state to lead Greece into its long-brewing contest with Persia would have been a silly idea, to say the least.  

There is, though, an interesting tendency for things to turn into their opposite.  Something that once played a progressive role in moving society forward (for instance, slavery), can become a fetter (consider the long decay of the Roman Empire due to the rotting corpse of slave agriculture).  The opposite took place in Macedonia.  The backward state of its economy and political apparatus once ensured its status as a culturally-handicapped backwater, and it would eventually become its strength.  Ultimately, it took a king- namely, Philip II- to build Greece's first truly professional army.  

To back up this statement, it is necessary to look at the state of affairs in Greece, during the latter half of the 4th century.  The Peloponnesian War had devastated the Greek world from 431-404.  It brought a terrible outbreak of plague to Athens, the total ruin of many cities, both on the mainland and in the Aegean, and generally weakened all of the great city states.     The brief period of Spartan ascendancy following the war resulted in a successful, but interrupted, invasion of Persia by the great Spartan king Agesilaus.  The Corinthian War and Theban War that followed reduced Sparta to a second rate power and saw a short period of Theban ascendancy.  By the period of Philip's Grecian campaign, Athens was again the predominant Greek power, although an exhausted one.  

What led to this long nightmare of war among the Greeks?  Ultimately, as Greek slave society grew more productive and the great trading cities of Corinth and Athens became more important in the Mediterranean, the growing economic interests of the states were bound to bring them into conflict.  Military might and trade were intimately connected, as states vied for access to the rich markets of the East and pirates preyed upon unprepared traders.  The conflicts in the economic sphere thus led to a series of draining and destructive wars.  No state, not even the Athenian Empire, proved powerful enough to create a monopoly of trade in the Aegean or Mediterranean, and the struggles ground on.

Inside the states themselves, great contradictions were playing themselves out.  As states grew more prosperous, and, in the case of Athens grew imperial ambitions, it ground against the social relations that had developed in previous periods.  Democracy, for instance, which was itself the product of great class conflict between small landowners, a growing merchant class, and large land owners, required a small geographical state to ensure that citizens could easily travel to the city for voting.  As the representatives of the large landowning class sought, and were pushed by the growth in slave economy to seek, greater political and economic influence throughout the Mediterranean, they were held back by the nature of the small democratic state.  The Athenian empire, although it employed 700 magistrates throughout the Aegean to administer its dominion, was hardly much more than a forced confederacy when compared to the successor kingdoms or the Roman empire.  The political form, balanced on explosive class conflict, was at odds with the demands of the expanding states.  

Traditionally, the Greek states relied on civilian militias for defense.  The fame of the "Marathon men" and the 300 Spartans attests to the effectiveness of the Greek man-at-arms.  However, a major weakness of Greek armies was that the bulk of the phalanx was made up of farmers who needed to be back home by the harvest season.  Indeed, this was a matter of pride and a mark of prestige for the layer of society that had made up the oldest base of citizenry back into the period of the tribal state.  There was a limit to the amount of time that a state could keep such army in the field, a campaign season that coincided with the natural rhythm of agriculture.  

Since the Greek states had a strong agricultural base of production, and one in which even relatively wealthy Greeks worked alongside their slaves in the fields at least for a portion of the year, especially in the period before the 5th century BC, it also ensured that the wars were of a generally limited nature.  States fought over borders and access to farmland or rare grazing land.  There was no military caste in Greece, as existed in the East, whose lives were dedicated to arms.  This, along with the poverty of Greek cities and the agrarian nature of productive property, assured that the model of war centered around short campaigns and aimed at decisive pitched battles.  

The great wars of the 5th and 4th centuries strained this system of war to its limits.  States began employing mercenaries in greater numbers to augment the numbers of available citizens, as well as to overcome their seasonal combat limits.  Incidentally, the mercenaries were available in greater numbers as the growth in population of the 5th century created a larger population of farmers' sons with no hope of acquiring land of their own as large land owners expanded their holdings.  The ease at which Cyrus brought together 10,000 mercenaries in 401 attests to their availability in the wake of the 30 years of the Peloponnesian War.  

Slaves were also filling ranks formerly reserved for citizens - a clear sign of social crisis.  Athens put them to work as rowers and light troops, while Sparta went as far to put enfranchised Helots in the phalanx with full Spartiates.  The great Spartan strategos, Brasidas conducted his campaigns with an army composed almost completely of freed helots and resident aliens.  The conditions demanded a standing army, but the social structure of the Greek city states could not allow for its creation- democracy and oligarchy each rested upon the military traditions of the citizen soldier.  It was left to Philip II, Alexander's father and one of the most brilliant military reformers in history, to accomplish what the southern Greek states could not.  

The Macedonian king spent part of his youth as a hostage in Thebes during the generalship of Epaminondas and learned much from the methods of the greatest Greek military man before the reign of his son.  He took the distilled lessons and advancements of Greek arms and began to build an army upon those principles.  He had a fresh population to work with, unused to democracy or citizenship and unaffected by its political and social traditions.  The citizen soldier spirit that had once made the Greek such a formidable foe had become a fetter on the military development, and thus political development of slave society.  The hoplite was traditionally expected to arm himself and serve without pay- as the economic importance of the Greek cities increased disparity and demanded more military service, this became less possible.  Philip molded the Macedonian peasants into a crack force, armed, trained, and paid full-time by the state.    

In order to pay for all of this, he also had to do something impossible in the other Greek states- take on heavy state debt.  Despite being able to fund some of his projects through the conquest and utilization of Illyrian and Thracian gold and silver mines (a large source of wealth in themselves), Alexander inherited a state heavily in debt to Greek lenders.  No Greek politician, especially those elected to yearly posts by the fickle citizenry, and supported by the frugal large land owners, could have hoped to take on such debt in the name of warfare.

Conquest 

The incredible tale of Alexanders conquests has been well-documented in countless books, and there is certainly no need to recount it in full here.  But, the reasons for his conquests, as well as their success, are, more often than not, attributed to personal ambition or personality quirks.  I cannot think of anything less useful to our purpose- surely, the personality of Alexander can account for plenty of peculiarities, but it is a rare thing, indeed, for a man to conquer the known world because of his great personality.  Alexander's conquests were driven by material conditions in the Greek world.

The first among these conditions was the geography of Greece itself.  The history of Greece is that of colonization and exploration; even a superficial examination of the geography of the mainland will explain such a tendency.  Lord Byron called Greece "the land of mountains and the sea", and these two geographic features dominated the life of Greeks from the earliest days.  A mountainous land with little in the way of arable land, and most of that being of poor quality, even by ancient standards, pushed the sons of Greek farmers to seek other lands in which to claim their own plots.  Since the year 1000, Greek sailors had been colonizing the Mediterranean and Aegean from Spain to Egypt, even as far as the Black Sea.

One can be sure that during the ascendancy of Greek trade and manufacture in the 5th and 4th centuries, this tendency was not reversed- rather, it was accelerated!  The population growth that came with the economic growth put further stress on the small landholders, as land became even more valuable, large slave farmers became richer, and states fought to gain access to the most fertile plains.  We can be sure, by the growth of mercenary service and colonization, that there was an increasing population of Greek men and women with no means to make a traditional agrarian living.  From this, we can begin to trace the origins of the long series of Greek offensives and counter-offensives into Persia;  they were effects of the need for living space and access to arable land.  

Whether they realized it or not (and I am certain they did not), the visions of Persian conquest held dear by Philip and Alexander were the effects of the historical need felt for land over hundreds of years.  The Seleucid empire, the successor kingdom in Syria, actively encouraged Greek immigration, and they do not seem to have had problems in finding willing participants; hundreds of Greek cities were founded throughout Asia Minor in this period.  The rich plains of Asia offered a stark comparison to the mountains of Greece.  The city of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt also saw a great influx of Greek immigrants.  

A second, and more immediate condition for Alexander himself, was driven by debt.  As mentioned above, Philip accumulated a large amount of debt in order to build his military machine, and that had to be paid for.  As Alexander conquered, he secured means to make money.  These ranged from gaining control over important trade cities and routes to that most valuable of ancient commodities: slaves.  When a city refused to enter into cordial relations with Alexander, it was besieged.  Inevitably, the city would fall, and its inhabitants sold, en masse, into slavery, providing Alexander with plenty of cash. 

Over the course of his campaigns, hundreds of thousands were enslaved in such a manner.  This had a secondary effect, though:  as Alexander won the world on the strength of an ascendant Greek slave society, he furthered the interests of slave society by flooding the market with huge amounts of cheap slaves.  

What conditions allowed for success, then?  Chief among them was the above-mentioned ascendancy of Greek society.  Slave society was in a period of strength and growth from the 5th century, measured by the Greek dominance in almost all of the Mediterranean, both economically and socially.  Greek goods could be found in markets from Asia to the dark forests of central Europe, and Greek culture was producing works of science, philosophy, and literature unrivaled by Persia; Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar in the 3rd century, using geometry, measured the circumference of the globe (that had not even been discovered by Greeks yet) with an error of only 2%.  Persia, despite the confusing mix of economic modes of production to be found within its borders, rested upon the core of the old Asiatic mode of production, which saw a strong, centralized state, controlled by various castes, utilize the labor of its subject peasant populations.  

The Persian state had, upon such a system, diverted major rivers, created great systems of irrigation and water travel, and showed the West the first postal service.  Yet, it was being eclipsed by the Greek mode of production in the language of material and culture, and its decent was evidenced by its feeble military showing in the face of Alexander's greatly-inferior numbers.  The empire, along with the whole base of its society was wiped away by the new.

Alexander, in the last analysis, represented the force of historical progress in the character of a man.  Despite all the ink spilled over his personality, if it were not him, another would have taken up this task.  In fact, the Spartan king Agisilaus, at the turn of the 4th century, had also waged a rather successful campaign in Asia, although it was cut short by the outbreak of the Corinthian War.  The long-felt historical needs addressed above made the Greek conquest inevitable, it just happened to be Alexander who finally existed at the right time with the right resources.  To paraphrase Engels, a great man always seems to step up exactly when he is needed.  

*the notable exception of Sparta was due to the devastating defeats that the state suffered at the hands of the Thebans during their post-Corinthian War conflicts.  

The Hoplite Heresies pt.2

This second entry is on the material conditions related to the development (or lack thereof) of the Greek general, or Strategos.  Again, it is primarily a military piece.  All dates are B.C. unless otherwise noted.

The Strategos  

Despite the military dominance of their armies, the Classical Greeks developed very few great captains.  Those that come quickly to mind are Brasidas (a brilliant Spartan commander during the latter half of the Peloponnesian War) ,Epaminondas (the Theban father of modern strategy who led his army to victory over the Spartans in 371), the innovative condottiero Iphicrates of Athens, Pyrrhus of Epirus, and Alexander.  The Spartans, despite their ability to turn out excellent soldiers, produced but two commanders of note: Brasidas, and the controversial admiral Lysander, and both during the latter half of the 5th century, and, significantly both operated in conditions that were uncommon to the traditional heavy infantry base of Spartan operations.  It was left to the Romans to produce strategic leadership in a consistent manner.

The classical phalanx has been romantically referred to as the "armed polis".  This gives us some indication as to its origins, which lay with the development of the ctiy-states themselves.  In the archaic period, the lack of a developed state structure, and so also lacking a military organization, meant that the early Greek commander was the tribal "front fighter".  In order to instill any discipline at all, it was necessary that he lead by example and by feats of personal bravery.  It is notable that the role of the general, or "strategos", did not completely change from the front-fighter, even through the 5th and 4th century.  The strategos continued to fight in the front rank of the phalanx, on the right side place of honor, and there is a long list of generals killed in such action, including the above-mentioned Brasidas and Epaminondas.  This practice persisted despite the growth in strategic and tactical use of combined arms in the latter half of the 5th century.

Strategoi

In Athens, the Board of Strategoi, a body born in the late 6th century, was a government council made up of the ten annually elected strategoi.  It was heavily, if not exclusively, stacked with representatives from the same old aristocratic families.  This will not shock anyone, as politics in general were very much the sphere of Athens' top families; the class nature of Athenian democracy shows itself in the fact that being an elected official was a full-time job with no pay, but not many farmers had enough slaves to completely leave their farm behind for the city through the whole year.  But, it does illustrate the continuing connection between the aristocratic front fighter and the strategos.  Being a politically important position, it was not necessarily the best military minds who were elected to this position, and the genius of the competent was often negated by the common practice of splitting commands between political opponents (see the tragic fate of the Syracuse expedition in 415).

Unlike in the East, war was not the exclusive sphere of a warrior caste.  But, as I noted, the positions of command were nonetheless manned by the sons of aristocracy.  This persisted despite the coming of democracy in Athens.  The aristocracy of large land and slave owners, after all, was the only class in society that was trained in military arts until well into the 4th century.  This situation was in contradiction with the make-up of the phalanx, as the citizen phalanx forced the aristocratic fighters to rely on the shields of the small farmer- hardly conditions in which to win personal glory.

It was also in contradiction with the conditions of battle.  The phalanx relied on discipline and unit cohesion as much as skill in arms.  Sword fighting came into play primarily during retreat or other moments of desperation.  It would be a mistake to call it a useless skill, but it certainly did not carry the value that it did in the Homeric tribal battles of the past.  There were those in Athens who mocked the many trainers who sold lessons on swordsmanship to the wealthy, but this was an important tradition to the sons of the slave owners.  The phalanx did not rely on personal bravery and did not present its fighters with one-on-one combat with which to prove that bravery and skill.  The training of the aristocracy was a holdover from the past and the classical strategos was a transitional position between the tribal front fighter and Roman general.  It was events related to the ascendancy of slave society in the 5th century that would strain the contradictions of the position.

Border skirmishes and world wars

There is an idea that battles between Greek armies were somehow formalized and bound by rules of conduct or traditions.  In the 4th century, Athenian politicians spoke of how the "ancients" conducted war in a more honorable way, with rules and notions of fairness.  In reality, these men spoke of the Greeks of the 5th century, just a few generations removed, and one can provide numerous examples of trickery, ambush, and barbarism both before and during the Peloponnesian War.  This talk is reminiscent of the commonly-heard, and ridiculous, notion that wars in the 19th century were somehow formalized and honorable, etc. etc.   The Greek wars during the 7th and 6th centuries were certainly limited in scope and aim, but that is a different issue.

Mainland Greece, as I have mentioned before, was not known for being a particularly wealthy land.  This is especially true of the Greece of the 6th and 7th centuries, the period in which the phalanx developed.  Corinth stood out as the first major trading city, its unique geography giving it excellent ports on both the East and West sides of the isthmus.  Other than this one Greek city, the major trade cities were concentrated in the East- the Eastern Greek cities of Miletus and Sardis, Egyptian Memphis, and Tyre.  But, it was not until after the Persian Wars that the city states began to grow wealthy and greatly expand their commercial interests.  In a period when sea travel was dangerous due to piracy, foreign war ships, and the limitations of navigational technology, there was no such thing as separation of military and commercial enterprise;  the two were intimately linked to each other, and so also the interest of the state.  After the Persian defeats, Athens, with her newly-built navy went on the offensive throughout the Aegean and southern Mediterranean, clearing the way for Greek ascendance in rapid fashion.

Clauswitz famously wrote that war is a continuation of politics by other means.  The aim in war is, generally, to destroy the ability of the enemy to continue the conflict.  But, the political aims of the combatants give proportion to the means by which the war is fought and propagated.  So, the more limited the aims- the less that the arouse great interest and concern the fate of the ruling class, and the state as a whole- the more likely it is that peace will be sought, and obtained, through avenues other than the annihilation of the military power of the enemy state.  There is a point at which the cost of carrying on the conflict becomes greater than the political object itself.

Before the Persian Wars, the interests of conflict were generally of a limited nature.  Border conflicts, inevitable given the lack of arable land and the agricultural interest of both the small farmers and large slave owners alike, made up the vast majority of warfare between the mainland states.  The Greeks of the Classical Period had no general method of taxation for military expenses.  Funds were secured on a needs basis through a combination of compulsory collection and individual donation and loan.  It was not long before a campaign ate through the available funds.

Neither were there, among the Greeks, standing professional armies.  Each state relied on citizen militias up until the late 4th century, although an increasing use of mercenaries was made from the middle 5th century on.  The men who made up the phalanx, especially in the period before the Persian invasions, were the land and slave-owning farmers of each state.  These citizens were willing to give a limited amount of time for campaigning before they had to return to their fields.

All of the above-mentioned factors conspired to assure that the short campaign, leading up to a pitched battle, dominated the warfare of the 7th and 6th centuries.  There were no formal rules that govern this, merely material conditions.  This point flies in the face of a long historical tradition.  This school can see for themselves the limited nature of Greek campaigns during the archaic period before the 5th century, their tendency toward the pitched battle, and these men can also plainly contrast those practices with the rapid military changes during the 5th century; they come to the conclusion that warfare must have been more ritualized, but then things began to change.  Unfortunately, they are only viewing the superficial aspects of the issue - warfare is rooted in the material interests of the ruling classes of a given society, be they unconscious or not.

Relating this all back to the Strategos: there was little demand for the development of the general as the strategic commander and planner during the early period of hoplite warfare.  It is no accident that the first great Greek generals are born of the later 5th century and the Peloponnesian War; the stakes were higher and concerned access to the wealth of the greater Mediterranean world, rather than the shifting of tiny borders.  This led to myriad changes in the military organization of Grecian armies and fleets, but overall, the situation led to the demand for true generalship.  And when great men are demanded by historical conditions, they tend to appear.

Ultimately, the city states never produced an Alexander, Scipio, or Caesar- the strategos was a transitional position in the development of the Western general.  But, to not understand the material conditions which governed the possibility of that development is to be forced to accept the poor notion of a formalized warfare.  And to accept that is to fall into an idealist trap of either calling the Greeks not naturally inclined toward military genius or lacking a great mind to come up with better ideas in relation to military command- both of these are wrong.