Mercenaries and Bonapartists

Mercenaries and Bonapartists: Unraveling the Contradictions of Ancient Greek Class Society

        I have written quite a bit about the social forces that drove the ascent of the Greek world and its subsequent decline.  I have insisted upon their precise formulation.  There is a reason for the belabored approach, though.  These concepts are complex and lie outside the normal language and intellectual frame of the history we learn in school; they are the product of an unfamiliar mode of thought.  As a Marxist, I often find myself exasperated with the span of space and time that I need to cover on a subject before getting to a relatively simple point.  The truth is that when working from the Marxist perspective, there are no easy answers or simple conversations about history; in the classroom, I most often find myself rejecting the premise of the questions asked or points made, so any answer has to build its own framework.  We speak and think with constructs and concepts, and with casual ease because they are generally understood.  But, when we must explain such complex phenomena as human behavior in history, the simple concepts are insufficient and we must turn to more complicated and nuanced ones.  All of these are built with certain abstractions, and abstractions out of tendency in concrete phenomena.  The philosophies most commonly employed in schools and everyday life, though, are often incompatible with the Marxist philosophy, which builds its own constructs, often with a long series of intermediate abstractions between them and the perceivable.  Inevitably, the result is a cognitive dissonance.  So, the burden is upon the Marxist to constantly elaborate the basic building blocks of our thought.  The philosophy provides us with the most precise and accurate intellectual tools, but it is not grasped instinctively.

        I put a good deal of energy into writing an entry, between research, note-taking, and the long process of grappling with the concepts themselves - this is largely responsible for the irregularity of my content production.  This post will deal with many of the themes that I have explored in the past, especially in the Alexander articles, but in a more precise manner.  Given the difficult subject matter and my wish to keep these entries relatively short, I hope that the reader will forgive some amount of backtracking and overlap. 

        Ancient Greek society, like ours, was composed of social classes.  "Class" has been rendered almost meaningless by way it is commonly used in the mainstream news, by politicians and teachers.  It has become a measurement of income level, which tells one absolutely nothing at all about the individuals who fall into the brackets.  This entire way of thinking about class is arbitrary and hollow, amounting to the lack of a definition.  Classes are the social expression of the real relations of production, the relations that bring us into contact with one another on a daily basis; an individual's relation to production determines, broadly their class position.  Social class is not a precise measurement, and there are no neat lines to separate one from another - that kind of chart-making belongs to the academics.  The real world is a lot messier than income groupings. 

        In fact, it would be impossible to apply the method of measuring income to antiquity.  The way that we think about income, and about money, is firmly rooted in the workings of capitalism.  Money was of little importance to most Greeks, and there was always more demand for it than supply.  Finley (1973) noted that in a society where value was found primarily in the land, currency was often hard to come by, even for the ruling class of large landowners.  The trading of use-value items and payment-in-kind remained common practice in the rural areas of Greece for the whole of antiquity.
  
        Class plays a large part in explaining the interrelated phenomena of mercenaries and tyrants in the late Classical and Hellenistic Greek world.  By examining their causes, I will explain some of the forces driving the decline of Greek civilization.  I have chosen to focus mainly on the aspects of the subject that most affected the whole.

Mercenary Service

        War and economy have never been completely separate realms of activity.  This was especially true of the ancient world, where trade and piracy, taxation and armed robbery, were often one and the same.  Warfare was not only a consequence of the drive for wealth and access to land, but wealth and land were counted among the spoils of a successful campaign.  Individual soldiers could expect to come home with some booty of their own, especially the general, but the state took its share, too: half.  War was good business for most of those involved - on the side of the victors, that is.  Many farmer-warriors marched off to battle with hopes of coming home with a little something of value.

         The word “soldier” is an inappropriate label for the Greek man-at-arms for this time period; to the modern reader, it conjures up a series of associations that serve only to misrepresent the men and their place on the battlefield.  The modern soldier of the advanced capitalist world is disciplined, trained to fairly rigorous physical and technical standards, and (importantly for them) paid for their service.  The Greek warrior of the Archaic and Classical periods was none of these. If there is something more “modern” or familiar about the Greek hoplite than his Asian counterparts, it is certainly not due to his being more professional or soldier-like.  The typical classical army was a grouping of armed amateurs; training was deemed inferior to battle experience and the occasional drilling of citizen youths was considered enough. 

        As mentioned in the "Hoplite Heresies" articles, the Classical Greek city-state relied on its citizens to provide for their own arms and armor.  Payment for military service (the navy was something else) was not instituted with any regularity until well into the 4th century.  Even then, a good deal of this payment is better understood as a subsidy to pay for food and supplies on the road.  A basic shield and spear cost about 25-30 drachmas, or about a month’s earnings for an artisan (Hans van Wees, Greek Warfare, 52), while a full bronze panoply is estimated at around 100 drachmas, or three months earnings for that same artisan.  So, there was, in reality, a minimum wealth requirement for military service.  In the ancient economy this meant, in most cases, a requirement of land ownership.  Yes, the landless and destitute of the polis could serve as psiloi, literally "light guys", skirmishing with javelins and slingshots, but there was little social honor in doing so, and one would usually be serving alongside resident foreigners and slaves.  
 

Psiloi (http://johnnyshumate.deviantart.com)

        
     

       For a period, this method of military service worked, as evidenced the fact that it remained virtually untouched until the Peloponnesian War. The war was one of those "epoch making" conflicts, a "world war" if you will, in which the old is violently marked off from something new. Along with the Persian Wars, it bookmarks the "golden age" of Classical Greece. Like the two world wars of the 20th century, it was a violent explosion that resulted from many sharp and deep contradictions that had simmered just under the surface of society. I will not give an account of that terrible conflict here, but for the purposes of the essay, will recognize how it affected the military practices of antiquity, and how in turn the war was effected by social changes.


          Clausewitz (1832) tells us that a state will pursue a war with expenditure of social and financial resources in proportion to how dire the consequences of losing would be.  The conflicts between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian had been of limited scale and scope: Athenian campaigning in the Aegean against Persia, the usual border conflicts and raiding between Greek states, etc.  But, during the war of 431- 405, everything was on the line for the ruling classes of all the major combatants.  The Spartans emptied out the Peloponnese, marshaling an impressive allied army, some 50,000 strong and mostly of heavy infantry, on Attica in the summer of 431.  When the Athenians refused battle and countered with coastal raids on the Peloponnese, one of history's most classic examples of stalemate ensued.  The thing about a citizen militia, especially one that consisted mainly of farmers, is that they cannot stay in the field forever, but must return to their work.  As the war spread across the Greek world, horrible sieges and year-round campaigning called for a different type of troop.  So, the war marked the first case of wide-spread mercenary use among Greek combatants.  In a previous post on Alexander, I outlined the growth of mercenary service to meet the demand and its connection to social changes, but the world left in the wake of the war accelerated these processes. 

      A further sign that the traditional system of military service was breaking under stress was the development of specially trained hoplite corps in cities like Argos and Thebes during the 4th century.  Previously, only Spartan citizens engaged in any real training.  Furthermore, Athens began supplying arms to its male citizens, as well as minimal training.  States were no longer willing to risk their wealth and power on farmers' bravery, and fewer of those farmers could even afford to arm themselves.

      Land concentration was a constant process throughout antiquity, especially given the level of insecurity that loomed over most peasants in even good times.  The majority of citizen-peasants produced on a subsistence level, with a very limited ability to pay debt or weather a disaster.  Disaster often led to the peasant falling into debt to the large landowners, and that debt led to ruin.  Ironically, the more politically free a peasant was in antiquity, the less secure he was (Finley, 1973).  The process of ruin was accelerated by the widespread destruction that the war brought to the whole of the Greek peninsula for nearly three decades; there was hardly an arable region, from the backwaters of Arcanania and Elis to the Attic hinterland, that had not been trampled over by raiding bands and armies.  

        Behind the walls of Athens, peasants waited out the raiding Peloponnesian armies.  The marauders had a hard time killing green grain fields, olive trees, and grape vines (Hanson, 2005), but that does not mean that the farm's owners could simply return to work once the enemy went home.  The cost of repairing or replacing ruined fences, furniture, and houses, as well as dead livestock, added up quickly for most farmers, and for many it was too high to pay.  For the thousands who relied on rowing for the Athenian navy for work or supplementary income, the end of the empire was a terrible economic blow.  Likewise, the many large public works programs, which made use of every kind of skilled labor, were mourned by artisans.The wealthy generally had plenty of resources to repair their properties, and since many were involved in other ventures such as funding trading expeditions, leasing out slave gangs, or political money-lending, they were still aquiring wealth.  We see how in Athens, the most wealthy and populous polis, land concentration and pauperization undermined the social structure of democracy - one can imagine the effect of long-term war on the more backward and non-urban regions of Greece. 

          The war brought revolutions, outbreaks of plague, the destruction of entire cities, and the period that followed was one of continuing warfare and instability.  Thirty years of war had solved nothing; it merely heralded the end of the ascendency of the polis.  States rose and fell, desperately throwing all they had into their bid for supremacy.  By this point, the mercenary was a common sight on the battlefield, not only in "old Greece", but in the East and West.  For those citizens who could not hope to gain a living through agriculture, there was no other work; skilled labor and trade were primarily in the hands of resident foreigners, and the former employed slaves in their workshops, and those looking to earn a wage could only find work helping during the harvest.  So, thousands turned to mercenary work, which was in demand and could be lucrative.  

        The records of Greek mercenary service go back to the Bronze Age, when a pharaoh of Egypt employed a group of "men of bronze"; it was not a new phenomenon in itself.  The new element was the scale, which was determined by the two factors discussed above.  First, the ambitions of the Greek ruling classes to gain supremacy, in order to access the whole wealth of the trade routes, drove war past the military bounds of its old, tribal, forms.  Second, the continuing process of land concentration threw more men into pauperism, creating a reliable recruiting pool.

        Greeks were known to make good fighting men, and they found good work in the East.  Xenophon, in his account of the famous Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries in Persian service at the end of the 5th century, notes that the largest contingents came from the poor regions in the Peloponnese, such as Arcadia.  Among the whole of the that force, hardly 50 full sets of bronze armor could be put together: for every affluent adventurer (Xenophon) there were thousands of landless carrying little more than a spear and shield.  Xenophon's group was not the last in Persian service, Greeks remained a mainstay of the empire's infantry; Alexander fought a large group of them at the Battle of the Granicus River (334).

        Mercenaries also found a comfortable home in the West, "Magna Graecia", very often in the employ of a species of man that they would forever be linked with: the Tyrant.

Bonapartists 

         The instability of the period following the Peloponnesian War cut to the core of society, pushing on all tectonic fault lines of civilization.  Revolution and counter-revolution were common events as different wings of the ruling class plotted against one another.  In the crowded cities, the masses of landless poor seethed.  They were a cancer at the heart of the polis, incendiary, declassed elements who consumed and did not produce.  

        Every class society suffers from core contradictions that eventually lead to its end.  In classical antiquity, the land concentration that continued through the centuries, coupled with the primacy of slave and other forms of compulsory labor, brought about the crisis of long decline; men who had no hope of earning a livelihood on the land trickled into the crowded cities.  Revolution and counter-revolution were common occurrences in public life.  The ruling class of large landowners could no longer govern; they had undermined their base of stability through driving the peasantry into ruin.  Their wars exhausted the population and increased the rate of wealth polarization.  In fact, the wars of the 5th and 4th centuries endangered the whole social existence of the ruling classes, as evidenced by the ruin of Sparta by Thebes in 371. 
        
       Revolutions and instability lead us the question of the role of the state.  Ultimately, a state arises alongside social classes as a means for the ruling class to maintain the social relations which allow them to rule.  The definition is general and abstract; the typical state structure varies between different modes of society, and even at different points in the same society.  The state in Imperial Athens differed greatly from that of Persia, given the historical development of the two differing modes of society.  The military, bureaucracy, and means of enforcing the law all represent the organs of the state.  

        The state is an historical necessity for the ruling class, but that does not mean a simple equation of "Ruling Class = State".  The threat of Bonapartism, which is when the state raises itself above the contending classes, balancing itself between them, is inherent in the bureaucracy and organs that make up the state.  So, the institutions which rose to protect the rule of a class, can quickly turn around and face them as an enemy, wrenching control of society away for a period.  

        Bonapartism is a complex phenomenon, each regime having its own character, but I broadly organize them into regimes of an ascendent society and those of one in decline.  Marx offers us a brilliant glimpse at the role of an ascendent Bonapartist regime in his Eighteenth Brumiere of Louis Napoleon.  The coup of Louis-Napoleon in 1851 was a reaction to the revolutionary movements of 1848, a messy series of events in which the nascent bourgeoisie clashed with both the remnants of feudalism and the growing power of the working class.  A class is tied together by their common place in the process of production, and so pushed and pulled by the same forces and interests, but that does not mean that there is a consciousness among them; the Greek large land-owners, like the modern bourgeoisie, were a cannibalistic class.  The bourgeois state was perfected gradually through their revolutions against the aristocracy, but not always through their own leadership - they often needed to be pushed.  Louis-Napoleon's regime played the role of "armed arbiter", restoring social order and leaving behind a stronger state apparatus for the bourgeois to take back in the future.  Often, it takes a strong man to play the role of battering ram of history.

        Why talk about Napoleon III?  Because he provides a parallel to Solon and other early Greek tyrants.  These men came from various middling social backgrounds and played armed arbiter to the class struggles in the advanced areas, breaking the rule of the aristocracy and organizing the state for the rule of private property ( de Ste. Croix, 1989).  The class struggle in Athens c. 600 was, on the one hand, a struggle between the peasantry and the aristocracy, and then also between the aristocracy and the middling class of merchants and traders rivaling them in wealth.  The resulting impasse and chaos brought arbiters and strong men to the surface - reformers and law-givers who developed the state and restored order.  The bonapartist regime is, first and foremost, one of crisis.

        Solon gave legal and economic concessions to all classes involved, a common trait among bonapartists, but they also tended to attain their position on the support of the lower layers of society.  Solon's first act was to cancel all debts, which was a major demand of the peasantry. Peisistratos, the tyrant who followed Solon, likewise rode a wave of popular support from below.  Above all, these facts tell us that the ruling class did not have the strength to keep control of its own state during these periods of growth and change.  The Greek world was expanding both geographically and economically, and bursting the old bounds of the archaic states. 

 Tyrants

       Thucydides provides us with our first clear reflection on the subject, 

As Greece became more powerful and the acquisition of wealth became more important than before, tyrannies were established in most of the poleis - previously there had been hereditary kingship with specified privileges - revenues increased, and the Greeks began to construct navies and look towards the sea (1.12)

The bonapartist regimes of the tyrants were the battering ram for the rule of private property, clearing away the base of power of the nobility.  No Greek state had a written constitution in the middle of the 7th century; the tyrants were often law-givers and state-builders.  Cypselus of Corinth reorganized the tribal structure and his son introduced a boule (council), and passed laws to limit expenditure and display among the wealthy (aimed at the old sceming nobility).  Other tyrants followed suit.  These men generally came from within the ranks of the aristocracy but often rose up by positioning themselves as champions of the commoners during periods of class struggle; Dionysius is a good example of this.  Gelon, the first tyrant of Syracuse, came to rule the city through a revolution (485) during which the common people forced the aristocracy out of the city.  The exiles appealed to Gelon, who was reigning as tyrant of neighboring Gela, and seeing an opportunity, he seized the polis with his mercenary force.  In this example, he took advantage of the chaos by intervening on the nobles' behalf, but it did not change a thing about the nature of his regime. 

      As mentioned, mercenaries and tyrants enjoyed something of a symbiotic existence.  This was most readily seen in the West of the Greek world, Sicily and South Italy.  Here, there were specific regional factors that interacted with the universal contradictions in slave society to create an atmosphere of crisis, fear, and instability that was ideal for the propagation of tyrannies.  The Greek world can generally be considered a frontier society, clinging to the sea and interacting in various ways with their inland neighbors.  In the West, they lived alongside Carthaginians, Gauls, Etruscans, Sicels, and various native populations, often in the same cities.  The ongoing wars between the Punic and Greek cities brought drew thousands of mercenaries to Sicily and provided a continual catalyst for social strife.  Dionysius, the archetypical Classical tyrant, famously took advantage of the chaos of war to seize power, as did others before and after him.

      Machiavelli described the destructive role played by mercenaries: they must either be constantly employed, draining funds, or the state must deal with roving bands of armed and desperate men in the countryside.  Warzones attract mercenaries looking for work, and the West brought those desperate men from all over the Mediterranean and even darker Europe.  Tyrants were happy to employ them, but even they were eventually forced with the lose-lose choice of keeping them or letting them go.  So, they often gave them what they wanted - land and citizenship - which then further strengthened the political position of the despot.  Gelon enfranchised some 10,000 mercenaries during his seven year reign.  That the above lay at the core of the relationship between mercenaries and tyrants is confirmed in the events following the overthrow of Syracusan tyrant Thrasybulus (466), the new democratic goverment, headed by the sons of the ruling class, refused to grant access to public office to the "new citizens" enrolled by Gelon and Hieron; these new citizens were largely former mercenaries, and many were not of Greek stock.  Through this measure they hoped to stamp out the greatest social support for the disposed regime.  

      This relationship proved fruitful, and during the late 5th and 4th centuries, as the deepening of societal crisis caused a second great wave of tyrannies, it also bred a large recruiting pool of mercenaries.  Democracy is often the mode of government most associated with Greece, but most states at most times in their history were oligarchies or tyrannies.  Though tyranny features prominently in our sources during the 4th and 3rd centuries, scholars sometimes overlook the fact that it never went away during the 5th century.  These regimes always existed in the more marginal areas of Greece.  Similarly, bonapartist military regimes exist in our world even during periods of relative peace and stability in the advanced nations.  The next phase of bonapartists and mercenaries was played out in wars of the diadochi and the Successor kings with their giant armies, a period that lies outside the limited scope of this entry.  

      Perhaps I will dig deeper into the phenomenon of tyranny in a later entry, since there is quite a bit more to say, but I hope the above reflections are clear in expressing their substance.