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.

      

       

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!