ECONOMYand society

IN ANCIENT GREECE

M. I. FINLEY

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

BRENT D. SHAW

AND RICHARD P. SALLER

THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK

 FBOPEBTY OF

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glMII5f“PAWLiSMG SCHOOL LIBRARY

Copyright © 1953, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1965,

1976, 1977, 1981 by M. I. Finley

Preface, Introduction and Bibliography copyright © 1981

by Brent D. Shaw and Richard P. Sailer

All rights reserved

Published in 1982 by The Viking Press
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Finley, M. I. (Moses I.), 1912-
Economy and society in ancient Greece.
Consists of 14 Finley articles from the early 1950s
to the late 1970s.
“Bibliography of M.I. Finley": p.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Greece—Economic conditions—Addresses, essays,
lectures. 2. Greece—Social conditions—Addresses,
essays, lectures. 3. Greece—History—To 146 B.C.—
Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Shaw, Brent D.
II. Sailer, Richard P. III. Title.
HC37.F56 330.938 81-51886
ISBN 0-670-28847-0 AACR2

“Sparta and Spartan Society" copyright © 1968 by Mouton and Co., and the
Ecole Pratique des Etudes.

“The Athenean Empire: A Balance Sheet" copyright © 1978 by the Faculty of

Classics, University of Cambridge.

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Linotron Palatino

tSY
 CONTENTS

Editors' Preface vii

Editors' Introduction ix

PART ONE - THE ANCIENT CITY

1 The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to
Max Weber and beyond 3
2 Sparta and Spartan society 24
3 The Athenian Empire: A balance sheet 41
4 Land, debt and the man of property in classical
Athens 62
5 The freedom of the citizen in the Greek world 77

PART TWO - SERVITUDE, SLAVERY AND

THE ECONOMY
6 Was Greek civilisation based on slave labour? 97
7 Between slavery and freedom 116
8 The servile statuses of ancient Greece 133
9 Debt-bondage and the problem of slavery 150
10 The slave trade in antiquity: The Black Sea and
Danubian regions 167
11 Technical innov^ation and economic progress in
the ancient world 176

PART THREE - MYCENAE AND HOMER

12 Mycenaean palace archives and economic history 199
13 Homer and Mycenae: Property and tenure 213
14 Marriage, sale and gift in the Homeric world 233

Notes 249
Bibliographical references 298
Bibliography of M. I. Finley 312
Index 319
 - 5 -

THE FREEDOM OF THE CITIZEN

IN THE GREEK WORLD

Men have for centuries exercised their minds in vain to find a workable
definition of 'freedom'. I do not propose to add yet another attempt to
the mountain of failures, for I do not believe the term to be definable in
any normal sense of the word 'definition', and that for two related
reasons. The first is that 'the concept of "freedom" can properly be
formulated (only) as the antithesis of "unfreedom"'.’ The statement, 'X
has a right', has no content until it is accompanied by 'Y has a correlative
duty'. My second reason is that the gamut of claims, privileges, powers
and immunities, and of their correlative duties, 'unprivileges', liabilities
and disabilities, is too vast over the whole range of human activity, and
too varied not only from society to society but also among the members
within any known society. The rights recognised in a given society
constitute a bundle of claims, privileges, powers and immunities, un¬
evenly distributed among the individual members, even among those
who are called 'free', so that a definition of freedom encompassing them
would be either a tautology or a misrepresentation of the reality.^ A man
who possessed claims, privileges and powers in all matters against the
whole world would be a god, not a man, to paraphrase Aristotle.
In lieu of a definition, I shall begin by pointing up some of the
analytical difficulties inherent in any account of the subject and the
instability over time of essential conceptions. I start with a quotation
from the classic statement of what we may call the 'libertarian position',
by John Stuart Mill. 'The object of this essay', he wrote in the introduc¬
tion to his On Liberty,
is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the
dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and
control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal
penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. The principle is, that
the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively.

Originally published in Talanta 7 (1976) 1-23, and reprinted by permission of the editors
and publisher.
78 THE ANCIENT CITY

in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is

self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is
to prevent harm to others. . . . The only part of the conduct of any one,
for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the
part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right,
absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is
sovereign.
Mill's 'one very simple principle' may be easily asserted, it is less easily
elaborated: if nothing else, 'self-protection', 'harm to others', turn out to
be almost as slippery as 'liberty' itself. Mill had to acknowledge that later
in the same essay: 'there are many acts which, being directly injurious
only to the agents themselves, ought not to be legally interdicted, but
which, if done publicly, are a violation of good manners, and coming
thus within the category of public offences, may rightfully be
prohibited.'3
That qualification of course opens the door to the conflict over the
relationship between taw and morals which has lost little of its sharpness
even in our more permissive societies today. Mill managed to keep it
within the tight frame of 'harm to others'. Even when he extended the
notion of 'public offences' slightly, he went no further than 'good man¬
ners'. Contrast to this doggedly negative approach the following selec¬
tions from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the
General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948: 'Everyone, without any
discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work' (Article 23,
sect. 2); 'Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the
protection of his interests' (Article 23, sect. 4); 'Elementary education
shall be compulsory' (from Article 26, sect. i).«
These clauses exemplify a positive approach, that is to say, they
establish claims for individuals (for 'everyone' in fact) which, by their
very nature, reduce the claims of others - in my first two quotations the
claims of employers of labour to liberty of action. Hence enforcement of
these rights would cause them 'harm'.
John Stuart Mill came at the end of one period of sharp political conflict
and he codified in an extreme form some principles of the victors. The
central issue in the conflict (though not for Mill) may be reduced for our
purposes to the freedom of the citizen from the arbitrary authority of a
monarch or a foreign power; a freedom, it is important to remember, in
which taxation and the autonomy of private economic activity were
major components. When the English crown was offered to William and
Mary in 1689, the accompanying Declaration of Rights not only dealt
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN
79

with elections, trial by jury, the standing army and the right to bear arms,
but also declared expressly that 'levying of money without consent of
Parliament is illegal'. The provisions were all concrete, not abstract
statements of freedom or of rights, and they reflected the struggle with
the Crown which had been brought to a successful conclusion.
Both the American and the French revolutions, a century or so later,
also had their proximate causes in a conflict over taxes and various
economic restrictions. The outcome transcended these limited concerns
- transcended, but did not eliminate. The most famous rhetoric emerged
from the American Revolution, in the second paragraph of the Declar¬
ation of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.' The rhetoric was not meant to be taken literally:
not 'all men' since the numerous slaves were excluded; 'inalienable' only
with important exceptions, for the right to liberty did not prohibit im¬
prisonment, nor did the right to life prohibit capital punishment or
conscription into the armed forces. The rhetoric was translated into
practical propositions in the Constitution, where we find freedom of
speech and religion and so on, in the first ten amendments collectively
known as the Bill of Rights, but, no less important, we read in the fifth
amendment that no person shall 'be deprived of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public
use, without just compensation'. There is no reference to a right of
property in the Declaration of Independence, but clearly 'the pursuit of
Happiness' implied both its existence and its protection.
The road from the conception of rights in the American Constitution to
the very different conception in the Declaration of the United Nations
was a long and difficult one, strewn not only with debate but also with
overt conflict. In the United States, to give but one example, it required
an amendment to the Constitution, the sixteenth (not formally adopted
until 1913), to permit Congress to levy an income tax, the courts having
previously ruled such a tax unconstitutional. I do not propose to pursue
that history. I have called attention to certain contemporary aspects of
the problem of rights and freedom solely in order to lay the foundation
for several conceptual and methodological points that I believe one
needs to formulate expressly in an account of the ancient Greek situation
(the classical polis, more narrowly, in which citizenship was acquired
by birth in all but exceptional cases; I shall not be concerned with the
Greek cities in the Hellenistic monarchies or in the Roman empire). They
8o THE ANCIENT CITY

are commonplace points. My justification for taking time to state and

document three of them is that recent extensive reading of the learned
literature has brought home to me how common is the tendency to
overlook, ignore and even flout the obvious.
1. My first point is that rights are not fixed entities but historically
conditioned variables; that so-called universal or inalienable or natural
rights are merely those which a given society, or a given sector of a
society, or even a particular individual favours. The dialectic is that
specific 'natural rights' arise as a positive demand against authority, only
to be transformed into an argument against further changes in the social
and political arrangements. Freedom was once used as an argument
against the income tax; it is now deployed as an argument against the
right to equal pay for equal work. The latter is not traditional, it is argued,
it embodies no universal moral right (it cannot apply to those who do not
work for pay), it is not enforceable. The poverty of such arguments
requires little demonstration.^ Freedom of speech was not always tra¬
ditional either, it too cannot apply to various categories of people, it is
not always enforceable.
2. Changes in the matrix of rights that prevail in any society normally
begin in a struggle over specific issues, not over abstract concepts or
slogans. The rhetoric and the abstractions come later, and then are
reified. Consider stasis, civil strife, in the Greek world. Although the
dominant line of Greek writers, from Thucydides to Aristotle, called it
the greatest of evils, they had little impact on the Greek people, who
went on with their staseis unrelentingly. Why? Because, Aristotle con¬
cluded in our textbook on Greek stasis, the fifth book of his Politics, one
sector of the community sought more kerdos, profit, gain, material
advantage, and more time, honour (i302a32): two concrete, definable
objectives. The methods employed ranged from normal political means
to open civil war; the intellectual argument, when there was one, centred
round the concept of equality, the only abstraction which Aristotle
introduced into his analysis.
3. Any attempt to gain more rights and privileges for one man or one
class or one sector of the population necessarily involves a correspond¬
ing reduction of the rights and privileges of others. In all hitherto existing
societies, ever since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, rights have
clashed. At least in those spheres of human behaviour that involve
goods or power or honour, one man's claims and privileges are another
man's duties and disabilities. That is not one jot less true if we resort to
Greek and say agon, as anyone knows who has read his Pindar with an
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN 8i

eye to the values expressed. A gain on either side automatically entailed

a corresponding loss on the other side, and naturally led to resistance
from that side. That is what underlay stasis in the Greek city-states, and
stasis was by definition restricted to the citizen-body, to the free men, to
those who already had rights which they wished either to increase or to
protect.
One reason for their ability to indulge in so much fratricidal activity
was the presence of others who possessed no rights. On this subject the
Greek view was virtually unanimous: there was no contradiction, in
their minds, between freedom for some and (partial or total) unfreedom
for others, no notion that all men are created free, let alone equal. Tt was
no easy matter', wrote Thucydides (8.68.4) of tfio oligarchic coup of 411
B c, 'some hundred years after the expulsion of the tyrants to deprive the

Athenian people of their freedom, a people not only unused to subjec¬

tion but for more than half this period accustomed to rule over others.'®
Thucydides was thinking not of slaves at this point, but of the citizens
of the other communities within the Athenian empire. When he used the
verb 'to enslave' repeatedly as a metaphor for Athenian treatment of
subject-states, he was dividing the spectrum of rights very near one end:
'freedom' became 'unfreedom', 'enslavement', the moment the auton¬
omy of the community in foreign and military affairs was lost. Normally,
a Greek divided the line very much nearer the other end, the complete
loss of what we call personal freedom.^ He would not have considered
the perioikoi of Laconia unfree, though they, like the Athenian subjects,
had no autonomy in military or foreign affairs. Nor, turning to the
domestic field, would he have called the numerous mehcs in Athens
unfree despite their serious disabilities, such as their debarment from
political life, their incapacity to own landed property, their exclusion
from state grain requisitions and other public perquisites, their liability
to be taken before a magistrate by force when served with a summons in
a private lawsuit.
In sum, the citizens possessed a larger share of the bundle of claims,
privileges, powers, and immunities than anyone else, though not all
citizens had equal shares. The freedom of the Greek citizen cannot be
examined solely as an antithesis to unfreedom, to slavery: one must
acknowledge the range among the free. In particular, it must be recog¬
nised that what we commonly call privileges or immunities are not
something apart from rights but a proper class within the genus 'rights',
and therefore a component of freedom. A public distribution of grain,
the gift of an African prince to Athens in 445 b c, led to a purge of the
82 THE ANCIENT CITY

citizen roster because some non-citizens, falsely inscribed as citizens,

were claiming a privilege to which they were not entitled.® At first sight
that might appear a minor instance, almost a caricature of the subject of
rights and freedom, but behind it there looms a major consideration,
namely, the positive right of the citizen to assistance with respect to food
supply. Hence two items were regularly on the agenda of the first
assembly meeting in each prytany, defence of the city and the corn
supply (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 43.4). No doubt few Athenian
citizens actively wished the metics to starve, but only the citizen had the
right to demand that the state help prevent such an eventuality.
One of the most important privileges of the Greek citizen was the
freedom to engage in stasis. I am being neither frivolous nor perverse. A
quarter of a century ago Loenon made the acute, and still generally
neglected, observation that 'illegality is simply not the constant hallmark
of stasis. The label stasis was always also applied to completely legal
groups, existing or arising, between whom there were permanent
oppositions and tensions which did not burst into spectacular forms.
Freedom that does not include the freedom to advocate change is empty.
So is the freedom of advocacy that does not include the freedom to
combine with others. And change, as I have already said, entails the loss
of some rights by some members of the community. They resist, hence
stasis.
Now, it is inherent in a political society - and the Greek polis was a
quintessentially political society - that conflict over important matters of
substance, in every sphere of life, is sooner or later translated into a
political conflict. Our ancient authorities therefore deal with stasis solely
on that level, as conflict between oligarchy and democracy, as conflict
within the oligarchic minority, as conflict between democratic factions.
But, then as now, politics was a way of life for very few members of the
community. Even when we make allowance for the satisfaction that
comes from the right to vote in the assembly or to sit on juries, the fact
remains that for most people political rights are purely instrumental:
they are means for achieving non-political ends. So are the now tradi¬
tional, negative rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press,
freedom of assembly. These are understandably the rights most dear to
intellectuals, to professors, playwrights and publicists. They could also
become important to ordinary men in autocracies: the troubles of the
good soldier Schweik began when he said in his local cafe that the flies
had left their trademark on the emperor, referring to the portrait hanging
over the bar. We are not in the present context concerned with such
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN 83

systems. When Aristotle {Constitution of Athens i6.8) reported that Pisi-

stratus, once accused of murder, was so eager to maintain the rule of law
that he appeared in person before the Areopagus to defend himself, but
that the frightened accuser failed to appear, the philosopher permitted
himself the only joke known to me in the entire corpus of his surviving
works. Freedom under a tyranny is not a fruitful subject for discussion.
In Sparta, I believe, a citizen could safely have said that the flies have left
their trademark on King Archidamus, or on Lysander. But could he have
advocated a radical change in the agoge, abolition of the syssitia or the
introduction of silver coinage? That is a meaningful question, and,
though advocacy would have been a political act, the objectives 1 have
mentioned would not have been.
Modern discussions of the subject of Greek freedom are too narrowly,
too obsessively, concerned with political rights and with the negative
freedoms. They are also, I believe, too narrowly concentrated on abstract
rights, with insufficient attention to their enforceability in practice. If
Aristotle's joke about Pisistratus and the rule of law does not strike one
as a cogent example, I offer isegoria, the right of every citizen to speak and
make proposals in the Assembly, a topic which has recently produced a
spate of scholarly articles.'® That was a right which Spartans lacked, but
what happened in practice in the Athenian Assembly? A fifth-century
Athenian Thersites could not have been beaten by a nobleman for his
presumption; he would usually have been shouted down by his equals."
Why? Because even the Athenian demos, for all its drive towards the
right of every individual to full participation in the activity of govern¬
ment, accepted certain limits on the exercise of its political rights. The
Athenians extended the use of the lot widely, for example, and they
insured rotation of office by the one-year rule, but they exempted the
strategia from both. The people claimed isegoria but left its exercise to a
few. Again we must ask. Why?, and one part of the answer is that the
demos recognised the instrumental role of political rights and were more
concerned in the end with the substantive decisions, were content with
their power to direct those decisions through their power to select,
dismiss and punish their political leaders.On this score they were
favoured by an important and genuine equality - equality of the vote.
Wherever there was a popular assembly in Greece, the principle of 'one
man, one vote' prevailed. There was no weighted group voting, as in the
Roman centuriate assembly, for example, or in the French Estates
General.
In employing such phrases as 'the demos accepted', 'the demos recognised'.
84 THE ANCIENT CITY

I am of course not suggesting that these were deliberate choices made

after due examination and weighing of the issues and the possibilities
in the rather abstract, conceptual terms I used. The history of struggles
for political rights has never been like that. There were a number of
critical moments in the prehistory and history of Athenian democracy -
the crisis which produced the reforms of Solon, the seizure of power by
Pisistratus, the struggle leading to the reforms of Cleisthenes, the inter¬
nal problems created by the two Persian invasions, the stasis of the late
460s which saw the assassination of Ephialtes and which brought Athens
to the brink of civil war. Each of these moments was one of struggle, of
overt conflict; each centred round specific concrete issues, not round
abstract theories about rights or freedom.
The antagonists produced their rhetoric, of course, and I do not
underestimate political rhetoric, an expression of basic ideology. If any
one term is to be singled out as the 'banner' of the ultimately victorious
democracy, it is the word isonomia, which has two distinct
connotations.The dominant one is 'equality through the law', virtually
a synonym for 'democracy',and therefore regularly employed in the
context of political rights. But the other sense, 'equality before the law',
takes us into a different sphere of behaviour. 'With written laws,' says
Theseus in the Suppliant Women (lines 433-7) of Euripides,
People of few resources and the rich
Both have the same recourse to justice. Now
A man of means, if badly spoken of.
Will have no better standing than the weak;
And if the lesser is in the right, he wins
Against the great.

The boldness and rarity of such a notion cannot be overstressed. The

Romans of the Republic never attained it and never seriously desired to,
the Roman emperors openly rejected it.'^ There is no reason in principle
why an oligarchy should not accept equality before the law in private
relations and there is evidence to suggest that some Greek oligarchies in
fact did.i^ Then, with the demise of the independent Greek polis, the
western world had to wait until recent times before the doctrine was
reasserted and reintroduced. And modern experience, including our
own, has shown that there is no principle more difficult to translate fully
into practice than that of equality before the law. What was the ancient
Greek reality?
To begin with, there was a grave technical weakness: there was insuf¬
ficient governmental machinery for the purpose. To a considerable ex-
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN 85
tent in the case of public offences, and almost wholly in the case of
private legal disputes (including many accusations of what we call
'crimes', murder for one), legal redress depended on self-help, from the
initial summons to the final execution of a judgment. At the beginning of
his year in office the Athenian archon proclaimed by herald that every¬
one shall possess and control to the end of the year whatever property he
held at the beginning (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 56.2), but the
archon was largely powerless to fulfil that intention against an obstinate
and sufficiently powerful miscreant. Self-help is a workable procedure
between equals: it weighs the scales heavily in the case of unequals.'®
Consider the behaviour of the wealthy Midias, son of Cephisodorus.
In 349 BC, Demosthenes undertook the liturgy of preparing a male
chorus for the Greater Dionysia of the following year. His old enemy
Midias then embarked on a career of disruption, including nocturnal
entry into a goldsmith's shop in order to destroy the garments and
golden crowns that were being prepared for the chorus, bribery of the
chorus-master to prevent proper rehearsals, and a number of hooligan
actions at the festival itself. Demosthenes' chorus failed to win first prize
and the orator took Midias to court. In the course of his long address to
the jury he said the following (21.20): Some of Midias' previous victims
'remained silent because they were cowed by him and his insolence, his
henchmen, his wealth and all his other resources; others chose to go to
court and failed; still others came to terms with him'. Demosthenes won
his case - and promptly came to terms with Midias, for 3,000 drachmas
(Aeschines 3.52).
Demosthenes' oration against Midias has been an embarrassment to
modern scholars. It has been ignored, rejected, dismissed as an un¬
finished draft of an undelivered speech in a case that never came to trial -
not on the evidence of the oration itself, but, one must assume, on a
reluctance to believe that such things could go on in classical Athens and
the wealthy rascal remain unpunished, and on an equal reluctance to
believe that the great Demosthenes would have so demeaned himself as
to allow himself to be bought off cheaply by Midias.'^ Similar disbelief is
less in evidence with respect to the opposite view, repeatedly stated by
Greek pamphleteers, theorists and comic poets, that the Athenian juries
took every opportunity to plunder the rich. 'Court verdicts', we read,
'amounted to pure arbitrariness, which could not be overcome because
of the primitive procedure and the pettifogging of the advocates.The
words are those of a professor of Hamburg, not of the anonymous
oligarchic author of the late fifth-century work known as the Constitution
 86 THE ANCIENT CITY

of Athens, but a close study of the surviving forensic speeches has shown
that the conclusion is based on political preconceptions akin to those of
Pseudo-Xenophon, and on the professional preconceptions of a modern
continental jurist.^' Midias had no fear of being plundered, and rightly
so: the family fortune remained sufficiently intact to permit his sons to
perform expensive liturgies half a century after the affair with
Demosthenes.
Athens was no Utopia. Injustices were committed there, both by
individuals and by official bodies. Isonomia in practice cannot be assessed
by the evocation of individual instances, or by literal acceptance of the
rhetoric on either side. I am doubtful that a proper assessment, with all
the necessary nuances, is possible today, given the available evidence.
But there is one sphere in which we can be confident that the rule was
inequality, not equality, before the law. I refer to the law of debt, which
lay heavily and onesidedly on the defaulting debtor. His property was
subject to forceable seizure by self-help, though after due process, and in
many Greek states also his person.23 Solon put an end to personal
bondage in Athens, and the magic of Solon's name induces forgetfulness
of the fact that he was an Athenian, not a Greek, lawgiver. Solon greatly
influenced political theory and political ideals; he made less impact on
the law outside his native city. Cancellation of debts and redistribution of
land together were the perennial 'revolutionary' demands in the Greek
cities. Debtors are 'very dangerous' when a city is under siege, wrote the
fourth-century bc mercenary captain Aeneas (14.1).
The incompatibility of freedom and demands for equality is a familiar
dogma throughout the history of political theory. There were many
Greeks, however, who believed that the fundamental incompatibility
was between freedom and inequality, though they are not easily to be
found among those who wrote books. In the political field, narrowly
understood, steps were taken to create an artificial equality, carried
furthest in Athens: they included the widespread use of selection by lot,
pay for office, annual rotation of office, ostracism. But there were limits-
It IS hard to imagine how the education and leisure necessary for political
leadership could have been equally distributed, and no one tried. It is
equally hard to imagine devices aimed at an artificial equality in the
juristic sphere, in private relations between individuals, short of either
the abolition or the equalisation of wealth. And no one tried in practice,
though a rare Utopian writer, notably Phaleas of Chalcedon, showed a
realisation of this central issue.2-*
Nevertheless, it is an absurdity to dismiss Athenian, or any other
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN 87

Greek, judicial procedure as 'pure arbitrariness', to relegate isonomia to

the realm of empty rhetoric. Classical Greek communities would have
torn themselves apart long before Philip and Alexander brought the
curtain down on the city-state. They were not Utopian communities,
neither were they the victims of pure arbitrariness, caprice and anarchy.
Under the best conditions, they practised the principles of the rule of law
and equality before the law as well as could be expected, though always
setting the citizen above all other men in both respects. In matters of
property and contract they allowed wide, though of course not absolute,
freedom to the individual,and sought to protect that freedom against
fraud and duress. Restrictions on the individual's freedom in this broad
sphere were as likely to arise from social pressures as from the law, for
example in the preference for certain forms of income-producing wealth
against others.
To catalogue and examine the rights and disabilities through the
whole gamut of property relations would require another essay. I shall
restrict myself to one example because of two important implications,
and that is the virtually unlimited freedom of a slaveowner to manumit
his slaves. In Rome, when a citizen slaveowner did that the freedmen
automatically became Roman citizens (with exceptions that are
irrelevant in the present context). But never in Greece, so far as I know.
More broadly a Greek had his freedom severely restricted by law in any
activity that entailed the introduction of new members into the closed
circle of the citizen-body.“ That meant, in particular, tight restriction in
the field of marriage and family law. The state determined the legitimacy
of a marriage, not only by laying down the required formalities but also
by specifying the categories of men and women who could, or could not,
marry each other, and in so doing they went well beyond the incest
taboos. Pericles' law of 451 or 450 bc, prohibiting marriage between a
citizen and a non-citizen, is only the most famous instance.Violators
may not have been punished personally, but their children paid the
heavy penalty of being declared bastards, nothoi, and therefore being
excluded from the citizenship roster as well as having their inheritance
rights reduced.
Such disabilities, such limitations on the freedom of the citizen, were
accepted without a murmur. A Diogenes did not accept them, of course,
but Diogenes renders all discussion impossible. Furthermore, family law
cut across political rights and political systems, and that is the second
implication arising from my initial example of manumission. In this field
of behaviour, and it is not the only one, democracy did not necessarily
88 THE ANCIENT CITY

entail an extension of rights, greater freedom, beyond those existing in

oligarchies. On the contrary, Pericles' law of 451/0, for example, was
more restricting than any other we know, in any Greek community of
that period. Similarly, Athenian women had fewer claims to an inheri¬
tance than the women of Sparta or Crete; conversely, Athenian male
citizens had less freedom to dispose of their property with respect to
their wives, daughters and female relations.
In short, when we turn, as I now do, to the freedom of the Greek
citizen in his relations with the state, as distinct from his relations with
other individuals, we must try to rid our minds of the false unitary notion
that all rights, political and non-political, moved in tandem. I must stress
this particularly because I shall be concentrating on classical Athens, the
only polis other than the very atypical Sparta that is accessible to system¬
atic analysis, and Athens was an exceptional polis because of the quality
of its democracy and also because of its fifth-century empire.
I begin with the state and the individual in the military sphere. It has
been calculated that, during the century and a half from the end of the
Persian wars in 479 b c to the defeat by Philip of Macedon in 338, Athens
was engaged in war on an average of two out of every three years, and
never enjoyed a period of peace for as long as ten consecutive years. No
wonder that defence of the city was on the agenda of the Athenian
assembly ten times a year at a minimum. Who performed the necessary
military service and under what conditions? If we put aside such mar¬
ginal groups as archers and slingers, normally mercenaries, the Greek
ideal can be formulated in two parts: (1) the propertied sector of the
population, both citizens and non-citizens, were obligated to serve as
hoplites, paying for their equipment themselves, with the wealthiest
performing the even more expensive duties of cavalrymen; (2) the poorer
sector of the citizen-body were eligible, but normally not compelled, to
serve as rowers in the fleet, supplemented by foreigners and even slaves.
That the ideal could not be maintained in grave emergencies or in such a
protracted conflict as the Peloponnesian War is obvious and easily
documented. Sparta, for example, then had eventually to enrol helots as
hoplites, Athens to use slaves as rowers (though she normally was more
able than other states to resist this practice).2® And in the fourth century
BC the professional general and the mercenary soldier became in¬
creasingly important.
Had we the information, therefore, a full account of military and naval
service in classical Greece would reveal endless variations, according to
place, time and circumstance. Nevertheless, the reality approximated
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN 89

the ideal sufficiently, for much of the classical period, to permit us in the
present context to assume the existence of the ideal.^ And the fun¬
damental distinction between the richer and the poorer must be carried
one step further than 1 have so far taken it. While on active service,
soldiers and rowers were paid a per diem sum, the same for both when¬
ever possible except that the hoplite was expected to have a batman, and
indeed needed one because of his armour, and he was given a second,
identical allowance for his servant. In fifth-century Athens the amount
varied from a half-drachma to a drachma a day, according to the state of
the treasury and the size of the demand.The sources call the per diem
'pay' and 'rations' indiscriminately, a usage which has the implication of
a trifling sum, and which may accordingly mislead. Hoplites were
usually on active duty for periods of only days or weeks and rarely in full
force, and, it is worth repeating, they were not compensated for the
considerable cost of their equipment. Their pay was therefore in fact a
trifle. A substantial number of triremes, on the other hand, were on duty
in fifth-century Athens for seven or eight months of the year, quite apart
from the ships called out in an emergency. For those poorer citizens who
rowed regularly, their pay thus ranged from perhaps loo drachmas a
year in times of peace to over 200 in the Peloponnesian War - no longer a
trifle.^*
If we now combine the pay situation with the distinction between
compulsory military service and voluntary naval service, we are drawn
to say that contribution to the defence of the city was a duty of the richer
citizens and a privilege of the poorer. That may not be the whole truth:
the Greek polis was not the only society in history in which army service
was transformed from a duty to a privilege, a right, through powerful
ideological pressures. But the paradox is valid nonetheless. I shall restate
it brutally: the poorer Athenian citizen had the freedom to choose be¬
tween serving and not serving and to be maintained by the state if he
chose to serve, whereas the wealthier Athenian citizen had no freedom
in this sphere. I have carefully said 'Athenian', not 'Greek', because
Athenian exceptionalism is very marked here. The obligation of hoplite
service was more or less universal, irrespective of the political regime,
but the naval side of the paradox existed only in the maritime states, and
we may doubt that others were able to pay on the Athenian scale with
any regularity.
In so far as non-citizens were drawn into the same structure of military
and naval service, political rights were reduced, in this sphere, to a
minor, almost irrelevant, factor. However, that is not the important
90 THE ANCIENT CITY

approach. The decision to deploy the army and navy was a sovereign
one. In democracies the power lay with the assembly. Since Greek
democracies were direct, not representative, many of the men who, on
the day, voted for war with Sparta or for-the Sicilian expedition, were
voting to take themselves off on campaign, with the distinction between
hoplite service and naval service I have drawn certainly in their minds.
Only in an imaginary world of disembodied spirits could they have been
unaware of the personal implications, or unaffected by them.
A similar distinction was to be found in the fiscal sphere. The classical
Greeks looked upon direct taxes as tyrannical and avoided them
whenever possible.The two exceptions in Athens, the only city about
which we know enough in these matters, are most revealing. One was
the metoikion, a flat-rate head-tax paid by every non-Athenian residing in
the city for even short periods, a 'tyrannical' kind of tax which by its mere
existence marked the free non-citizen off from the citizen.^3 The other
was the eisphora, a capital levy imposed from time to time to meet special
military costs, from which the poor, roughly everyone below the hoplite
status, were exempt. The rich therefore paid for the wars as well as
fighting in them (unless they could pass the costs to subject-states).
Otherwise normal governmental income was derived from state prop¬
erty, court fees and fines, and such indirect taxes as sales taxes and
harbour dues. Again with one exception; the 'liturgies', the device by
which the state got certain things done, not by paying for them by the
treasury but by assigning to richer individuals direct responsibility both
for the costs and for the actual performance, such as the training of a
festival chorus or the command and maintenance of a trireme. The
honorific element in liturgies was a strong one, but so was the financial
burden.
I called attention at the beginning of this paper to the well-known
importance of taxation in the modern struggles for citizens' rights. In
Greece, by contrast, taxation was no issue at all in the analogous strug¬
gles (except, I believe, against tyranny once again),34 and the explanation
lies ready to hand. Whatever the grievances and the demands of citizens
with restricted rights, they did not refer to a tax burden. In all the vast
catalogue of complaints which Aristophanes was able to compile, much
helped by his fertile imagination, not once does a peasant or townsman
grumble about his taxes. But we do find in Aristophanes, notably in the
Wasps, the soak-the-rich charge I mentioned earlier. And it is a fact that
only in staseis designed to overthrow democracy, not in those aimed to
introduce or advance it, did fiscal burdens feature prominently, those
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN
91

borne by the rich. Thucydides says so explicitly (8.48, 63.4) about the
oligarchic coup of 411 bc. In the fifth book of the Politics (i304b20-05a7)
Aristotle gives five instances in which oligarchic revolts were provoked
by the 'wantonness' of the 'demagogues', in Cos, Rhodes, Heraclea,
Megara and Cyme. Characteristically there are no dates and little con¬
crete information, but it is certain from his concluding sentences that
financial charges, particularly liturgies, were an essential element in the
conflicts.
For Athens there is the oft-quoted remark of Pseudo-Xenophon {Con¬
stitution of Athens 1.13): the demos 'demand payment for singing, run¬
ning, dancing and sailing on ships in order that they may get the money
and the rich become poorer'. That comes from a skilfully contrived
political pamphlet, with an unconcealed oligarchic bias. The expressed
motive, that the rich should become poorer, need not detain us: the
egalitarianism runs counter to all the contemporary evidence, such as
the openness with which wealthy Athenians, from Alcibiades to the
minor figures in the forensic orations, paraded their wealth in the
assembly and the courts as points in their favour because they employed
that wealth in the public interest.^ges of wealth, not its possession,
were the crux of the matter. However, it does not follow that the
remainder of the quotation is as easily dismissible. Pay for a wide range
of public activity had become the order of the day in Athens, varying
from the per diem of the jurors to the naval payments which sometimes
amounted to annual salaries, on to the monetary rewards for Games
victors and the pensions of war-orphans. Non-citizens were sometimes
admitted, when there was no alternative, but the fundamental divide is
symbolised by a decree of 402 bc, which voted maintenance for the
orphans of men killed in the fighting that overthrew the Thirty Tyrants,
and explicitly restricted the benefit to the legitimate sons of citizens.^
The number of boys involved, and therefore the sums of money, were
tiny; that is precisely why the decree is so revealing.
I am not for a moment suggesting that a notable proportion of the
citizen-body were idlers living at public expense. Most Athenians, like
most Greeks, had a low standard of living and worked for it, none harder
than the rowers in the fleet, the largest body of men receiving pay from
the state. My point is, rather, one which is implicit in the formal language
of government - 'the Athenians', not 'Athens', passed laws, levied
taxes, declared war and so on - that in practice the Greek concept of
rights was closer in spirit to the one revealed by the United Nations
Declaration than to the libertarian position of John Stuart Mill. A citizen
92 THE ANCIENT CITY

had positive claims on the state, not merely the right not to be interfered
with in the private sphere. Such claims, if pressed, quickly produced
financial crises: I need not review the history of fourth-century Athens
on this score, with its chronic difficulties in financing the navy or with
the characteristic difficulties of Demosthenes in getting public monies
transferred to the war fund from the theoric fund, which provided free
admissions to the theatre. Elsewhere stasis was endemic, but not in
Athens, though no city carried the claims of its citizens to public pay and
assistance so far. The key to this Athenian exceptionalism, 1 have already
suggested, will be found in the empire, discussed in another chapter.
Except in moments of desperation when they called for the cancel¬
lation of debts and redistribution of the land, Greek citizens failed to
press their claims as far as one might imagine they could and would.
Despite Pseudo-Xenophon and his co-believers, not even the Athenian
demos ever mounted an assault on the fortunes or the honours of the
Athenian wealthy. Nor, to look at the matter from another angle, did the
Greek state exercise its powers in many spheres of behaviour. It did not
restrict interest rates, as the Romans did, or (save for Sparta) introduce
compulsory education. Neither did it build highways: that is to say, the
limits of observable governmental intervention in the realm of rights and
duties were set by the structure and value-system of the society, not by
transcendental doctrines, just as in the normally neutral realm of techno¬
logical activities. There were no inalienable rights guaranteed by a higher
authority. There were no natural rights. The secular discussion ofphysis
and nomos, nature and convention, initiated by the Sophists and con¬
tinued by philosophers of different schools, ultimately found its way
into political rhetoric (among the Romans rather than among the
Greeks), but it is difficult to discover any significant impact on the
practical behaviour of citizens and governments.
That is not to say that the Greeks were determined immoralists. In
matters of the family and sexual relations, most notably, there was a
common belief that some practices and relations were somehow natural
and universal (at least among civilised people), others unnatural, though
even here there was a wide latitude for legislation and change. What was
wholly lacking was a conception of precisely those inalienable rights
which have been the foundation of the modern libertarian doctrine:
freedom of speech, of religion and so on. In the family field, the
Athenian state could narrow the range of legitimate marriage; it would
have found it impossible to abolish the incest taboos. But it could make
inroads into freedom of speech and thought, and did so when it chose.
 FREEDOM OF THE GREEK CITIZEN 93

The operative phrase is 'when it chose'. Provided the procedures

adopted were themselves lawful, there were no limits to the powers of
the polis, other than self-imposed (and therefore changeable) limits,
outside the sphere in which deep-rooted and ancient taboos remained
powerful. In 411 bc, after all, the Athenian assembly voted to abolish
democracy.
What, then, were the sources of rights and duties, of freedom, and
what were the sanctions? Where, particularly, were the gods in this
whole story? The pervasiveness of rituals, of sacrifices, oaths and oracles
is too familiar to require retelling. So is the strength of the public outcry
against a blasphemous outrage, or the ubiquity of the curse, public and
private. However, it is also true that Greek law had undergone a process
of thorough de-sacralisation by the classical period.Although the re¬
ligious externals were scrupulously retained, there is silence about di¬
vine command, divine favour or divine sanction in the substantive
provisions. Athena received gifts and her share of the tribute, she was
even given confiscated counterfeit coins carrying her portrait (as was
Poseidon in Corinth),but she was not invoked in the massive legis¬
lative reform of the end of the fifth century. Zeus Xenios protected
strangers; he was never invoked to increase the rights of metics: even the
pious Xenophon restricted himself to purely utilitarian arguments in the
Poroi when he called for various benefits, within narrow limits, designed
to attract more metics to Athens. In other historical periods, religion has
sometimes been a positive ideology on behalf of rights and freedom, in
the peasant revolts at the end of the Middle Ages, for example, or in the
Calvinist support against autocracy in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Not in Greece, however.
I have oversimplified, of course, under the compulsion of brevity, and
I have concentrated almost entirely on the state and its governmental
machinery, leaving aside the important role of informal social pressures,
all the stronger because the Greek poleis were small, face-to-face commu¬
nities, in which men lived out their lives in public, so to speak. Granted
the need for qualification that a more extended and nuanced treatment
would require, the conclusion seems to me to be warranted, neverthe¬
less, that the classical Greek polis had evolved an institutional system
which, of itself, was capable of formulating, sanctioning, and when
necessary changing the intricate network of rights and duties that are
subsumed under the label 'freedom'. The weaknesses which the ancient
theorists pursued relentlessly were the strengths of the system seen
from within. The greatest flaw, from our standpoint, the underpinning
94 THE ANCIENT CITY

of the polls by a majority with restricted rights or with no rights at all, was
not one of the weaknesses condemned by the theorists. On the contrary,
they held the democratic polls to be insufficiently hierarchical, the exten¬
sion of Isonomla (in both its senses) to peasants, shopkeepers and crafts¬
men to be its greatest fault.
Historians have an understandable affinity with their own prede¬
cessors, the intellectuals of antiquity, and tend to see ancient realities
through their eyes, which means as refracted through their values.
There is another way of looking at the Greek realities. It was no one less a
man than Pseudo-Xenophon who concluded (3.1): 'As for the Athenian
system of government, I do not like it. However, since they decided to
become a democracy, it seems to me that they are preserving the
democracy well.'