Re: Geoffrey De Ste. Croix, 89, Marxist Historian of Ancient World Dies(NY Times Obit)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One proposal Geoffrey De Ste. Croix made in his work on class
struggle is of some interest. He argued that in ancient Athens, the
women of the ruling class did *not* belong to that class but formed
a separate exploited class. I believe the argument has not been
very widely accepted, but it does serve to underline the extreme
male supremacy of Athenian democracy. His argument that slave
labor produced the surplus in Athens has been challenged by
a number of scholars (convincingly, it seems to me), but his
argument on the position of women in Athens would not be
incompatible with such accounts of Athens as those provided
by Wood and the scholars she draws from.

Right or wrong,  *Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World*
is a beautiful and impassioned  history of the ancient world. It is
also a history of Rome because it follows the Greek part of the
Roman Empire to its end, and thus he needed to deal with Rome in
general. The frontispiece, incidentally, is a reproduction of a
striking Van Gogh painting, The Potato Eaters -- a peasant
family at supper.

Carrol