Re: query

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Devine, James" wrote:
>

> The US has a rich person's democracy, while for awhile Athens had a populist slave-owners' democracy.

Much recent scholarship has argued (1) that the great mass of Athenians
did _not_ own slaves (2) slaves were used primarily for household duties
rather than for basic production. They were almost certainly not used
much for agricultural production, since land in Attica was split up into
small parcels. Even the great landowners did not possess large
continguous tracts of land but scattered parcels. It would not have been
possible to make effective use of slave labor under those conditions.

Solon's reforms, followed by the democratic revolution, had completely
freed the peasantry of Athens from any obligations for service to the
aristocracy. To appreciate what this meant, one must realize that almost
nothing but bulk goods were for sale, and of course domestic technology
was limited. Hence it would have been impossible for the rich to profit
from their riches without a large domestic labor force for cooking,
laundry, tailoring, cleaning, weaving, spinning, grinding grain, and so
on. And the freeing of the peasantry had eliminated what in most peasant
societies is the main (or only) source for such labor. Hence the huge
growth in slavery in the 5th century was probably mostly to remedy this
lack. So slavery was essential to Athenian democracy but in an indirect
way, by making that democracy minimally acceptable to the aristocracy.

It was a peasant, not a slave-owners', democracy. This does not mean
that many peasants actually attended the meetings of the Assembly in
Athens: that was probably dominated by the rich. But the _demes_ were
completely self-governing, and there the peasantry would have been
dominant.

I believe the main use to which imperial loot was put was to relieve the
rich of taxation -- which also moderated their motives for resistance.
Nevertheless, the rule of the Thirty Tyrants (who included a bunch of
Socrates' close buddies and patrons) was about as bloody as such rules
come.

Carrol

> Jim Devine