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Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism. Perry Anderson
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isbn 9781781684696
Автор произведения Perry Anderson
Серия World History Series
Издательство Ingram
But the limits of Athenian external power were soon reached. It probably stimulated trade and manufactures in the Aegean, where use of Attic coinage was extended by decree and piracy was suppressed, although the major profits from commercial growth accrued to the metic community in Athens itself. The imperial system also enjoyed the sympathy of the poorer classes of the allied cities, because Athenian tutelage generally meant the installation of democratic regimes locally, congruent with those of the imperial city itself, while the financial burden of tribute fell on the upper classes.25 But it was incapable of achieving an institutional inclusion of these allies into a unified political system. Athenian citizenship was so wide at home that it was impracticable ever to extend it abroad to non-Athenians, for to do so would have functionally contradicted the direct residential democracy of the mass Assembly, only feasible within a very small geographical compass. Thus, despite the popular overtones of Athenian rule, the ‘democratic’ domestic foundation of Periclean imperialism necessarily generated ‘dictatorial’ exploitation of its Ionian allies, who inevitably tended to be thrust rapaciously downwards into colonial servitude: there was no basis for equality or federation, such as a more oligarchic constitution might have permitted. At the same time, however, the democratic nature of the Athenian polis – whose principle was direct participation, not representation – precluded the creation of a bureaucratic machinery that could have held down an extended territorial empire by administrative coercion. There was scarcely any separate or professional State apparatus in the city, whose political structure was essentially defined by its rejection of specialized bodies of officials – civilian or military apart from the ordinary citizenry: Athenian democracy signified, precisely, the refusal of any such division between ‘state’ and ‘society’.26 There was thus no basis for an imperial bureaucracy either. Athenian expansionism consequently broke down relatively soon, both because of the contradictions of its own structure, and because of the resistance, thereby facilitated to it, from the more oligarchic cities of mainland Greece, led by Sparta. The Spartan League possessed the converse advantages of Athenian liabilities: a confederation of oligarchies, whose strength was based squarely on hoplite proprietors rather than an admixture with demotic sailors, and whose unity did not therefore involve either monetary tribute or a military monopoly by the hegemon city of Sparta itself, whose power was therefore always intrinsically less of a threat to the other Greek cities than that of Athens. The lack of any substantial hinterland rendered Athenian military power – both in recruitment and resources – too thin to resist a coalition of terrestrial rivals.27 The Peloponnesian War joined the attack of its peers to the revolt of its subjects, whose propertied classes rallied to the mainland oligarchies once it had started. Even so, however, Persian gold was necessary to finance a Spartan fleet capable of ending Athenian mastery of the sea, before the Athenian Empire was finally broken on land by Lysander. Thereafter there was no chance of the Hellenic cities generating a unified imperial state from within their midst, despite their relatively rapid economic recovery from the effects of the long Peloponnesian War: the very parity and multiplicity of urban centres in Greece neutralized them collectively for external expansion. The Greek cities of the 4th century sank into exhaustion, as the classical polis experienced increasing difficulties of finance and conscription, symptoms of impending anachronism.
1. A. Andrewes, Greek Society, London 1967, pp. 76–82.
2. See the arguments in William McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago 1963, pp. 201, 273.
3. W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, London 1966, pp. 55, 150–6, who emphasizes the new economic growth in the countryside; A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, London 1956, pp. 80–1, who stresses the social depression of the small farmer class.
4. It is uncertain whether the poor peasantry in Attica were tenants or owners of their farms before Solon’s reforms. Andrewes argues that they may have been the former (Greek Society, pp. 106–7), but subsequent generations had no memory of an actual redistribution of land by Solon, so this seems improbable.
5. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks, London 1963, p. 33, regards Peisistratus’s policies as more important for the economic independence of the Attic peasantry than Solon’s reforms.
6. The reality of an original land division, or even a later inalienability of the kleroi, has been doubted: for example, see A. H. M. Jones, Sparta, Oxford 1967, pp. 40–3. Andrewes, although cautious, accords more credit to Greek beliefs: Greek Society, pp. 94–5.
7. The size of the kleroi which underpinned Spartan social solidarity has been much debated, with estimates varying from 20 to 90 acres of arable: see P. Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems, Amsterdam-Prague 1971, pp. 51–2.
8. For the structure of the constitution, see Jones, Sparta, pp. 13–43.
9. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, pp. 75–6.
10. Andrewes, Greek Society, p. 133. Compare V. Ehrenburg, The Greek State, London 1969, p. 96: ‘Without metics or slaves, the polis could hardly have existed at all’.
11. Andrewes, Greek Society, p. 135.
12. Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems, pp. 43–4. Helots also possessed their own families and were on occasion used for military duties.
13. Victor Ehrenburg, The Greek State, p. 97.
14. Finley, The Ancient Greeks, p. 36.
15. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, p. 46.
16. M. I. Finley, Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens 500–200 B.C., New Brunswick, pp. 58–9.
17. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9.
18. A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy, Oxford 1957, pp. 79–91.
19. Jones, Athenian Democracy, pp. 41–72, documents this divergence, but fails to see its implications for the structure of Athenian civilization as a whole, contenting himself with defending the democracy of the polis against the thinkers of the city.
20. Politics, III, iv, 2, cited above.
21. Tradition held that it was the sailors victory at Salamis that had rendered the demands of the thetes for political rights irresistible, much as the soldiers’ campaigns against Messenia had once probably gained the Spartan hoplites their franchise.
22. M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, London 1973, pp. 45, 48–9; see also his remarks in The Ancient Economy, pp. 96, 573.
23. R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire, Oxford 1972, pp. 152, 258–60.
24. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire, pp. 171–4, 205–7, 215–16, 220–33.
25. This sympathy is convincingly demonstrated by G. E. M. De Ste Croix, ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, Historia, Bd. III, 1954–5, pp. 1–41. There were some oligarchic allies in the Delian League – Mytilene, Chios or Samos – and Athens did not intervene systematically in its constituent cities; but local conflicts were typically used as opportunities for the forcible establishment of popular systems.
26. For Ehrenburg, this was its great weakness. The identity of State and Society was necessarily a contradiction, because the state had to be single while society always remained plural, because divided into classes. Hence either the State could reproduce these social divisions (oligarchy) or society could absorb the state (democracy): neither solution respected an institutional distinction that was for him unalterable, and hence both bore the seed of destruction within them: The Greek State, p. 89. It was, of course, for Marx and Engels just in this structural refusal that the greatness of Athenian democracy lay.
27. In general, the lines of division between ‘oligarchy’ and ‘democracy’ correlated fairly closely with maritime vs. mainland orientations in classical Greece; the same seaward factors which obtained in Athens were present in its Ionian zone of influence, while most of Sparta’s allies in the Peloponnese and Boeotia were more narrowly rooted in the soil. The main exception, of course, was Corinth, the traditional commercial rival of Athens.