by Will Durant
The army is identical with the electorate; every citizen must serve, and is subject, until the age of sixty, to conscription in any war. But Athenian life is not militarized; after a period of youthful training there is little of martial drill, no strutting of uniforms, no interference of soldiery with the civilian population. In active service the army consists of light-armed infantry, chiefly the poorer citizens, carrying slings or spears; the heavy-armed infantry, or hoplites, those prosperous citizens who can afford armor, shield, and javelin; and the cavalry of rich men, clad in armor and helmet, and equipped with lance and sword. The Greeks excel the Asiatics in military discipline, and perhaps owe their achievements to a striking combination of loyal obedience on the battlefield with vigorous independence in civil affairs. Nevertheless there is no science of war among them, no definite principles of tactics on strategy, before Epaminondas and Philip. Cities are usually walled, and defense is—among the Greeks as among ourselves—more effective than offense; otherwise man might have no civilization to record. Siege armies bring up great beams suspended by chains, and, drawing the beams back, drive them forward against the wall; this is as far as siege machinery develops before Archimedes. As for the navy, it is kept up by choosing, each year, four hundred trierarchs, rich men whose privilege it is to recruit a crew, equip a trireme with materials supplied by the state, pay for its building and launching, and keep it in repair; in this way Athens supports in peacetime a fleet of some sixty ships.55
The maintenance of the army and the navy constitutes the chief expenditure of the state. Revenues come from traffic tolls, harbor dues, a two per cent tariff on imports and exports, a twelve-drachma annual poll tax on metics, a half-drachma tax on freedmen and slaves, a tax on prostitutes, a sales tax, licenses, fines, confiscations, and the imperial tribute. The tax on farm produce, which financed Athens under Peisistratus, is abandoned by the democracy as derogatory to the dignity of agriculture. Most taxes are farmed out to publicans, who collect them for the state and pocket a share as their profit. Considerable income is derived from state ownership of mineral resources. In emergencies the city resorts to a capital levy, the rate rising with the amount of property owned; by this method, for example, the Athenians in 428 raise two hundred talents ($1,200,000) for the siege of Mytilene. Rich men are also invited to undertake certain leiturgiai, i.e., public services, such as equipping embassies, fitting out ships for the fleet, or paying for plays, musical contests, and games. These “liturgies” are voluntarily undertaken by some of the wealthy, and are forced by public opinion upon others. To add to the discomfort of the well to do, any citizen assigned to a liturgy may compel any other to take it from him, or exchange fortunes with him, if he can prove the other to be richer than himself. As the democratic faction grows in power it finds ever more numerous occasions and reasons for using this device; and in return the financiers, merchants, manufacturers, and landed proprietors of Attica study the arts of concealment and obstruction, and meditate revolution.
Excluding such gifts and levies, the total internal revenue of Athens in the time of Pericles amounts to some four hundred talents ($2,400,000) a year; to which is added six hundred talents of contributions from subjects and allies. This income is spent without any budget, or advance estimate and allocation of funds. Under Pericles’ thrifty management, and despite his unprecedented expenditures, the treasury shows a growing surplus, which in 440 stands at 9700 talents ($58,200,000); a pretty sum for any city in any age, and quite extraordinary in Greece, where few states—in the Peloponnesus none—have any surplus at all.56 In cities that have such a reserve it is deposited, usually, in the temple of the city’s god—at Athens, after 434, in the Parthenon. The state claims the right to use not only this surplus, but, as well, the gold in the statues which it raises to its god; in the case of Pheidias’ Athene Parthenos this amounts to forty talents ($240,000), and is so affixed as to be removable.57 In the temple the city keeps also its “theoric fund,” from which it makes the payments annually due the citizens for attendance at the sacred plays and games.
Such is Athenian democracy—the narrowest and fullest in history: narrowest in the number of those who share its privileges, fullest in the directness and equality with which all the citizens control legislation, and administer public affairs. The faults of the system will appear vividly as its history unfolds; indeed, they are already noised about in Aristophanes. The irresponsibility of an Assembly that may without check of precedent or revision vote its momentary passion on one day, and on the next day its passionate regret, punishing then not itself but those who have misled it; the limitation of legislative authority to those who can attend the ekklesia; the encouragement of demagogues and the wasteful ostracism of able men; the filling of offices by lot and rotation, changing the personnel yearly and creating a chaos of government; the disorderliness of faction perpetually disturbing the guidance and administration of the state—these are vital defects, for which Athens will pay the full penalty to Sparta, Philip, Alexander, and Rome.
But every government is imperfect, irksome, and mortal; we have no reason to believe that monarchy or aristocracy would govern Athens better, or longer preserve it; and perhaps only this chaotic democracy can release the energy that will lift Athens to one of the peaks of history. Never before or since has political life, within the circle of citizenship, been so intense or so creative. This corrupt and incompetent democracy is at least a school: the voter in the Assembly listens to the cleverest men in Athens, the juror in the courts has his wits sharpened by the taking and sifting of evidence, the holder of office is molded by executive responsibility and experience into a deeper maturity of understanding and judgment; “the city,” says Simonides, “is the teacher of the man.”58 For these reasons, it may be, the Athenians can appreciate, and thereby call into existence, Aeschylus and Euripides, Socrates and Plato; the audience at the theater has been formed in the Assembly and the courts, and is ready to receive the best. This aristocratic democracy is no laissez-faire state, no mere watchman of property and order; it finances the Greek drama, and builds the Parthenon; it makes itself responsible for the welfare and development of its people, and opens up to them the opportunity ou monon tou zen, alla tou eu zen—“not only to live, but to live well.” History can afford to forgive it all its sins.
CHAPTER XII
Work and Wealth in Athens
I. LAND AND FOOD
AT the base of this democracy and this culture lies the production and distribution of wealth. Some men can govern states, seek truth, make music, carve statues, paint pictures, write books, teach children, or serve the gods because others toil to grow food, weave clothing, build dwellings, mine the earth, make useful things, transport goods, exchange them, or finance their production or their movement. Everywhere this is the foundation.
Supporting all society is the peasant, the poorest and most necessary of men. In Attica he has at least the franchise; only citizens are permitted to own land, and nearly all peasants own the soil that they till. Clan control of the land has disappeared, and private ownership is solidly established. As in modern France and America, this great class of small proprietors is a steadying conservative force in a democracy where the propertyless city dwellers are always driving toward reform. The ancient war between the country and the city—between those who want high returns for agriculture and low prices for manufactured goods, and those who want low prices for food and high wages or profits in industry—is especially conscious and lively in Attica. Whereas industry and trade are accounted plebeian and degrading by the Athenian citizen, the pursuits of husbandry are honored as the groundwork of national economy, personal character, and military power; and the freemen of the countryside tend to look down upon the denizens of the city as either weakling parasites or degraded slaves.1
The soil is poor: of 630,000 acres in Attica a third is unsuitable for cultivation, and the rest is impoverished by deforestation, meager rainfall, and rapid erosion by winter floods. The pe
asants of Attica shirk no toil—for themselves or their handful of slaves—to remedy this dry humor of the gods; they gather the surplus flow of headwaters into reservoirs, dike the channels of the streams to control the floods, reclaim the precious humus of the swamps, build thousands of irrigation canals to bring to their thirsty fields the trickle of the rivulets, patiently transplant vegetables to improve their size and quality, and let the land lie fallow in alternate years to regain its strength. They alkalinize the soil with salts like carbonate of lime, and fertilize it with potassium nitrate, ashes, and human waste;2 the gardens and groves about Athens are enriched with the sewage of the city, brought by a main sewer to a reservoir outside the Dipylon, and led thence by bricklined canals into the valley of the Cephisus River.3 Different soils are mixed to their mutual benefit, and green crops like beans in flower are plowed in to nourish the earth. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and planting are crowded into the brief days of the fall; the grain harvest comes at the end of May, and the rainless summer is the season of preparation and rest. With all this care Attica produces only 675,000 bushels of grain yearly—hardly enough to supply a quarter of its population. Without imported food Periclean Athens would starve; hence the urge to imperialism, and the necessity for a powerful fleet.
The countryside tries to atone for its parsimonious grain by generous harvests of olives and grapes. Hillsides are terraced and watered, and asses are encouraged to make the vine more fruitful by gnawing off the twigs.4 Olive trees cover many a landscape in Periclean Greece, but it is Peisistratus and Solon who deserve the credit for introducing them. The olive tree takes sixteen years to come to fruit, forty years to reach perfection; without the subsidies of Peisistratus it might never have grown on Attic soil; and the devastation of the olive orchards in the Peloponnesian War will play a part in the decline of Athens. To the Greek the olive has many uses: one pressing gives oil for eating, a second, oil for anointing, a third, oil for illumination; and the remainder is used as fuel.5 It becomes Attica’s richest crop, so valuable that the state assumes a monopoly of its export, and pays with it and wine for the grain that it must import.
It forbids altogether the export of figs, for these are a main source of health and energy in Greece. The fig tree grows well even in arid soil; its spreading roots gather whatever moisture the earth will yield, and its stinted foliage offers scant surface for evaporation. Furthermore, the husbandman learns from the East the secret of caprification: he hangs branches of the wild male goat fig (caprificus) among the boughs of the female cultivated tree, and relies upon gall wasps to carry the fertilizing pollen of the male into the fruit of the female, which then bears richer and sweeter figs.
These products of the soil—cereals, olive oil, figs, grapes, and wine—are the staples of diet in Attica. Cattle rearing is negligible as a source of food; horses are bred for racing, sheep for wool, goats for milk, asses, mules, cows, and oxen for transport, but chiefly pigs for food; and bees are kept as providers of honey for a sugarless world. Meat is a luxury; the poor have it only on feast days; the heroic banquets of Homeric days have disappeared. Fish is both a commonplace and a delicacy; the poor man buys it salted and dried; the rich man celebrates with fresh shark meat and eels.6 Cereals take the form of porridge, flat loaves, or cakes, often mixed with honey. Bread and cake are seldom baked at home, but are bought from women peddlers or in market stalls. Eggs are added, and vegetables—particularly beans, peas, cabbage, lentils, lettuce, onions, and garlic. Fruits are few; oranges and lemons are unknown. Nuts are common, and condiments abound. Salt is collected in salt pans from the sea, and is traded in the interior for slaves; a cheap slave is called a “salting,” and a good one is “worth his salt.” Nearly everything is cooked and dressed with olive oil, which makes an excellent substitute for petroleum. Butter is hard to keep in Mediterranean lands, and olive oil takes its place. Honey, sweetmeats, and cheese provide dessert; cheesecakes are so fancied that many classic treatises are devoted to their esoteric art.7 Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants. Snow and ice are kept in the ground to cool wine in the hot months.8 Beer is known but scorned in Periclean days. All in all, the Greek is a moderate eater, and contents himself with two meals daily. “Yet there are many,” says Hippocrates, “who, if accustomed to it, can easily bear three full meals a day.”9
II. INDUSTRY
Out of the earth come minerals and fuels as well as food. Lighting is provided by graceful lamps or torches—burning refined olive oil, or resin—or by candles. Heat is derived from dry wood or charcoal, burning in portable braziers. The cutting of trees for fuel and building denudes the woods and hills near the towns; already in the fifth century timber for houses, furniture, and ships is imported. There is no coal.
Greek mining is not for fuels but for minerals. The soil of Attica is rich in marble, iron, zinc, silver, and lead. The mines at Laurium, near the southern tip of the peninsula, are in the phrase of Aeschylus “a fountain running silver”10 for Athens; they are a main support of the government, which retains all subsoil rights, and leases the mines to private operators for a talent ($6000) fee and one twenty-fourth of the product yearly.11 In 483 a prospector discovers the first really profitable veins at Laurium, and a silver rush takes place to the region of the mines. Only citizens are allowed to lease the properties, and only slaves perform the work. The pious Nicias, whose superstition will help to ruin Athens, makes $170 a day by leasing a thousand slaves to the mine operators at a rental of one obol (17 cents) each per day; many an Athenian fortune is made in this way, or by lending money to the enterprise. The slaves in the mine number some twenty thousand, and include the superintendents and engineers. They work in ten-hour shifts, and the operations continue without interruption, night and day. If the slave rests he feels the foreman’s lash; if he tries to escape he is attached to his work by iron shackles; if he runs away and is captured his forehead is branded with a hot iron.12 The galleries are but three feet high and two feet wide; the slaves, with pick or chisel and hammer, work on their knees, their stomachs, or their backs.13 The broken ore is carried out in baskets or bags handed from man to man, for the galleries are too narrow to let two men pass each other conveniently. The profits are enormous: in 483 the share received by the government is a hundred talents ($600,000)—a windfall that builds a fleet for Athens and saves Greece at Salamis. Even for others than the slaves there is evil in this as well as good; the Athenian treasury becomes dependent upon the mines, and when, in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans capture Laurium the whole economy of Athens is upset. The exhaustion of the veins in the fourth century co-operates with many other factors in Athenian decay. For Attica has no other precious metal in her soil.
Metallurgy advances with mining. The ore at Laurium is crushed in huge mortars with a heavy iron pestle worked by slave power; then it goes to mills where it is ground between revolving stones of hard trachyte; then it is sized by screening; the material that passes through the screen is sent to an ore washer, where jets of water are discharged from cisterns upon inclined rectangular tables of stone covered with a smooth thin coat of hard cement; the current is turned at sharp angles, where pockets snare the metal particles. The collected metal is thrown into small smelting furnaces equipped with blowers to raise the heat; at the bottom of each furnace are openings through which the molten metal is drawn. Lead is separated from the silver by heating the molten metal on cupels of porous material and exposing it to the air; by this simple process the lead is converted into litharge, and the silver is freed. The processes of smelting and refining are competently performed, for the silver coins of Athens are ninety-eight per cent pure. Laurium pays the price of the wealth it produces, as mining always pays the price for metal industry; plants and men wither and die from the furnace fumes, and the vicinity of the works becomes a scene of dusty desolation.14
Other industries are not so toilsome. Attica has many of them now, small
in scale but remarkably specialized. It quarries marble and other stones, it makes a thousand shapes of pottery, it dresses hides in great tanneries like those owned by Cleon, rival of Pericles, and Anytus, accuser of Socrates; it has wagon-makers, shipbuilders, saddlers, harness makers, shoe manufacturers; there are saddlers who make only bridles, and shoemakers who make only men’s or women’s shoes.15 In the building trades are carpenters, molders, stonecutters, metalworkers, painters, veneerers. There are blacksmiths, swordmakers, shieldmakers, lampmakers, lyre tuners, millers, bakers, sausage men, fishmongers—everything necessary to an economic life busy and varied, but not mechanized or monotonous. Common textiles are still for the most part produced in the home; there the women weave and mend the ordinary clothing and bedding of the family, some carding the wool, some at the spinning wheel, some at the loom, some bent over an embroidery frame. Special fabrics come from workshops, or from abroad—fine linens from Egypt, Amorgos, and Tarentum, dyed woolens from Syracuse, blankets from Corinth, carpets from the Near East and Carthage, colorful coverlets from Cyprus; and the women of Cos, late in the fourth century, learn the art of unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm and weaving the filaments into silk.16 In some homes the women become so highly skilled in textile arts that they produce more than their families can use; they sell the surplus at first to consumers, then to middlemen; they employ helpers, freedmen or slaves; and in this way a domestic industry develops as a step to a factory system.