Early Greece

by Oswyn Murray

  The decline of the city of Athens coincided with a resurgence of the countryside. Until about 750 the city had been the focus of wealth and population; it is here that the rich Geometric burials of the aristocracy have been found, while much of the countryside was uninhabited. But from about 740 many of the abandoned Mycenean sites in Attica were settled again, and rich burials begin to occur in the countryside. The aristocracy of Athens consisted of a group of families unconnected by descent, known merely as the Eupatridai, ‘the men of good birth’: despite this somewhat artificial title, they were an exclusive group who reserved for themselves the magistracies and membership of the council of the Areopagus (the ‘hill of Ares’ where it met). Even later many of the families had territorial bases in particular areas of Attica, whence they could raise supporters in political and civil war; their power was not finally broken until the end of the sixth century by the reforms of Kleisthenes (p. 274). Whether or not they had always possessed these country domains, it was from the mid eighth century that they consolidated them.

  This movement coincided with the great expansion of population in Attica mentioned before (p. 64): between 800 and 700 the number of datable graves increases by a factor of six, and even within the central areas of the city the number of wells found shows a threefold Athens was fortunate In possessing a large territory, and was therefore able to expand at home during the colonizing period. The result was that during the seventh century Athenian society became insulated, conservative and agrarian; yet the city itself remained large, and (as Solon describes it: p. 140) economically advanced in its differentiation into specialized trades and activities, and its attitude to wealth. This radical dichotomy between the city and the resurgent countryside with its aristocratic base in the Solonian reform.

  Another is the late coming of hoplite tactics: Athenian military enterprises did not begin until the late seventh century. The earliest evidence is Alkaios’ war over the Athenian colony at Sigeum on the Black Sea route about 610 (p. 156); in the period 595–586 Athenian troops took part in the first Sacred War for the control of Delphi, alongside such hardened warriors as Kleisthenes of Sicyon and the Thessalians (p. 243). Probably between these two events Solon himself had entered politics, as the warrior poet exhorting the troops fighting Megara for control of the island of Salamis (Frags. 1–3).

  This episode shows Solon’s debt to Tyrtaios and to Sparta; here he found the model for his use of poetry to gain immediate political ends, and the inspiration for much of his political thought. But there were other influences too, as the history of the ideal of eunomia (good order) shows. Later this term came to designate the Spartan system, and had probably done so from the start; although no extant fragment of Tyrtaios contains the word, commentators referred to ‘Tyrtaios’ poem called Eunomia’ (above p. 167), and Alkman apparently plays on its resonance for contemporary Spartans in altering Hesiod’s serious genealogy into three aristocratic ladies, Tychē (good fortune), Eunomia and Peitho (persuasion), daughters of Promatheia (foresight) (Frag. 64). In describing his version of eunomia, Solon looks beyond the Spartan model to Hesiod’s original image of social relations, where the daughters of Zeus and Themis (custom) are the Horai (norms), Eunomiē, Dikē (justice) and blessed Eirēnē (peace) (above p. 62). And it is Hesiod’s great vision of the two cities of justice and violence (hybris) (Works and Days 225–47) which Solon recalls in his lines on the blessings of eunomiē and the consequences of violence or bad government (dusnomiē):

  Eunomiē makes all things well ordered and fitted

  and often puts chains on the unjust;

  she smooths the rough, puts an end to excess, blinds insolence,

  withers the flowers of unrighteousness,

  straightens crooked judgements and softens deeds of arrogance,

  puts an end to works of faction

  and to the anger of painful strife; under her

  all men’s actions are fitting and wise.

  (Fragment 4.32–9 = 3D)

  There are two developments in this new formulation. Justice was notably absent from Tyrtaios: his social virtue was good order in the sense of discipline; Solon returned to the conception of Hesiod in which good order in society was founded on social justice. But he went beyond Hesiod in one respect. For Hesiod it was still the gods who guaranteed the social order; the vision of the city of justice is described in terms of the absence of the signs of divine vengeance, war, plague and famine, and the presence of natural fertility in land, flocks and women. For Solon the benefits and the sanctions are human: the gods and nature are absent, for it is the civil society which prospers or suffers. Solon’s approach to the problems of politics was rational and practical.

  Man controls his destiny; the eunomia ‘fragment’ (it may in fact be a complete poem) begins:

  Our city will never perish by the decree of Zeus

  or the will of the blessed immortal gods;

  for the great-hearted guardian of a mighty father,

  Pallas Athene, stretches her hands over us.

  But the citizens themselves in their wildness wish

  to destroy this great city, trusting in wealth.

  The leaders of the people have an evil mind, they are ripe

  to suffer many griefs for their great arrogance;

  for they know not how to restrain their greed,

  nor to conduct decently their present joys of feasting in peace.

  (Fragment 4.1–10)

  The final scornful metaphor is significantly from the aristocratic world of the feast of honour. The poem goes on to blame the wealthy for the evils which afflict the city and the present rule of dusnomiē:

  So does the public evil come home to each,

  and the courtyard gates can no longer keep it out;

  it leaps over the high wall, and seeks him out

  though a man flees to the innermost depths of his house.

  (lines 26–9)

  This insistence on the greed and pride of the wealthy recurred throughout his poems; Aristotle gives a number of quotations, and concludes ‘in general he is continually attributing the cause of the conflict to the wealthy’ (Constitution of the Athenians 5). Such an emphasis reflects Solon’s belief in his more theoretical poems that, although man’s desire for wealth is natural, there are two types of wealth, that rightfully gained and that gained through abuse of power (compare Frag. 13, p. 140). Solon clearly set himself up before his reforms as the spokesman of the oppressed against the aristocracy; and he was expected to be considerably more radical than in fact he was. His later poetry is full of defence of himself against those who had hoped that he would go further, and establish himself as a tyrant or distribute the land equally (above p. 144). Before the reforms he had stood forward as a radical, but afterwards he preferred to present himself as an embattled moderate, a wolf at bay amid a pack of hounds:

  I stood between them like a marker-stone

  in boundary land.

  (Fragment 37.9–10 = 25D)

  The social reforms of Solon were known as the seisachtheia, ‘the shaking off of burdens’, a unique word which must derive from Solon himself, although it is not attested in the fragments. He describes the reforms in general terms afterwards:

  Did I stop before I gained

  the objects for which I brought the people together?

  May the supreme mother of the Olympian gods

  best bear witness in the court of time,

  the Black Earth, from whom I once tore up

  the marker-stones planted in many places:

  enslaved before, now she is free.

  I brought back to their god-given homeland Athens

  many who had been sold, one unjustly,

  another justly, others fleeing

  from dire necessity, no longer speaking

  the Attic tongue, for they had wandered far.

  Others here held in shameful slavery

  trembling at their masters’ whims

  I freed. These things I did
by force,

  fitting together might with right;

  and I achieved what I had promised.

  (Fragment 36.1–17 = 240)

  The two great radical slogans of the fourth century and later were ‘abolition of debts’ and ‘redistribution of land’; ancient commentators concentrated on where Solon, the founder of democracy, stood on these issues. Two measures were attributed to him in relation to debt. The first is uncontroversial, the abolition of loans on the person of the debtor or his family, and therefore of debt-slavery: it is surely the effects of this reform that Solon describes in the second part of the passage above, and Aristotle rightly regarded it as the most important of the three great democratic reforms of Solon (Constitution of the Athenians 9). But beyond this, the ancient authorities were deeply concerned with the question of whether Solon also abolished all other existing debts; various writers attempted either to discredit him by suggesting that he or his friends made money in the process, or to diminish the significance of the hypothetical reform by claiming that this consisted in a devaluation of the silver coinage, and was therefore not an abolition of debts but merely a reduction in the interest and capital outstanding; such a variety of opinions serves merely to show that Solon in fact never clearly mentioned the subject of the abolition of debts. These speculations, along with many by modern scholars, have been discredited by the proof that coinage proper was not invented until the late seventh century, and not minted at Athens until almost a generation after Solon’s archonship (p. 237). This must lead in turn to a reassessment of the level of economic sophistication which Athens had reached by the end of the seventh century; as Fustel de Coulanges wrote in 1864, ‘it is difficult to believe that the circulation of silver before Solon was such as to create large numbers of debtors and creditors’.

  Nevertheless enslavement for debt existed. It is characteristic of such forms of servitude that they are not primarily responses to economic pressures, but are rather an extension of the social system in general, and more particularly the system of land tenure; that is, such slaves are not usually created by a form of ‘bankruptcy’, but rather they exist in a stratified society in which inferiors may be liable to perform services for their superiors, and where ‘debt-slavery’ is the lowest level, to which a man may be born or sink for a variety of reasons, often non-economic: ‘men are not much accustomed in any society to lend to the poor’. The law is in the hands of the rich, and therefore enforces obligations by depriving the poor of existing rights; the poor may want protection (or have it forced on them); the rich are more concerned with manpower for military or civil purposes than with loan capital or interest, for labour is more valuable than surplus goods in a pre-monetary economy; and debt-slavery is often closely connected with forms of land tenure, because its prime function is usually to provide agricultural labour.

  Ancient authors were clearly at a loss to understand what effect Solon’s measures had on land tenure. Solon himself said that he had not given equal shares in the land (Frag. 34, p. 144). On the other hand he also said that he ‘tore up the marker-stones (horoi – the usual word for boundary stones) planted in many places’, and freed the earth. Certain obsolete words appeared to reflect an earlier agrarian system: land could be described as epimortos (subject to a share); peasants could be called hektēmoroi (sixth parters) or pelatai (men who approach another, clients); they paid a mortē (part) to another (Constitution of the Athenians 2.2 and various late lexicographers). The system was naturally interpreted as a form of rent in which the tenant paid a sixth of the crop to the landowner, who was entitled to enslave him if he defaulted; Solon had abolished this system.

  There are obvious objections to this interpretation. There is no sign that Attica was ever a countryside of large estates, or that Solon was responsible for breaking them up: the implied redistribution of land into unequal shares is hard to envisage, and Solon’s words are not really compatible with redistribution at all. Moreover one sixth is an impossibly low rent in a share-cropping system, which requires the landowner to take part in the risks by varying his rent according to the harvest; the normal proportion is a half or more. On this interpretation the Attic peasants had nothing to complain of, and would have been in little danger of being sold into slavery.

  One influential modern interpretation seeks to explain this evidence in purely economic terms. Overpopulation leading to deforestation, overproduction and soil exhaustion will have reduced the yield from the land to such an extent that peasant freeholders were forced to mortgage it with local aristocrats in order to obtain food and seed-corn; the return on these mortgages was fixed at some time (perhaps by Drakon) as a sixth. The marker-stones which Solon tore up were mortgage stones recording the fact that the land was obligated to a particular aristocrat: such stones are in fact known from the fourth century, though not earlier; they may perhaps have been wooden, or uninscribed. The peasants were now even less able to live on their land, and eventually defaulted, to flee overseas or be sold into slavery. But such dramatic changes in crop yields as this theory supposes would make share-cropping a particularly unattractive form of return for aristocrats (since they too, along with the peasant, would get less each year); and they are in any case unlikely in a primitive agricultural economy, where subsistence farming was the norm: under such conditions productivity varies little, and men adapt their expectations to any fall. The theory is plausible only in so far as it avoids relating debt to coinage (expressing it in corn instead), and links economic distress with overpopulation: the great population increase of the previous two centuries was very probably causing serious problems by the second half of the seventh century.

  The most productive approach to the agrarian unrest in the age of Solon was suggested by Fustel de Coulanges, the founder of French comparative sociology, in his pioneering book on Indo-European institutions, The Ancient City; the first edition was published in 1864, a generation before the discovery of the Constitution of the Athenians, and his original formulation of the theory therefore relied only on the limited information in Plutarch’s life of Solon. Fustel saw that the problem of debt was subsidiary: the Solonian ‘shaking off of burdens’ was primarily a social revolution, the abolition of the relation of clientship between peasants and aristocrats. The origins of the system may be left obscure: it might perhaps be a remnant of the old Mycenean land tenure system, where the peasantry was subordinate to local basileis and ultimately to the royal palace, which was essentially an office of administration and a storehouse for contributions in kind; or the origin of the system might be later, in a voluntary ‘feudal’ contract of mutual help entered into during the unsettled migration period; or it may reflect the conditions under which Attica was repopulated in the mid eighth century. The essential character of the developed system is that it is one of ‘conditional tenure’ in which the peasant owns the land, subject to a traditional payment in service or kind: such a system, even after its abolition, could well explain the fierce local loyalties and private fiefs of the Athenian aristocracy that persisted during the next few generations (p. 199).

  The system was not in itself harsh: the payment standardized at one sixth of the produce of the land was little more than a recognition of dependent status; nor need the men who paid this tithe have been poor. It is in the breakdown of such a system of mutual obligations that tension is most likely to arise. On the one hand the peasant farmers, many of whom may have been hoplites, will have increasingly regarded the payment of their sixth as a degrading sign of subservience in an age when other cities, both new and old, were admitting the principle of political equality. On the other hand the system could now be regarded more as a means of gaining wealth than as a reciprocal relationship; the services which the aristocracy had once performed were no longer required in the hoplite age. The new international aristocracy included tyrants who controlled the wealth of cities: it was a world where intermarriage was common, and wealth was needed to compete with the rich elsewhere, in entertainment and
gift-giving, in dowries, in the great athletic competitions and chariot racing at Olympia, and even in winning power from the people by public building and display (p. 243). The wealth of the Athenian aristocracy may also have been falling, if the city of Athens was coming to rely on cheap Egyptian and Black Sea corn imported by Aeginetan merchants, rather than the surplus created from the larger estates and the hektemorage system. The easiest way to maximize income was by exploitation of that system.

  Such a network of obligations will undoubtedly have caused confusion over who owned the land: the title of the peasant was impugned by his dependent status; and at the least, if he could be persuaded or forced to leave, vacant land must fall to his patron. Hence pressure to use all means possible to enslave the peasants (some unjustly, some justly, says Solon), and sell them or drive them into exile. The marker-stones which Solon tore up perhaps represented the claims of the aristocracy to possess such vacated land. The very poor had little power; but some of these men, and many perhaps of their neighbours, will have been hoplites. Nor will the nobility have been united. The enclosures of common land in eighteenth century England, and the displacement of the traditional peasantry in the name of scientific agriculture, split the landowning classes, many of whom viewed with deep misgivings the misery their more progressive neighbours were causing, even as they recognized the economic necessity of following suit. Solon’s moral outrage at the behaviour of the aristocracy will have appealed not only to the people but also to those nobles who believed in the old values.

  Such a theory then supposes the existence of a form of status dependence coupled with debt-bondage; it explains the reasons why that social system came to be resented, and (unlike other theories) how those oppressed were powerful enough to overthrow the system, and how they found a leader in a man whose most insistent message was that justice was more important than wealth.