ORIGIN OF THE ATTIC STATE.
How the state gradually developed by partly transforming the organs of
the gentile constitution, partly replacing them by new organs and
finally installing real state authorities; how the place of the nation
in arms defending itself through its gentes, phratries and tribes, was
taken by an armed public power of coërcion in the hands of these
authorities and available against the mass of the people; nowhere can we
observe the first act of this drama so well as in ancient Athens. The
essential stages of the various transformations are outlined by Morgan,
but the analysis of the economic causes producing them is largely added
by myself.
In the heroic period, the four tribes of the Athenians were still
installed in separate parts of Attica. Even the twelve phratries
composing them seem to have had separate seats in the twelve different
towns of Cecrops. The constitution was in harmony with the period: a
public meeting (agorâ), a council (bûlê) and a basileus.
As far back as we can trace written history we find the land divided up
and in the possession of private individuals. For during the last period
of the higher stage of barbarism the production of commodities and the
resulting trade had well advanced. Grain, wine and oil were staple
articles. The sea trade on the Aegean Sea drifted more and more out of
the hands of the Phoenicians into those of the Athenians. By the
purchase and sale of land, by continued division of labor between
agriculture and industry, trade and navigation, the members of gentes,
phratries and tribes very soon intermingled. The districts of the
phratry and the tribe received inhabitants who did not belong to these
bodies and, therefore, were strangers in their own homes, although they
were countrymen. For during times of peace, every phratry and every
tribe administered its own affairs without consulting the council of
Athens or the basileus. But inhabitants not belonging to the phratry or
the tribe could not take part in the administration of these bodies.
Thus the well-regulated functions of the gentile organs became so
disarranged that relief was already needed during the heroic period. A
constitution attributed to Theseus was introduced. The main feature of
this change was the institution of a central administration in Athens. A
part of the affairs that had so long been conducted autonomously by the
tribes was declared collective business and transferred to a general
council in Athens. This step of the Athenians went farther than any ever
taken by the nations of America. For the simple federation of autonomous
tribes was now replaced by the conglomeration of all tribes into one
single body. The next result was a common Athenian law, standing above
the legal traditions of the tribes and gentes. It bestowed on the
citizens of Athens certain privileges and legal protection, even in a
territory that did not belong to their tribe. This meant another blow to
the gentile constitution; for it opened the way to the admission of
citizens who were not members of any Attic tribe and stood entirely
outside of the Athenian gentile constitution.
A second institution attributed to Theseus was the division of the
entire nation into three classes regardless of the gentes, phratries and
tribes: eupatrides or nobles, geomoroì or farmers, and demiurgoi or
tradesmen. The exclusive privilege of the nobles to fill the offices
was included in this innovation. Apart from this privilege the new
division remained ineffective, as it did not create any legal
distinctions between the classes. But it is important, because it shows
us the new social elements that had developed in secret. It shows that
the habitual holding of gentile offices by certain families had already
developed into a practically uncontested privilege; that these families,
already powerful through their wealth, began to combine outside of their
gentes into a privileged class; and that the just arising state
sanctioned this assumption. It shows furthermore that the division of
labor between farmers and tradesmen had grown strong enough to contest
the supremacy of the old gentile and tribal division of society. And
finally it proclaims the irreconcilable opposition of gentile society to
the state. The first attempt to form a state broke up the gentes by
dividing their members against one another and opposing a privileged
class to a class of disowned belonging to two different branches of
production.
The ensuing political history of Athens up to the time of Solon is only
incompletely known. The office of basileus became obsolete. Archons
elected from the ranks of the nobility occupied the leading position in
the state. The power of the nobility increased continually, until it
became unbearable about the year 600 before Christ. The principal means
for stifling the liberty of the people were--money and usury. The main
seat of the nobility was in and around Athens. There the sea trade and
now and then a little convenient piracy enriched them and concentrated
the money into their hands. From this point the gradually arising money
power penetrated like corrugating acid into the traditional modes of
rural existence founded on natural economy. The gentile constitution is
absolutely irreconcilable with money rule. The ruin of the Attic
farmers coïncided with the loosening of the old gentile bonds that
protected them. The debtor's receipt and the pawning of the
property--for the mortgage was also invented by the Athenians--cared
neither for the gens nor for the phratry. But the old gentile
constitution knew nothing of money, advance and debt. Hence the ever
more virulently spreading money rule of the nobility developed a new
legal custom, securing the creditor against the debtor and sanctioning
the exploitation of the small farmer by the wealthy. All the rural
districts of Attica were crowded with mortgage columns bearing the
legend that the lot on which they stood was mortgaged to such and such
for so much. The fields that were not so designated had for the most
part been sold on account of overdue mortgages or interest and
transferred to the aristocratic usurers. The farmer could thank his
stars, if he was granted permission to live as a tenant on one-sixth of
the product of his labor and to pay five-sixths to his new master in the
form of rent. Worse still, if the sale of the lot did not bring
sufficient returns to cover the debt, or if such a debt had been
contracted without a lien, then the debtor had to sell his children into
slavery abroad in order to satisfy the claim of the creditor. The sale
of the children by the father--that was the first fruit of paternal law
and monogamy! And if that did not satisfy the bloodsuckers, they could
sell the debtor himself into slavery. Such was the pleasant dawn of
civilization among the people of Attica.
Formerly, while the condition of the people was in keeping with gentile
traditions, a similar downfall would have been impossible. But here it
had come about, nobody knew how. Let us return for a moment to the
Iroquois. The state of things that had imposed itself on the Athenians
almost without their doing, so to say, and assuredly against their will,
was inconceivable among the Indians. There the ever unchanging mode of
production could at no time generate such conflicts as a distinction
between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, caused by external
conditions. The Iroquois were far from controlling the forces of nature,
but within the limits drawn for them by nature they dominated their own
production. Apart from a failure of the crops in their little gardens,
the exhaustion of the fish supply in their lakes and rivers or of the
game stock in their forests, they always knew what would be the outcome
of their mode of gaining a living. A more or less abundant supply of
food, that would come of it. But the outcome could never be any
unpremeditated social upheavals, breaking of gentile bonds or division
of the gentiles against one another by conflicting class interests.
Production was carried on in the most limited manner; but--the producers
controlled their own product. This immense advantage of barbarian
production was lost in the transition to civilization. To win it back on
the basis of man's present gigantic control of nature and of the free
association rendered possible by it, that will be the task of the next
generations.
Not so among the Greeks. The advent of private property in herds of
cattle and articles of luxury led to an exchange between individuals, to
a transformation of products into commodities. Here is the root of the
entire revolution that followed. When the producers did no longer
consume their own product, but released their hold of it in exchange for
another's product, then they lost the control of it. They did not know
any more what became of it. There was a possibility that the product
might be turned against the producers for the purpose of exploiting and
oppressing them. No society can, therefore, retain for any length of
time the control of its own production and of the social effects of the
mode of production, unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.
How rapidly after the establishment of individual exchange and after the
transformation of products into commodities the product manifests its
rule over the producer, the Athenians were soon to learn. Along with the
production of marketable commodities came the tilling of the soil by
individual cultivators for their own account, soon followed by
individual ownership of the land. Along came also the money, that
general commodity for which all others could be exchanged. But when men
invented money they little suspected that they were creating a new
social power, that one universal power before which the whole of society
must bow down. It was this new power, suddenly sprung into existence
without the forethought and intention of its own creators, that vented
its rule on the Athenians with the full brutality of youth.
What was to be done? The old gentile organization had not only proved
impotent against the triumphant march of money; it was also absolutely
incapable of containing within its confines any such thing as money,
creditors, debtors and forcible collection of debts. But the new social
power was upon them and neither pious wishes nor a longing for the
return of the good old times could drive money and usury from the face
of the earth. Moreover, gentile constitution had suffered a number of
minor defeats. The indiscriminate mingling of the gentiles and phrators
in the whole of Attica, and especially in Athens, had assumed larger
proportions from generation to generation. Still even now a citizen of
Athens was not allowed to sell his residence outside of his gens,
although he could do so with plots of land. The division of labor
between the different branches of production--agriculture, trades,
numberless specialties within the trades, commerce, navigation,
etc.--had developed more fully with the progress of industry and
traffic. The population was now divided according to occupations into
rather well defined groups, everyone of which had separate interests not
guarded by the gens or phratry and therefore necessitating the creation
of new offices. The number of slaves had increased considerably and must
have surpassed by far that of the free Athenians even at this early
stage. Gentile society originally knew no slavery and was, therefore,
ignorant of any means to hold this mass of bondsmen in check. And
finally, commerce had attracted a great many strangers who settled in
Athens for the sake of the easier living it afforded. According to the
old constitution, the strangers had neither civil rights nor the
protection of the law. Though tacitly admitted by tradition, they
remained a disturbing and foreign element.
In short, gentile constitution approached its doom. Society was daily
growing more and more beyond it. It was powerless to stop or allay even
the most distressing evils that had grown under its very eyes. But in
the meantime the state had secretly developed. The new groups formed by
division of labor, first between city and country, then between the
various branches of city industry, had created new organs for the care
of their interests. Public offices of every description had been
instituted. And above all the young state needed its own fighting
forces. Among the seafaring Athenians this had to be at first only a
navy, for occasional short expeditions and the protection of the
merchant vessels. At some uncertain time before Solon, the naukrariai
were instituted, little territorial districts, twelve in each tribe.
Every naukraria had to furnish, equip and man a war vessel and to detail
two horsemen. This arrangement was a twofold attack on the gentile
constitution. In the first place it created a public power of coërcion
that did no longer absolutely coincide with the entirety of the armed
nation. In the second place it was the first division of the people for
public purposes, not by groups of kinship, but by local residence. We
shall soon see what that signified.
As the gentile constitution could not come to the assistance of the
exploited people, they could look only to the rising state. And the
state brought help in the form of the constitution of Solon. At the same
time it added to its own strength at the expense of the old
constitution. Solon opened the series of so-called political revolutions
by an infringement on private property. We pass over the means by which
this reform was accomplished in the year 594 B. C. or thereabout. Ever
since, all revolutions have been revolutions for the protection of one
kind of property against another kind of property. They cannot protect
one kind without violating another. In the great French revolution the
feudal property was sacrificed for the sake of saving bourgeois
property. In Solon's revolution, the property of the creditors had to
make concessions to the property of the debtors. The debts were simply
declared illegal. We are not acquainted with the accurate details, but
Solon boasts in his poëms that he removed the mortgage columns from the
indented lots and enabled all who had fled or been sold abroad for debts
to return home. This was only feasible by an open violation of private
property. And indeed, all so-called political revolutions were started
for the protection of one kind of property by the confiscation, also
called theft, of another kind of property. It is absolutely true that
for more than 2,500 years private property could only be protected by
the violation of private property.
But now a way had to be found to avoid the return of such an enslavement
of the free Athenians. This was first attempted by general measures, e.
g., the prohibition of contracts giving the person of the debtor in
lien. Furthermore a maximum limit was fixed for the amount of land any
one individual could own, in order to keep the craving of the nobility
for the land of the farmers within reasonable bounds. Constitutional
amendments were next in order. The following deserve special
consideration:
The council was increased to four hundred members, one hundred from each
tribe. Here, then, the tribe still served as a basis. But this was the
only remnant of the old constitution that was transferred to the new
body politic. For otherwise Solon divided the citizens into four classes
according to their property in land and its yield. Five hundred, three
hundred and one hundred and fifty medimnoi of grain (1 medimnos equals
1.16 bushels) were the minimum yields of the first three classes.
Whoever had less land or none at all belonged to the fourth class. Only
members of the first three classes could hold office; the highest
offices were filled by the first class. The fourth class had only the
right to speak and vote in the public council. But here all officials
were elected, here they had to give account, here all the laws were
made, and here the fourth class was in the majority. The aristocratic
privileges were partly renewed in the form of privileges of wealth, but
the people retained the decisive power. The four classes also formed the
basis for the reorganization of the fighting forces. The first two
classes furnished the horsemen; the third had to serve as heavy
infantry; the fourth was employed as light unarmored infantry and had to
man the navy. Probably the last class also received wages in this case.
An entirely new element is thus introduced into the constitution:
private property. The rights and duties of the citizens are graduated
according to their property in land. Wherever the classification by
property gains ground, there the old groups of blood relationship give
way. Gentile constitution has suffered another defeat.
However, the gradation of political rights according to private property
was not one of those institutions without which a state cannot exist. It
may have been ever so important in the constitutional development of
some states. Still a good many others, and the most completely developed
at that, had no need of it. Even in Athens it played only a passing
role. Since the time of Aristides, all offices were open to all the
citizens.
During the next eighty years the Athenian society gradually drifted into
the course on which it further developed in the following centuries. The
outrageous land speculation of the time before Solon had been fettered,
likewise the excessive concentration of property in land. Commerce,
trades and artisan handicrafts, which were carried on in an ever larger
scale as slave labor increased, became the ruling factors in gaining a
living. Public enlightenment advanced. Instead of exploiting their own
fellow citizens in the old brutal style, the Athenians now exploited
mainly the slaves and the customers outside. Movable property, wealth in
money, slaves and ships, increased more and more. But instead of being a
simple means for the purchase of land, as in the old stupid times, it
had now become an end in itself. The new class of industrial and
commercial owners of wealth now waged a victorious competition against
the old nobility. The remnants of the old gentile constitution lost
their last hold. The gentes, phratries and tribes, the members of which
now were dispersed all over Attica and completely intermixed, had thus
become unavailable as political groups. A great many citizens of Athens
did not belong to any gens. They were immigrants who had been adopted
into citizenship, but not into any of the old groups of kinship.
Besides, there was a steadily increasing number of foreign immigrants
who were only protected by traditional sufferance.
Meanwhile the struggles of the parties proceeded. The nobility tried to
regain their former privileges and for a short time recovered their
supremacy, until the revolution of Kleisthenes (509 B. C.) brought their
final downfall and completed the ruin of gentile law.
In his new constitution, Kleisthenes ignored the four old tribes founded
on the gentes and phratries. Their place was taken by an entirely new
organization based on the recently attempted division of the citizens
into naukrariai according to residence. No longer was membership in a
group of kindred the dominant fact, but simply local residence. Not the
nation, but the territory was now divided; the inhabitants became mere
political fixtures of the territory.
The whole of Attica was divided into one hundred communal districts,
so-called demoi, every one of which was autonomous. The citizens living
in a demos (demotoi) elected their official head (demarchos), treasurer
and thirty judges with jurisdiction in minor cases. They also received
their own temple and divine guardian or heros, whose priest they
elected. The control of the demos was in the hands of the council of
demotoì. This is, as Morgan correctly remarks, the prototype of the
autonomous American township. The modern state in its highest
development ended in the same unit with which the rising state began its
career in Athens.
Ten of these units (demoi) formed a tribe, which, however, was now
designated as local tribe in order to distinguish it from the old sex
tribe. The local tribe was not only an autonomous political, but also a
military group. It elected the phylarchos or tribal head who commanded
the horsemen, the taxiarchos commanding the infantry and the strategic
leader, who was in command of the entire contingent raised in the tribal
territory by conscription. The local tribe furthermore furnished,
equipped and fully manned five war vessels. It was designated by the
name of the Attic hero who was its guardian deity. It elected fifty
councilmen into the council of Athens.
Thus we arrive at the Athenian state, governed by a council of five
hundred elected by and representing the ten tribes and subject to the
vote of the public meeting, where every citizen could enter and vote.
Archons and other officials attended to the different departments of
administration and justice.
By this new constitution and by the admission of a large number of
aliens, partly freed slaves, partly immigrants, the organs of gentile
constitution were displaced in public affairs. They became mere private
and religious clubs. But their moral influence, the traditional
conceptions and views of the old gentile period, survived for a long
time and expired only gradually. This was evident in another state
institution.
We have seen that an essential mark of the state consists in a public
power of coërcion divorced from the mass of the people. Athens possessed
at that time only a militia and a navy equipped and manned directly by
the people. These afforded protection against external enemies and held
the slaves in check, who at that time already made up the large majority
of the population. For the citizens, this coërcive power at first only
existed in the shape of the police, which is as old as the state. The
innocent Frenchmen of the 18th century, therefore, had the habit of
speaking not of civilized, but of policed nations (nations policées).
The Athenians, then, provided for a police in their new state, a
veritable "force" of bowmen on foot and horseback. This police force
consisted--of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so
degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than
lending himself to such an ignominious service. That was still a sign of
the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without a police, but
as yet it was too young and did not command sufficient moral respect to
give prestige to an occupation that necessarily appeared ignominious to
the old gentiles.
How well this state, now completed in its main outlines, suited the
social condition of the Athenians was apparent by the rapid growth of
wealth, commerce and industry. The distinction of classes on which the
social and political institutions are resting was no longer between
nobility and common people, but between slaves and freemen, aliens and
citizens. At the time of the greatest prosperity the whole number of
free Athenian citizens, women and children included, amounted to about
90,000; the slaves of both sexes numbered 365,000 and the
aliens--foreigners and freed slaves--45,000. Per capita of each adult
citizen there were, therefore, at least eighteen slaves and more than
two aliens. The great number of slaves is explained by the fact that
many of them worked together in large factories under supervision. The
development of commerce and industry brought about an accumulation and
concentration of wealth in a few hands. The mass of the free citizens
were impoverished and had to face the choice of either competing with
their own labor against slave labor, which was considered ignoble and
vile, besides promising little success, or to be ruined. Under the
prevailing circumstances they necessarily chose the latter course and
being in the majority they ruined the whole Attic state. Not democracy
caused the downfall of Athens, as the European glorifiers of princes and
lickspittle schoolmasters would have us believe, but slavery
ostracizing the labor of the free citizen.
The origin of the state among the Athenians presents a very typical form
of state organization. For it took place without any marring external
interference or internal obstruction--the usurpation of Pisistratos left
no trace of its short duration. It shows the direct rise of a highly
developed form of a state, the democratic republic, out of gentile
society. And finally, we are sufficiently acquainted with all the
essential details of the process.