this was only one segment of their society. Agriculture and nearly all productive activity among the tribes, except for hunting, was carried out by women, dependents, old men, and the non-warriors whom Tacitus terms the “weaklings of the family.”41 Though he places a nearly exclusive emphasis on the warriors, we cannot assume this to be a value generalized in the tribal society itself. The warriors thought it beneath them to dirty their hands in the fields or win wealth by the sweat of their brows rather than by bloodshed, but we do not know what those who did work in the fields thought about such labor or about warfare. We do know, however, that women played an important role in mobilizing the tribe for warfare, urging the warriors on through a mixture of encouragement and shaming. We can also assume that as these tribes fractured and spread into the vacuum left by the collapsing Roman Empire, when bands of warriors colonized populations previously subject to the empire, they generalized their value hierarchy that placed warfare—and by extension affairs of state and ownership—at the top, and labor—what in their societies of origin had been the work of women and war captives—on the bottom. In effect, what was potentially an egalitarian, complementary division of labor between the masculine and the feminine became a hierarchical and patriarchal division of labor when the masculine half of Germanic society was able to spread and conquer other populations. As warfare became the more important activity in the reproduction of Germanic societies, the warrior half was able to impose its own value system, regardless of whether it had truly been the dominant half previously.
(As a useful contrast, we can consider an inverse situation; centuries later, when it was trade and artisanal production rather than warfare that became more important for the spread of the dominant social model, it was the descendants of the servants and dependents—commoners—who began to take power away from the descendants of the warriors—the nobility—though it was also necessary that changes take place in the techniques of warfare favoring the military units of urban citizens over the mounted nobility before this democratization process could reach fruition.)
Roman colonization and contact had a great impact on the Germanic tribes. Highly developed Roman patriarchy encouraged and empowered nascent forms of Germanic patriarchy (ever present as a possibility in a gender-divided society, even an egalitarian one). This in turn is related to a motor of state formation that I will refer to as militarization. The contest of arms made inevitable by Roman expansion found a certain resonance in the warlike German society. For the Germanic tribes, already accustomed to competitive warfare, battle with the Romans was not only a question of winning their freedom, but also of winning. Some warlike societies are fiercely libertarian, but those that exhibit democratic characteristics—such as the Germanic tribes with their warriors’ assemblies presided over by war leaders who introduced proposals for common voting—can operate as a centralized polity and are much more likely to be induced into the competitive aspect of war. David Graeber makes a similar argument with respect to the ancient Greeks, asserting that democratic organization was typical to state-forming warrior societies whereas consensus-based organization was typical to stateless societies.42
It is noteworthy that the Germanic armies that not only defended against but also invaded Rome tended not to be pristine barbarians fighting for their freedom. On the contrary, they were usually led by warriors who had served in the Roman legions and were now trying their own hand at the Roman project of conquest.
Warrior brotherhoods such as those that existed in Germanic society are egalitarian on the surface, especially as judged by democratic criteria of freedom. But they have proven themselves inclined and able to constitute politogens. Rome itself, which evolved inexorably from Kingdom to Republic to Empire—and was at every point in that process authoritarian and hierarchical, a fact obscured by the democratic criteria of freedom—started out as a warrior brotherhood similar in many ways to those of the Germanic tribes.
When the Romans founded their city in the eighth century BCE, they had a patriarchal social organization dominated by a king, thirty curiae, and gentes or clans. It was a democratic organization in the true militaristic, authoritarian, patriarchal sense of the word. (I understand that this assertion will rankle many readers. The arguments that back it up—and there are many—are material for an entire book. That is exactly, however, the topic of a future book that is already in preparation.)
The king was a symbolic leader who could also institute organizational reforms and push the whole society to accept ambitious new strategies or projects, provided he had the support of the other two groups.
The curiae were egalitarian groups of free men, probably composed of one hundred infantry warriors each. Etymologically, curia derived from co-viria, co-manhood. Each curia had a leader, the curio, and each elected two priests. “Curial hierurgies were often accompanied by joint dining […] which confirms the parallel with Spartan syssitiae […], egalitarian (brotherhoods) of messmate warriors.”43 All the men could vote, and they divided land won by conquest on an egalitarian basis. Related to the curiae was the populus, the people-host, which had an assembly in which free men could vote. Incidentally, extended kinship bonds were weak and communities of commoners were united by neighbor bonds, with each household led by a man. This may not seem rare to Western readers but in a broad historical perspective was quite uncommon and bears important ramifications for state formation that will be discussed in a later chapter. To summarize, though, such conditions of alienation and relative individualism were likely the result of displacement, slaving, and turmoil—basically, refugee crises—caused by expansive states and their continuous warfare throughout the Mediterranean in prior centuries. In other words, we are dealing with state effects. One of the most significant of these effects for subsequent developments was land alienation: given the atomized family structure, land was doled out as individual property.
Finally there were the gentes, the clans, whose leaders were patriarchal, noble families with legendary ancestors, private hierurgies (rituals led by a priest), and private places of worship. In the militarized schema of Roman social organization, these were the equestrians, the mounted warriors, who commanded retainers and enough economic resources to be able to maintain horses and the corresponding arms and armor. A clan might be able to field a thousand warriors, nobles and commoners bound by a common loyalty oath to the military chief of the gens. They also had clients who swore allegiance in exchange for protection. The clients had to perform some duties for the clan, needed the chief’s permission to marry, and were expected to support the clan chief in public office, but the chief also had responsibilities to them, for example having to support them and acquire them legal defense if they were put on trial. Legally and symbolically, they had the status of dependent children to the clan. Politically, the clan chiefs had the patres, their council. The assembly and the council existed in relative political equality; for example both had to legitimate a new king.44
The perceptive reader will have noticed here the prototype for the oldest existing democratic governments, those of the United Kingdom and the United States, along with that of numerous other states. Bicameral legislation, a House of Lords and a House of Commons, or Senate and House of Representatives; this is a structure that finds its root in the caste system of ancient Rome, in which a noble elite enjoyed many economic and symbolic privileges, and enjoyed a potent hegemony in the economic mode that was naturalized, based in individual, alienable property rather than communal or collective holdings (which constituted an obstacle to state formation in many other societies but which the Romans never had to deal with). The equality of this system, which is formal and meaningless in terms of quality of life, stems from a militaristic and patriarchal idea of organization, in which male commoners were motivated to fight by being promised a piece of the pie, and given symbolic status recognition (in lay terms, ego boosts). The huge, despotic empires of the Fertile Crescent had proven time and time again that armies composed largely of slaves could not stand up to smaller, democratic armies. We can’t know if the Romans were conscious of this lesson, but we can’t help but think that it filtered through to them at least indirectly, given that the Italic Peninsula had been a part of the Mediterranean world system for more than a millennium.
With a city, the Romans established their state. First they conquered and absorbed the other members of the Latin League, before expanding across the
