between the two, in a common economic space that excluded the application of culture to technique for inventions. The divorce of material work from the sphere of liberty was so rigorous that the Greeks had no word in their language even to express the concept of labour, either as a social function or as personal conduct. Both agricultural and artisanal work were essentially deemed ‘adaptations’ to nature, not transformations of it; they were forms of service. Plato too implicitly barred artisans from the polis altogether: for him ‘labour remains alien to any human value and in certain respects seems even to be the antithesis of what is essential to man’.18 Technique as premeditated, progressive instrumentation of the natural world by man was incompatible with wholesale assimilation of men to the natural world as its ‘speaking instruments’. Productivity was fixed by the perennial routine of the instrumentum vocale, which devalued all labour by precluding any sustained concern with devices to save it. The typical path of expansion in Antiquity, for any given state, was thus always a ‘lateral’ one – geographical conquest – not economic advance. Classical civilization was in consequence inherently colonial in character: the cellular city-state invariably reproduced itself, in phases of ascent, by settlement and war. Plunder, tribute and slaves were the central objects of aggrandizement, both means and ends to colonial expansion. Military power was more closely locked to economic growth than in perhaps any other mode of production, before or since, because the main single origin of slave-labour was normally captured prisoners of war, while the raising of free urban troops for war depended on the maintenance of production at home by slaves; battle-fields provided the manpower for cornfields, and vice-versa, captive labourers permitted the creation of citizen armies. Three great cycles of imperial expansion can be traced in classical Antiquity, whose successive and variant features structured the total pattern of the Graeco-Roman world: Athenian, Macedonian and Roman. Each represented a certain solution to the political and organizational problems of overseas conquest, which was integrated and surpassed by the next, without the underlying bases of a common urban civilization ever being transgressed.
1. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, 1896 (Bury edition), p. 1. Gibbon repented of this sentence in a manuscript note for a projected revision of his book, restricting its reference to the countries of Europe only, not those of the world. ‘Have Asia and Africa, from Japan to Morocco, any feeling or memory of the Roman Empire?’, he asked (op. cit., p. xxxv). He wrote too soon to see how the rest of the world was indeed to ‘feel’ the impact of Europe, and with it of the ultimate consequences of the ‘revolution’ he recorded; neither remote Japan nor adjacent Morocco were to be immune from the history it inaugurated.
2. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, Vol. I, p. 465. The tax was paid by negotiatores, or virtually all those engaged in commercial production of any sort in the towns, merchants and craftsmen alike. Despite its minimal returns, it proved intensely oppressive and unpopular to the urban population, so fragile was the city economy proper.
3. Max Weber was the first scholar to give full emphasis to this fundamental fact, in his two great, forgotten studies, ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ and ‘Die Sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der Antiken Kultur’. See Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Tübingen 1924, pp. 4 ff., 292 ff.
4. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, II, pp. 841–2.
5. M. I. Finley, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, VI, 1963–4, pp. 237–8.
6. Throughout this text, the term ‘social formation’ will generally be preferred to that of ‘society’. In Marxist usage, the purport of the concept of social formation is precisely to underline the plurality and heterogeneity of possible modes of production within any given historical and social totality. Uncritical repetition of the term ‘society’, conversely, all too often conveys the assumption of an inherent unity of economy, polity or culture within a historical ensemble, when in fact this simple unity and identity does not exist. Social formations, unless specified otherwise, are thus here always concrete combinations of different modes of production, organized under the dominance of one of them. For this distinction, see Nicos Poulantzas, Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales, Paris 1968, pp. 10–11. Having made this clear, it would be pedantry to avoid the familiar term ‘society’ altogether, and no attempt will be made to do so here.
7. A. Andrewes, Greek Society, London 1967, p. 155, who reckons that the total slave labour-force was in the region of 80–100,000 in the 5th century, when the citizenry numbered perhaps some 45,000. This order of magnitude probably commands a wider consensus than lower or higher estimates. But all modern histories of Antiquity are hampered by basic lack of reliable information as to the size of populations and social classes. Jones could compute the proportion of slaves to citizens in the 4th century, when the population of Athens had fallen, at 1:1 on the basis of the city’s corn imports: Athenian Democracy, Oxford 1957, pp. 76–9. Finley, on the other hand, has argued that it may have been as high as 3 or 4:1 in peak periods of both the 5th and 4th centuries: ‘Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?’, Historia, VIII, 1959, pp. 58–9. The most comprehensive, if defective, modern monograph on the subject of ancient slavery, W. L. Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Philadelphia 1955, p. 9, arrives at something like the same gross figure as that accepted by Andrewes and Finley, of some 60–80,000 slaves at the outset of the Peloponnesian War.
8. Aristotle, Politics, VII, iv, 4; Xenophon, Ways and Means, IV, 17.
9. Westerman, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, pp. 42–3; Finley, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, pp. 236–9.
10. Politics, VII, ix, 9.
11. The very ubiquity of slave-labour at the height of the Roman Republic and Principate had the paradoxical effect of promoting certain categories of slaves to responsible administrative or professional position; which in turn facilitated manumission and subsequent integration of the sons of skilled freedmen into the citizen class. This process was not so much a humanitarian palliation of classical slavery, as another index of the radical abstention of the Roman ruling class from any form of productive labour whatever, even of an executive type.
12. Weber, ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, pp. 5–6.
13. See especially F. Kiechle, Sklavenarbeit und Technischer Fortschritt im römischen Reich, Wiesbaden 1969, pp. 12–114; L. A. Moritz, Grain-Mills and Flour in Classical Antiquity, Oxford 1958; K. D. White, Roman Farming, London 1970, pp. 123–4, 147–72, 188–91, 260–1, 452.
14. The general problem is forcibly put, as usual, by Finley, ‘Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World’, Economic History Review, XVIII, No. 1, 1955, pp. 29–45. For the specific record of the Roman Empire, see F. W. Walbank, The Awful Revolution, Liverpool 1969, pp. 40–1, 46–7, 108–10.
15. Politics, III, iv, 2.
16. Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomle, Berlin 1953, p. 27.
17. Finley points out that the Greek term penia, customarily opposed to ploutos as ‘poverty’ to ‘wealth’, in fact had the wider pejorative meaning of ‘drudgery’ or ‘compulsion to toil’, and could cover even prosperous small-holders, whose labour fell under the same cultural shadow: M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, London 1973, p. 41.
18. J. P. Vernant, Myth et Pensée chez les Grecs, Paris 1965, pp. 191, 197–9, 217. Vernant’s two essays, ‘Prométhée et la Fonction Technique’ and ‘Travail et Nature dans la Grèce Ancienne’ provide a subtle analysis of the distinctions between poiesis and praxis, and the relations of the cultivator, craftsman and money-lender to the polis. Alexandre Koyré once tried to argue that the technical stagnation of Greek civilization was not due to the presence of slavery or the devaluation of labour, but to the absence of physics, rendered impossible by its inability to apply mathematical measurement
