the citizenry of Sparta. In the 4th century B.C., Aristotle could remark as a matter of course that ‘states are bound to contain slaves in large numbers’, while Xenophon drew up a scheme to restore the fortunes of Athens by which ‘the state would possess public slaves, until there were three for every Athenian citizen’.8 In classical Greece, slaves were thus for the first time habitually employed in crafts, industry and agriculture beyond the household scale. At the same time, while the use of slavery became general, its nature correspondingly became absolute: it was no longer one relative form of servitude among many, along a gradual continuum, but a polar condition of complete loss of freedom, juxtaposed against a new and untrammelled liberty. For it was precisely the formation of a limpidly demarcated slave sub-population that conversely lifted the citizenry of the Greek cities to hitherto unknown heights of conscious juridical freedom. Hellenic liberty and slavery were indivisible: each was the structural condition of the other, in a dyadic system which had no precedent or equivalent in the social hierarchies of the Near Eastern Empires, ignorant alike of either the notion of free citizenship or servile property.9 This profound juridical change was itself the social and ideological correlate of the economic ‘miracle’ wrought by the advent of the slave mode of production.
The civilization of classical Antiquity represented, as we have seen, the anomalous supremacy of town over country within an overwhelmingly rural economy: antithesis of the early feudal world which succeeded it. The condition of possibility of this metropolitan grandeur in the absence of municipal industry was the existence of slave-labour in the countryside: for it alone could free a landowning class so radically from its rural background that it could be transmuted into an essentially urban citizenry that yet still drew its fundamental wealth from the soil. Aristotle expressed the resultant social ideology of late classical Greece with his casual prescription: ‘Those who cultivate the land should ideally be slaves, not all recruited from one people nor spirited in temperament (so as to be industrious in work and immune to rebellion), or as a second best barbarian bondsmen of a similar character.’10 It was characteristic of the fully developed slave mode of production in the Roman countryside that even management functions were delegated to slave supervisors and bailiffs, putting to work slave gangs in the fields.11 The slave estate, unlike the feudal manor, permitted a permanent disjuncture between residence and revenue; the surplus product that provided the fortunes of the possessing class could be extracted without its presence on the land. The nexus binding the immediate rural producer to the urban appropriator of his product was not a customary one, and was not mediated through the locality of the land itself (as in later adscriptive serfdom). It was, on the contrary, typically the universal, commercial act of commodity purchase realized in the towns, where the slave trade had its typical markets. The slave labour of classical Antiquity thus embodied two contradictory attributes in whose unity lay the secret of the paradoxical urban precocity of the Graeco-Roman world. On the one hand, slavery represented the most radical rural degradation of labour imaginable – the conversion of men themselves into inert means of production by their deprivation of every social right and their legal assimilation to beasts of burden: in Roman theory, the agricultural slave was designated an instrumentum vocale, the speaking tool, one grade away from the livestock that constituted an instrumentum semi-vocale, and two from the implement which was an instrumentum mutum. On the other hand, slavery was simultaneously the most drastic urban commercialization of labour conceivable: the reduction of the total person of the labourer to a standard object of sale and purchase, in metropolitan markets of commodity exchange. The destination of the numerical bulk of slaves in classical Antiquity was agrarian labour (this was not so everywhere or always, but was in aggregate the case): their normal assemblage, allocation and dispatch was effected from the marts of the cities, where many of them were also, of course, employed. Slavery was thus the economic hinge that joined town and country together, to the inordinate profit of the polis. It both maintained the captive agriculture that permitted the dramatic differentiation of an urban ruling class from its rural origins, and promoted the inter-city trade that was the complement of this agriculture in the Mediterranean. Slaves, among other advantages, were an eminently movable commodity in a world where transport bottlenecks were central to the structure of the whole economy.12 They could be shifted without difficulty from one region to another; they could be trained in a number of different skills; in epochs of abundant supply, moreover, they acted to keep down costs where hired labourers or independent craftsmen were at work, because of the alternative labour they provided. The wealth and ease of the propertied urban class of classical Antiquity – above all, that of Athens and Rome at their zenith – rested on the broad surplus yielded by the pervasive presence of this labour system, that left none other untouched.
The price paid for this brutal and lucrative device was, nevertheless, a high one. Slave relations of production determined certain insurmountable limits to ancient forces of production, in the classical epoch. Above all, they ultimately tended to paralyze productivity in both agriculture and industry. There were, of course, certain technical improvements in the economy of classical Antiquity. No mode of production is ever devoid of material progress in its ascendant phase, and the slave mode of production in its prime registered certain important advances in the economic equipment deployed within the framework of its new social division of labour. Among them can be accounted the spread of more profitable wine and oil cultures; the introduction of rotary mills for grain and an amelioration in the quality of bread. Screw-presses were designed, glass-blowing developed and heating-systems refined; combination cropping, botanical knowledge and field drainage probably also advanced.13 There was thus no simple, terminal halt to technique in the classical world. But at the same time, no major cluster of inventions ever occurred to propel the Ancient economy forward to qualitatively new forces of production. Nothing is more striking, in any comparative retrospect, than the overall technological stagnation of Antiquity.14 It is enough to contrast the record of its eight centuries of existence from the rise of Athens to the fall of Rome, with the equivalent span of the feudal mode of production which succeeded it, to perceive the difference between a relatively static and dynamic economy. More dramatic still, of course, was the contrast within the classical world itself between its cultural and superstructural vitality and its infrastructural hebetude: the manual technology of Antiquity was exiguous and primitive not merely by the external standards of a posterior history, but above all by the measure of its own intellectual firmament – which in most critical respects always remained far higher than that of the Middle Ages to come. There is little doubt that it was the structure of the slave economy that was fundamentally responsible for this extraordinary disproportion. Aristotle, to later ages the greatest and most representative thinker of Antiquity, tersely summed up its social principle with his dictum: ‘The best State will not make a manual worker a citizen, for the bulk of manual labour today is slave or foreign.’15 Such a State represented the ideal norm of the slave mode of production, nowhere realized in any actual social formation in the Ancient World. But its logic was always immanently present in the nature of the classical economies.
Once manual labour became deeply associated with loss of liberty, there was no free social rationale for invention. The stifling effects of slavery on technique were not a simple function of the low average productivity of slave-labour itself, or even of the volume of its use: they subtly affected all forms of labour. Marx sought to express the type of action which they exerted in a celebrated, if cryptic theoretical formula: ‘In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign every other production and its relations their rank and influence. It is a general illumination in which all other colours are plunged and which modifies their specific tonalities. It is a special ether which defines the specific gravity of everything found within it.’16 Agricultural slaves themselves had notoriously little incentive to perform their economic tasks competently and conscientiously, once surveillance was relaxed; their optimal employment was in compact vineyards or olive-groves. On the other hand, many slave craftsmen and some slave cultivators were often notably skilled, within the limits of prevailing techniques. The structural constraint of slavery on technology thus lay not so much in a direct intra-economic causality, although this was important in its own right, as in the mediate social ideology which enveloped the totality of manual work in the classical world, contaminating hired and even independent labour with the stigma of debasement.17 Slave-labour
