hoplites, heavily armoured infantry which were a Greek innovation in the Mediterranean world. Each hoplite equipped himself with weaponry and armour at his own expense: such a soldiery thus presupposed a reasonable economic livelihood, and in fact hoplite troops were always drawn from the medium farmer class of the cities. Their military efficacy was to be proved by the startling Greek victories over the Persians in the next century. But it was their pivotal position within the political structure of the city-states that was ultimately most important. The precondition of later Greek ‘democracy’ or extended ‘oligarchy’ was a self-armed citizen infantry.
Sparta was the first city-state to embody the social results of hoplite warfare. Its evolution forms a curious pendant to that of Athens in the pre-classical epoch. For Sparta did not experience a tyranny, and its omission of this normal transitional episode lent a peculiar character to its economic and political institutions thereafter, blending advanced and archaic features in a sui generis mould. The city of Sparta at an early date conquered a relatively large hinterland in the Peloponnese, first in Laconia to the east and then in Messenia to the west, and enslaved the bulk of the inhabitants of both regions, who became state ‘helots’. This geographical aggrandizement and social subjection of the surrounding population was achieved under monarchic rule. In the course of the 7th century, however, after either the initial conquest of Messenia or the subsequent repression of a Messenian rebellion, and as a consequence, certain radical changes in Spartan society occurred – traditionally attributed to the mythical figure of the reformer Lycurgus. According to Greek legend, the land was divided up into equal portions, which was distributed to the Spartans as kleroi or allotments, tilled by helots who were collectively owned by the State; these ‘ancient’ holdings were later reputed to be inalienable, while more recent tracts of land were deemed personal property that could be bought or sold.6 Each citizen had to pay fixed subscriptions in kind to commensal syssitia, served by helot cooks and waiters: those who became unable to do so automatically lost citizenship and became ‘inferiors’, a misfortune against which the possession of inalienable lots may have been purposefully designed. The upshot of this system was to create an intense collective unity among the Spartiates, who proudly designated themselves hoi homoioi – the ‘Equals’ – although complete economic equality was never at any time a feature of the actual Spartan citizenry.7
The political system which emerged on the basis of the kleroi farms was a correspondingly novel one for its time. Monarchy never entirely disappeared, as it did in the other Greek cities, but it was reduced to a hereditary generalship and restricted by a dual incumbency, vested in two royal families.8 In all other respects, the Spartan ‘kings’ were merely members of the aristocracy, participants without special privileges in the thirty-man council of elders or gerousia which originally ruled the city; the typical conflict between monarchy and nobility in the early archaic age was here resolved by an institutional compromise between the two. During the 7th century, however, the rank-and-file citizenry came to constitute a full city Assembly, with rights of decision over policies submitted to it by the council of elders, which itself became an elective body; while five annual magistrates or ephors henceforward wielded supreme executive authority, by direct election from the whole citizenry. The Assembly could be over-ruled by a veto of the gerousia, and the ephors were endowed with an exceptional concentration of arbitrary power. But the Spartan Constitution which thus crystallized in the pre-classical epoch was nevertheless the most socially advanced of its time. It represented, in effect, the first hoplite franchise to be achieved in Greece.9 Its introduction is often, indeed, dated from the role of the new heavy infantry in conquering or crushing the Messenian subject population; and Sparta was thereafter, of course, always famed for the matchless discipline and prowess of its hoplite soldiery. The unique military qualities of the Spartiates, in their turn, were a function of the ubiquitous helot labour which relieved the citizenry of any direct role in production at all, allowing it to train professionally for war on a full-time basis. The result was to produce a body of perhaps some 8–9,000 Spartan citizens, economically self-sufficient and politically enfranchised, which was far wider and more egalitarian than any contemporary aristocracy or later oligarchy in Greece. The extreme conservatism of the Spartan social formation and political system in the classical epoch, which made it appear backward and retarded by the 5th century, was in fact the product of the very success of its pioneering transformations in the 7th century. The earliest Greek state to achieve a hoplite constitution, it became the last ever to modify it: the primal pattern of the archaic age survived down to the very eve of Sparta’s final extinction, half a millennium later.
Elsewhere, as we have seen, the city-states of Greece were slower to evolve towards their classical form. The tyrannies were usually necessary intermediate phases of development: it was their agrarian legislation or military innovations which prepared the Hellenic polis of the 5th century. But one further and completely decisive innovation was necessary for the advent of classical Greek civilization. This was, of course, the introduction on a massive scale of chattel slavery. The conservation of small and medium property on the land had solved a mounting social crisis in Attica and elsewhere. But by itself it would have tended to arrest the political and cultural development of Greek civilization at a ‘Boeotian’ level, by preventing the growth of a more complex social division of labour and urban superstructure. Relatively egalitarian peasant communities could congregate physically in towns; they could never in their simple state create a luminous city-civilization of the type that Antiquity was now for the first time to witness. For this, generalized and captive surplus labour was necessary, to emancipate their ruling stratum for the construction of a new civic and intellectual world. ‘In the broadest terms, slavery was basic to Greek civilization in the sense that, to abolish it and substitute free labour, if it had occurred to anyone to try this, would have dislocated the whole society and done away with the leisure of the upper classes in Athens and Sparta.’10
Thus it was not fortuitous that the salvation of the independent peasantry and the cancellation of debt bondage were promptly followed by a novel and steep increase in the use of slave-labour, both in the towns and countryside of classical Greece. For once the extremes of social polarization were blocked within the Hellenic communities, recourse to slave imports was logical to solve labour shortages for the dominant class. The price of slaves – mostly Thracian, Phrygians and Syrians – was extremely low, not much more than the cost of a year’s upkeep;11 and so their employment became generalized throughout native Greek society, until even the humblest artisans or small farmers might often possess them. This economic development, too, had first been anticipated in Sparta; for it was the previous creation of mass rural helotry in Laconia and Messenia that had permitted the bonded fraternity of the Spartiates to emerge, the first major slave population of pre-classical Greece and the first hoplite franchise. But here as elsewhere, early Spartan priority arrested further evolution: helotry remained an ‘undeveloped form of slavery,12 since helots could not be bought, sold or manumitted, and were collective rather than individual property. Full commodity slavery, governed by market exchange, was ushered into Greece in the city-states that were to be its rivals. By the 5th century, the apogee of the classical polis, Athens, Corinth, Aegina and virtually every other city of importance contained a voluminous slave population, frequently outnumbering the free citizenry. It was the establishment of this slave economy – in mining, agriculture and crafts – which permitted the sudden florescence of Greek urban civilization. Naturally, its impact – as was seen above was not simply economic. ‘Slavery, of course, was not merely an economic necessity, it was vital to the whole social and political life of the citizenry’.13 The classical polis was based on the new conceptual discovery of liberty, entrained by the systematic institution of slavery: the free citizen now stood out in full relief, against the background of slave labourers. The first ‘democratic’ institutions in classical Greece are recorded in Chios, during the mid 6th century: it was also Chios that tradition held to be the first Greek city to import slaves on a large scale from the barbarian East.14 In Athens, the reforms of Solon had been succeeded by a sharp increase in the slave population in the epoch of the tyranny; and this in turn was followed by a new constitution devised by Cleisthenes, which abolished the traditional tribal divisions of the population with their facilities for aristocratic clientage, reorganized the citizenry into local territorial ‘demes’, and
