Hundred to preside over the affairs of the city, in combination with the popular Assembly. The 5th century saw the generalization of this ‘probouleutic’ political formula in the Greek city-states: a smaller Council proposed public decisions to a larger Assembly that voted on them, without rights of initiative (although in more popular states, the Assembly was later to gain these). The variations in the composition of the Council and Assembly, and in the election of the magistrates of the State who conducted its administration, defined the relative degree of ‘democracy’ or ‘oligarchy’ within each polis. The Spartan system, dominated by an authoritarian ephorate, was notoriously antipodal to the Athenian, which came to be centred in the full Assembly of citizens. But the essential line of demarcation did not pass within the constituent citizenry of the polis, however it was organized or stratified: it divided the citizenry – whether the 8,000 Spartiates or 45,000 Athenians – from the non-citizens and unfree beneath them. The community of the classical polis, no matter how internally class-divided, was erected above an enslaved workforce which underlay its whole shape and substance.
These city-states of classical Greece were engaged in constant rivalry and aggression against each other: their typical path of expansion, after the colonization process had come to an end in the late 6th century, was military conquest and tribute. With the expulsion of Persian forces from Greece in the early 5th century, Athens gradually achieved preeminent power among the competing cities of the Aegean basin. The Athenian Empire that was built up in the generation from Themistocles to Pericles appeared to contain the promise, or threat, of the political unification of Greece under the rule of a single polis. Its material basis was provided by the peculiar profile and situation of Athens itself, territorially and demographically the largest Hellenic city-state – although only some 1,000 square miles in extent and perhaps 250,000 in population. The Attic agrarian system exemplified the general pattern of the time, perhaps in a particularly pronounced form. By Hellenic standards, big landed property was an estate of 100–200 acres.15 In Attica, there were few large estates, even wealthy landowners possessing a number of small farms rather than concentrated latifundia. Holdings of 70 or even 45 acres were above average, while the smallest plots were probably not much more than 5 acres; three-quarters of the free citizenry owned some rural property down to the end of the 5th century.16 Slaves provided domestic service, field labour – where they typically tilled the home farms of the rich – and artisanal work; they were probably outnumbered by free labour in agriculture and perhaps in the crafts, but constituted a much larger group than the total citizenry. In the 5th century, there were perhaps some 80–100,000 slaves in Athens, to some 30–40,000 citizens.17 A third of the free population lived in the city itself. Most of the rest were settled in villages in the immediate hinterland. The bulk of the citizenry were formed by the ‘hoplite’ and ‘thee’ classes, in respective proportions of perhaps 1:2, the latter being the poorest section of the population, which was incapable of equipping itself for heavy infantry duty. The division between hoplites and thetes was technically one of income, not occupation or residence: hoplites might be urban craftsmen, while perhaps half the thetes were poor peasants. Above these two rank-and-file classes were two much smaller orders of richer citizens, the elite of which formed an apex of some 300 wealthy families at the summit of Athenian society.18 This social structure, with its acknowledged stratification but absence of dramatic crevasses within the citizen body, provided the foundation of Athenian political democracy.
By the mid 5th century, the Council of Five Hundred which supervised the administration of Athens was selected from the whole citizenry by sortition, to avoid the dangers of autocratic predominance and clientage associated with elections. The only major elective posts in the State were ten military generalships, which accordingly went as a rule to the upper stratum of the city. The Council no longer presented controversial resolutions to the Assembly of Citizenry, which by now concentrated full sovereignty and political initiative within itself, merely preparing its agenda and submitting key issues for its decision. The Assembly itself held a minimum of 40 sessions a year, at which average attendance was probably well over 5,000 citizens: a quorum of 6,000 was necessary for deliberations on even many routine matters. All important political questions were directly debated and determined by it. The judicial system which flanked the legislative centre of the polis was composed of jurors selected by lot from the citizenry and paid for their duties, to enable the poor to serve, as were councillors; a principle extended in the 4th century to attendance at the Assembly itself. There was virtually no permanent officialdom whatever, administrative positions being distributed by sortition among councillors, while the diminutive police-force was composed of Scythian slaves. In practice, of course, the direct popular democracy of the Athenian constitution was diluted by the informal dominance of professional politicians over the Assembly, recruited from traditionally wealthy and well-born families in the city (or later from the newly rich). But this social dominance never became legally entrenched or solidified, and was always liable to upsets and challenges because of the demotic nature or the polity in which it had to be exercised. The contradiction between the two was basic to the structure of the Athenian polis, and found striking reflection in the unanimous condemnation of the city’s unprecedented democracy by the thinkers who incarnated its unexampled culture – Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, or Xenophon. Athens never produced any democratic political theory: virtually all Attic philosophers or historians of note were oligarchic by conviction.19 Aristotle condensed the quintessence of their outlook in his brief and pregnant proscription of all manual workers from the citizenry of the ideal State.20 The slave mode of production which underlay Athenian civilization necessarily found its most pristine ideological expression in the privileged social stratum of the city, whose intellectual heights its surplus labour in the silent depths below the polis made possible.
The structure of the Athenian social formation, thus constituted, was not in itself sufficient to generate its imperial primacy in Greece. For this, two further and specific features of the Athenian economy and society, which set it apart from any other Hellenic city-state of the 5th century, were necessary. Firstly, Attica contained the richest silver mines in Greece, at Laureion. Worked mainly by massed gangs of slaves – some 30,000 or so – it was the ore of these mines that financed the construction of the Athenian fleet which triumphed over the Persian ships at Salamis. Athenian silver was from the beginning the condition of Athenian naval power. Moreover, it made possible an Attic currency which – alone among Greek coinages of the time – became widely accepted abroad, as a medium of interlocal trade, contributing greatly to the commercial prosperity of the city. This was further enhanced by the exceptional concentration of ‘metic’ foreigners in Athens, who were debarred from landownership but came to dominate trading and industrial enterprise in the city, making it the focal point of the Aegean. The maritime hegemony which thus accrued to Athens bore a functional relation to the political complexion of the city. The hoplite class of medium farmers which provided the infantry of the polis numbered some 13,000 – a third of the citizenry. The Athenian fleet, however, was manned by sailors recruited from the poorer class of thetes below them; rowers were paid money wages, and were on service eight months a year. Their numbers were virtually equal to those of the foot-soldiers (12,000), and it was their presence which helped to ensure the democratic breadth of the Athenian polity, in contrast to those Greek city-states where the hoplite category alone provided the social basis of the polis.21 It was the monetary and naval superiority of Athens which gave the edge to its imperialism; as it was also these which fostered its democracy. The citizenry of the city was largely exempt from any form of direct taxation: in particular, ownership of land which was legally confined to citizens – bore no fiscal burden whatever, a critical condition of peasant autonomy within the polis. Athenian public revenues at home were derived from state property, indirect taxes (such as harbour dues), and obligatory financial ‘liturgies’ offered to the city by the wealthy. This clement fiscality was complemented by public pay for jury service and ample naval employment, a combination which helped to ensure the notable degree of civic peace which marked Athenian political life.22 The economic costs of this popular harmony were displaced into Athenian expansion abroad.
The Athenian Empire which emerged in the wake of the Persian Wars was essentially a marine system, designed for the coercive subjugation of the Greek city-states of the Aegean. Settlement proper
