27 Greeks, Democracy and Slavery (650-501 BCE)...

Greeks, Democracy and Slavery (650-501 BCE)...

Athens was a city on the water's edge and, unlike Sparta, it was a city of maritime trade and commerce. But like Sparta it was devoted mainly to agriculture. By the 600's BCE (a century that included the fall of the great Assyrian Empire) Athens governed an area of about twenty-five by fifty miles. And with enough land the Athenians prospered for a while. They were emerging from a time when there was no overcrowding. They launched no wars of conquest. They enjoyed peace as well as prosperity.

Like most other cities in the 600s, Athens was authoritarian and divided by economic classes. It was ruled by an oligarchy. Power within Athens and in the surrounding countryside was distributed among local families of wealth, each ruling over the common people in its locality, providing the kind of protection that the Sicilian Mafia would provide people in the 20th century.

Then came change. With success in agriculture in the 600s came a rise in population. There might have been a problem with rains washing away topsoil, reducing the amount of land for farming, but there was definitely the problem of fathers dividing land among their sons. Trouble was brewing in what was essentially a laissez faire economy. Land was divided into smaller and smaller plots. People were plowing land that was only marginally arable, and over-plowing increased soil exhaustion.

Those who owned and worked small plots of land were at times obliged to borrow money to tide themselves over until their next successful harvest. Money was lent at high interest rates, and across Attica small farms became covered with stones on which mortgage bonds were written. Increasingly, small farmers were working the lands of their debtor, giving up a sixth of their crop to those whom they owed wealth, or they were being sold as slaves abroad – diminishing the population only minimally.

Another source of trouble was the one-third in Athens who were foreign slaves. The availability of slave labor bid down wages. Landless freemen could be hired to work in fields or small shops at what some might call starvation wages. City jobs were also occupied by slaves. People of wealth and the city saw themselves as benefiting from slavery. And those with wealth felt no responsibility for those who had grown poor.

In 621 BCE, while unrest was rising among the poor of Athens, a man named Draco led the ruling oligarchy. Draco had existing laws put into writing. He made a legal distinction between intentionally killing someone and accidental homicide. He used state power to intervene in blood feuds. And for almost everything that the ruling elite considered a crime he devised one penalty: death. Not only were rebellion and murder punished by death, so too were idleness and the stealing of vegetables and fruit. It was from Draco's name that the word Draconian would be derived

If Draco's laws could have been enforced effectively and allowed to work long enough, they might have ended rebellion by killing most of the city's malcontents. But before this could happen, unrest among common Athenians grew, and fearing revolution the elite decided to try appeasement through reform. In the year 594 the elite chose as their leader a 44-year-old fellow aristocrat named Solon. He was one of only a few aristocrats in Athens who was interested in philosophy, and he was religiously devout. He believed in the innate superiority of his own class but he also believed in a justice that was decreed by Zeus for all Athenian citizens.

Solon described Athens as having fallen into "base slavery." Under Solon, slavery was to continue, but he put restrictions on it. Solon prohibited enslavement of the poor and rescued many Athenians who had been sold and sent abroad. He forbade Athenians to sell their children into slavery – except for girls who had committed fornication before marriage. And he made a master responsible for protecting his slaves and liable for his slave's actions.

Solon wished to protect the poor from the rich and the rich from the poor, and using dictatorial powers given him by his fellow aristocrats he overturned Draco's death penalties, except for murder. To preserve the justice of Zeus he increased state intervention in society. He had the state give relief to the poor. He canceled mortgages. He passed a law against debt-bondage. He put an end to tenant farming by returning farms to those who had lost them through debt. And he limited the size of land that any one person could own.

Solon left the aristocracy with much of their land. He also left the aristocracy with top government jobs and seats on ruling bodies. Under his laws only those whose lands produced a certain amount could hold office.

But Solon took a step in the direction of democracy: the Athenian citizen would be given a voice in an assembly. Solon also gave common people a greater role in Athens' system of justice: positions on the city's courts. Judges were chosen by lot so that the poorest people would have their turn sitting with the panel of judges that decided cases. And Solon maintained a check on judges by allowing them to be accused of wrongdoing after their service as judges had ended.

Solon reduced the penalty for idleness to a small fine. He enacted laws to care for widows and orphans. Under Solon it was illegal to strike another person, and parents could be punished for mistreating their children. Under Solon it was illegal to slander others, to use abusive language or to engage in other forms of offensive conduct. Solon outlawed pimping and male prostitution, and he had the city remove the dead from its streets.

Athenian Democracy 

 A Reformer and a Tyrant ·

In the earliest history of the Greek world, as far as anyone can tell, the political landscape consisted of small-time “kings” ruling over their own homes and immediate surroundings. In certain places, individual kings acquired power over larger territories, and influence over neighboring kings. This is what the world depicted in the Homeric epics looks like.

he Athenians thought that the mythological hero Theseus was their first king, and they attributed to him the birth of the Athenian state. Before Theseus, the peninsula of Atticawas home to various, independent towns and villages, with Athensbeing the largest. Theseus, when he had gained power in Athens, abolished the local governments in the towns; the people kept their property, but all were governed from a single political center at Athens. The Greeks called this process of bringing many settlements together into a political unity synoikism ( συνοίκισις ) (See Thuc. 2.15.1-2). Whether or not Theseus had anything to do with this, the fact remains that, when the Greek world moved from prehistory into historical times, the Attic peninsula was a unified political state with Athens at its center.

During the 8th and 7th centuries BCE (the 700s and 600s), Athensmoved from being ruled by a king to being ruled by a small number of wealthy, land-owning aristocrats. Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians, a description of Athenian government, says that the status of “King” (basileus, βασιλεύς ) became a political office, one of three “Rulers” or “Archons” under the new system, and Athens came to be governed by the King Archon, theWar-Lord, and the Archon (this last sometimes called the Eponymous Archon, because the year was identified by his name). “Appointment to the supreme offices of state went by birth and wealth; and they were held at first for life, and afterwards for a term of ten years.” Later, six other Archons were added to the role. These Nine Archons ruled the Athenians, along with the Council of the Areopagus, which consisted of all former Archons, serving on this board for life (See Aristot. Ath. Pol. 3).

In the latter part of the 7th century, perhaps in the 630s, an Athenian named Cylon won the double foot-race at the Olympic Games and became a celebrity. He used his earned fame to gather a group of supporters, seized the Acropolis, and attempted to make himself tyrant of Athens. The attempt was a complete failure and ended with Cylon and his party hiding by the statue of Athene, surrounded by an angry mob. Lured out by promises of their own safety, Cylon and his men were killed by members of the aristocratic family called the Alcmeonidae (see Paus. 1.40.1; Paus. 1.28.1; Paus. 7.25.3; Hdt. 5.71). This was a political crisis, both because of the attempted coup by an upstart and because of his murder by the arisocrats—he had claimed the goddess’s protection, which ought to have been respected. Whether this crisis brought about subsequent political changes we cannot tell, but it certainly left its mark on Athenian politics. The old families could not longer be confident in ruling at will forever, and the stain on the reputation of the Alcmeonidae lasted for hundreds of years—it would cause trouble for Pericles, an Alcmeonid, in the 5th century.

About ten years later, in 621 or 620 BCE, the Athenians enlisted a certain Draco to make new laws for them. According to Aristotle’s description of these laws, the new Consitution gave political rights to those Athenians “who bore arms,” in other words, those Athenians wealthy enough to afford the bronze armor and weapons of a hoplite (see Aristot. Ath. Pol. 4, although some of the details given there may have been invented during the 4th century BCE). Draco’s laws were most notable for their harshness: there was only one penalty prescribed, death, for every crime from murder down to loitering (see Plut. Sol. 17.1). For this reason, later Athenians would find irony in the lawgiver’s name (“Draco” means “serpent”), and his reforms have given us the English word “draconian”.

Draco’s laws did not avert the next crisis, which pitted the wealthy against the poor. Poor citizens, in years of poor harvests, had to mortgage portions of their land to wealthier citizens in exchange for food and seed to plant. Having lost the use of a portion of their land, they were even more vulnerable to subsequent hardships (see Aristot. Ath. Pol. 2.1-2). Eventually, many of these Athenians lost the use of their land altogether, and became tenant-farmers, virtually (or perhaps actually) slaves to the wealthy. The resulting crisis threatened both the stability and prosperity of Athens. In 594, however, the Athenians selected Solon to revise their laws.

Solon’s laws, even though they did not establish a democracy as radical as what would follow, nevertheless became the template for all future Athenian government. It was common for Athenians, for the next 200 years, to describe subsequent legal innovations in terms of their fidelity to the “Solonian Constitution” (whether or not those innovations remotely resembled the laws of Solon). So, after the brief rule of the “Thirty Tyrants” at the end of the 5th century BCE, when the Athenians were restoring their democracy, the first thing they did was to re-affirm the Laws of Solon, using that as a base to reconstruct their damaged constitution (Andoc. 1.83-84).

Solon took steps to alleviate the crisis of debt that the poor suffered, and to make the constitution of Athens somewhat more equitable. He abolished the practice of giving loans with a citizen’s freedom as collateral, the practice that had made slaves of many Athenians (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 9.1). He gave every Athenian the right to appeal to a jury, thus taking ultimate authority for interpreting the law out of the hands of the Nine Archons and putting it in the hands of a more democratic body, since any citizen could serve on a jury (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 9.1; Aristot. Ath. Pol. 7.3). Otherwise, he divided the population into four classes, based on wealth, and limited the office of Archon to members of the top three classes (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 7.3).

Formerly, the Council of the Areopagus, which consisted of formerArchons, chose the Nine Archons each year—a self-perpetuating system that ensured that the office of Archon was held only by aristocrats. Solon had all of the Athenians elect a short-list of candidates for the Archonship, from which the Nine Archonswere chosen by lot (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 8.1); the office was still limited to citizens of a certain class, but it was no longer limited to members of a few families. How, precisely, laws came to be passed under the Constitution of Solon is not entirely clear, but there was an Assembly, in which every citizen could participate (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 7.3), a Council of 400 citizens chosen probably from the top three property classes (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 8.4), with the Areopagus being charged with “guarding the laws” (Aristot. Ath. Pol. 8.4). Regardless of the details, it does seem that the Archons were still a very important element of Athenian government, since (asAristotle notes), in subsequent years, much political strife seemed to focus on them (Aristot.Ath. Pol. 13.2).

So Athens under Solon had many elements that would later be a part of the radical democracy—democratic juries, an Assembly and a Council, selection of officials by lot rather than by vote—while retaining many oligarchic elements in the form of property qualifications and a powerful Council of the Areopagus.

According to the Constitution of the Athenians attributed traditionally to Aristotle, Solon himself was from an aristocratic family, while his personal wealth put him in the middle-class of Athenians, and his sympathy for the injustices against the poor made him a champion of the people generally. This combination was a recipe for tyranny—tyrannies were common in the Greek world during the6th century, as certain individuals made themselves champions of the poor in order to seize power—but Solon was no tyrant. According to Herodotus, after formulating these new laws for a new Athenian Constitution, Solon made the people swear to obey them, unchanged, for ten years, then went abroad from Athens to avoid being badgered into changing anything (Hdt. 1.29.1).