Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and the Ancient World
Perry Anderson on The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.
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The appearance of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix's The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World alters, significantly and unexpectedly, the image of materialist history in Britain. Part of this change lies simply in the surprise of the author itself. It would have been reasonable to think that the remarkable company of Marxist historians formed in the years immediately before or during the Second World War had long since become a finite pleiad, its names familiar to every reader of History Workshop Journal. But it is now clear how mistaken such an assumption would have been. Alongside Hill or Hobsbawm, Hilton or Thompson, Ste. Croix must be entered as a comparable magnitude. The paradox is that he is older than any of these. The great work before us - avowedly designed for students of Marx' and the 'general reader' as well as for specialist scholars - was written during his seventh decade.
The second change that Ste. Croix's book brings is to widen once again - one hopes once and for all - the horizons of historical materialism to embrace the classical world as a central field of intellectual enquiry. Raphael Samuel has pointed out how important the 'class struggle in Antiquity' was for the terms of intellectual and political debate among Marxists around 1900 - yet how 'almost entirely forgotten' it became afterwards. The reasons for this shift will have been complex. But among them, ironically, may have been the very rise of 'people's history', in its modern sense. The term lends itself, perhaps inescapably, to national horizons and definitions more easily than to universal ones: for obvious reasons, it is difficult to stretch the notion from, say, the English ‘people’ back to the Roman populus. The peculiar pattern of evidence that has survived from the classical past, too, is drastically taciturn on the lives of the exploited and oppressed - providing little immediate purchase for the kind of detailed and imaginative investigations of them associated with the best of 'history from below'. But whatever its causes, the result of this shift of sensibility and interest has commonly been to separate Classical from 'European' - let alone British - history, in the mental repertoires of many Marxists. Such intellectual separation, of course, itself reproduces the institutional division between Ancient and Modern History (every other type) entrenched in academic departments. The effect of Ste. Croix's work is to overturn this situation. It restores the classical world to a natural and central position within the explanatory universe of Marxism.
It does so, however, in an especially pointed and challenging way. For its proposed reintegration of Antiquity involves more than simply a 'temporal' expansion of materialist historiography: it also invites a reconstruction of its concepts. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is one of the most strenuously theoretical works of history ever to have been produced in this country. Direct exposition and sustained critical discussion of Marxist concepts, at a very high level of analytic rigour, occupy a position in the overall design of Ste. Croix's book without equivalent in the practice of his peers. For that reason alone its repercussions will make themselves felt wherever social classes and the conflicts between them remain an organizing theme in the writing of history. It seems only appropriate that one of the incidental hallmarks (and pleasures) of Ste. Croix's writing should be the liberty and pungency of his topical asides - on the Conservative Party or the Welfare State, the Cold War or the Christian religion.
Two interrelated facts appear to have set Ste. Croix apart from his generation, among Marxist historians. He started his career much later, studying as an undergraduate in his thirties at University College, London (1946-1949), under A.H.M. Jones; and he came to classical studies after a decade of professional life as a solicitor before the War (1931-1939). His first book - his only one till The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World - was a survey of The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, published in 1972. This brilliant study, already revealing many of his gifts and idiosyncrasies, advanced a radical reinterpretation of the springs of the conflict between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC, whose upshot was to shift primary responsibility for the outbreak of the war from the former to the latter, while emphasizing the unappeasable nature of the long-term antagonism between the democratic and oligarchic polities of these two slave-owning societies. Methodologically, the distinctive feature of the book is the extraordinary delicacy and precision of the textual analysis it deploys, in scrutinizing and revising the evidence for the origins of the Peloponnesian conflict. The two tours de force - one technical, the other philosophical- of Ste. Croix's approach here were his demolition of the traditional view of the Megarian decrees (generally seen as vindictive economic reprisals by Athens against a neighbouring city that provoked hostilities in Greece, which he argued were in all probability religious sanctions of rather limited significance, exploited for propaganda purposes by Sparta), and his reconstruction of Thucydides' vision of history at large. His sombre account of the Thucydidean thought-world, especially its conviction of the essential amorality of the relations between states, is of unforgettable power. It alone gives The Origins of the Peloponnesian War enduring importance for the general reader.
In these passages, as throughout the book, the marks of the highest kind of legal training are unmistakable: a capacity to analyse, with the utmost ingenuity and vigilance, the finest nuance and most elusive context, by means of comparison or precedent, in a contradictory set of written documents, in order to arrive at the most plausible final rendition of meaning or event. At the same time, a lawyer's presentation is not always, as everyone knows, the easiest for a layperson. The Origins of the Peloponnesian War shuns the attractions of any narrative. Its chapters are severely organized by problematics, virtually discontinuous from each other, with a minimum of linkage. Discussion of res gestae is constantly interwoven with criticism of accounts of them, in a manner more usual for a specialist article than for a book: other authorities are cited and cross-examined in detail, over many pages, within the body of the text itself. The title bears a somewhat wilful relation to the contents of the book, which include reflections on the end of the Peloponnesian War, and even the fall of Sparta or Athens a century later. Moreover, in what must be some sort of record for a recent historian, indifference to conventional expectations of storytelling, or even argument-setting, generates no fewer than forty-seven appendices, covering well over a hundred pages, after the conclusion the main narrative itself- a formidable cliff for any reader, perhaps even the contemporary classicist, to scale. A more substantive criticism of the book, finally, might be that an element of involuntary advocacy creeps into Ste. Croix's allocation of responsibilities for the Peloponnesian War: Spartan policy, at all events, earns a series of judgements and epithets - 'selfish', 'cynical', 'expansionist', 'aggressive, 'repressive' - from which Athenian is generally exempt, even at times directly exculpated. Here the sympathies of the historian are at variance with the axioms of politics he draws from Thucydides, whose central lesson was that the logic of contention between all states in the ancient world was so implacable that their external policies could by nature never be other than ruthless and rapacious. With more reason to distribute political blame, for a catastrophe from which he suffered himself, Thucydides yielded less to it.
The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is a very different kind of work. Constructed on a monumental scale, it surveys 1400 years of history - from 'Archaic Greece to the Arab conquests' - across 700 pages; and what pages. In a prose of exhilarating sharpness and clarity, Ste. Croix attacks the huge task of unravelling the successive class structures that spanned the evolution of the Ancient World. To this end the book summons up a fabulous range of sources. Classical historians have in some ways always needed to be more polymathic than most of their colleagues, for the stock of evidence that has survived from the Ancient World can be regarded in most respects - effectively all save its archaeological residue - as a closed inventory. Just because that quantity is for many purposes so limited, it tends to impose exceptional qualitative dexterity on those who investigate it: that is, an ability to move - and arbitrate - between different sorts of evidence that in later periods of history would rarely be brought together within the compass of any one programme of research. In The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, these peculiar skills are practised in virtuoso style. Ste. Croix mobilizes his evidence from lyric poems, municipal inscriptions, legal corpuses, imperial constitutions, patristic polemics, narrative annals, philosophical discourses, medical anecdotes, biblical texts, senatorial correspondence, popular tombstones, administrative papyri, numismatic slogans - not indiscriminately, but in each case incisively and critically. Some of the idiosyncrasies of his earlier writing persist. The title of the book is again misleading - more so, indeed, since Ste. Croix in no way confines himself to the 'Greek' world: his treatment of Roman history is actually considerably longer and fuller. Its architecture is less abrupt than that of its predecessor, proceeding from general theoretical and sociological sections (Part I) to sequential historical accounts (Part II). But space is very unevenly distributed within the latter, which themselves contain interpolations of extraneous material, where the author has effectively incorporated the substance of previously written articles into the text. This waywardness often produces some of the most enjoyable passages in the book - such as the splendid excursus on Jesus' relation to the world of the Graeco-Roman polis or on Jewish and Christian attitudes towards women; but it also introduces a certain arbitrary element into the composition of the work as a whole, curiously inseparable from its grandeur.
If these aspects of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World recall The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, the decisive difference lies in the theoretical scope and ambition of the new work. Here too, it is difficult not to see the influence of Ste. Croix's legal formation. It is a commonplace that when historians come to write about historiography and its typically provisional procedures of enquiry, verification and judgement, they have frequently resorted to analogies from law - as opposed, that is, to science. Two of the most recent and famous examples are Edward Thompson's extended metaphor linking historical and legal courts in The Poverty of Theory, and Oscar Handlin's earlier and more comprehensive comparison of the two disciplines, which it in some ways echoes. Yet despite this, in the present century at least, it has been rather rare for a major historian to have any real experience of the law: even most legal historians have not usually been practitioners. This may account for the fact that the conventional construal of wherein juridical virtues lie should have tended to be so partial. The traditional analogies essentially emphasize the empirical dimensions of legal or judicial practice: case-by-case examination of evidence, with attendant protocols of proof. But, of course, law also involves - even preeminently consists of - concepts. Real jurisprudence, in other words, demands the highest capacity for rigorously abstract analysis of formalized categories - their distinction, interrelation, modification. In this respect, it is much closer as a discipline to classical sociology than to most varieties of descriptive or narrative history, as they are usually practised. It is no accident, then, that Ste. Croix should show such an eloquent appreciation of the two-sided demands of any genuine historical materialism - the need, that is, for the Marxist historian 'to reconcile full and scrupulous attention to all forms of evidence for his chosen subject and a study of the modern literature relating to it with a grasp of general historical methodology and sociological theory sufficient to enable him to make the most of what he learns'. Ste. Croix's mastery of evidence has already been noted. Its complement is his command of concepts, his declared and deliberate use of categories of social analysis which are not only precise, in the sense that I can define them, but also general, in the sense that they can be applied to the analysis of other societies'. A large part of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is devoted to the work of systematic clarification and foundation of Marxist social categories, a work performed in no spirit of grudging preliminary penance but with the energy of a natural theoretical temperament.
The central purpose of Ste. Croix's work is to show the material structures of oppression and exploitation which laid the historical basis for successive forms of state and society in Antiquity. A full-colour reproduction of Van Gogh's Potato Eaters, for Ste. Croix 'the most profound and moving representation in art' of the primary producers on the land, serves as frontispiece to the book. 'These are the voiceless toilers, the great majority- let us not forget it - of the population of the Greek and Roman world, upon whom was built a great civilization which despised them and did all it could to forget them.'" To establish the exact and various identities of these toilers, Ste.Croix starts out with a general discussion of class, of far-reaching consequence for theory and history alike. Against the grain of most Marxist historical writing of the sixties and seventies, he insists that class should not be primarily defined as a subjective 'happening', whose essential criteria are therefore cultural consciousness or political autonomy - self-awareness or self-making. Ste. Croix respectfully but firmly rejects the different versions of this position that he finds in the work of fellow-Marxist historians. Classes, he contends, are primarily objective formations, defined by social relationships of exploitation that secure the extraction of surplus labour from the immediate producers. That exploitation may, or may not, generate a sense of collective unity and interest in the exploited - outcomes depending on the determinate possibilities for common action open to them. Consciousness of class identity, in other words, varies enormously among the dominated classes - the dominant classes, by contrast, will always possess a strong measure of it. What will not vary in the same way, however, is the fact of resistance to exploitation: for Ste. Croix, this is the other, equally objective, pole of the relationship constituting social class as such. That resistance, however, need be neither conscious nor collective, nor yet obviously visible in the recorded traces of the past which have survived the filters of prejudice and privilege. Class struggle is inherent in the class relationship itself, as the practices of exploitation, or resistance to them. It thus exists even where 'there may be no explicit common awareness of class on either side, no specifically political struggle at all, and perhaps even little consciousness of struggle of any kind.' Ste. Croix is fully alive to the theoretical and political implications of this position. ‘To adopt the very common conception of class struggle which refuses to regard it as such unless it includes class consciousness and active political conflict (as some Marxists do) is to water it down to the point where it virtually disappears in many situations. It is then possible to deny altogether the very existence of class struggle today in the United States of America or between employers and immigrant workers in northern Europe, and between masters and slaves in antiquity, merely because in each case the exploited class concerned does not or did not have any "class consciousness" or take any political action in common except on very rare occasions and to a very limited degree. But this, I would say, makes nonsense not merely of The Communist Manifesto but of the greater part of Marx's work.
Having defined class in general, Ste. Croix then proceeds to discuss the problem of slavery in the Ancient World, and its position within the Greek and Roman economies. It is well known how much controversy has surrounded this issue in recent years. Roughly speaking, opinion has divided into two camps: those who argue that slavery was constitutive of the nature of Ancient civilization, and point to the structural scale of slave ownership at its peak periods, and those who deny that slavery was central to it, on the grounds that independent or dependent small producers were in general more numerous overall than slaves. Among the latter, some would restrict their claim to classical Greece, or even just Athens, as opposed to the Roman order that ultimately succeeded it. Frequently, though not invariably, tenants of the second position have tended to reduce the slave condition to an essentially cultural or juridical phenomenon, athwart economic divisions - closer to a Weberian 'status' than a Marxist class. Ste. Croix resolves these arguments with a decisive clarification of their terms. The bulk of the labour performed in Antiquity, he maintains, may nearly always have been the work of non-slave producers - whether smallholders, artisans or dependent tenants. But the surplus labour that provided the income and wealth of the dominant classes was essentially extorted from slaves, until the advent of generalized serfdom in the later Roman Empire. Ste. Croix reminds us that it was the latter category which was expressly theorized by Marx as the basis for his periodization of modes of production in history, in Capital and elsewhere: 'What I think has often been overlooked is that what Marx is concentrating on as the really distinctive feature of each society is not the way in which the bulk of the labour of production is done, but how the extraction of the surplus from the immediate producer is secured.
Arraying the uneven but unquestionable evidence for the presence of slave-labour on agricultural estates, not only in the Roman Republic or Principate but in classical Attica as well, Ste. Croix points out that if this is to be regarded as insufficient, then there is far less evidence for any other form of agrarian exploitation by the wealthy in these epochs. 'How then,' he asks, if not by slave labour, was the agricultural work done for the propertied class? How otherwise did that class derive its surplus?' Not merely is there no sign empirically that wage-labour or leasing, the only alternatives, were more widespread: logically too, he demonstrates, neither could have yielded rates of exploitation comparable to the use of slave-labour in the conditions of the time. The conclusion, then, is irresistible. Reinstating the classical Marxist vision of the role of slavery in Antiquity, but now on the basis of the most exhaustive modern scholarship, Ste. Croix sums up: 'Slavery increased the surplus in the hands of the propertied class to an extent which could not otherwise have been achieved and was therefore an essential precondition of the magnificent achievements of Classical civilization. This holds good, he makes clear, for Athenian democracy itself, which well-meaning writers have on occasion sought to absolve from the taint of slavery. Yielding to none in his admiration for that democracy, of which he gives a memorable account, Ste. Croix nevertheless insists that it was a dictatorship by the minority of the population', albeit not a small minority; that just because it was a democracy and the poorer citizens were to some extent protected against the powerful, the very most had to be made out of the classes below the citizens'; and that therefore we need not be surprised if we find a more intense development of slavery at Athens than at most other places in the Greek world: if the humbler citizens could not be fully exploited, and it was inexpedient to try to put too much pressure on the metics, then it was necessary to rely to an exceptional degree on exploiting the labour of slaves.' It was thus no accident that it was slaveowners - 'men liberated from toil' - who 'produced virtually all Greek art and literature and science and philosophy, and provided a good proportion of the armies which won remarkable victories by land over the Persian invaders at Marathon in 490 and at Plataea in 479 BC. In a very real sense most of them were parasitic upon other men, their slaves above all: most of them were not supporters of the democracy which ancient Greece invented and which was its great contribution to political progress, although they did supply almost all its leaders' - what we know as Greek civilization expressed itself in and through them above all.
While the centrality of slavery is copiously documented, it is one of the great strengths of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World that Ste. Croix gives full and proper attention to the various other forms of exploitation characteristic of Antiquity, and to the different types of small producers who were so densely represented within it. Detailed discussions of independent smallholders, free artisans, rural laoi, later coloni, provide a wide panorama of these distinct subordinate classes. 'Two aspects of Ste. Croix's treatment of them perhaps stand out. The first is his contention that laoi or coloni - that is, dependent cultivators tied to the land - can be described without reservation as 'serfs', a term often withheld from them because of its mediaeval connotations. The second is his claim that women in Antiquity must be regarded as a separate class, because their special position in 'the earliest and most fundamental of all divisions of labour', monopolizing the reproductive function (in its broadest sense), made them an exploited group with inferior property and other legal rights, dependent on men.
However numerically and humanly important these other oppressed strata were - preponderant even, in census terms, at most times - for Ste. Croix they do not provide the guiding thread of ancient history. That lies within the exploitative structures of slave-labour itself. For it is part of the principal theme of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World that slavery not only provided the surplus-labour on which the fortunes of the propertied classes were based in the peak periods of Greek and Roman civilization, but also furnishes the explanation for the long-run evolution of the ancient world. Contrasting Marxist theory, which dynamically relates social classes to each other in antagonistic conflicts that generate historical change, with Weberian theory, in which status groups are juxtaposed inertly in a hierarchy without internal tendency or momentum, Ste. Croix argues that one test of the former is precisely its ability to explain, rather than merely describe, the decline and fall of Roman imperial civilization. Much of the second half of his book is devoted to such an explanation. He starts by suggesting, as we have seen, that slavery was generally the most efficient form of extraction of surplus-labour in Antiquity - maximizing the rate of exploitation for the propertied classes, and therefore always preferred by them when circumstances permitted. He then notes, as many other scholars have done before him, perhaps especially Weber, that once the frontiers of the Roman Empire were stabilized after Trajan, the supply of slaves captured in war tailed off, with the result that slave-breeding became more widespread, as landowners strove to maintain the labour force on their estates. At this point, Ste. Croix introduces the crucial link - in his view, hitherto missing - in the causal chain that led to the subsequent colonate, and thereafter to the collapse of the imperial order itself.
To promote more regular reproduction, he argues, slaveowners must perforce have given more leeway to female slaves to bear and bring up children, rather than till the fields, and maintained more female slaves tout court, as well as allowing greater elements of stable cohabitation between the sexes. Such changes from the lop-sided ergastulum of Republican days could only have lowered the rate at which slave-labour as a whole was exploited. "Breeding slaves inside the economy, then, instead of mainly bringing them in from outside, either cheap or even (as a consequence of the enslavement of war captives) virtually gratis, necessarily imposes a greater burden on the economy as a whole, especially in a society like ancient Greece (and Rome), with a high infant and maternal death-rate.' The logical reaction of the propertied classes was then to try to compensate for the declining profitability of slave-labour by extending their mechanisms of extortion to hitherto free labour, and depressing it to a serf-like level: 'The inevitable consequence is that the propertied class cannot maintain the same rate of profit from slave labour, and, to prevent its standard of living from falling, is likely to be driven to increase the rate of exploitation of the humbler free population - as I believe the Roman ruling class now actually did, by degrees.
The result was the series of social and juridical changes that set in from the second century onwards, steadily degrading the position of the lower classes in the Empire - what came to be called the humiliores in the legal terminology that emerged during the Antonine Age, until eventually a uniform class of coloni, including former slaves and smallholders alike, emerged on the land by the fourth century: a population of tied serfs, paying rents to their landowners and taxes to the state. The average rate of exploitation in the new system must have gone down: but its volume, as surplus labour was extracted on a far wider scale in the countryside, undoubtedly went up, as the escalating size of senatorial fortunes, not to speak of imperial indictions or clerical prebends, attests. The result was a social polarization of late Roman society so extreme, thrusting even the bulk of the curial class of provincial gentry downwards, as to fatally weaken its capacity to maintain either vigorous military forces of the Republican type (armies recruited from independent smallholders), or to generate any civilian loyalty and resistance in the face of external enemies. The barbarian invasions could then finish off a social order undone from within, by its own immanent logic.
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Such are the overarching themes of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Space precludes any adequate account of the richness of detail and digression with which they are developed. Nor can any lay reader hope to do more than suggest a few possible queries or qualifications, from within the complex edifice of Ste. Croix's argument itself, as it were. These do not touch on the central theoretical statement of the book. Ste. Croix's redefinition of class, and redrawing of the place of slavery in the class societies of Antiquity, have compelling force. It is difficult to imagine that discussion of either could ever be exactly the same again. Where grounds for further exploration start, is in some of the more strictly historical proposals within his conceptual framework. Three areas stand out here, relating respectively to the frontiers of class, the role of class struggle, and the dynamic of the mode of production in which such struggle may have occurred.
The first raises an issue that is in fact marginal to Ste. Croix's book as a whole, but an absorbing one for all that. Granted his definition of social class, can women in Antiquity have constituted one? Ste. Croix makes his case by two moves. Firstly, he assimilates 'reproduction' to 'production', as simply another form of the latter. Secondly, he emphasizes the inferior legal position of women, as reproducers, in Antiquity - especially their lesser property rights, token of their exploitation by men. 'Greek wives, I have argued, and therefore potentially all Greek women, should be regarded as a distinct economic class, in the technical Marxist sense, since their productive role - the very fact that they were the half of the human race which supported the main part of the burden of reproduction - led directly to their being subjected to men, politically, economically and socially. Ste. Croix remarks in this connection, plausibly enough, that individuals can in principle belong to a plurality of classes, if they combine a number of social roles in their person: but that one of these roles will normally preponderate, and so for most purposes define that person's class identity. The partners and daughters of slaves or smallholders, therefore, could be primarily slaves or smallholders, given the common destitution of both sexes in these groups, whereas the wives or female offspring of slaveowners would be primarily women by class position, given the great disparity of rights between them and their husbands or fathers. 'In Classical Athens I would see the class position of a citizen woman belonging to the highest class as largely determined by her sex, by the fact that she belonged to the class of women, for her father, brothers, husband and sons would all be property owners, while she would be virtually destitute of property rights, and her class position would therefore be greatly inferior to theirs. The humble peasant woman, however, would not in practice be in nearly such an inferior position to the men of her family, who would have very little property; and partly owing to the fact that she would to some extent participate in their agricultural activities and work alongside them (in so far as her child-bearing and child-rearing permitted), her membership of the class of poor peasants might be a far more important determinant of her class position than her sex.
It is possible to doubt the strength of these two arguments. For reproduction, however central a human function it may be in the generation of life, clearly is not production in the conventional sense of the term. It does not provide the necessities of life, still less yield a surplus over and above them; nor is it amenable to any yardstick of 'productivity', for Marx a central criterion for distinguishing any one type of historical economy from another. Moreover, there is obviously something paradoxical in arguing that the only women to form a truly separate exploited class were those from privileged backgrounds. For these were precisely the women who would dispose of domestic servants, generally slaves, not to speak of the other material comforts of wealthy households. What surplus labour was extracted from them, by Ste. Croix's own criteria? The social and cultural discrimination from which they suffered in Greece was, of course, real and grievous enough. But to speak of their 'economic exploitation' seems captious. It might be added that Roman women of the upper class - here, unusually, excluded from the discussion by Ste. Croix - in fact possessed very extensive legal and property rights, enjoying a measure of formal equality with their men that has struck many feminist observers from Simone de Beauvoir onwards. Ste. Croix's discussion of these questions is more tentative than that of his main themes, and he rightly looks forward to further research that may clarify them.
A second area where some readers might feel Ste. Croix's choices of coverage were a trifle disconcerting concern the 'class struggle in Antiquity' itself. For despite its salience in the title of the book, and its foregrounding in Part I, it could be argued that the actual manifestations of class struggle in Part Il, which surveys the historical development of Greek and Roman civilization, are registered rather patchily, at times perhaps even underplayed. The most obvious lacuna here is any account of the great slave rebellions of the Roman Republic. Spartacus earns no more than three passing references; Eunus, leader of the Sicilian rising that preceded the era of Gracchan agitation, receives not one. It might be argued that these fall outside Ste. Croix's brief, as belonging to Roman history prior to its final incorporation of the Greek East. But in fact Ste. Croix devotes a fascinating chapter to class struggles within the citizen body of Republican Rome, from the conflict between 'patricians' and 'plebeians' to the popular tumults against the late oligarchy in the epoch of Cicero and Clodius. Given his own insistence on the centrality of slavery as a class relationship, the pattern of attention here seems inconsistent. For that matter, it might also be objected that the discussion of specifically Greek class struggle - promised by the title - is by comparison unduly terse. Certainly, two of its outstanding episodes are accorded scant space: the successful revolt of the Messenian helots against Sparta, in conjunction with Theban penetration of the Peloponnese, and the extraordinary attempt at social regeneration by a sweeping programme of reforms that included the emancipation of the Laconian helots, of the Spartan king Nabis in the second century BC - an enterprise that unleashed fierce class struggle within the Spartiate body itself. These absences must inspire a special regret, since no historian has displayed a more gripping mastery of Spartan society, in all its intricacy and obscurity, than Ste. Croix himself, in the very substantial sections devoted to it in The Origins of the Peloponnesian War.
In part, the apparent imbalances of topical concentration within the second part of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World no doubt reflect the heterodox temper of the author himself, as impatient of conventional norms of composition as of received notions of any sort. But they also indicate an underlying issue in the treatment of the curve of ancient civilization that warrants further elucidation. Does the class struggle, as Ste. Croix formulates it, provide the direct key to the dynamic of successive classical societies? In Part I, he emphatically claims that it does. The irregularities of Part II, so far at any rate as direct accounts of the resistance of the exploited go, might be a symptom of the difficulties of that claim. The cruces here are obviously the 'destruction of Greek democracy and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire - the two most momentous changes in the political history of Antiquity. What is Ste. Croix's explanation of the first? Why was classical Greek society eclipsed by the end of the fourth century BC? His general answer seems to be that there was an inbuilt tendency for the economically stronger groups within the city-states to increase their political power at the expense of the poorer citizens, which in the long run had to lead to the contraction and subversion of democratic institutions: 'the basic economic situation asserted itself in the long run, as it always does: the Greek propertied classes, with the assistance first of their Macedonian overlords and later of their Roman masters, gradually undermined and in the end entirely destroyed Greek democracy.’ After the turn of the fourth century, he suggests, a 'slow regression' began in Greece: there was widespread and serious poverty among the mass of the people, at the same time as the few rich were perhaps growing richer' (p. 294) - this in a region that never possessed great natural resources anyway. The result was rising social tension and internecine conflicts in many of the city-states. These were then exploited by the Macedonian monarchy, which- given its own aristocratic character - found natural allies in the local propertied classes in its drive into Greece.
How persuasive is such a compressed account? A major drawback of it would seem to be its lack of any sufficiently specific temporal logic. Ste. Croix argues, in both his books, that Greek democracy should be seen essentially as a mechanism whereby the humbler citizens protected themselves against the economic threat to them by the propertied. If successful defence was possible in the fifth century, however, why not also in the fourth? In fact, Athenian democracy did indeed prove relatively stable after the Peloponnesian War. The major change in its operation was not so much any greater power accruing to the rich within the city, as the lesser power rich and poor alike now enjoyed outside the city, with the disappearance of the Athenian Empire. Ste. Croix cites the financial crisis provoked by the stoppage of imperial tribute, and the ensuing difficulty for Athens in mobilizing adequate naval forces. But these factors are not integrated into his main explanation of the 'fall of Greece'. Yet an alternative account of the decline of Hellenic democracy might be constructed in terms, not so much of internal social polarization within the polis, as of the external limitations of the democratic state-form in Antiquity, which - just because of its radically direct character, exemplified above all at Athens - could never transcend municipal size without contradicting itself by issuing into an imperial domination over other cities. Only such domination, however, could provide it with sufficient territorial and material resources to compete militarily with centralized monarchies or oligarchic republics. In this sense, loss of empire may be said to have doomed Athens, and with Athens the smaller cities that maintained popular constitutions in its shadow.
The immediate agent of their downfall, however, was the Macedonian monarchy, treated by Ste. Croix as a more or less exogenous force in the whole process. But this understates the degree of symbiosis between urban Greece and its tribal periphery: the increasing strength and sophistication of the Macedonian polity and nobility under Philip I was itself the product of a cumulative acculturation within the orbit of classical civilization proper, in the peninsula. Classical Greece drew its own destroyer onto it, in this sense. The struggle that was directly at stake here, it might be said, was one between ruling groups: a mountain aristocracy and municipal citizenries. While Macedonian policy was indeed socially and politically conservative in Greece, ruling out radical innovations in the cities that fell under its control, it is significant that it showed no immediate hostility to Athenian democracy as such, once its suzerainty was established over it; as Ste. Croix concedes, neither Philip II nor Alexander interfered in any way with the Athenian constitution. It was not until the Lamian War, a generalized Greek revolt against Macedonian rule after Alexander's death, that Antipater temporarily imposed a more oligarchic regime on Athens - even then a fairly broad one, based on a hoplite census. But, of course, the vitality of any municipal polity could not in the long run survive the abolition of external autonomy, and the classical institutions of Greek democracy inevitably became ever more convulsed and weakened within the new Hellenistic universe of royal overlords, until finally Roman conquest effectively put an end to them.
If we now turn to the decline of the Roman imperial order itself, Ste. Croix's account does not this time take as its point of departure the class struggle as such. It is a systemic contradiction, rather than social struggle, that sets in motion the secular process of dissolution. A decline in the supply of slave-labour, consequent on low rates of internal reproduction, leads to offsetting attempts at slave-breeding which decrease the rate of exploitation, thus necessitating a complementary depression of free labour to sustain overall levels of surplus extraction. The major manifestations of class struggle between slaves and their owners - slave revolts - play no causal role here. This is surely why they figure so fleetingly in Ste. Croix's text: they bear little or no explanatory weight. Empirically, the soundness of Ste. Croix's judgement here brooks little doubt. Attempts to make of slave resistance – in a recent version, if not rebellion then mass desertion - the lever of the diminution of slavery in the Ancient World are uniformly unconvincing. The real mechanisms, indicated by Ste. Croix, rather form an instance of that other fundamental theme of historical materialism: namely, that modes of production change when the forces and relations of production enter into decisive contradiction with each other. The maturing of such a contradiction need involve no conscious class agency on either side, by exploiters and exploited - no set battle for the future of economy and society; although its subsequent unfolding, on the other hand, is likely to unleash relentless social struggles between opposing forces. This is, in fact, just the sequence that Ste. Croix's interpretation of the final centuries of Antiquity tends to suggest. It is striking how closely the theoretical and historical issues here resemble those posed by the dissolution of feudalism a millennium later. There too, Marxist writers - the most illustrious was Maurice Dobb - have sometimes been inclined to read the crisis of the late mediaeval economy as the direct outcome of class struggle between lords and peasants, with ever mounting exactions of the former leading to a collapse of production by the latter. In fact, the demographic and ecological limits of the feudal mode of production in Western Europe cannot be ignored in an analysis of its contradictory logic: it was the objective deadlock they imposed on the societies of the fourteenth century, as forces of production struck against insuperable barriers within existing relations of production, that precipitated the economic disasters of the time, which then set off the most spectacular episodes of pitched conflict on the land.
The capital difference between the two processes, mediaeval and ancient, was of course that the one led to general emancipation o fthe direct producers in the countryside, the other to their general subjection - final exit as against initial entry into a serf-like condition, as it were (provided all the discontinuities and dissimilarities between villeins and coloni are remembered). To note this is to register some of the unsolved problems of the slow change of labour system in the later Roman Empire. The formidable cogency of Ste. Croix's reconstruction of the shift from slavery to colonate as predominant form of surplus extraction - superior to any alternative account available - rests more on logical deduction than on any empirical documentation. Given the absence of sources, this could not be otherwise. But it is in the nature of his argument to raise a number of further questions about the process it offers to explain. The first of these concerns the issue of slave reproduction. The central thrust of Ste. Croix's argument is that slave-breeding, increasingly necessary once the great windfalls of conquest ceased, was economically less profitable than slave capture - hence the pressure to complement it with depression of tenants or smallholders, if the income of the propertied classes was to be preserved.Could there have been a cultural spur to this change as well? Ste. Croix emphasizes, in his discussion of Greek slavery, the crucial advantages to slaveowners of a labour force that was ethnically not only alien but also heterogeneous, at once demarcated from the rest of the population and deprived of common springs of resistance. It was the absence of these two qualities, he writes, which rendered the Messenian helots so much more dangerous than Attic slaves ever were. The vast bulk of Roman slaves, as the empire expanded, were of course constituted from non- Latin peoples. There too, when there occurred an unduly large concentration of captives from any one region, enslaved and imported into Italy, insurrection could break out in Republican days: the revolt led by Eunus, for example, massed recent prisoners from Syria and Asia Minor in common resistance in Sicily. But after the Augustan Age, the relative stabilization of the workforce must - in the absence of any colour bar - have led to widespread assimilation, in language and customs, between slaves and free poor over large areas of the Western Empire. An episode like the plebeian riots in protest against a mass execution of domestic slaves in Rome under Nero, cited by Ste. Croix, suggests such a cultural convergence. In these conditions, it may be wondered whether one of the further limitations of slave-breeding as a remedy to supply shortages was not its tendency to weaken ideological and coercive control over the slave population itself, which as time went on would become ever less immediately distinguishable as such - perhaps facilitating flight, if not manumission (always higher in the Latin than in the Greek world anyway, possibly for reasons to do with Roman patterns of patronage, in Ste. Croix's view), while at the same time rendering the poor free population ever less perceptibly separate from the slave. Here might lie one of the ancillary reasons for the social and juridical changes of the Antonine epoch.
However that may be, the consequence of these changes was vastly to extend the network of rural exploitation. The second question that Ste. Croix's account brings home very sharply is how this exploitation was organized. Two distinct problems are involved here. How was the surplus actually extracted from the immediate producers? How was it realized by the ultimate exploiters? The adjectives require emphasis here, because the obscurity of each process lies essentially ni the intermediary agents and mechanisms ensuring them. Ste. Croix does not address the first problem directly. We know from the detailed descriptions in Columella how a slave villa was supposed to function in the first century AD: through an elaborate division of the workforce itself, involving a hierarchy of supervisory, skilled, unskilled and chained slaves, toiling in small labour teams each with their own drivers, coordinated by foremen and commanded by the bailiff or villicus. Differentiation of rank, cooperation oftask, and invigilation of rhythm, backed by lash and fetter, made up the prescriptive model of slave agriculture, whose average units of exploitation were probably no more than 150-200 acres. This transparency, however, disappears once the focus shifts to the way in which slaveowners marketed the produce of their estates: as Ste. Croix comments, in an important passage, 'we have extraordinarily little evidence about this kind of activity'. He goes on to agree that landowners wil have typically sold their output (corn, oil, wine) on local markets. But this only compounds the mystery of the administration of very large fortunes on the land, since these frequently involved a wide scatter of estates - which, in the late Republic or early Principate, say, might be distributed up and down the length of Italy. How was the income from such disparate sources effectively gathered and centralized?
This issue, far from clear for the period of large-scale slave agriculture itself, becomes more acutely perplexing once a shift to the colonate has occurred. For on the one hand, direct supervision of the labour process by landowners necessarily declined, and with it the extraction of surplus at the point of production itself. But on the other hand, fi the rate of exploitation decreased, the range of exploitation actually increased with the generalization of predial dependency in the Later Empire. Ste. Croix, in one of the most arresting statements in his book, writes: 'There is one phenomenon in particular which strongly suggests that in the Roman empire the peasantry was more thoroughly and effectively exploited than in most other societies which rely largely upon peasant populations for their food supply. It has often been noticed that peasants have usually been able to survive famines better than their towndwelling fellow-countrymen, because they can hide away for themselves some of the food they produce and may still have something to eat when there is starvation in the towns. It was not so in the Roman empire - there, again and again we find peasants crowding into the nearest city in time of famine, because only in the city is there any edible food to be had. What he does not perhaps sufficiently underline, however, is the fact that all the examples he gives date from the epoch subsequent to the decline of slavery, or fourth to sixth centuries AD. The extraordinary 'efficiency' of the agrarian exploitation of the ruling class in this age finds confirmation, on the other side of the coin, in the gigantic size of senatorial fortunes in the Western Empire - by the fourth century some five times larger on average than those of the first century.
Yet how were these enormous sums levied from the immediate producers? What immensely ramified systems of rent collection, enforced by which forms of compulsion, operated by how many levels of intermediaries, secured the steady, lethal puncture of so many peasant livings in countless remote regions, without good transport or communications, to the profit of a magnate family in Rome? The geographical scale of the process, at its maximum reaches, was more like that of a modern multinational corporation than of any conceivable medieval holding. Melania, a noblewoman of the early fifth century, owned estates in Campania, Apulia, Sicily, Tunisia, Numidia, Mauretania, Spain and Britain: literally transcontinental domains. On these estates were still thousands of slaves; but many more will have been coloni. By what channels was their produce converted into her income of 1600 pounds of gold a year? Ste. Croix makes a point of calling colon 'serfs', but their relationship to their landlords never approached the potent ideological compact of medieval serfdom, lacking either the feudal rights of the seigneur over the family of the villein (merchet, heriot, etc.) or the loyalties owed by the villein to the juridical authority of the lord. Yet, pressed less close to the ground, the Roman system yielded more.
Part of the reason why it could do so, of course, was the sheer weight of the late Imperial State itself. This figures less directly in Ste. Croix's concluding chapters than perhaps it is entitled to do. At any rate, there is no analysis as such of the deep and prolonged crisis of the Empire in the third century AD, between the death of Alexander Severus and the elevation of Diocletian, when endemic anarchy, invasion, plague and inflation seemed to threaten its existence for fifty years. The structural approach - by problematic, rather than period - preferred by Ste. Croix bypasses this watershed. It may in fact be the case that sources are so scant for these broken years - Jones compared them to a black tunnel - that no useful hypotheses can be advanced about their overall meaning. But the coincidence between their timing and the transition in the countryside seems unlikely to have been fortuitous. Any history that sacrifices narrative too austerely will pay a certain price for its analytic clarity. In this case, the cost is any close reflection on the metamorphosis of the imperial state in the third century, which yet must be of central relevance to Ste. Croix's own explanatory purpose. It looks as if a kind of servomechanism may have been at work in this epoch. The great increase in the size of the imperial army and bureaucracy must have borne some relation to the enhanced capacity of the propertied classes to squeeze the peasantry ever more pervasively; the central apparatus of repression and coercion was enormously strengthened by the end of these decades. On the other hand, the growth of this apparatus in turn put remorseless further pressure on the same direct producers, in the shape of the much greater fiscal burden imposed for its upkeep - so depressing their economic position sharply in its own right, and thereby rendering them evermore liable to fall into the servitude of the colonate. The fourth and fifth century phenomenon of the patrocinium points very clearly to this dialectic: peasants 'voluntarily' putting themselves at the mercy of a landowner, to secure some relief from the attentions of the tax collector. It is necessary to keep the complex logic of this circuit in mind. If Finley - with whom Ste. Croix polemicizes unremittingly, and exaggeratedly - unduly hypostatizes what he calls 'the iron law of absolutist bureaucracy that it grows both in numbers and in cost, as a virtually supernal process detached from the determinate functions of such bureaucracy, Ste. Croix for his part fails to allow sufficiently for the degree of autonomy that the imperial state henceforward acquired from the aristocratic class that it served, by its very overhaul.
For while the socio-economic privileges of the late imperial nobility were fortified and extended under the bureaucratic canopy of the Dominate, its political power was clipped where it had once most counted - in the military machinery of the state, which now acquired quite novel proportions (an army of over 600,000 to a civilian bureaucracy of about 30,000). The senatorial order was excluded from military commands by Diocletian, and never recovered them. The result in the West, where the aristocracy was wealthiest and most powerful, seems to have been widespread indifference by the rich to the defence needs of the state in the face of external pressures or emergencies- an indifference expressed in generalized tax evasion, withholding of conscripts and hostility to the professional officers (by now often of barbarian origin) trying to muster imperial forces in the region. Ste. Croix argues that it was the disappearance of an independent peasantry that undermined the vitality of the Roman armies during the fifth century. But in fact conscription, reintroduced under the Dominate, produced a large and relatively reliable military machine, whose soldiers enjoyed a series of material privileges that set them above the mass of the peasantry from which they came. After contending that the morale (and probably the physique) of the army deteriorated because of the debasement of the peasantry, Ste. Croix concedes a few pages later that the army of the late Empire "developed a most remarkable discipline and esprit de corps of its own: the rank-and-file soldiers became entirely detached from their origins and were usually the obedient instruments, if not of their emperors, then of their actual officers - which seems closer to the mark. While popular apathy towards the barbarian invasions is manifest as a civilian phenomenon, it was patrician alienation that affected most directly the strictly military capabilities of the Roman order in the west. The armies gave a good account of themselves so long as they were kept up to strength. It was when they were neglected, in the final decades of the fourth century, under a series of emperors who were little more than aristocratic figureheads, that disaster struck.
Even so, the Empire did not fall simply from its own internal weaknesses. External assaults were the necessary agent of its execution. Here again Ste. Croix's picture of the process of decline needs to be complemented by some reference to the historical changes in the barbarian periphery of the Empire. The increasing pressure from the Germanic peoples in the north, from the third century onwards, cannot have been unconnected with the economic, political and cultural impact on them of the magnetic civilization to their south. Growing social differentiation and military sophistication were bound to be concomitants of any long-term proximity of primitive tribal societies to an advanced urban and commercial culture of the classical type. Here Ste. Croix's account needs to be complemented by the outstanding work that documents just this process, by his fellow-Marxist historian Edward Arthur Thompson – one of the most original contributions to classical studies since the war. In fact, the evidence he himself marshals - in a valuable Appendix on barbarian settlers within the Empire prior to its fall, who he reckons numbered hundreds of thousands' - speaks directly of the creeping interpenetration of the two worlds. In this sense, an analogy could be ventured with the fall of Greece. Just as the latter developed at a distance its backward periphery in Macedonia, and thereby eventually drew its conqueror down upon itself, so the fall of Rome ultimately occurred when its rudimentary borderlands in Germany had evolved, under the force of its attraction, social and military forces capable of overwhelming it in its extremity. The difference, of course, was that Macedonia was politically a centralized monarchy and culturally a Hellenized society, sharing language and traditions with a classical Greece still intellectually and civically vigorous- the result being the great expansion of Hellenistic civilization; whereas the Germanic invaders were no Latinate country cousins, but still loose tribal confederations, while classical Roman society had long since been hollowed out from within - the result being the Dark Ages.
Recollection of these external aspects of the collapse of the Western Empire, however, does not alter the essential conclusion to which Ste. Croix conveys us at the end of his long work. 'As I see it,' he writes, 'the Roman political system facilitated a most intense and ultimately destructive exploitation of the great mass of the people, whether slave or free, and it made radical reform impossible. The result was that the propertied class, the men of real wealth, who had deliberately created this system for their own benefit, drained the life-blood from their world and thus destroyed Graeco-Roman civilization over a large part of the Empire - Britain, Gaul, Spain and north Africa in the fifth century; much of Italy and the Balkans in the sixth; and in the seventh, Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia, and again north Africa, which had been reconquered by Justinian's generals in the sixth century. That, I believe, was the principal reason for the decline of Classical civilization. This summing-up, with its emphasis on the main lineaments of the process, can be accepted entirely. Characteristically, in an explicit contrast with the dictum of his gifted non-Marxist colleague Peter Brown, that 'the prosperity of the Mediterranean world seems to have drained to the top' by the fourth century, Ste. Croix concludes: 'If I were in search of a metaphor to describe the great and growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper classes, I would not incline towards anything so innocent and so automatic as drainage: I should want to think in terms of something much more purposive and deliberate - perhaps the vampire bat.’ That judgement is unlikely to be forgotten.
This is an edited excerpt from A Zone of Engagement.
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