1. Land and City

Cities play an indisputably dominant role in modern life. They visibly decide the development of modern society. It would thus seem that once urban communities arose, they quickly achieved a leading position and, like our own cities, entered into an overbearing antagonism with the countryside.

But there was a time when urban life was either subordinated to or in balance with the countryside. The development of social relations through much of precapitalist history’did not definitively depend upon the development of city life until the late Middle Ages, when cities became the precursors of an authentic bourgeois economy. It is easily forgotten that most of human history is occupied with women and men as food cultivators, and that the social wealth of the past came primarily from agricultural pursuits. Moreover, agrarian society was itself the product of a long and complex evolution, involving different forms of land tenure and social relations. From the more or less communal forms of horticulture practiced by early clans and tribes, agrarian society advanced through the Asian land system with its paramount monarchies to feudalism and to an agricultural society based on an independent peasantry. The problems of this long period were, primarily agrarian problems and the greatest economic weight lay not in cities but in the countryside, or at least among social classes based on the land.

All cities constitute an antithesis to the land. They are a break in the solidity of agrarian conditions, a germ of negalion in the agrarian community. At the same time, however, rural life summons forth the city from its own inner development as a division of labor between crafts and trade on the one hand, and relatively self-sufficient agriculttural communities on the other. The emerging city begins by reflecting the social relations in the countryside so that there are different cities more or less corresponding to different forms of agrarian society. In various phases of social development, the City is raised from a distinctly subordinate position to one of equilibrium with the countryside and may remain so for long periods of time or, after overstepping the limits of its rural base, finally yield to the hegemony of the land when the two become clearly incompatible. Viewed over most of precapitalist history, city life did not have as complete an urban basis as it seems to have today. Urban centers were largely the foci of surrounding agrarian relations. They were horticultural clan cities, Asian cities. Feudal cities, and even peasant and yeoman cities. Urban life could be clearly understood only by searching back to the economic relationships that prevailed in the agricultural environs. Although city life acquired social forces of its own and often entered into contradiction with the land, the agrarian economy established, the historical limits for almost every Urban development.

This can be demonstrated quite clearly by a number of examples, An illustration of the earliest cities can be drawn from descriptions of the Aztec “capital” of Tenochtitlan, encountered by Spanish conquistadores only three centuries ago. At first glance, the community is deceptively similar in appearance to a modern city. Although architecture and the design of life were “exotic,” the dimensions of the city, the height of its structures, and the lateness of its discovery by white men seem to place it closer to the end rather than the beginning of urban history. According to George C. Vaillant, to the Spanish invaders who first saw it, “in contrast to the drab towns and tawny bills of Spain, Tenochtitlan must have appeared a paradise, for its green gardens and white buildings were set in the midst of blue lakes, ringed by lofty mountains.” [2] Vaillant quotes Bernal Diaz, one of Cortes’s soldiers:

Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one Side in the land were great Cities and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the City of Mexico.[3]

But Diaz was not a provincial gazing spellbound at a cosmopolis, nor were the towns of Spain merely villages by comparison with Tenochtitlan. A closer, perhaps intellectually more ruthless view suggests that the brilliance of the Mexican city consisted largely of externals The city’s resemblance to a modern urban center rests on its lofty religious structures, its spacious plazas for ceremonies, its palaces and administrative buildings. Looking beyond these structures, the city in many respects was very likely a grossly oversize pueblo community

It would be difficult to understand clearly the nature of Tenochtitlan without directing attention to the clan structure and horticultural basis of Aztec society. Although the city was unusually large for such a traditional society, the horticultural activities of the clans reached directly into the urban community. Together with religious and military affairs, the coordination of clans for social and economic activities formed the major interest of the city’s governing bodies. So complete was the integration of land and city, indeed the supremacy of agrarian interests over uniquely urban ones, that the Aztecs never quite developed money. Exchange normally proceeded on a barter basis — that is to say, on a village basis — ’equalized, by cacao beans when the value of one commodity exceeded that of another. The city dweller was born into a complex body of social relationships that essentially developed from life on the land. His position in society was defined by hereditary roots in groups of kinfolk and blood relationships. The clan formed the matrix of the Aztecs civic, social, and cultural life.

The city, to be sure, differentiated a sizable portion of the populace from their older agrarian elan ties, creating craftsmen and traders. But these groups were also obliged to participate in the traditional social scheme, formally duplicating relationships developed in the countryside. Vaillant observes:

The opening of intertribal contact through settlement and warfare and the growth of material and ritualistic wants led to the establishment of a class, the pochteca. whose members traveled all over Mexico, exchanging local for foreign produce. [4]

The pochteca, however, “had their own god, and apparently lived in a special quarter” in a manner similar to other clans in the community. They held a position within the city or as part of it, not as its leaders; they did not represent the city like the burghers in the medieval towns and the modern bourgeoisie.

Although a centralized monarchical “capital,” Tenochtiilan was managed by four executive officers and a variety of nobles who adjudicated disputes between the clans and cared for military affairs. Within this infrastructure, from the lowest lineages to the highest, power was a function of a very complex social stratification. Vaillant notes that the

continual election of such high officers of the same family or lineage, when democratic procedure obtained elsewhere, is harder to explain. Tradition is strong in primitive communities, and a family that produced one effective man might in the next generation produce another.[5]

More recent evidence reveals that the “democratic procedure” to which Vaillant gives so much emphasis had in fact waned to a point where the city council of Tenochtitlan, once a fairly democratic body composed of clan loaders, was appointed by the monarchy and largely controlled by the ruling stratum, By the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec society had become a highly complex hierarchy of nobles and commoners, a hierarchy Still based on kin ties and superimposed on a clan structure, but one that may have been drifting toward art increasingly territorial form of social life. How fair the society might have developed in this direction — or, quite possibly, in the direction of a rigid centralized structure similar to the “state communism” of the Inca empire — will never be known. The Spanish conquest brought the Aztec development to an end and completely demolished its internal Structure.

This urban society, viewed from the standpoint of its clan relationships, may have existed for centuries in Mesoamerica before it was encountered by white men. The Aztec and Inca empires seem to have marked the culmination of the Indian urban tradition in the Americas, perhaps its outermost limits. Generally, throughout Mesoamerica, as one city arose, another declined in eminence; a continual rising arid falling of cities was the rule. Once the old administrative structure was demolished in a given area — perhaps owing to land exhaustion or war — the city disappeared, only to reappear elsewhere when Favorable conditions for urbanism developed. These cities arose, flourished, and often vanished without abolishing the clan structure.

It is fair to say that the American Indian city up to the Spanish conquest was essentially rooted in the clan or in similar kinship structures. As time passed and as populations increased, a tendency emerged to extend the “plan of government” (to borrow Lewis H. Morgan’s phrase) from clan to tribe and from tribe to tribal federation. This tendency must be seen as a quantitative linking of clan to clan, a colonization by social affinity of relatively self-sufficient, socio-natural organisms along increasingly hierarchical lines. Attempts to relate the Aztec and Inca empires to the historical city and landed aristocracy of Europe, despite their many similarities, are often misleading. An American Indian analog to the historical cities of Europe and the Mediterranean basin would be meaningful if clan society had so completely decomposed that it yielded a class society based on territorial rather than kinship ties and eventually on the private ownership and control of social wealth. No such qualitative transformation actually occurred in Mesoamerica before the conquest. Generally, where the pressures of scarcity and survival abated in parts of Indian America, there emerged a fairly unified community, often superficially urban in character, that tended to integrate rather than exacerbate internal divergences. “There was little to harass the individual intellectually or economically,” observes Vaillant,

Existence was subject to divine favor, and a man fared much as did bits fellows. Large as some towns were — Mexico City [Tenochtitlan] had 300,000 people — the sense of community was strong. Freedom of thought, individual liberty, personal Fortunes, were nonexistent, but people lived according to a code that had worked well and continuously for centuries. An Aztec would have been horrified at the marked isolation of an individual’s life in our Western world. [6]

Viewed from the base of society, the clan established the limits of this type of urban life. The city was the product of the clan and was seen as the shelter of the clan’s federative tendencies.

History, conceived as the account of conflicting social interests, begins when the external means for expropriating material surpluses (notably, war and pillage) are internalized as systematic modes of exploitation, restructuring the clan and transforming social life from within. Society’s transcendence of the clan is the greatest and most significant Single development of the ancient world. Humanity is exiled from a harmonized universe to the realm of social contradiction, where the problems of material want are Fell as harsh antagonisms between one stratum and another. Society becomes one-sided and incomplete, disrupting the balance within the human community and between humanity and the natural world. Mankind is propelled on a restless journey to round out social life on a higher equilibrium. It should not surprise us that the internal reworking of the clan, and later, its complete destruction, involves a more decisive technological revolution than any development known before. The division of tabor expands and new strata are set apart from agricultural work, each of which crystallizes into a social class with special interests that are often in sharp opposition to the interests of other classes.

So far removed, as yet, are the early cities from the urban mainstream of history that changes in clan society arise from technological developments in the countryside rather than in the towns, notably the domestication of animals and the discovery of plow agriculture. With this new mode of agriculture, the clan ceases to be a precondition for social life. To have eliminated the clan in Indian America would have completely disrupted the material basis of society: without a highly dedicated, socially responsible labor force that alone could have provided the intensive cultivation required by maize and by a technology that had not advanced beyond the hoe and human muscle power, it is doubtful if the substantial material surpluses needed to sustain large cities would have been available in Mexico and Peru. Indian food cultivation on such a scale was possible only under social conditions in which people related to each other as kinfolk rather than isolated urban citizens. The significance of the clan structure becomes all the more evident if we hear in mind that food cultivation in areas like the Peruvian Andes depended in large part on terracing barren mountainous regions with soil painstakingly collected from distant lowlands. As Edward Hyams observes, owing to the fact that

they were Forced, in the Andes ... to create their soils in order to expand, ... they were forced to retain ... the ancient structure of society, at least in so far as it related to systems of land-tenure and land working. In the absence of machinery or of an advanced slave-owning economy, large works of terracing, or reclamation and of irrigation can only be carried out by communal efforts and common labor.... There has probably never been, unless under European Feudalism, a system in which agricultural practice and social organization were so locked together in a perfect artifact of the mind and spirit And nothing makes this clearer than the results which followed the imposition of the European system and religion on the Andeans. The soil was not directly attacked for the Spaniards were at first interested only in gold, but the social organism was destroyed and at once the soil itself began to die. [7]

With the discovery of the plow and the broadcast sowing of hardy grains in the Near East — as well as the general application of animal labor to the tilling of the land — agriculture became extensive rather than intensive. Food cultivation now required a fraction of the work needed to achieve corresponding outputs in the Americas. But if the elan was no longer a limit to further social changes, neither was it, at least initially, an obstacle. Indeed, it persisted as a basic form of social relationship and labor mobilization well into historical times. Here, were would do well to emphasize that humanity does not casually change its social structures, particularly if they have been sanctified by millennia of development and the weight of tradition. Retrospectively, we might comfortably entertain many alternative’s to the historical development that actually occurred, perhaps to suggest more rational and humanistic lines of social evolution. But if nothing else, history teaches us that old institutions are rarely changed until their possibilities have been largely exhausted. Clan society was especially durable. Even where it exists today, it remains the most stable form of human association thus far developed. Perhaps no institution following it Fostered as deep a sense of solidarity, mutual aid, and supportive comfort to the individual. Owing to their natural basis in kinship ties, clans proved to be the most intimate and perhaps satisfying social forms devised by humanity. Accordingly, the clan tended to perpetuate itself against compelling social forces that easily overwhelmed or drastically altered other Forms of human association.

At first, the new plow and field economy did not appreciably alter the social Forms based on the hoe and gardening economy of an earlier epoch. The evolution of one system into another, in Fact, proceeded so subtly and organically that it is often difficult to delineate the social distinctions between the two. Variations occurred in communal property and in the old nature religions, but communal systems of property persisted For a long time under new forms of social administration. Even the clans lingered on vestigially, if not intact, well into advanced historical periods. Formally speaking, the successors of the traditional clan system emerged when tribal chiefs, prominent warriors, or a consolidated priestly caste succeeded in becoming the solo proprietors of the land. They seasonally allocated plots for cultivation among the clansfolk, and collected agricultural surpluses presumably for use by the community as a whole. The change from the old social forms to the new assumed the character of a shift in emphasis rather than a total rupture with the past — a change in the original communal system that seemed to consist in enlarging its social functions and dimensions.

In time, however, the clan form was so thoroughly divested of its original content as the determining factor in social Life that it became little more than a device for allocating labor and resources. Claus lost virtually all of their influence in the administration of the community. In the hands of ruthless authorities, clans often became the instruments of their self-exploitation and plunder, The change from older equalitarian relations in Egypt and Mesopotamia to new systems of exploitation and class stratification was not quite accepted passively by the oppressed; indeed, the archaeological record attests to widespread popular revolts and interregnums of social disorder in which futile attempts were made to restore the old order of things. Interestingly, apart from separatist tendencies and uprisings by conquered populations, no internal social conflicts of such magnitude are known t o the civilizations of Indian America, for the preoccupation of dominated tribes in this region was not with the social structure as such, notably its clan form, but with the tribute which was claimed by domineering tribes such as the Aztec rulers of Mexico.

We owe largely to Marx the term “Asian land system” as the designation of a mode of agriculture in which land is still inalienable, indeed communally worked, but its management is controlled by a powerful state apparatus. [8] Possibly the most archaic of class societies, its elements tend to appear whenever tribal society has begun to disintegrate and the need for viable clan structures has been removed by the economic development of the community. The Asian land system appears not only in early Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in a nascent form when agrarian kingships were established over the Greek, Roman„ and German tribes during the era of their settlement on the land. In all such cases, we see evidence that society is trying to formulate a compromise between a time-honored tradition that land is inalienable and belongs to the community as a whole with new tendencies toward private proprietorship in land or, at least, control of agricultural surpluses by a privileged stratum. Within these archaic parameters, exploitation of human by human emerges even before private property in land and resources has been firmly established. With the Asian land system, we encounter a society that enjoys a durability comparable to that of the clan structure: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, it remained the basis of social relations For thousands of years; indeed, apart from Mesopotamia;, it was not substantially eroded until: fairly modern times. Nor is it difficult to understand why these civilizations, largely alluvial ones, failed to advance into propertied forms of Society, Irrigation, by virtue of its technical requirements, festers cooperative if not public forms of agricultural management.[9] In the ancient world, a world stilt heir to social ownership of land and a communal organization of labor, a society based on irrigation necessarily retained elements of the archaic clan and tribal structure, albeit in a highly centralized statist framework. Insofar as the cultivation of food required the coordinated management of water resources and an extensive system of canals, any regional particularism — much less any development of private property — would have vitiated the success of agriculture. Christopher Dawson observes:

The conversion of the jungles and swamps of the prehistoric valley into the rich cornlands which made Egypt the wonder of the world was only accomplished by ages of communal coordinated effort The prosperity of the country depends, not as in northern lands on the industry of the individual peasant and his family, but on the organized labor of the irrigation dykes, and on the fertilizing waters of the annual inundation, for land in itself is valueless apart from the water which is supplied by the Nile and the irrigation canals. From the earliest times the measurement of the Nile flood and the maintenance of the irrigation works has been the primary duty of every Egyptian Government. The ancient Egyptian year began on July 19, the day that the inundation reached the neighborhood of the head of the Delta, and as early as the First Dynasty the annual taxation was fixed according to the level of the river, for the yield of the following harvest depends entirely on a good Nile.... Hence the power which regulates and controls the inundation is the master of the life and property of the whole population, arid the principle of compulsory public labor — the corvee — which elsewhere appears as a tyrannical infringement of the rights of the individual, is in Egypt the necessary condition of all economic life.[10]

Irrigation, by necessitating coordinated communal labor, Fostered state centralization and bureaucratization. As early as the first Dynasty in Egypt, we learn from the historical record of the existence of a vizier, chancellor, chamberlain, master of ceremonies, royal architect. Superintendent of Inundation, and so forth, down to a Keeper of the King’s Cosmetic Box — in short, a wide spectrum of office holders, selected largely from the leading families of the valley, who remind us more of royal courtiers and bureaucrats than independent feudal nobles. In Egypt, apart From claims made by the priesthood, the land belonged to the Pharaoh. It was essentially in his name that local governors collected tribute and tuxes in kind, which were thereupon stored in royal warehouses. The peasantry, largely bound to the soil, was either left with a residue of its produce or rewarded in kind from the public Fund. In Mesopotamia, these privileges were preempted by priestly corporations, later to be transferred to the person of a monarch who enjoyed an authority not dissimilar from that of the Pharaonic power. In the course of time, this highly centralized system broke down before the assault of the landed nobility, but it was almost invariably reconstituted again, depending upon the vigor of successive dynasties and usurpers. The Asian land system remained the baste social form of Near Eastern and Oriental civilizations until modern times.

These agrarian societies are the key to understanding ancient city development, for they not only advance but also limit the evolution of urban life. Agrarian interests, owing to the centralized power and wealth they command, subordinate the city to the land. Although many large and ornate cities arose in Mesopotamia (and, to a lesser extent, in Egypt), these urban communities did nut come into lasting balance with she authority exercised by lauded classes. Commerce, crafts, anti new industrial techniques were numerous, but these were placed in She service of the agrarian strata. Urban wealth, instead of returning to a local bourgeoisie in the form of capital accumulation, was expropriated by monarchies, slate bureaucracies, and local governors. Capital formation, in effect, was largely circumscribed and essentially arrested. The emergence of an independent bourgeois class was blocked by taxes, imposts, and state-owned enterprises.

The scale on which industry and commerce was plundered can be dealt with Only summarily. As Late as Ptolemaic times, the Egyptian economy was snarled in over two hundred taxes. The internal market of the valley was effectively limited by a 10 percent sales tax, a 5 percent tax on home rents, an inheritance tax and, except for privileged strata, a poll tax. Wealthy classes were commonly burdened by costly liturgies and by obligations to give “crowns” to the monarchy. Commodity taxes were imposed not only at ports and frontier routes, but also at the borders of provinces. Virtually all handicrafts and professions were licensed by the state. Royal monopolies were established in the production of oil, papyrus, textiles, and in mining and banking, while state enterprises competed with the private sector in industries such as dyeing, leather, cosmetics, perfumery, glass, pottery, and beer.

The economic controls exercised by the Ptolemaic pharaohs differed little in principle from the regulations and Imposts that burdened commerce and industry in nearly all the agrarian civilizations of the Near East and the Orient, The first waves of commodity production, so essential to the development of an authentic urban society, were thus scattered by the massive boulders of lightly knit, state-managed agrarian economies. Allowing for a few exceptions, City life became an ornament of agrarian kingly power and the product of agricultural superfluity, not unlike the huge monuments, temples, and mortuaries whose construction absorbed the surplus labor and resources of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Within this social arrangement, capital accumulation, which later formed the basis for an independent bourgeoisie and for an industrial economy in Europe, was virtually impossible under the Asian land system. While weathered by time, the granite structure of this system never Fractured or shattered. For thousands of years after the dawn of history, it persisted with surprising endurance — while men elsewhere picked up the main thread of social development and advanced to more promising and flexible urban forms.

After the first millennium B.C. a new agrarian system and a new mode of urban life began to emerge on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Pastoral tribes, filtering into the Greek promontory, conquered and gradually mixed with preexisting stable agricultural communities, rapidly developing away from tribal society. Hellenic society, allowing for its many unique qualities, in its own way recapitulates the evolution of agrarian kingships from communal relations to a loose kind of feudalism, passing through social forms not unlike the Asian land system. That this phase emerged prototypically is attested by a good deal of evidence from archaic Creek culture. The legendary figure of Theseus seems to group under a single name a number of Hellenic chieftains who organized the Creek tribes into federations somewhat reminiscent of early Nilotic society. “The first unquestionable fact which meets us in the life of this new kind community is that it was originally governed by kings,” observes William F Fowler.

The thing was expressed by various words — Basileus, Archon. Pyrtanis, [and among the Latins] Hex, Dictator — but, so far as we know, it was always I here in the childhood of the ancient State. Tradition, both in Greece and Italy, always told of a time when the essential acts of government were performed either by or under the authority of a single man; and in this case we Can be sure that tradition was right. Both Thucydides and Aristotle accepted it; at conservative Sparta the king himself survived throughout her history; and at Athens and Home kingship left traces behind it when it had vanished... [11]

Indeed, archaic Greek society found its esthetic inspiration in an Orientalized art so alien to the sculpture which nourished during the later classical period that it seems difficult to believe that the people who produced the rigid, overstylized Apollo of Tenea could have shared any historical relationship to those who sculpted the figures which adorned the temples of Periclean Athens.

Yet we know that the relationship existed and we must find our explanation for the differences between the two periods in the geography of southern Europe, The rugged mountain terrain of Greece made it virtually impossible to achieve the degree of political consolidation and centralism which so conspicuously distinguishes the high Asian and Near Eastern civilizations. Early Hellenic communities, like their Asian counterparts, invested land ownership in chieftains, but the centrifugal forces which episodically shaped Asian societies along feudal and particularistic lines became, in Greece, the dominant factors which guided the development of the political structure. By Homeric times, feudal vassalage rather than a highly centralized state had become the basis of Greek federation. George Thompson doubtless gives us an accurate picture of Homeric life when he notes that the Creek king

lives in s palace on some rocky eminence, surrounded by the dwellings of his vassals. The relation between king and vassal is such as we find in similar conditions among the primitive Germans 2,000 years later In reward for military service, the vassal holds in fee the rule of some portion of the conquered territory, and in return he takes up arms for the king when called on to do so. Such was the relation of Bellerophon to the King of Lycia, of Phonix to the father of Achilles; and we remember how Odysseus endeavored, but in vain, to evade military service. The vassal is entitled to be consulted on matters of policy and to feed at the royal table. There are many such councils in the Iliad, and in the Odyssey the offense of the suitors lies in their abuse of a recognized privilege. Finally, each vassal stood in the relation of king to vassals of his own, Odysseus was a vassal of Agamemnon’s, but to the princes of Ithaca he was king. [12]

If the investiture of control over tribal lands in the person of agrarian monarchs tends to disintegrate into feudalism unless the kingly authority is reinforced by the social need to coordinate a complex irrigation system, so feudalism, in turn, tends to give way to independent peasant communities based on small-scale food cultivation, especially after commodity production emerges in an agrarian society. The towns, freeing themselves from the waning authority of the territorial lords, reaches back into the countryside to replicate the same economic conditions which prevail in urban marketplaces and workshops. Commodity relations and trade turn the vassal and serf into independent peasants, the agrarian analog of the free urban craftsman and master. This basic social tendency, as we shall see later, was to be followed in late medieval Europe. In ancient Greece and Italy, the development was considerably modified by the impact of successive tribal invasions From the north and by the settlement of craftsmen and traders from the more advanced Mediterranean civilizations. The northern invaders reduced the older, preexisting agricultural communities to the Status of serfs, while the conquerors often acquired a quasi-peasant status, free in name if not in fact. Peasant and serf worked the land side by side, each shading socially into the other’s position. In time, a yeoman society of landed freeholders began to crystallize from the fluid, often tumultuous conditions of a disintegrating system of feudal land-tenure. A new kind of city now emerges, a city that forms the political, cultural, and commercial center of free farmers and craftsmen — each independent and producing primarily for the other in a remarkably well-balanced economy.

By the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., a number of Greek cities already began to resemble, at least superficially, the modern image of an urban community. Athens, the Hellenic city with which we are most familiar, probably supported some 30,000 male citizens (and if we add their women and children, a total of 150,0001, perhaps 100,000 slaves, and an estimated 35,000 metics, or free aliens. During Athens’s classical period, the city’s population may have well exceeded a quarter of a million. Generally, we must conceive of the new Greek cities as independent urban entities, freed from the suzerainty of territorial lords and landed magnates. (This fact decisively distinguishes the Greek city-states or, more accurately, poleis From the Cities of the Near East and Orient.) Urban life now exists as an end in itself, not as a supplement to a rural society, and enjoys art autonomy that would have been inconceivable within the framework of the earlier Asian land system.

But the Hellenic cities are not truly modern cities in the political and social sense of the term. As civic structures, they differ profoundly not only from Asian cities but from the metropolises and even smaller cities of our own era. What Strikes us at once about Athens, the most advanced of the Greek cities, is that civic activity involves an exceptionally high degree of public participation. All the policy decisions of the poiis are formulated directly by a popular assembly, or Ecclesia, which every male citizen from the city and its environs (Attica) is expected to attend. The execution of the Ecclesia’s decisions falls to the authority of the Council of Five Hundred, composed of elected citizens from all parts of Attica, who, in groups of fifty, rotate their office every tenth of the year. The practical aspects of urban administration are ordinarily delegated by election or lot to public boards, not to a professional bureaucracy — notably to nine Archons, ten elected Strategoi or generals, boards of finance, education, dockyards, and so forth. Inasmuch as all the civic agencies of Athens are reconstituted every year, it would seem that a sizable number of ordinary citizens participate in tine executive bodies of the city at any given time, William Fowler estimates that in the days of Pericles, 1,900 citizens out of an adult population of 30,000 men were actively engaged in the service of the city, thereby rendering wide public participation an inherent feature of urban administration:

Now if we take this in connection with the universal right of citizens to take part in the Ecclesia, and of those over thirty years of age to sit as jurors in the courts, it becomes at once plain that the Athenian people did actually conduct its own government, and that the State was a true democracy. Here is no privileged class, no class of skilled politicians, no bureaucracy: no body of men, like the Roman Senate, who alone understood the secrets of State, and were looked op to and trusted as the gathered wisdom of the whole community. At Athens there was no disposition, and in fact no need, to trust the experience of any one. each man entered intelligently into the details of his own temporary duties, and discharged them as far as we ran tell, with industry and integrity. Like the players in a well-trained orchestra, all contrived to learn their parts and to he satisfied with the share allotted to them. [13]

But the administrative aspects of Athenian civic life capture only an aspect of the well-rounded, balanced, and intensely social nature of what Edith Hamilton has so aptly described as “the Greek Way.” For centuries afterwards, men were to leek hack to Attica where, for a brief period, there flourished a community whose development was not to he excelled over the course of later history. What immediately catches the eye in a study of Hellenic society is the rich flow of Athenian life — its all-encompassing rationality and its human scale. The “Men of Marathon” take up arms against the Persian invaders of their country with the same readiness that they take up the scythe in harvesting their farms. They nourish their minds with the same fortitude that they do battle in the mountain fastnesses of their land. Hellenic mythology, unequivocably naturalistic under the bright Mediterranean sky, gracefully intertwines with the monumental oaks of Attic tragedy; the Hellenic mind, cultivated in the most demanding schools of speculative reason, never fails to pause — almost childishly — to marvel at the physical beauty of the land and sea, and. above all, at the supple form of man. whose destiny in Athenian literature mingles a philosophical pathos with serene dignity.

Athenian life, during its finest moments, formed a totality that was sustained by the balance And unity of the polis itself To a Greek, it would have seemed preposterous that mind should be separated from body, art from society, man from nature, culture from politics. The polis was the man; the man, the polis. To he exiled from the polis was to suffer an extinction more horrifying even than death. The Hellenic citizen was nourished by his community like a tree by the soil. So inseparably wedded were men and society that a social sunlight permeated everything Greek. We never fail to marvel at how remarkably welt the satires of Aristophanes read to this very day, how advanced they are over so much of our own contemporary literature of the same genre, how unexcelled they are in their energy; how refreshing their earthiness and realism, how generous their humanity, and how subtly philosophical their nuances, Yet these plays were political works — courageously incisive satires of the outstanding politicians of the day and savage commentaries on immediate civic problems. They Owe their unexcelled position in western literature to the clear rationality of the Greek mind, to the essentiality of all relations in the polis, to a candor toward life (hat chased away the false shadows of introspection and the shams of neurotic esthcticism.

From the totality of the polis arose the Greek view, which Paul Landis so eloquently describes in his discussion of the Athenian drama:

An attitude toward life at once honest and so intelligent that the minds of men, however far they may be deceived by Fancy or philosophy, must always return to it at the end. By virtue of something that looks almost like racial genius the Athenians of the fifth century succeeded in looking upon life with a level gaze. They faced it neither with bravado and bluster, nor with fear and trembling; not with an ignorant assumption of power over it, nor with an equally ignorant and cowardly feeling of inferiority...

The message of the Athenian drama is

this honest intellectualism, this passion for truth, this serene and level gaze on life — and this has always been the modern spirit....It is the struggle to free the intellect, to tear from it the veils of hope and fear, so that it may look clearly and unafraid upon the face of life and know it as it is, terrible and pitiful and glorious and utterly nonsensical.[14]

That Hellenic society was scarred by slavery and by a severely patriarchal dispensation fur women need hardly be emphasized. These cruet features it shared with all city states I hat began to duster along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea — features that were part of the general barbarism of the epoch. But they do not explain why the polis succeeded so admirably in transcending that barbarism, indeed, the horrors which were to follow in the wake of the polis’s decline, notably the emergence of the Roman Imperium and the early Middle Ages. Lest we lose all sense of perspective toward urban development, we must never fail to focus on the essentials which produced so advanced a society as the Athenian polis. The civic spirit of Athens has its source in yeoman virtues, not in slavery or patriarchal ism, Athenian internal unity stems from men of strong character who were indomitable in their social allegiances and rounded in their urbanity because they had firm ties to the soil and were independent its their economic position. Labor and land, town and country, men and society were joined in a common destiny In bourgeois society the community dissolves into competing monads and is pervaded by spiritual mediocrity directly as the material being of man is rendered enslaved, insecure, and one-sided. In the polis, the community achieves unity and flourishes spiritually as the material being of man achieves relative freedom, independence, and roundedness. In bourgeois society, the commodity, which mediates all human relations, not only “unites” society in a cash nexus and minute division of labor, but at the same time separates man from the instruments of production, labor from creativity, object from subject, and eventually man from man. In the polis, the relative independence of the individual makes it possible to see the true dependence of man on the community, completely identifying the Athenian with his society.

Finally, precisely because in bourgeois society man has “mastered” nature without rationally coordinating his social life, consciousness has only to reflect society as it exists to yield the most catastrophic as well as the most inane results. The untutored act of thought is brought to the service of horrors that the blindest Forces of nature could never yield. The more passive thought remains in the face of conditions it can no longer comprehend, the more actively demoniacal it becomes merely by acquiescing to the status quo. In the polis, thought reaches sublime height s of philosophy, poetry, and art if only because of the solidarity. Freedom, and independence it affords the individual, an independence rooted not only in civic conditions but also in material ones.

Classical Athenian drama ends not with another Aeschylus, whose tragedies dwell on the consolidation of the polis, but with Aristophanes, whose savage mockery voices the tragic apprehension of social dissolution. The irony of Greek conditions, here, acquires its adequate form, for the very forces that produce the Hellenic yeomanry — the “Men of Marathon” — lead to their extinction. Given the limited material basis of Hellenic society, the aristocracy which emerges from tribal life cannot he replaced by the yeoman without also creating favorable conditions for a new and more pedestrian aristocracy — the aristocracy of trade, usury, and wealth.

This crisis was by no means new lo Greek society. As early as the time of Hesiod, during the eighth century B.c., merchants and usurers began encroaching on the smallholding, consolidating farms into estates, and reducing many citizens to debtor-slaves. In the two centuries that separate Hesiod from Cleisthenes, Attica was torn by intense social struggles, later to be paralleled closely by similar conflicts in the early Roman Republic. In contrast to Rome, whose pillaging expeditions abroad reinforced the power and wealth of the nil trig classes, Attica’s crisis remained largely internalized and the polis was able to arrive at a more rational solution of its problems. Whereas Rome rapidly succumbed to the latifundia system (a plantation form of agriculture administered by wealthy land magnates and worked by slave gangs), Attica returned again to the small-holding. Solon, Pisistratus, and Cleisthenes divided the large estates among the dispossessed and allowed a limited margin of independence to its craftsmen and traders, Pisistratus, after his second exile, ruthlessly uprooted the big landowners. Their estates were confiscated and divided among the peasantry, dispossessed agricultural laborers, and the Athenian poor Cleisthenes completed this immense work: he put down all attempts at an aristocratic restoration and juridically established the Athenian democracy which was to pass into history as the political model of the classical polis.

Was it indeed “something that looks almost like radical genius,” as Landis would have it, or was it perhaps more mundane factors that guided the Athenians to so rational a disposition of their social problems? That the Creeks were, in Marx’s words, the “normal children” of early history can be partly accounted for by the weight of their tradition and by their geographic setting. Athenian society was not so far removed from its tribal origins, nor so muddled by the rubbish of history, that it lacked a clear, direct, and humanistic view of its social problems. The memory of its primitive democracy was strong enough to find a more secular fulfillment in the establishment of the Ecelesia, Close to nature, situated in a hospitable climate, neither so rich as to yield oppressive standards of opulence nor so poor as to be strangled by oppressive poverty, decentralized by a mountainous terrain but repeatedly invigorated culturally by the sea, Attica remained remarkably flexible and generously susceptible to the civilizing crosscurrents of the age. Accordingly, Athenian leaders were favored by every opportunity to act with wisdom — to reconcile and fund the interests of the community into a common and harmonizing social perspective, H. D. F. Kitto is only just when he sharply contrasts the course followed by Solon, Pisistratus, and Cleisthenes with that of modern Europe: in Athens, the reconciliation of the community to new social demands occurred at a high point of social vigor, when all strata of the polis were able to contribute vitally to the community; in Europe, it occurred after the complete exhaustion and decay of the old society, when little remained of earlier traditions. Hellenic society resolved its problems rationally; Europe, as yet, has not freed itself from blind and demoniacal social forces.

Owing to the fact that Athenian society was based on a yeomanry and on small agricultural holdings, town and country were brought into delicate balance. In turn, the preservation of this balance depended upon the internal self-sufficiency supplied by the division of labor between urban and rural society. The polis flourished only as long as one did not outweigh the other. To the Creeks, this social equilibrium was summed up by the term autarkeia: a concept of wholeness, material self-sufficiency, and balance that is the core of the Hellenic outlook. But this outlook did not prove impervious to the powerful economic Forces which were gathering in the Mediterranean basin and gradually restructuring Creek society. With the expansion of handicrafts and commercial contact with the outside world, the nascent Hellenic bourgeoisie became increasingly powerful and began to alter the balance between town and country on which the unity of the polis depended. Athenian interests now graduated from a local scale to encompass the Mediterranean area. The polis was becoming a cosmopolis, a change that brought it into conflict with the self-sufficient small-holding, not to speak of Greek communities abroad. In 434 B.C., with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Periclean Athens embarked upon a disastrous struggle for hegemony over other Greek cities and for a commanding position in the Mediterranean trade. The war lasted some thirty years, laying waste to Attica’s farms and exhausting her resources. “The Peloponnesian War,” observes Kitto, “virtually saw the end of the city-state as a creative force fashioning and fulfilling the lives of all its members.”[15] Although the Athenian economy recovered from this conflict, Athens ceased to be a stable small-holders’ community’ designed to meet local needs. Attic agriculture now became oriented toward the Mediterranean trade. Wealth and property were amassed in fewer and fewer hands;, political life became increasingly devitalized and corrupt until the independence of Athens was swept away by a Macedonian phalanx.

Rome is little more than an epilogue to Athens. It is easy enough to draw parallels between the Latin development and the Hellenic: Camillus for Solon, the Gracchi for the Pisistradae, Cicero for Demosthenes. But however much Latium seems to follow in the wake of Greece From tribalism to feudalism and then to a community of independent farmers, the two diverge on the issue of public control over the administrative organs of society. In contrast to the Ecclesia and Council of Five Hundred, the Roman Senate develops into a specialized professional body, divorced from the populace. It becomes a legislative aristocracy. Moreover, unlike Solon and Pisistratus, Camillas and the Gracchi fail to restore the small-holding as a viable economic basis for the Roman city-state. The Greek polis, once it declined, could no longer be duplicated by other communities within the social framework of antiquity. Its passing bears witness to the fact that the elements which produced the polis had been exhausted. Indeed, the complexities of Mediterranean society were already present wills the consolidation of Latium and the historic preeminence of the Roman city-state.

Once trade and the free cities acquired cosmopolitan proportions, two alternatives confronted the ancient world: either mercantile relations would expand to a point that would produce an authentic capitalist economy or the cities would become parasitic entities, living in vampire fashion on tho agricultural wealth of the older social system in the Near East and North Africa. The realization of the first alternative was almost completely precluded by the nature of Mediterranean economic life. Trade, while growing considerably, could never reach sufficient proportions to transform Mediterranean society as a whole. There was simply not enough quantity, as it were, to produce a change In quality. Although commerce managed to undermine the small-holding, which gave way to large-scale agriculture in Latium, the free cities were too few in number and much too weak economically to dissolve the self-contained wealthy land systems of the Near East and open them as commercial markets. The Asian land system imposed the same limits on the development of capitalist production abroad which confronted its domestic commercial strata at home. Owing to its solidity, it dosed off the only potential market of sufficient dimensions that might have transformed mercantile capitalism into industrial capitalism. Ancient trade remained primarily a carrying trade, a cement between the Free cities and economically impenetrable societies based on time-honored agricultural ways.

The “Fall of Rome” can be explained by the rise of Rome, The Latin city was carried to imperial heights not by the resources of its rural environs, but by spoils acquired from the systematic loo Ling of the Near East, Egypt, and North Africa, The very process involved in maintaining the Roman cosmopolis destroyed the cosmopolis. Every attempt on Rome’s part to exact Further tribute from her colonies involved increasing coercion and expenditures, which in torn required more tribute. A point was finally reached where the negative aspect of this escalating development predominated over the positive: the costs of maintaining the city began to outweigh what it received. As the needs of die city and its urban satellites began to rise far out of proportion to the How of tribute, impoverishment and demoralization also increased; local taxation strangled domestic economic life, the urban population began to drift into the countryside, and the city’s birthrates declined. Rome could no longer be maintained as a viable entity. The imperial eagles migrated from the west to the east, from the artificial center of administration to the sources of real wealth, Constantinople replaced Rome as the authentic center of the empire and Italy now lay at the feet of the barbarians. Having passed beyond its domestic limits, Rome “fell” in the sense that the city contracted to its Own agrarian base — and declined even more as a result of the enormous urban heights from which it had fallen.

What earlier historians once described as Europe’s “dark ages” comprise a sweeping readjustment of urban life to the only agrarian possibilities which lay at hand. Under the Roman empire, town and country had entered into sharp contradiction with each other. Lacking an adequate agrarian and industrial basis of its own. Rome had swollen to enormous dimensions around a system of plunder and parasitism. The city had turned upon the Land and introduced inefficient — even destructive — forms of agricultural exploitation, such as slave-worked latifundia owned by absentee proprietors. Not surprisingly, Rome succumbed to these internal weaknesses when the parasitic system overreached itself and began to acquire less than it lost. By slowly abandoning a slave-worked agriculture for a feudal one. Italy simply returned to the only stable agrarian forms which could satisfy her needs. The “Fall of Rome” as a city, quite aside from the destiny of the empire, was a local “retrogression.” Indeed, apart front Roman Europe, no such retrogression occurred elsewhere, No doc lino of urban life occurred in the Near East, where agricultural resources were adequate for the development of large cities Similarly in North Africa, In these areas, the free cities patterned themselves on preexisting agrarian social forms and essentially became the urban creatures of the Asian land system. As to the central and northern areas of Europe, where Germanic peoples were emerging from tribalism and agrarian kingships, the development of feudalism was a logical extension of the course followed by tribal communities in early Greece and Latium. With the rise of feudal society, the European continent was thrown back upon its own mainsprings, A new relationship between land and city began to emerge, one that initiated an authentic development toward more advanced social relationships,