Saturday, April 07, 2007
Of Attica, India and Unlearned Lessons
Earnest students of history and philosophy are all prodigious readers, they have to be. I am not. Concealing my meager exposure to authors on these vast subjects, I will sophomorically assert that the greatest ever writer on both subjects was Will (William James) Durant. His eleven volume magnum opus, The Story of Civilization, is a masterpiece that lent grandeur to the Pulitzer prize it won. I have not come across any other author of such erudition, objectivity, eloquence, humility, humanity and humour. I will never fully comprehend why he and his wife (Ariel) were not awarded the Noble prize for literature, perhaps the committee felt that ten thousand or so pages were burden enough for an elderly couple.
The second volume of his (the initial volumes were written solely by Will) Story is titled The Life of Greece and was first published in 1939 by Simon and Schuster. Durant takes a little over a hundred pages to get to the Solonian revolution, the foundation on which Athens grew to glory. Just before he gets to Solon and his peaceful revolution, Durant writes about Attica, a southern “periphery” of Greece, containing both Athens and Marathon.
This, in part, is what he wrote.
Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peasants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of the moneylenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a bit of earth.
Some of the peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously individual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious, many peasants sold their lands – despite the fine and disenfranchisement that punished such sales – and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders or craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of ownership, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or “share-croppers” who kept part of the produce as their pay. Still others struggled on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest, were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab announcing their ownership (hence, hypothecation). Small holdings became smaller, free peasants fewer, great holdings greater. “A few proprietors,” says Aristotle, “owned all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable to be sold as slaves on failure to pay their rents or their debts.” Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coinage, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured articles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers, and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attica became so great that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer mouths would have to be fed.
Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with slaves. Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen.
For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these evils. About 620 BC this thesmothete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to codify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would restore order in Attica. So far as we know, the essential advances of his code were …… the replacement of feud vengeance with law ……… but to enforce it, indeed persuade vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own revenge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his legislation had been superseded by Solon’s, he was remembered for his punishments rather than for his laws. Draco’s code congealed the cruel customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws and issues affecting their interests.
As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of fortune begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. “The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor”, says Plutarch, “had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances …… seemed possible but a despotic power.” The poor, finding their situation worse with each year – the government and the army in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them – began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth. The rich, unable any longer to collect debts legally due them, and angry at the challenges to their property, invoked ancient laws, and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all civilization.
It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often repeated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, without any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaos (Chaos was the first of innumerable Greek gods, presiding over an ill-ordered universe) but established a new and more generous political and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens’ independent career. Such peaceful revolution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.
Within a few ticks of history’s clock after the time of Solon, two more such miraculous men were born in what is now Bihar in India, Vardhamana of Kasyapa lineage and Siddhartha of Gautama lineage, subsequently known as Mahavira and the Buddha respectively.
I choose to read Durant as meaning that when such events are “repeated in the history of nations”, miracles occur to redress them. We did witness another such miracle millennia later, but an assassin saw him as neither a miracle nor a Mahatma. Yet another may arise.
Our farmers, however, will derive little comfort in knowing that almost three millennia ago, their Greek counterparts had suffered as they do today. As for a Solonian saviour, they are astute enough to realize that he will not survive in India’s caste driven and dynastic political arena, where callousness is camouflaged by contrived concern. Yet, they wait in peace, for now.
The second volume of his (the initial volumes were written solely by Will) Story is titled The Life of Greece and was first published in 1939 by Simon and Schuster. Durant takes a little over a hundred pages to get to the Solonian revolution, the foundation on which Athens grew to glory. Just before he gets to Solon and his peaceful revolution, Durant writes about Attica, a southern “periphery” of Greece, containing both Athens and Marathon.
This, in part, is what he wrote.
Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peasants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of the moneylenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a bit of earth.
Some of the peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously individual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious, many peasants sold their lands – despite the fine and disenfranchisement that punished such sales – and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders or craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of ownership, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or “share-croppers” who kept part of the produce as their pay. Still others struggled on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest, were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab announcing their ownership (hence, hypothecation). Small holdings became smaller, free peasants fewer, great holdings greater. “A few proprietors,” says Aristotle, “owned all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable to be sold as slaves on failure to pay their rents or their debts.” Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coinage, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured articles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers, and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attica became so great that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer mouths would have to be fed.
Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with slaves. Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen.
For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these evils. About 620 BC this thesmothete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to codify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would restore order in Attica. So far as we know, the essential advances of his code were …… the replacement of feud vengeance with law ……… but to enforce it, indeed persuade vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own revenge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his legislation had been superseded by Solon’s, he was remembered for his punishments rather than for his laws. Draco’s code congealed the cruel customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws and issues affecting their interests.
As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of fortune begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. “The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor”, says Plutarch, “had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances …… seemed possible but a despotic power.” The poor, finding their situation worse with each year – the government and the army in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them – began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth. The rich, unable any longer to collect debts legally due them, and angry at the challenges to their property, invoked ancient laws, and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all civilization.
It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often repeated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, without any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaos (Chaos was the first of innumerable Greek gods, presiding over an ill-ordered universe) but established a new and more generous political and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens’ independent career. Such peaceful revolution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.
Within a few ticks of history’s clock after the time of Solon, two more such miraculous men were born in what is now Bihar in India, Vardhamana of Kasyapa lineage and Siddhartha of Gautama lineage, subsequently known as Mahavira and the Buddha respectively.
I choose to read Durant as meaning that when such events are “repeated in the history of nations”, miracles occur to redress them. We did witness another such miracle millennia later, but an assassin saw him as neither a miracle nor a Mahatma. Yet another may arise.
Our farmers, however, will derive little comfort in knowing that almost three millennia ago, their Greek counterparts had suffered as they do today. As for a Solonian saviour, they are astute enough to realize that he will not survive in India’s caste driven and dynastic political arena, where callousness is camouflaged by contrived concern. Yet, they wait in peace, for now.
Labels: India
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