The scale of the Athenian social crisis that raged in 594 BCE, when Solon was given dictatorial powers, can be gleaned from Plutarch’s account, written seven centuries later. While he is surely unreliable in details, Plutarch seems to have grasped the broad sweep of the historical moment:
And the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor, at that time, also reached its height; so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances and settling it to be possible but a despotic power. All the people were indebted to the rich; and either they tilled the land for their creditors, paying them a sixth part of the increase, and were therefore called Hectemorii or Thetes, or else they engaged their body for the debt, and might be seized and either sent into slavery, or sold to strangers; some (for no law forbade it) were forced to sell their children, or fly the country to avoid the cruelty of their creditors; but for the most part and the bravest of them began to combine together and encourage one another to stand to it, to choose a leader, to liberate the condemned debtors, divide the land, and change the government.
Then the wisest of the Athenians, perceiving Solon … pressed him to succour the commonwealth
and compose the differences. 74
We will return to these issues and the rise of democracy later in this chapter. But for the moment one further result ought to be underlined: due to the democratic transformations at Athens, the definition of servility was once more restricted to enslaved people. We saw earlier that by at least 600 BCE, in the midst of dispossession and impoverishment, the lines of servitude had become blurred. With tenant farmers becoming poorer, increasingly indebted to noble men, and even enslaved, relations of servility had been extended to the native born. A variety of conditions of “bondage”—which included, according to the author of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, the hektemoroi, or rent-owing peasants—had come to overlap with slavery. Indeed, historians note that by now, most of the terms used for enslaved people—among them doulos, oiketes, therapon, pais, soma—designated any kind of servant or wage laborer.75 With the Solonian abolition of debts, rents, and debt bondage, however, such intermediate forms of subordination and subjection were eliminated, and free and servile statuses became sharply differentiated in Athens. While elitists like Plato might continue to use servile terms for all who labored, they did so on contested ground, as democrats were challenging degrading depictions of laboring citizens. Rather than a continuum of forms of bondage that overlapped and bled into one another, Athenian society in its democratic phase knew only freemen—divided, to be sure, by wealth, but still fully free participants in making the laws by which they were governed—as against enslaved people. Non-enslaved women, however, notwithstanding the greater liberties they experienced at Athens compared to other Greek cities,76 were denied the rights that adhered to their male counterparts. Male social status was now organized around a single binary structure. And given the Solonian decree that no Athenian could be enslaved, servility was aligned with foreignness. To be enslaved was to be an outsider (which is not to say that all foreigners were enslaved). And for the rich, the relaxation of exactions on the Athenian poor meant that the bulk of their surplus product would henceforth have to come from enslaved people.77 Moreover, if poor members of the community could no longer be subjected to bondage in any form, then it followed that enslaved people would henceforth enter the society principally as commodities purchased on the market.78 Fundamentally, slavery assumed not only a chattel form, with enslaved people as outright pieces of property, but also a commodity form. And this returns us to the equivalence between enslaved people and money that is central to the story of ancient money.
War, Slavery, and Market Exchange
As Marx suspected, commodity exchange appears to have originated between strangers.79 Certainly this was true for the Greek society of the Homeric epics. As Finley pointed out, there is not a single example in the epics of a market exchange involving two Greeks or two Trojans.80 The evidence we have suggests that members of the same archaic communities did not conduct commercial transactions with one another.81 It is surely no surprise that within a community organized around generalized reciprocity, theft and plunder would be considered antisocial acts. That haggling over equivalents (balanced reciprocity) should also be considered antisocial seems less obvious to those of us raised in a market economy. However, in societies of generalized reciprocity, what one gave to neighbors and kin had nothing to do with their capacity to return an equivalent. Need was need, and it involved a moral obligation beyond the calculus of equivalence. True, support in time of need presumed an obligation on the recipient to reciprocate in the future, if necessary. But this obligation was not subjected to rules of quantitative measure. The principle of commercial exchange—to bargain for trade of equivalents—was foreign to those that regulated this sort of communal life. Indeed, market exchange was considered closer to piracy, which is why it was undertaken with outsiders. Another reason that commercial exchange was kept at a distance from communal life may have had to do with the fact that the principal commodity exchanged with foreigners was often enslaved persons. In fact, linguistic evidence suggests that the concepts of purchase and sale originated in the rights of captors to possess and transfer captives.82 What could be sold was that which had been seized outside the bounds of the community, and human captives topped the list. Not only was trade conducted with outsiders; it often comprised the exchange of outsiders.
The ancient Greek world was by no means unique in this regard. Enslaved people appear to have been the earliest goods traded in Neolithic Europe, and the principal item of commerce among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In some societies, enslaved people in fact appear to have been the first acceptable form of private property, particularly where land was not privatized.83 We find evidence of slave sales in Babylonia and Assyria around 2400 BCE. And further south, in Sumer, temple records indicate the presence of enslaved people by 2700 BCE and of an active market in foreign captives by about 2000 BCE.84 The commodification of enslaved people was thus a phenomenon familiar to the ancient Middle East for at least two thousand years before the Christian era. As early as 1580 BCE, a large-scale trade in enslaved people had developed across the Indian Ocean—a case that prompted Patterson to remark, “Slavery was intricately tied up with the origins of trade itself.”85 Indeed, outside the ambit of the Greco-Roman world, the evidence strongly suggests that the Arab slave trade that began in the eighth and ninth centuries CE exceeded in size the staggering scale of the Roman trade, which at its height involved 250,000 to 400,000 enslaved people per year.86 But even though slave markets came later to the Greco-Roman world, by the time of Homer, war, slavery, and market exchange were inextricably connected, and the Mediterranean was home to some of the most active slave markets anywhere. Indeed, all of the enslaved people whose names and histories appear in the Odyssey were either purchased, or are the descendants of enslaved people acquired on the market.87 So closely integrated were warfare and trade that slave dealers in the ancient Greek world trailed behind armies, purchasing their captives.88
Let us recall Achilles’ boast, with reference to one of his battles against the Trojans: “Droves I took alive and auctioned off as slaves” (Iliad, 21.99). As elsewhere, Homer here depicts violence as the primary means of enslaving others, and markets as the place where the victims of such violence—people enslaved as chattel—were sold. Recognizing the decisive role of force in determining personal fate, Heraclitus proclaimed, “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves,