For much of human history, the mobilization of military forces was among the largest of state undertakings. Large-scale warfare requires the recruitment of thousands of soldiers, their provision with weapons and equipment (swords, ships, horses, shields), and their means of provision (food, tents, clothing), along with monetary reserves for wages. Herodotus tells us that the last time the tyrant Peisistratus seized power in Athens, he “hired bodyguards,” paying them with revenue raised “from various sources.”79 As the decades proceeded, such mercenary soldiers were employed on ever-larger scales, not just as bodyguards, but as soldiers and sailors for military campaigns. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, between Sparta and Athens (431–404 BCE), both sides were utilizing hired fighters on a substantial scale. One Spartan expedition is said to have contained a thousand troops “persuaded by pay,” while the Athenian navy was bursting with mercenaries. The year after the war’s end, during the violent class struggles that shook Athens, oligarchs and democrats alike hired armed combatants. This was followed almost immediately by Cyrus the Younger’s ostensible recruitment of ten thousand Greek mercenaries in a campaign to win the Persian throne. Even larger numbers of hired fighters from Greece are said to have served in Egypt over a period lasting a century and a half.80 By then, large-scale hiring of Greek mercenaries—in the thousands or tens of thousands—was common throughout the Mediterranean region, North Africa, and Persia. In fact, one historian has proposed that a “military-coinage complex” was in place throughout the second half of the first millennium BCE.81 To get a rudimentary sense of the expenses involved and their impact on the supply of coinage, consider that “to support just one legion cost Rome around 1,500,000 denarii a year, so that the main reason for the regular annual issue of silver denarii was simply to pay the army.”82 One historian has suggested that the only reason silver coins were issued in the late Roman Empire, where the monetary standard was based on gold, was for military payments.83
Returning to ancient Greece, it is easy to grasp the symbiosis between mercenary warfare and coinage. To begin with, it was the nature of the mercenary arrangement that these fighters had to be paid, and it was entirely impractical to pay soldiers on-the-move in cattle, enslaved people, or raw bullion.84 Coins were readily portable and, if made of high-quality precious metal, as were Athenian owls, comprised readily mobile high-value items. But, of course, soldiers on the move would also spend some of their wages—on food, sex, clothing, and other goods. Not only did this contribute to rural monetization, as peasant farmers often sold produce to troops; it also expanded the circuits of Greek coins. At least equally significant, hired fighters, cut off from kin networks and any means of subsistence of their own, became more dependent upon money than before, and more accustomed to its usage. The claim, made with respect to Rome, that “army life taught soldiers to use money,” may be a slight overstatement, but only a slight one.85 Rome, for instance, increased coin production significantly during the first two Punic Wars (218–201 BCE), and it did so in small denominations that were more amenable to paying soldiers’ wages. In all these ways, the Roman army “was a major stimulus for monetization,”86 as was the Greek use of mercenaries during the first century of coinage.
But what was the status of these men who fought for wages? To modern eyes, they often appear as wage laborers. Yet to the ancients, particularly aristocratic commentators, to sell one’s body—and this was the predominant understanding of wage labor—was to be enslaved. The modern liberal distinction between selling one’s labor (or, to be precise, one’s labor power), as does a wage worker, and selling one’s body, like an enslaved person, seems not to be found in ancient texts.87 Repeatedly, those who work for wages, including mercenaries, are compared to enslaved people. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, for instance, Socrates questions Eutherus about his life and background. As a result of war in his homeland, Eutherus replies: “We were deprived of our possessions abroad…. I am now compelled to procure my provisions by the work of my body here at home. And, in my opinion, this is better than to beg for something from human beings.” Eutherus is thus an independent producer, living off the proceeds of his own labor. Yet, Socrates inquires, ironically to be sure, as to whether there are not advantages to being employed instead as a wage laborer. Since the body ages and wears out, says Socrates, might it not be best to hire oneself out to “one of those possessing a good deal of wealth” and become an employee? Eutherus’s response affirms the Socratic position that we find in Plato: “It would be hard, Socrates … for me to endure slavery.”88 To work for another, to be employed for wages, is to be enslaved, one who sells their body and places it under the command of a master. Aristotle takes the same position in his Rhetoric, where he defines lack of freedom (slavery) as “living under the control of another” (1367a33).
This merging of the statuses of enslaved and wage laborer was widespread in ancient texts, which typically described those working for wages as doulos, the most frequent term for a chattel slave, or as latris, a term meaning “hired man” or “servant,” as well as “slave.”89 This semantic ambiguity must have owed something to the fact that of those who arrived every day at the Athenian market for day laborers, the overwhelming majority were enslaved.90 Indeed, it was not uncommon in both Greece and Rome for enslaved people to earn wages, which they shared with their masters.91 In Athens, enslaved people were almost certainly the largest group working for wages, and in Rome some enslaved people, particularly those with a craft skill, received a regular monthly wage from their masters.92 Thus, when mercenaries hired themselves out for money, they were engaged in an activity that most observers associated with enslaved people, and which seemed to them to resemble slavery. Even several centuries later, under the late Roman Republic, Cicero (106–51 BCE) described the wages of mercenaries as the reward of slavery. Another century on, Seneca defined an enslaved person as a perpetual mercenary.93 Enslaved people and wage earners shared the condition of being under the control of someone else, a control registered in the surrender of their bodies (and liberties), even if temporarily, for money. These associations continued at least into the early modern period in Europe. Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist of the first half of the seventeenth century, for instance, declared that there were many forms of servitus. While slavery was “the most ignoble” of these, servile statuses included serfs and mercenarii (wage laborers). The latter were described by Grotius as a “perpetual Hireling,” bound to a master for the length of a contract.94 I have elsewhere explored the ways in which wage laborers experienced social death in a different register.95 But for the moment, it is worth observing that because enslaved people comprised the largest group of wage workers in Athens, this identification of slavery with work for wages was daily reinforced. And this equation worked its way into the very lexicon associated with working for money, as Latin terms associated with wages and trade—think mercantile in English—are related to those for mercenaries, as we see in Grotius. As renowned linguist Émile Benveniste noted, “The images of war, of mercenary services preceded and engendered those of work and the legal remuneration attached to it.”96
This brings us to Marx’s insight that “it was in the army that the ancients first fully developed a wage system.”97 Elaborating on this insight in the Grundrisse, Marx indicates that he is thinking of both mercenaries and citizen-soldiers in the Greco-Roman world as wage laborers.98 After all, in the imperial armies of Greece and Rome, citizen-soldiers received pay, as did mercenaries. Athenian democracy sought to cleanse this payment for service of all traces of servility, just as it aspired to do for payments for jury service or for attendance at the assembly. But these efforts encountered stiff resistance from aristocratic elitists, including those in the Socratic tradition. While poor citizen-soldiers were clearly distinguished from enslaved people, aristocrats also sharply differentiated them from patricians, with their noble “virtues.” Military wage labor was thus a contested category, combining elements of political freedom and public service with mercenary activity (work for wages), which carried undertones of social degradation. By the early 200s CE, when Rome’s imperial army peaked at about four hundred fifty thousand soldiers, military service was unquestionably the primary site of wage labor. The wage system flourished at the nexus of money and war.
“Soldiers