Peasant-Citizen and Slave by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Author:Ellen Meiksins Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The difference between these types, then, lies above all in the extent to which they exercise their right to participate in politics at the centre of the polis, a right that is at least in principle open to countryman and town-dweller alike. The idea of Athens, the city, in contrast to the chōra of Attica is itself a political concept rather than a geographical notation: for example, while countrymen are Athenaioi, women, wherever they reside, because they lack political rights and ‘hence have no special connection with the city and indeed … are excluded from just those areas which distinguish city life’, are never Athenaiai but Attikai gynaikes, not Athenians but Attic women.47 Much the same can be said, as Osborne suggests, about the deme-identity. Whereas a male villager, as a citizen, would be identified by his demotikon, his deme name, the countrywoman might be identified by her husband’s or her father’s deme, but in her own right was simply someone who lived in a particular village.

Humphreys has suggested that the critical factor in determining the difference between the urban-rural continuum which characterized ancient Athens, and the urban-rural dichotomy of, for example, Hellenistic Alexandria or the cities of mediaeval Europe, is not the level of economic specialization nor the size and density of the urban population, but rather the presence or absence of ‘middlemen’ – feudal lords, patrons or economic entrepreneurs – whose position in some way depends on maintaining such a dichotomy. In Athens, she argues, the countryman’s relation with the city and its institutions was direct, not mediated through middlemen: ‘The Athenian countryman had a close and direct relationship with the city; he voted in its assembly, bought and sold in its markets, took part in its religious festivals, sued in its courts, had the same political rights and obligations – including that of military service – as the urban population.’48 This is, perhaps, just another way of saying that the unity of town and country, which reached its peak in Athenian democracy, as well as the ‘disproportion’ between the degree of urbanization and the size of the urban economy, can be attributed in large part to the political status of the peasantry.

In fact, the political importance of the village seems to have reinforced the attachment to subsistence strategies in agriculture; and there is a striking absence of evidence for local markets in Attica, in sharp contrast to their prevalence in Rome.49 The paradox is thus complete: the political elevation of the village, signalling the breakdown of the age-old division between ruling centre and subject countryside, encouraged the growth of the city, while at the same time and by the same means it placed limits on the development of the urban economy.

If the political function of the city helps to account for a level of urbanization not commensurate with the development of the urban economy, it still remains to ask how it was possible to sustain this political function and this degree of urbanization upon a material base that was more rural than urban.

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