The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations by Max Weber

Author:Max Weber [Weber, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-241-8
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2013-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

We now come to the problem of whether there was in the classical period a ‘capitalist invasion’ of the countryside in Attica and in other Greek states outside of Sparta (though even there concentration of wealth occurred), and whether this took place in the fifth century or – as is most often argued – in the fourth. No sure answer can be given, but most students agree for good reason that in fact this did occur. Conditions were not the same in the Hellenistic age, when great private fortunes arose so that at times rich men made loans to cities on harsh terms and then held them in a form of debt bondage; this may be contrasted with the classical period, when the temples were the normal source of state loans.

Furthermore, the cities of Greece, especially Athens, more and more came to be dominated [in post-classical times] by rentiers; they had the amenities of Weimar and Heidelberg, and also that civic freedom which set Greece apart from the Near East and later Rome. Along with this went a tendency for wealthy and successful men ‘to return’ to Greece, acquire citizenship, and then invest their capital in land. This was a safe investment, safer certainly than in the past, as we can see from the fact that in the late classical period interest rates fell to about 8 per cent. For long Athens’ port, the Piraeus, was a sort of staple and monopolized re-shipment trade, first because of political privilege and then because of superior facilities. However, when this leading role passed to Rhodes the result was that at Athens there was a great decrease of opportunities to invest in overseas trade, banks, and other forms of capitalist enterprise. After Athens finally lost its domination of the seas in the League Wars, there was a rapid decline in the number of metics, to whose financial resources Athens had owed so much of its prosperity. Since commerce now ceased to be profitable, investments tended to be made in land, and this tendency was strengthened by the great numbers who emigrated to the colonial areas of the Hellenistic world.

It is therefore not surprising that the Attic demes, so important in the fourth century, began to fall into obscurity from the third century on. The immediate causes of this were a decline in local demand for Attic agricultural products and the replacement of yeomen by tenants.

During the fifth and fourth centuries, however, there was no tendency towards concentration of land ownership. There is nothing whatever in the sources to indicate that there were private coloni. Furthermore, the returns from slave labour in industry were rather favourable then: slave prices were not particularly low, though there were frequent fluctuations. Yet in the time of Demosthenes a horse sometimes sold for twice the price of a slave; if this is compared to conditions in the slave states of the US, it seems a very low price for slaves, but for Antiquity it was in fact only moderate, since the slaveowner had to assume costs arising from training and from risks.

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