Apropos to this project (drawing a historical parallel), the following paper mixes the two varieties of Chicago style: the notes-bibliography method for citing historical articles and sources, and the author-date method for citing contemporary news and sources.
Keywords: Debt, Solon, Seisachtheia, the State
Debt & Bondage: The Socioeconomic Relations of the State and Its People
Since the dawn of complex societies and early civilizations, history has been a series of experimentation and trials in creating the best form of government and state. What this form of government and state looks like depends on the needs of its society, and ultimately, those who wield power. Different ideologies and political systems have been contested and negotiated to little avail by ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato in his The Republic, Thomas Moore in his Utopia, and contemporary political scientists and historians alike. A civilized society emerges when we start differentiation (division of labour), and people choose to relinquish their freedom and power in return for protection both physically and interest-wise. In this paper, the socioeconomic aspects of the state will be examined, but it is also important to note that throughout history, it was never the oversimplification of food-producers versus the rulers.
ONE The nature of slavery in Ancient Greece
Removed from our human experience now is the concept of “slavery” in the sense that it existed in Archaic Attica. Aristotle understood slavery as ‘natural’, and slaves as property or tools important to the households and greater society.¹ Public slaves demosios belonging to the state could be confiscated and redistributed to other oikoi with the property and land.² In the Greek terminology oikoi per se, the definition comprises of not only the household which includes the family but also their land, animals, house, property, and slaves.³ The terms for what comes close to the English word ‘slave’ in Ancient Greek are in fact numerous and imbued with meanings of its time: “doulos, andrapodon, pais, hypêretês.”⁴
TWO Conditions that led to the indebtedness of farmers and peasants
From the end of the Dark Age and early Archaic Age onwards, the Greeks were met with pressures of population growth and scarcity of land.⁵ It was not a problem of a lack of land, but a lack of arable, productive land that were inherited by the elite minority.⁶ The majority could only live off of marginal plots of land requiring more labour for little return, while the aristocratic landowners only got richer through a positive feedback of surplus production which were exchanged for other goods and wealth. This lead to two choices for the have-nots: either follow the exodus to settle in new colonizations in southern Italy and Sicily, or work as a thēs for another family which was considered worse than death for a free man.⁷
For the poor farmers who chose the latter, they were reduced to hired labourers toiling away on the lands of other families for little pay. One of the few records that illustrates the exploitation of the poor by the rich from the poor’s perspective is Hesiod’s Work and Days. Unlike the epics of Homer, ordinary people are the main characters of Hesiod’s Work and Days, and within it he preaches for the middle and lower classes, admonishing the basileis.⁸ The abject situation of the farmers and growing inequality between the wealthy minority and everyone else only pushed for social change and new forms of government that would redistribute power and resources to the poor.
THREE Solon’s reforms and seisachtheia
Another figure that emerged who spoke up for the rights of the poor in his work and attempted to make things more equitable, was Solon. On the other hand, Solon also spoke for the rich, defending their rights. Despite cries of the poor for obtaining political rights and redistributing the land, Solon only gave them half of what they wanted.⁹ Solon introduced seisachtheia which was the abolishment of enslavement of debt, clearing the loans and interests of free men.
Prominently, the nature of Solon’s seisachtheia (“the shaking off of burdens”) or cancellation of “debt-slavery” and what effects his legislations actually had on the poor are debated by scholars like Edward Harris (Solon and the Spirit of Early Greek Law).¹⁰ The terms debt bondage, debt slavery, and different servile statuses must be clearly separated in their definitions (or connotations). Different from slavery, debt bondage was not a permanent status.¹¹ Discussing the debt continuously incurred by peasants, Blok and Krul writes that:
When tenancy of farmlands is held on the obligation to requite with produce, money, labor, or military service, reserves are even sooner exhausted and peasants become incurably indebted to wealthier landowners or rent farmers. All of this obviously becomes worse when loans are extended by interest. [...] In Archaic-period Athens, loans had even been made explicitly on the bodies (δανείζειν ἐπὶ τοῖς σώμασιν; Ath. Pol.6.1) of the farmers, giving the creditors full rights of ownership. Creditors were allowed to actively seek out possibilities to bring such debtors into continuous, absolute dependency, and they were often backed by laws of contract of which the debtors were ignorant and against which they were at any rate powerless, since virtually all were illiterate and did not know their rights.¹²
While Solon’s Reforms did not bring the exact and radical changes the people wanted, they became constitutional for Athenian democracy that follows later, after the civil unrest and years of tyrannical rule.¹³
FOUR Modern-day debt
Debt can be owed on a personal level, or between people and banks and people and companies, but a debtor-creditor relationship between the government and its people can show what the government does for the people and what the people do for their government. It is commonly believed that a large percentage of U.S. debt is foreign debt owed to other countries, but it is in fact owed to the country’s taxpayers, the Social Security and retirement & pension funds of U.S. citizens in other words (Amadeo 2020).
A measure of state stability can be the accrual of national debt, not simply because it is a measurement of whether the government can pay back the money it owes its creditors, but also how the money borrowed is spent. According to The Balance, “the public holds over $21 trillion, or almost 78%, of the national debt” (Amadeo 2020). Treasury bonds are when the government borrows from the public and has to periodically pay it back; an unstable government will pay it back on higher interests (Malik 2018). The U.S. national debt affects the American population in a sovereign default through lowered standard of living, increased mortgage cost, devalued or inflated currency, and become unappealing for foreign investors (Adkins 2020; Malik 2018).
The debt situation of the U.S. is controversy, but for the most part debt default is considered common despite its negative impacts (Adkins 2020; Malik 2018). Other economists believe that there will be a debt crisis in the future if f the U.S. national debt does not drop from its $27 trillion since October 1, 2020 (Amadeo 2020). The national debt and fiscal policies of a country is one way to figure out if a government is doing things right for its people. However, unlike Ancient Greece, the economy of the U.S. implicates global markets and interest rates globally, not just locally. With the pandemic revealing that prior fiscal polices were not made prudently, there is a dire need to prepare for more equitable and sustained economic growth (Sabelhaus 2020).
An issue published by The Atlantic titled “We Are Living in a Failed State” goes as far to claim that the ill symptoms of the U.S. was “a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy and distracted public—gone untreated for years [...] and we had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms” (Packer 2020). These are just some of the problems that come with the creation of the state and continually fails to appropriately confront the issues of its society. In Pre-Industrial Societies, the first state structures developed by the Sumerians were described as “Frankenstein’s monsters” that they did not know what they were creating (Crone 1989). For the state is a powerful organization “[that] can coordinate the actions of its subiects for warfare, defence, internal policing, the settlement of disputes, the creation of means of communication, the improvement of the means of production, precautionary measures against famine and disease, and many other aims (including ugly ones)” (Crone 1989).
FIVE Resolution: trust and credit as a currency
We oft think of happiness in terms of money, efficacy, productivity, and utility (this has been our state past and present); we neglect the fact that we are humans that require more human methods in the way we live and are governed. In current society, our economy evidently needs not to be supported by slaves, however, bondage still exists in different forms.
Money and coinage was not the only way of settling trade agreements in Classical antiquity.¹⁴ Bartering and loans existed between neighbours based on mutual reciprocity and trust. The present needs dealings in trust and mutuality, and moreso in the future where a culture of creditworthiness is crucial in conducting business transactions (e.g. online shopping reviews and the tomorrow of cryptocurrency) and social interactions with one another. As described by the mission of OIKOS, the National Research School in Classical Students:
[T]he ‘human factor’ is crucial in converting inventions and new ideas into successful and actualized innovation. New possibilities need to be realized and embedded in societal practices. New ideas need to ‘land’ in the intended target-group. They must fit the thoughts, knowledge, beliefs, convictions and understanding of human actors.
Endnotes
¹Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery”, 115.
²Thomas R. Martin, “Coins and Slaves”, 33.
³Sarah B. Pomeroy, “Glossary”, 370.
⁴Vlassopoulos, 117.
⁵Pomeroy, History of Ancient Greece, 58-9.
⁶Pomeroy, 58-9.
⁷Pomeroy, 52-3.
⁸Pomeroy, 77.
⁹Pomeroy, 125.
¹⁰Josine Blok, “Debt and Its Aftermath”, 609.
¹¹Edward M. Harris, “Did Solon Abolish Debt-Bondage?”, 417.
¹²Blok, 620.
¹³Pomeroy, 125.
¹⁴Sitta von Reden, “Money in Classical Antiquity”.
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Index
Images:
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Solon_before_Croesus_by_Nicolaes_Kn%C3%BCpfer%2C_Getty_Center.JPG
[2] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oFL6n6JCuuE/W3I0gyjxlFI/AAAAAAAApGM/qn_qEMiRihsFxsfHfnW978F6-wtnIf7mACLcBGAs/s1600/2018-08-13_22-35-44%2BSlaves%2Bin%2BGreece.jpg
[3] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vdvDG5v5fWY/XhFN8wrhsxI/AAAAAAAG6SA/MJO7r343HaMXdwLb4x0pzKpyCYkyjg0UQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/0358.jpg