5 ms·
Brings to mind the last paragraph here (see my comment below for the ending): > By the time of Plato’s death (347 B.C.) his hostile analysis of Athenian democr
by ciarannolan 6y ago
Brings to mind the last paragraph here (see my comment below for the ending):
> By the time of Plato’s death (347 B.C.) his hostile analysis of Athenian democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history. Athens recovered wealth, but this was now commercial rather than landed wealth; industrialists, merchants, and bankers were at the top of the reshuffled heap. The change produced a feverish struggle for money, a pleonexia, as the Greeks called it—an appetite for more and more.
> The nouveaux riches (neoplutoi) built gaudy mansions, bedecked their women with costly robes and jewelry, spoiled them with dozens of servants, rivaled one another in the feasts with which they regaled their guests. The gap between the rich and the poor widened; Athens was divided, as Plato put it, into “two cities:… one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with the other. The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation, taxation, and revolution; the rich organized themselves for protection against the poor. The members of some oligarchic organizations, says Aristotle, took a solemn oath: “I will be an adversary of the people” (i.e., the commonalty), “and in the Council I will do it all the evil that I can."
> "The rich have become so unsocial,” wrote Isocrates about 366 B.C., “that those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich.”
> The poorer citizens captured control of the Assembly, and began to vote the money of the rich into the coffers of the state, for redistribution among the people through governmental enterprises and subsidies. The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. In some cities the decentralizing of wealth was more direct: the debtors in Mytilene massacred their creditors en masse; the democrats of Argos fell upon the rich, killed hundreds of them, and confiscated their property. The moneyed families of otherwise hostile Greek states leagued themselves secretly for mutual aid against popular revolts.
[1] Will Durant. “The Lessons of History.” p. 58-60
- dpoochieni 6y agoHow did the poor fare in the end?
- ciarannolan 6y agoSorry, didn't want to spam, but here is the last paragraph of that thought: > The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor distrusted it as a sham equality of votes nullified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The rising bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip of Macedon pounced down upon it in 338 B.C., and many rich Greeks welcomed his coming as preferable to revolution. Athenian democracy disappeared under Macedonian dictatorship. TLDR on this whole thing: this never ends well for the poor.
- whakim 6y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that most of our primary sources are incredibly hostile towards the merchant class. (For much of history, the merchant class had an incredible stigma attached to them.)
- titzer 6y agoMaybe there's a good reason for that? (and not anti-semitism)
- whakim 6y agoWell, there is a reason for that. The vast majority of primary sources were written by members of a nobility who inherited their wealth, and the nobility viewed wealth that wasn't inherited as ill-gotten. There's also the fact that pre-modern societies didn't have modern economic theories to help them understand exactly what value the merchant class was providing to society. I'm not necessarily siding with the nobility here. Simply pointing out that when our aristocratic sources write about the terrible upheaval that occurred when people outside the nobility acquired great wealth, we should be pretty skeptical.