Carroll Quigley - The Evolution of Civilizations

The increased social conflicts that arose after 450 B.C. were quite different, being caused by tensions of evolution rather than by tensions of development. They did not arise from resistance to change, and even less from unsuccessful resistance to change, but from growing desperation because expansion was slowing up.

Of even greater significance, perhaps, is the fact that in this newer evolutionary crisis the victory was falling more and more to the groups who hated change. This triumph of the reactionaries had occurred occasionally in the earlier period of acute developmental tensions, most notably in Sparta. There the legislation associated with the name of Lycurgus had stopped the development from an agrarian to a commercial economy and had retained local control of political and social life in the hands of the noble landlord class at the price of a renunciation of all commercial expansion. But this local reaction had been overcome in the Greek world as a whole by increased expansion elsewhere, as in Corinth or Athens. This is, of course, a clear case of geographic circumvention to a local reactionary triumph. But in the period after 400 B.C. in the Greek world there was a general triumph of the forces of reaction. This can be seen in the victories of Sparta, Thebes, Macedonia, and Rome, all of whom supported the oligarchic groups over the democratic groups in each state they attacked.

The growth of class conflict in the period after 430 B.C. can be seen in the writings of the enemies of democracy such as Aristophanes, Xenophon, or Plato, but is most clearly shown in Thucydides. The latter describes the way in which each state became divided into two classes, the democratic group favorable to Athens and the oligarchic group favorable to Sparta. The bloody reprisals these two groups inflicted on each other provide some of the most violent pages in Greek history. In Corcyra, where this schism appeared in one of its earliest and most unhappy examples, the popular party obtained support from the rural slaves by offering them emancipation, while the oligarchic group hired mercenary fighters from neighboring areas, and each group set out, generally successfully, to massacre the other.

Closely related to these growing class conflicts was the increasing evidence of imperialist wars. In the earlier periods there had been political conflicts, but the economic expansion of each state, either intensively (as a shift from agriculture to commerce and handicrafts) or extensively (as colonial expansion), had usually taken place without head-on collisions; but by 450 B.C. expansion was increasingly extensive rather than intensive and was more and more likely to seek political support for its extension because more than one group (each backed by its own state) was trying to expand into the same area, or into an area already occupied by a third group. These two modifications in the nature of expansion are characteristic of the shift from a period of expansion to a period of conflict. When an organization becomes institutionalized, it resists structural changes and thus decreases the amount of intensive expansion (which can be achieved only by structural changes) but still seeks to expand extensively by spreading its institutionalized structure over wider areas of exploitation. When numerous groups seek to do this, the limited number of such wider areas makes conflicts arise. Each group seeks to support its extensive expansion by political force, and the result is imperialist war. Indeed, one of the most notable characteristics of any Age of Conflict is the effort to achieve economic expansion by political rather than by economic means.

Here again Thucydides provides our most reliable evidence. The growing rivalry of diverse economic imperialisms is well shown in his writings, and culminated in the clash between Corinth and Athens in the Adriatic. Athens had come to dominate the commerce of the Aegean in the first half of the fifth century as Corinth dominated that of the Adriatic. When Athens tried to push into the Adriatic, allying with Corcyra to do so, Corinth called upon its ally, Sparta, and the fierce struggle began. It is clear that this Athenian effort to push a fairly primitive commercial economy into an area already occupied by a similar economy was unnecessary and was a result of the institutionalization of that system, but we do not know enough about the Greek economy of the day to say exactly how the system was institutionalized and how it could have been reformed.

We cannot ask of any economic system that it expand beyond the limits of its own technical knowledge or of its own social traits, but we have the right to expect that it utilize these before it seeks to expand by taking wealth from its neighbors. From this point of view it seems quite evident that Greek agriculture was far from exploiting its available resources when the imperialist wars began in the fifth century. At that time grain (usually barley) was grown in a two-field system in which the field was left fallow alternate years; this was equivalent to tilling only half the land each year. The fallow was left to recover the nutritive elements in the soil (nitrogen) and to a lesser extent the moisture. The latter could undoubtedly have been increased to some extent by irrigation, but a lack of private enterprise hampered this. As for the nutritive elements, these could have been increased sufficiently to reduce the fallowing to one year in three or even to eliminate it completely. The Greeks were fully aware of the nitrogen-providing qualities of leguminous crops: clover is mentioned in the Odyssey; and alfalfa came from Persia about 480 B.C.; other legumes were known, and their function as green manures was fully known to Xenophon and Theophrastus, yet were rarely used. The use of lime, marls, and various volcanic soils as inorganic fertilizers was also known, above all to Theophrastus. Yet these improvements were generally neglected. The causes of this neglect are to be attributed to a general lack of enterprise associated with a long-established slave system and the growing idea that agricultural labor was a menial activity beneath the dignity of free men. A wider use of legumes and of irrigation could have been made the basis for a more intensive use of livestock and this, in turn, could have led to a considerable increase in the use of meat and cheese in the Greek diet. But, as long as so much of agricultural labor was slaves, and these could be fed on barley and fish, there was little incentive to seek improvements in diet. To some extent such improvements in living were hampered by poor transportation, especially by inadequate harnessing that made it hardly worthwhile to use draft animals, so that heavy work had to be done by slaves. Here again the existence of slavery undoubtedly discouraged innovation: the slaves had to be fed 365 days in the year and had to be kept busy, so there was no real profit in any inventions that would reduce the work of slaves, since their field work in agriculture kept them busy only a small part of the year. Fields were plowed four or five times in a year, and each time were plowed over and over again in many directions "until it was no longer possible to see in which direction the plow went last." The clods were broken up with mattocks. Although this used enormous labor, it was recognized that any increase in efficiency would merely have served to increase the periods in which the slaves were idle. It was difficult to turn slaves to other activities such as vine dressing or olive trimming because these required too much skill for ordinary slaves. In a similar way, deep plowing and drill planting of seed were known to produce superior crops but were not used for lack of enterprise.

On none of these matters can we be very certain of our interpretations, because the facts are rather scanty, but it does seem that the Greek economic system, especially in agriculture, ceased to improve after 400 B.C. even though the knowledge that could have made improvements possible was available. Undoubtedly this had a considerable influence on the growth of imperialist wars, and seems to indicate that slavery had become an institution.