Thucydides and Capital

It is easy to see what Thucydides rejects—the old world had not developed the large-scale political bodies that he admired. And it should be clear by now that Thucydides has little patience for the self-serving fictions of the Greek elites. But what was it that had changed? Was the Athenian empire only an accident? Or did it reflect a fundamental change and the emergence of possibilities that had not previously existed?

Thucydides was able to dismiss symbolic factors almost entirely from his analysis, because he perceived the emergence of a new force. Where material wealth had previously been inert and could return “interest” only when handed over as a gift, Thucydides saw imperialism as a mechanism that could, as it were, make money out of money. The Athenian empire was analogous to modern financial capital in that it earned a regular rate of return (tribute taking the place of interest). Thus Thucydides traced in the Peloponnesian War a major theme familiar from recent studies of the impact of modern capitalism on traditional societies. Once financial and technological systems give dominant figures unprecedented levels of control, they can begin to dispense with the expensive and tiresome obligations they had previously needed to win the loyalty of those on whose services the great depended. Thus, in the modern ethnographic record, we might turn to James Scott’s work^[41] to see how a technological tool such as a combine harvester could reduce the need for human labor in Indonesia and allowed the landlords to forgo many of the obligations they had formerly had toward the peasants who worked their land. The mechanized harvester was not simply a technological innovation, but a catalyst that allowed the powerful to increase their power and redefine the balance between themselves and those less powerful than they. The landlord-dependent relationship became tangibly less personal. Power increased in significance as social bonds became correspondingly less important. Scott describes a shift in what Bourdieu calls “modes of domination.” ^[42] The same kind of shift took place when Athens established its empire in the fifth century. Thucydides directs our gaze relentlessly at the impersonal calculations of his Athenians, who repeatedly turn to an objectified logic of power, rather than to traditional values or obligations.

Thucydides could not have differed more completely from Marx and Adam Smith alike in one fundamental respect: he had, as we noted earlier, remarkably little interest in material production. Agriculture is one of the factors with which Thucydides begins the Archaeology, and seaborne trade elicits additional wealth by means of some mechanism that Thucydides does not choose to describe. But Thucydides comes very close to seeing one kind of wealth, that associated with naval empires, as a kind of capital. The revenues of empire motivate Minos to clear the seas of pirates (Thuc. 1.4), but the accumulation of imperial wealth seems, in Thucydides’ view, to take on a life of its own. The land-based struggles of Greece were deficient precisely in this regard, for no one power could generate any momentum for its expansion but remained bogged down in disputes with its neighbors (1.15.2). Naval empires had emerged from time to time and had acquired the greatest strength by “revenues of money (1.5.1: chrêmatôn prosodôi) and by the domination of others (allôn archê).” Moving freely about the sea they would conquer (katesrephonto) the islands.

At 1.19, the Archaeology climaxes with the appearance of the Athenian empire, in many ways the logical culmination of the processes examined in the previous sections: “The Athenians in time received tribute from their subject cities with the exception of the Chians and Lesbians, and they imposed on them all monetary tribute. And so they possessed for this war far more stored wealth in their own control (hê idia paraskeuê meizôn) than would ever have been possible if they had expanded (ênthêsan) to the fullest extent of power (hôs ta kratista) with an ad hoc alliance.” ^[43] This passage, like many in Thucydides, is difficult to capture in translation: Thucydides examines potential energy in Athens’s paraskeuê, “stored wealth,” a word to which Thucydides gives a new importance.^[44]

But the wealth that Athens accumulates is more than just “a petrified hoard,” like Pythios’s millions of Darics or the precious metal that the unnamed Milesian deposits with Glaukos at Sparta. The chrêmata that the Athenians collect from their subjects supports the navy. The navy, in turn, can bring crushing force to bear on any who do not fulfill their obligations, and it can expand its own power base (as, on a small scale, with Melos). The Athenian empire is a machine that runs on money and that can use money to expand. The capacity—and need—to expand leads to a number of tensions within the History.

First, what is the source of power? Both the Spartan Sthenelaidas and the Athenian Perikles agree that human beings, in the final analysis, are the only true source of power and force. Sthenelaidas, as we will see, argues that Sparta must defend its allies, as they are its greatest strength, while Perikles repeatedly argues that the Athenians should dismiss their personal possessions and preserve the strength of the polis as a whole (e.g., Thuc. 1.143, 2.60, 62.3; cf. 2.21.2, 55.2). But Perikles urges the Athenians to give up their farms and agricultural assets, and for him such sacrifices are tactics to preserve the empire and its revenues. He can thus give up his own estates as a gesture of solidarity with the Athenian people (2.13.1) so that he may not appear to demand more than he is willing himself to do. Money, chrêmata, has begun in Thucydides to evolve into an autonomous source of power, to which human labor is subordinate. On the Peloponnesian side, both the Spartan king Archidamos and the Corinthian delegation emphasize that chrêmata is essential in naval affairs, since money commands the labor and purchases the supplies necessary to run triremes and thus to project force.^[45] For Perikles, Athenian financial reserves are a strategic asset. In the end, both the Peloponnesians and Perikles argue that human qualities will be decisive—the Peloponnesians claim greater courage, Perikles points to the fact that the Athenians have a greater store of naval skill and expertise.^[46]

On the other hand, the dominance of material interests is a constant aspect of Thucydidean analysis: powerful men leading pirate expeditions for their own kerdos and for the material support of the weak (Thuc. 1.5.1), the weaker becoming slaves to the strong for the sake of kerdos (1.8.3), and Agamemnon using deos as well as charis (1.9.3). In the Archaeology alone, chrêmata appears nine times, and achrêmatia (“a lack of chrêmata ”) twice.^[47] From the very beginning (2.2) a surplus (perisousia) of chrêmata is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for significant achievements. When Pindar describes wealth, he uses terms such as ploutos or olbos. He uses the term chrêmata only once and in a bitterly negative passage. “ Chrêmata, chrêmata is the man,” said the Argive man, “when he had lost his possessions (kteana) and those dear to him (philoi) alike” (Isthm. 2.11–12). Pindar deplores a condition that Thucydides uses as a central determinant in his analysis of human affairs: material possessions define one’s status and one’s relationship with other people. We are very close to the phenomenon that Marx deplored as “the fetishism of the commodity,” ^[48] where things become more important than the human beings who create them, and society is turned upside down. Thucydides does not conceptualize this phenomenon as clearly as does Marx, but Marx’s analysis provides a general framework that gives greater coherence to the isolated elements in Thucydides.

Or, to follow Karl Polanyi, we might say that in the archaic Greek world, economic activities were “embedded” in larger social relationships: one exchanged things with relations or personal connections, and these material exchanges constituted a major portion of one’s personal interaction with others. Monetary exchange is an end in itself and establishes no emotional bond between buyer and seller. To understand the impact that “market exchange” and the rise of money might have on Greek society, consider the blunt analysis offered by Adam Smith in the chapter “Accumulation of Capital” in his Wealth of Nations: “Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigality and misconduct.…Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital.” ^[49] And yet parsimony is, as we have seen, exactly what a poet such as Pindar deplores. For Smith, symbolic capital would be an oxymoron. Thus, Smith explains, “the labor of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labor is past, and for which an equal quantity of labor could afterwards be procured.” In Smith’s view, material wealth is a beginning and an end, with which all other concerns must be concerned. Unless material capital is preserved and augmented, society cannot function. Human beings must subordinate themselves to things, and there is little room for the ideology of megaloprepeia that we briefly traced earlier.

Second, military imperialism has an ambiguous relationship to economic exploitation. Thus Adam Smith argues that “the sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive laborers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. Their service, how honourable, how useful, or how necessary soever, produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. The protection, security, and defence of the commonwealth, the effect of their labour this year, will not purchase its protection, security, and defence for the year to come.” ^[50] The Athenian empire, like many others, did, however, pay for itself and turn a substantial profit for the state. While their perspectives are completely different, Adam Smith and Marx both focus with equal intensity upon the production of wealth rather than on the extraction of plunder from a limited store. In this regard, Thucydides’ analysis differs from both.

Third, Thucydides does, however, portray in the Athenian empire a phenomenon that qualitatively approaches the capitalist mode of production outlined by Marx more closely than does the Persian empire. On military campaigns the subjects of the Great King, like the vassals of a feudal lord, must provide him with their labor and even their lives, but they retain control of “the means of production.” The disparate nations that participated in Xerxes’ invasion each participated with their own weapons, with their own officers, and with their own tactics. In the Peloponnesian League, the individual poleis provided hoplites who themselves provided their own arms and thus controlled the basic tools of their trade. Although the individual hoplite submitted to the control of superiors, hoplite armor was an expensive commodity, and the hoplite, even as he risked his life and surrendered a part of this freedom, simultaneously reaffirmed his individual status within society.

The Athenian empire begins with a phase that may be likened to the primitive accumulation described by Marx: according to Marx, capitalism could take hold only when the majority of workers lost control of the means of production, and he saw this initial or “primitive” accumulation in the expropriation of land from the many by the few. The rich “accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had nothing to sell except their own skins.” ^[51] In Marx’s analysis of capitalism, this stage initiates the alienation of workers from the forces of production and allows the capitalist to convert workers into objects with no control over their actions as workers. The psychological consequences of this alienation are substantial, for the workers, losing control over their most basic actions, lose at the same time much of their dignity. Marx had placed his finger on a source of outrage that workers felt acutely in early European capitalism.

Marx’s analysis of alienation lends greater clarity to a feature that distinguished the Athenian empire from Persia or the Peloponnesian League. With the exception only of the Chians and the Lesbians, the Athenian empire alienated its subjects from the “means of production” for their defence. At an early stage, individuals poleis chose to contribute money rather than ships (Thuc. 1.99.3), but a large portion of the Athenian fleet continued to be manned by non-Athenians. The Phokaian or Andrian who once served on ships from his own island under officers of his own polis now served as a mercenary on ships owned and officered by Athenians but paid for by the tribute of his and other states. Thus Athens not only controlled the physical triremes of its fleet but had accumulated a surplus of managerial and technical expertise that is far harder to replace, while the subjects for the most part occupied the most menial and easily replaced functions. The Athenian empire thus exerted a control over its subjects that qualitatively exceeded that of Persia or the Peloponnesian League and that approached the control of early capitalism, which reduced its workers from skilled individuals to replaceable parts in an industrial system.

Fourth, Athenian imperialism by its nature gravitates toward expansion. This is a central theme in Thucydides: Alkibiades justifies the Sicilian expedition by appealing to this logic as a commonly understood phenomenon,^[52] and, as we will see in the next chapter, the Corinthians help precipitate the war with their analysis of Athens as an inherently expansionist power. The Archaeology, however, expresses more clearly than any other part of the History an acceptance, even an approval, for this phenomenon. From the opening chapter of the Archaeology, with its contemptuous dismissal of the weak and quarrelsome past, empire appears as the only hedge against chaos and random violence. The verb auxanô, “grow, augment,” appears four times in the Archaeology. The growth of cities (Thuc. 1.2.6), of Hellas as a whole (1.12.1), of different regions (1.16), and, by contrast, the parasitic growth of individual oikoi (1.17) are symptoms of the health of society. The Peloponnesian War is worthy of study because it exceeded in magnitude any previous conflict. In the opening chapter, Thucydides tells us that he expected the war would be “great” (1.1.1: megas). It proved to be the “greatest shock” (1.1.2: kinêsis megistê) ever to befall the Greek world and a good portion of the barbarians. Later, Thucydides concludes his survey of early Greek history with the claim that the accumulated resources available at its start were “greater” (meizôn) than any sudden alliance could muster. In between, Thucydides argues his thesis that previous events were “not great” (1.1.3: ou megala). The term megas recurs fifteen times as Thucydides calculates the magnitude of one entity or another. Sparta can summon considerable military force, but Athens is clearly portrayed as the expanding power, and this expansion is linked, as we will see in the next chapter, to the accumulation of money.

Without pressing the analogy too far, the general formula for capital outlined by Marx helps frame the gap that separates the world of Pindar and his patrons from that which unfolds in Thucydides’ model. The precapitalist may use money, but only as an intermediate step to acquire some necessity. Thus when the farmer sells surplus grain and uses the money to purchase a metal tool, he may get an unusually good price for the tool or he may be cheated, but the main point is that the farmer has acquired a new “use value” that he did not previously possess. The capitalist starts with money and ends with money, purchasing cotton, for example, at one price, but selling it at another. Where the farmer can exchange $10 of grain for a $10 tool, the capitalist cannot start with $10 and end with $10. Money is purely a quantitative measure, and monetary exchange does not seek something different (tools for grain), but more of the same. Thus by its nature capitalist exchange is quantitative: money cannot change its nature or serve qualitatively different purposes; it can change only by increasing or decreasing. Capital must generate a surplus, and the accumulation of this surplus leads inevitably toward expansion. This model helps explain the underlying logic of the unnerving energy and expansionism that Athens exhibits.

Marx’s analysis allows us to proceed one additional step. Marx argued that capitalism placed things above human beings, subordinating all concerns to profit, or the quantitative increase in money.^[53] Polanyi described the same general phenomenon when he argued that precapitalist exchange is embedded in a network of social ties: precapitalist exchanges serve to reinforce the personal relationships of the two parties as much as they serve the practical needs met by the exchange. At Odyssey 1.182–184 Athena disguised as Mentes claims to be heading to Temese to trade copper for iron. He stops at the home of Odysseus, an old xenos, guest-friend, secured when Mentes’ father gave Odysseus poison for his arrows (263–264). The exchange cemented a social bond, and we can be sure that Mentes would have a similar xenos at Temese with whom to trade.^[54] These personal relationships are, in fact, the substance of symbolic capital discussed earlier. Thucydides pays little attention to symbolic capital because the Athenian empire has established a system in which financial capital has taken on a life of its own. Although he had not developed a theory of capitalism such as appears in either Marx’s Capital or Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he sensed acutely that material forces had begun to exert a greater force than prevailing values and perceptions admitted.