Chapter 4 of 14

Citizens and Slaves: Athens and Rome

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The mines of Laurion

About forty kilometres south-east of Athens, in the hills of the Laurion peninsula near Cape Sounion, the ground is riddled with holes. There are more than two thousand ancient shafts, some of them over a hundred metres deep, and from their bottoms run many kilometres of galleries following the veins of silver-bearing lead ore. Many of these galleries are so low that a grown man cannot stand in them; in places they are well under a metre high. The people who cut them worked lying on their sides or crouching, by the light of small oil lamps, breaking the rock with iron hammers and picks and passing the ore back in baskets. Some scholars have suggested that children were used in the narrowest seams. Nobody knows for certain. The workers left no records of their own.

We do know who they were. Almost all of them were slaves. In his short treatise Ways and Means, written in the 350s BCE, the Athenian soldier and writer Xenophon mentions in passing that the general Nicias, one of the richest men in Athens in the previous century, had owned a thousand slaves whom he hired out to a mining contractor for an obol each per day. Others, Xenophon adds, had owned hundreds. The total number of slaves working at Laurion at the peak of production is unknown; modern estimates run into the tens of thousands, and all of them are guesses.

What makes Laurion one of the most important places in this book is not only what happened underground but what its silver paid for. In 483 BCE, the Athenians struck a rich new vein at a place called Maroneia. There was a proposal to distribute the windfall among the citizens. Instead, on the advice of the politician Themistocles, they used it to build a fleet of warships — triremes — as Herodotus and the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians both record. Three years later, that fleet defeated the Persian navy at Salamis.

A trireme was rowed by about 170 men. They were not, for the most part, slaves. They were free citizens of the poorest class, the thetes, who could not afford the armour of a heavy infantryman. As Athens became a naval power, those poor rowers became indispensable to the city's survival and its empire. And as they became indispensable, they gained political power. Within a generation, the poorest Athenian citizens were voting in the Assembly, sitting on juries and being paid by the state for doing so.

Here, in a single chain of cause and effect, is the paradox at the heart of this chapter. Slave labour in the mines produced silver. The silver built ships. The ships were rowed by poor citizens. The poor citizens won democracy. The most celebrated political freedom of the ancient world was built, quite literally, on silver dug by people who had no freedom at all.

The fence moves outwards

To understand how this happened, we need to go back to the debt crisis with which the previous chapter ended.

By the early sixth century BCE, according to the Constitution of the Athenians and to Plutarch's Life of Solon, many of the poorer farmers of Attica had fallen into dependence on the rich. Some, called hektemoroi or "sixth-parters", seem to have owed a portion of their harvest — probably a sixth — to a landlord. Others had borrowed on the security of their own bodies, and when they defaulted they and their families were enslaved, some of them sold abroad. The exact nature of these arrangements is obscure and much debated, but the result was clear: Athens was on the edge of civil war.

In 594 BCE, Solon was given authority to reform the laws. His central measure, the seisachtheia or "shaking off of burdens", cancelled debts secured on persons and land and outlawed, for the future, the practice of lending on the security of a citizen's body. In one of the surviving fragments of his own poetry, Solon boasts that he pulled up the boundary stones (horoi) that had been planted in the black earth of Attica to mark the creditors' claims, and that he brought home Athenians who had been sold into slavery in foreign lands, some of whom had wandered so long that they no longer spoke their own language.

It was a genuine breakout, one of the most consequential in history. But consider what it did to the farm. It did not abolish the need of the rich for labour on their estates, in their workshops and in the mines. It only made one source of that labour — their fellow citizens — illegal. From then on, the demand for dependent labour was increasingly met from outside the citizen body: by chattel slaves, bought in markets supplied by war, piracy and trade with the peoples on the edges of the Greek world — Thracians, Scythians, Phrygians, Carians, Syrians.

The historian Moses Finley drew the conclusion that has shaped the study of the subject ever since. In Greece, he argued, freedom and slavery advanced together. The same process that made Athenian citizens free made Athenian slaves necessary. The fence did not come down. It was moved outwards, from around the poor citizen to around the foreigner.

That is a pattern this book will meet again: a breakout for one group of the 99% paid for by intensified exploitation of another. The farm does not always resist reform. Sometimes it simply relocates.

Democracy for a few

From Cleisthenes' reforms of 508–507 BCE to its suppression by Macedon in 322 BCE, Athens developed the most radical form of direct democracy the world had seen. Adult male citizens met in the Assembly on the Pnyx hill to vote on war and peace, laws and finance. Most public offices were filled by lot. Juries of hundreds of citizens, chosen by lot and paid a small daily fee from the time of Pericles, decided both private and political cases. The rich were required to pay for warships and religious festivals out of their own pockets through a system of public services called liturgies. It is easy, and right, to admire much of this.

But who counted as a citizen? From 451–450 BCE, under a law proposed by Pericles, only a man whose mother and father were both Athenian could be a citizen. Women could not vote or hold office. Resident foreigners — the metics, many of whom had lived in Athens for generations — paid a special tax, served in the army and could not own land. And then there were the slaves.

Numbers for Athens are uncertain, and historians argue about them fiercely. At its peak in the fifth century BCE, the number of adult male citizens has been estimated at somewhere between about thirty thousand and sixty thousand. Estimates of the slave population of Attica range even more widely, from below fifty thousand to well over a hundred thousand. Whatever the true figures, the conclusion is unavoidable: the people with full political rights were a minority of the people who lived in Attica, perhaps somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the total.

Slaves did nearly every kind of work in Athens. They worked in the mines and quarries, in craft workshops, in agriculture alongside their owners, in households as servants, nurses and tutors. Some were owned by the state and served as clerks, coin-testers and even as a police force, a body of Scythian archers who kept order in the Assembly. Most free Athenian households of any means owned at least one or two slaves. Many poor citizens owned none.

An anonymous pamphlet written in the fifth century BCE, known as the Constitution of the Athenians and attributed to an author scholars call the "Old Oligarch", shows how this world looked to a rich man who disliked democracy. It is right, he concedes sourly, that the poor and the common people have more power in Athens than the noble and the rich, because it is the common people who row the ships and give the city its strength. Then he complains that in Athens you cannot strike a slave in the street, because the common people dress no better than slaves, and you might hit a citizen by mistake. It is a revealing complaint. The democracy he disliked had made the poor citizen visually indistinguishable from the slave — and for that very reason, the line between them in law had to be drawn all the more sharply.

The living tool

Every farm needs a story, and the Greek story about slavery was written by its greatest philosopher.

In the first book of the Politics, Aristotle defines the slave as a kind of property — a "living possession" — and as an instrument for action. He then asks whether slavery is natural or merely conventional. His answer is that some people are slaves by nature: they are capable of understanding reason when they hear it, but not of exercising it themselves, and for them it is both just and beneficial to be ruled by a master, as the body is ruled by the soul. Aristotle admitted that in practice many people were enslaved who were not slaves by nature — prisoners of war, for example — and that this was a matter of dispute in his own time. But he insisted that natural slaves existed, and his argument would be cited in defence of slavery for more than two thousand years, including by apologists for the Spanish conquest of the Americas and for slavery in the American South.

In the same passage Aristotle makes an observation that sounds startlingly modern. If every tool could do its own work when ordered, he writes, if shuttles could weave by themselves and plectrums could play the lyre without a hand to guide them, then master craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves. It is a thought experiment about automation, and its conclusion is clear: what the slave provided was the work that tools could not yet do by themselves. We will come back to this thought in Chapter 13, in an age when the shuttles have begun to weave on their own.

Aristotle's teacher Plato had already offered the city a "noble lie" about men of gold, silver and bronze, as we saw in Chapter 1. Aristotle provided something more durable: an argument that the farm's hierarchy reflected the structure of nature itself. It is the ancestor of every later theory that explains inequality as the outcome of natural differences in ability.

Sparta: the farm without disguise

If Athens shows how freedom and slavery could advance together, its great rival Sparta shows the farm with almost no disguise at all.

The Spartan citizens, the Spartiates, were a small warrior elite who were forbidden to work at any trade or farm their own land. Their land was worked for them by the helots: the descendants of the conquered populations of Laconia and Messenia, who were bound to the land and owed a large share of their harvest to the Spartiate household that held it. Helots were not bought and sold like chattel slaves, and they lived in their own families and communities. But they had no rights, and they vastly outnumbered their masters. Herodotus, describing the battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, says that each of the five thousand Spartiates who marched there was accompanied by seven helots.

The Spartans knew perfectly well what kind of farm they were running, and they designed their whole society around the fear of the herd. According to Plutarch, citing Aristotle, each year the Spartan magistrates formally declared war on the helots, so that killing one would not incur religious pollution. Young Spartans in an institution called the krypteia were sent into the countryside to kill helots who seemed dangerous. And Thucydides records an episode during the Peloponnesian War in which the Spartans invited those helots who claimed to have served them best in war to come forward to be freed. About two thousand were chosen, garlanded and paraded around the temples as free men. Shortly afterwards they disappeared, and no one ever knew how each of them was killed. The Spartans, Thucydides explains, had wanted to identify the helots with the most spirit, because those were the ones most likely to rebel.

They were right to be afraid. In about 464 BCE, after a great earthquake devastated Sparta, the helots of Messenia rose in a revolt that took years to suppress. And in 370–369 BCE, after the Theban general Epaminondas had shattered Spartan power at the battle of Leuctra, Messenia was liberated and its helots became the citizens of a new, independent city. Sparta never recovered. The farm that had been organised most nakedly around force fell as soon as the force failed.

Rome: the belly and the limbs

Rome's history begins, in its own tradition, with an act of class conflict.

According to the historian Livy, writing under Augustus about events nearly five hundred years earlier, in 494 BCE the plebeians of Rome — the ordinary citizens, as opposed to the hereditary patrician aristocracy — were crushed by debt. Under the old Roman institution of nexum, a debtor who could not pay could be bound to his creditor and made to work for him, chained and beaten. When the plebeians were called up to fight yet another war, they refused. They marched out of the city and camped on a hill outside it, the Sacred Mount. It was the first "secession of the plebs": in effect, a general strike by the army.

The Senate sent an envoy, Menenius Agrippa, to persuade them to return. Livy tells us he did so with a fable. Once, he said, the parts of the human body grew resentful of the belly. They did all the work, while the belly sat idle in the middle, enjoying what they brought it. So the hands refused to carry food to the mouth, the mouth refused to take it in and the teeth refused to chew. They meant to starve the belly into submission. Instead, the whole body wasted away. Only then did the limbs understand that the belly, too, had its function: it digested the food and sent the nourishment back out to every part of the body. The Senate, Agrippa implied, was the belly of Rome.

It is the perfect story of the farm, and it has been retold for over two thousand years — by Shakespeare, at the opening of Coriolanus, and in one form or another by every defender of the idea that the wealth flowing to the top is returned, in some form, to everyone else. Notice its structure. It does not deny that the belly consumes what the limbs produce. It admits it. What it claims is that this arrangement is natural, organic and in the limbs' own interest.

The plebeians came back, but not for a story. They came back because they won something: the right to elect their own officials, the tribunes of the plebs, who could protect individual plebeians against the magistrates and, later, veto legislation. Over the next two centuries, through further secessions and long political struggle — the so-called Conflict of the Orders — the plebeians won access to the highest offices and, in 287 BCE, the principle that decisions of the plebeian assembly were binding on all Romans. And around 326 BCE, according to Livy, after a scandal in which a creditor had abused a young debt-bondsman, the Lex Poetelia Papiria abolished nexum for Roman citizens.

As in Athens, the result was not the end of the farm. The Conflict of the Orders produced a new nobility, made up of the families, patrician and plebeian, whose members had held the highest offices. And the end of debt bondage for citizens coincided with the beginning of Rome's great conquests — and an inflow of foreign slaves on a scale the ancient world had never seen.

The harvest of conquest

Between the late fourth and the late second centuries BCE, Rome conquered Italy, defeated Carthage, and took over Spain, Greece, North Africa and much of Asia Minor. Every war produced captives, and captives were sold as slaves. The numbers recorded by ancient historians are sometimes exaggerated, but some of them are well attested. In 167 BCE, after the defeat of the Macedonian kingdom, the Senate ordered the general Aemilius Paullus to sack the cities of Epirus in north-western Greece, which had sided with Macedon. According to Livy and Polybius, seventy towns were plundered in a single day and 150,000 people were sold into slavery. The geographer Strabo wrote that the slave market on the island of Delos could receive and dispatch tens of thousands of slaves in a single day.

By the end of the Republic, Italy contained an enormous slave population. How large is disputed. Estimates range from around one million to as many as three million slaves, in a total population of perhaps six to seven and a half million. The historian Peter Brunt's influential figure lay at the upper end; Walter Scheidel and others have argued for lower numbers. Either way, Roman Italy was one of the few societies in history, alongside classical Athens, the Caribbean and the American South, that historians are willing to call a true "slave society" — a society in which slavery was central to production and to the wealth of the ruling class, not merely present.

The beneficiaries were the Roman elite. The Senate, which controlled the treasury and the conduct of wars, was dominated by a few hundred families, and its members turned the profits of conquest — plunder, provincial governorships, contracts and slaves — into land. Some of that land was public land, ager publicus, taken from defeated Italian communities and in principle owned by the Roman people. In practice, it was occupied by the rich, who worked it with slaves. The large estates that resulted came to be called latifundia.

We have unusually direct evidence of how Roman landowners thought about running them, because two of them wrote handbooks. Cato the Elder's On Agriculture, from the middle of the second century BCE, advises the owner arriving at his farm to check the work of the slave overseer, and to sell what is not needed: old oxen, blemished cattle and sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, worn-out tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and anything else superfluous. A century later, the scholar Varro, in his own treatise on farming, classified agricultural equipment into three kinds: the kind that speaks, which is slaves; the kind that has a voice but cannot speak, which is oxen; and the kind that is mute, which is wagons. The human farm in this book is a metaphor. On a Roman latifundium it was a literal entry in the inventory.

"Masters of the world" with no clod of earth

The Roman conquests also changed life for the ordinary citizens who did the fighting. The traditional Roman soldier was a small farmer, who left his plot to serve in the legions. As wars grew longer and further away — in Spain, in Greece, in Africa — many soldiers were absent from their farms for years. According to the ancient historians, especially Appian and Plutarch, many returned to find their farms ruined or their families in debt, and sold up to the rich, who were expanding their slave-worked estates. The dispossessed drifted to Rome, where they joined a growing urban poor.

How accurate this picture is has been the subject of intense debate. Some historians, such as Nathan Rosenstein, argue that the "decline of the Italian peasantry" has been exaggerated, pointing out that the census figures for Roman citizens did not collapse, and that the problems of the second century may have been caused more by rising population and land shortage than by slave-run estates squeezing out small farmers. What is not in doubt is that contemporaries believed there was a crisis, and that one young aristocrat decided to do something about it.

Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was elected tribune of the plebs for the year 133 BCE. He belonged to one of the most distinguished families in Rome: his father had been consul twice, and his mother Cornelia was the daughter of Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal. According to his brother, as reported by Plutarch, Tiberius had been struck while travelling through Etruria by the sight of a countryside emptied of free farmers and worked by imported slaves.

Plutarch preserves a speech of Tiberius's that is one of the most powerful pieces of political rhetoric to survive from antiquity. The wild beasts of Italy, he said, each had a den or a lair to shelter in, but the men who fought and died for Italy had nothing but air and light; they wandered homeless with their wives and children. Their generals urged them to fight for their ancestral tombs and shrines, but not one of them had an ancestral altar. In Bernadotte Perrin's translation, Tiberius concludes: "they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own."

His proposal was moderate. An old law, long ignored, limited the amount of public land any one person could occupy to 500 iugera, about 125 hectares. Tiberius proposed to enforce the limit, with an extra allowance for sons, and to distribute the surplus public land in small plots to landless citizens, who could not sell them. A commission of three men was to carry out the redistribution.

The wealthy occupiers of public land had, in many cases, treated it as their own for generations, built on it, bought and sold it, and used it as security for loans. They mobilised against the law. When another tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed it, Tiberius took the unprecedented step of having the assembly vote Octavius out of office. The law passed. When Tiberius then sought re-election to protect his reform, a group of senators led by the chief priest, Publius Scipio Nasica, attacked him and his supporters during the election, clubbing them to death with the legs of benches and pieces of wood. Around three hundred people were killed. Their bodies were thrown into the Tiber.

Ten years later, his younger brother Gaius Gracchus, also as tribune, attempted a more ambitious programme: the land commission was revived; new colonies were proposed for landless citizens; and, crucially, a law guaranteed every citizen in Rome the right to buy a monthly ration of grain at a fixed, subsidised price. In 121 BCE, with Gaius out of office and his laws under attack, the Senate passed for the first time a decree that would later be known as the senatus consultum ultimum — the "final decree" — urging the consul to see that the state came to no harm. The consul attacked Gaius and his supporters. Gaius had a slave kill him to avoid capture. According to Plutarch, some three thousand of his followers were killed or executed afterwards.

The Gracchi have been remembered as martyrs or as demagogues, depending on the politics of whoever is remembering them. For this book, they illustrate something very specific. They were not members of the 99%. They were members of the 0.01% — sons of the highest aristocracy — who tried to save the farm from its own logic, much as the debt-cancelling kings of Mesopotamia had done. Their proposals would have restored a class of free farmer-soldiers on whom Rome's military power depended. And they were killed not by the herd but by their peers, who would not give up the land.

Bread and circuses

The killing of the Gracchi opened a century of political violence that ended with the fall of the Republic. Along the way, the Roman elite discovered a more effective way of managing the urban poor than land reform: feeding and entertaining them.

Gaius Gracchus's subsidised grain was reformed, expanded and finally, in 58 BCE, made free by the populist politician Publius Clodius. By the time Julius Caesar took control of Rome, the number of citizens receiving free grain had reached some 320,000; according to the biographer Suetonius, Caesar reduced it to 150,000 by a census of eligible recipients. Under Augustus it settled at around 200,000. Grain from Sicily, North Africa and above all Egypt — the old granary of the pharaohs, now a Roman province — was shipped to the city in vast quantities to feed it. The farm in the provinces fed the herd in the capital.

Alongside the grain came the games. Roman politicians had long competed to put on chariot races, theatrical shows and gladiatorial fights to win popularity. Under the emperors, the spectacles became a central institution of the state. The Flavian Amphitheatre, the building we call the Colosseum, was dedicated in 80 CE. An inscription from the building, reconstructed by the epigrapher Géza Alföldy, records that it was built from the spoils of war — almost certainly the treasure taken from Jerusalem after the Roman sack of the city in 70 CE. Many historians believe that Jewish captives were among those who built it.

The satirist Juvenal, writing in the early second century CE, gave the system its permanent name. The Roman people, he wrote, who once handed out military commands, consulships and legions, now restrained themselves and longed anxiously for just two things: panem et circenses — bread and circuses.

Juvenal was a snob, and his line expresses contempt for the urban poor as much as for their rulers. But it captures a real shift in the farm's technique. The Republic had been a farm with a voice: the plebs could secede, the tribunes could veto, the assemblies could vote. Under the emperors, the voice was quietly removed, and in its place came a guaranteed ration and a spectacle. It is the first large-scale example of a pattern we will see again: when the 99% can no longer be safely excluded, they can sometimes be safely fed.

Shepherds and owners in the empire

What did the Roman farm look like at its height? The economic historians Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen attempted an estimate for the Roman Empire around 150 CE, a population of perhaps seventy million people. They concluded that a small elite — the senatorial and equestrian orders, the town councillors of the provinces and other wealthy families, together around 1.5% of the population — received something like a fifth of the empire's total income. A modest "middling" group, perhaps a tenth of the population, lived comfortably above subsistence. The great majority lived at or near the level of bare survival. All such estimates for the ancient world rest on fragile evidence, and Scheidel and Friesen are frank about their uncertainty. But the shape they describe is the shape of a farm.

The very top was astonishingly rich. Under Augustus the minimum property requirement for a senator was one million sesterces, at a time when a legionary soldier earned 900 a year. The richest Romans held hundreds of millions. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man of the late Republic, is said by Plutarch to have built part of his fortune by buying burning buildings and those next to them cheaply from their panicked owners, and then putting out the fires with his own private brigade of slaves. He is also reported to have said that no one should count himself rich unless he could maintain an army from his income. The elder Pliny, writing in the first century CE, claimed that latifundia had ruined Italy and were ruining the provinces too, and that six men had once owned half of the province of Africa — until the emperor Nero had them executed and took their land.

Below the owners stood the shepherds, and Rome developed them in great variety. There were the provincial governors and tax-farmers, the publicani, whose companies bid for the right to collect taxes and kept whatever they could extract above the contract price. There were the estate managers, the vilici, often slaves themselves, who ran the latifundia for absent owners. There was the web of patronage: every morning in Rome, crowds of clients gathered at the doors of their patrons for the salutatio, the formal greeting, in exchange for favours, protection and small gifts of food or money. And, remarkably, there were the freedmen.

Romans freed their slaves far more often than most slave-owning societies. A freed slave of a Roman citizen generally became a citizen himself, though with some restrictions, and owed continuing obligations to his former master. Many freedmen became wealthy merchants and craftsmen. Under the early emperors, imperial freedmen — men such as Narcissus and Pallas under Claudius — ran the central administration of the empire and became richer than most senators. Manumission was a genuine route out of slavery for some. It also worked, as many historians have pointed out, as an incentive that kept the rest working hard in the hope of it, and as a way of recruiting loyal managers who owed everything to their masters. It was a breakout designed by the farm itself.

The story was supplied, as in Greece, by philosophy as well as by custom. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, in a famous letter on the treatment of slaves, urged his reader to remember that the person he calls his slave was born of the same seed, enjoys the same sky, and breathes, lives and dies as he does. Treat your inferiors, Seneca advised, as you would wish your superiors to treat you. It is a humane letter. It does not suggest freeing anyone. Seneca himself was one of the richest men in Rome, and the later historian Cassius Dio claimed that his sudden calling-in of large loans he had made to British notables was one of the causes of the revolt of Boudica in 60–61 CE — a claim that historians treat with caution, but which shows how the philosopher's wealth looked to an ancient writer.

The revolts of the herd

The Roman farm had its breakouts, and some of them were enormous.

In Sicily, where great estates were worked by gangs of slaves, two major slave wars broke out in the second century BCE. The first, from about 135 to 132 BCE, was led by a Syrian slave named Eunus, who was said to be a prophet and miracle-worker, and who was proclaimed king by his followers. According to the ancient accounts, his army grew to tens of thousands. It took Roman consular armies several years to defeat it. A second Sicilian revolt followed between 104 and 100 BCE.

The most famous revolt began in 73 BCE in a gladiatorial training school at Capua, where some seventy gladiators led by a Thracian named Spartacus broke out armed with kitchen knives. Their numbers grew rapidly as slaves and free rural poor joined them, until, according to the ancient sources, their army numbered in the tens of thousands — some ancient writers say over a hundred thousand. For two years they defeated one Roman army after another and marched the length of Italy. It is not clear what Spartacus intended — whether to escape over the Alps, to reach Sicily, or to fight on — and there is no evidence that he aimed to abolish slavery as an institution. In 71 BCE the rebels were finally defeated by Crassus. According to Appian, six thousand captured rebels were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome.

There were also attempted breakouts by the free poor. In 63 BCE the aristocrat Catiline attracted desperate debtors with a programme of novae tabulae — "new account books", that is, the cancellation of debts — and plotted to seize power when the elections went against him. The consul Cicero suppressed the conspiracy and had five conspirators executed without trial. Debt was an issue that would not go away. Julius Caesar, once he had seized power, introduced measures that eased debtors' burdens without cancelling debts outright.

And there was, slowly, the extension of the fence itself. After the Social War of 91–88 BCE, in which Rome's Italian allies rebelled to demand Roman citizenship, citizenship was extended to most of Italy. In 212 CE, the emperor Caracalla's edict known as the Constitutio Antoniniana granted citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the empire. By then, however, citizenship meant much less than it had in the Republic. The real line in Roman law had moved: it now ran between the honestiores, the "more honourable" — the elite — and the humiliores, the "humbler" people, who could be subjected to beatings, torture and degrading forms of execution from which the elite were exempt. The old distinction between citizen and non-citizen was replaced by a franker one between the top and the bottom.

What the citizens' farm teaches

Athens and Rome are rightly remembered as the birthplaces of democracy and republican government, of citizenship and the rule of law. This chapter has not tried to diminish those achievements. They were real, they were won by struggle, and they have inspired breakouts ever since.

But viewed through the lens of this book, the classical world shows something uncomfortable. The fence did not disappear when citizens won their freedom; it moved outwards, to enclose foreigners, captives and slaves — and in Sparta, a whole conquered people. The feed was the labour of slaves in mines, workshops and estates, the land taken in conquest, the taxes of the provinces and the grain of Egypt. The shepherds were officials and tax-farmers, overseers who were often slaves themselves, patrons with their clients and, in Rome, freedmen who rose to run the empire. The story was the belly and the limbs, the natural slave, the living tool, the citizen's pride and, under the emperors, the bread and the games. And the breakouts — Solon's shaking off of burdens, the secessions of the plebs, the helots of Messenia, the Gracchi, Spartacus — were all real, and all show the farm's ability to adapt: conceding to some, displacing the burden onto others, killing reformers, crucifying rebels and buying off the rest.

Perhaps the most important lesson is the one Moses Finley drew. In the ancient world, the freedom of some depended on the unfreedom of others. The question that every later chapter will ask, in one form or another, is whether this was a peculiarity of antiquity, or a permanent feature of the farm.

Bridge: chained to the soil

As the Roman Empire faced crisis in the third century CE — invasions, civil wars, plague and the collapse of its silver currency — the supply of new slaves from conquest dried up, and the emperors needed to secure their tax revenue from a shrinking rural population. Increasingly, the great estates were worked not by chattel slaves but by tenant farmers, coloni, who held plots in return for rent and labour.

In 332 CE, the emperor Constantine — the first Christian emperor — issued a law, preserved in the Theodosian Code, dealing with coloni who had fled from the estates to which they belonged. Anyone found harbouring such a fugitive was to restore him and pay his taxes. And coloni who were planning flight, the law added, could be bound in chains like slaves, so that they might perform the duties of free men under the punishment of a slave.

It is one of the most quietly momentous documents in this book. The free tenant was becoming bound to the soil. The farm was about to take the shape it would hold in Europe for the next thousand years. In the next chapter, we enter the world of lords and serfs, tithes and salvation — and of a Church that was both the herd's shepherd and one of its greatest landlords.