Chapter 1

SLAVERY, ECONOMY & PHILOSOPHY - CITY-STATES & EMPIRE INMEDITERRANEAN ANTIQUITIES

Debabrata Banerjee

Map of the Agora of Megara Hyblaea(from G. Vallet - F. Villard -P. Auberson, Megara Hyblaea 1Le quartier de l’agora archaïque

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1.1 Slavery, Economy, Democracy and Intellection in Historical Contexts &Theory – Outlining Space-Time Constellations

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1

How could Greco-Roman Antiquity invent philosophy and politics; how could they invent monuments that so perfectly embodied those values,and at the same time make men fight in amphitheatre or reduce a portion of humanity to slavery?

The Slave, Yvon Thebert 1

Strife is no only child. Upon the earth

Two strifes exist; the one is praised by those

Who come to know her and the other blamed.

Their nature differs: for the cruel one

Makes battles thrive, and war; she wins no love

…. The other first-born child of blackest night

Was set by Zeus, who lives in air, on high,

Set in the roots of the earth, an aid to men

She urges even lazy men to work

…So neighbor vies with neighbor in their rush

For wealth: this strife is good for mortal men

Hesiod, Works and Days

This chapter proposes the need of overhauling for grasping the qualitative dimension of the ancient worldby re-definition of social forms of labour and `enquiries’ in the realm of comprehension in Mediterraneanantiquities, while restraining from exaggerated essentialist interpretations, which has been the hallmark inthe study of slavery in the ancient world. The ancient mentalite regarded the quantifier, whose arche<originary> has been located in ancient Mesopotamian conception of arithmetic by Denise Schmandt-Besserat approximating the origin of written language in ancient Mediterranean, as a generic unit, asymbol of both `pure’ un-quantified, yet arithmetical i.e., quantifiable qualifier co-abstracted togetherwith the multitude of abstract, generic un-quantified qualifiers, or a symbolization of both an abstractgeneric quantifier and also an abstract generic qualifier. Deciphering the Elamite and BabylonianCuneiform made substantial progress between 1840 and 1850 with the find that their signs could have aphonetic value [ a sign=a syllable] or an ideographic value [ a sign=a word], which laid down the basicprinciples. Later it was discovered that the ideograms came from a very ancient language – Sumerian.The Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform documentation represents a considerable body of texts touching onnearly every field. The scientific literature, for its part, often adopted a form of a list, revealing their

1 In Andrea Giardina, The Romans, Chicago, 1993, p. 138

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desire to catalogue their environment in most material and spiritual aspects. But it defined the scientificfield – law, medicine, mathematics, etc. - `rub shoulders with divination, astrology and magicalconjuration’. Scientific literature was therefore closely linked with religious literature which set down inwriting `rituals and different types of prayers.’2 The math corresponding to this mentalite is therefore,quanto-qualitative, whose generic unit , <arche> is a quantifiable qualifier, called by Plato, the arithmoimonadikoi, expressed by notations that fully developed around 250 AD in the Arithmetike of Diophantus[elision of qualifiers].3 Modern mentalite , steeped pervasively in the experiences of exchange-value basedexchanges than were those of ancient Mediterranean, is more comfortable with the `hyper-abstractness’ ofabstracting pure unqualified quantifiers [ by using a set of ten symbols] thereby eliding quality, eventhough modern arithmetic has expanded < sublated> ideo-ontologically like ancient arithmetic byincluding 0 and 1 as numbers. But abstract quantity is founded on the nonlinearity barrier, which is notfound in the `prehistory’ of arithmetic – from iconic tokenology to Cuneiform literacy. An analysis ofmodern reification and fetishism arises out of ignorance of modern pseudo-subjectivity. These are somereasons why Marx would emphasize the stress lain on use-value, rather than exchange-value, by thewriters of antiquity [especially Plato] while discussing division of labour . If the growth of quantity isoccasionally mentioned, `this is only done with the greater abundance of use values. There is not a wordalluding to exchange value…This standpoint, the standpoint is adopted by Plato’ who treats `division oflabour within the community’ develops from `the many sidedness of the needs of individuals and one-sidedness of their capabilities.`4 The main point here is that labourer must adapt himself to work, not thework to the labourer’.` That is because work will not wait for the leisure of the and the workman shouldattend to it as his own affair.’5 At another level interpreting Aristotle, Marx says that Aristotle could notextract abstract-homogeneous labour, that in the form of commodity values, all labour is expressed asequal human labour and therefore equal quality by inspection of the form of value because Greek societywas founded on the labour of the slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and labourpower6 We are talking about historical epochs when consciousness mattered far more than it does in themodern historical phase though a form of self-expanding and `evoluting’ consciousness was seen to have

2 Francis Joannes, The Age of Empires – Mesopotamia in the First Millennium B C, Edinburg, 2004, pp. 17-18

3 Kline J, Greek mathematical thought and the origin of Algebra, N Y, 1992, p. 89-91; Peters F E, GreekPhilosophical Terms, N Y, 1990 ; Diophantus of Alexandria [? 200-284 AD], Diophantus Mathemetika can be foundin the Mansfield Collection [1650-1750], janus@lib.com.ac.uk

4 Marx K, Capital, vol 1, p. 487

5 Plato, Republic, k 2:2, quoted by Marx K, Op Cit., p. 488

6 From F Beise, Die Philosophy des Aristotle, [Politics, Bk1] in Marx K, Capital, vol 1, p. 532

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the capacity to bring about major changes to the extent in which it could appear as a real force.`Considered ideally, the dissolution of a given form of consciousness sufficed to kill a whole epoch.’7 Itwas symbolic that the town of Hurran Carrhae, in upper Mesopotamia gave refuge to the lastrepresentatives of paganism – the Neo-Platonic philosophers whom Christianity had expelled fromAthens in late 5th c. AD. As opposed to the position of Weber and more reworked ideas along similar linesof Finley, there are no assumptions in this study about `ancient economy’, such as an `economy`embedded’ within cultural constraints, or Finley’s view that `classical Greeks’ had `no concept ofeconomy at all, when the emphasis was on social, and political `status’, as contrasted with moderncapitalist economic sector, as historicized by Hasebrock and Polyani, who contrast ethnographic accountsto conclude that in the earliest societies `there is an absence of any institution based on economicmotive’.8 The Greco-Roman world is defined, or reduced to it essence [Husserl] as `slave society/s’,predominantly natural /subsistence based rural landscapes interspersed with large estates of absenteelandlords, especially in the Roman world who used slaves as a differentiated strata, not limited tourban/rural distinction. In these works there obtains specificity or particularity, which simultaneouslyprovides the alibi for generating historicist illusions culled out of a broad spectrum of records for the sakeof proof or validations. While noting that though recent increase in works on slavery cover not only the`autonomous’, detailed examination of almost all aspects of slavery but also `comprehensive coverage’and attempts at `synthesis’ at varying levels, analysis of family situation and living conditions influencedby such contemporary preoccupation with studying mentalities, none of the beliefs, assumptions andmethodologies of a vast body of studies have more than some minor overlaps in our study/work.9

This work enquires into the complexity, the `verticality’ / depth of natural, naive or ancient consciousnessdoes without attempting to resolve the problems of ancient slavery through attempts to clarify the verticalin terms of horizontal in a projected `intentional’ register, where the concept of region demands theconcept of horizon and a field of objects appears before a subject. The subject in the Greek world wasimplicit and Greek individuality cannot be found in `regions’ with its boundaries and limits lined withslaves. The Greeks were mainly caught between the `individuality’ of their anthropological discourse andthe subject of phenomenology, turned inwards, as with the Socratic tradition, which was also an aspect of

7 Marx K, Grundrisse, pp. 539-540

8 Finley M I, Ancient Economy, p. 26-27, London, 1992, writes that `my justification for speaking of the `ancienteconomy’ lies in another direction, in the fact that in the final centuries the ancient world was a single politicalunit, and in the common cultural-psychological framework.’, p. 34 ; Polanyi K, The Great Transformation, 1957,p.27

9 Brockmayer N and Vogt J, The Bibliography of ancient slavery [ Bibliographie zur antiken sklaveri] had 5162entries in 1983 compared to 1707 in 1871, Finley M I [ed] Classical slavery, slavery and Abolition [1987]; Lawson B,[ed], Family in Ancient Rome – new perspectives [1986], J Wallons, Histoire de l’esclavege dans le Antiquite [1870],cited in Carlson J, Vilici and Roman Estate Managers until A D, 284, Rome 1995, p. 14, Carlson’s study takes up theposition and nomenclature of `elite slaves’ by focusing on the trusted slaves in the countryside.

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the decline of the `Greek world’. We draw upon Merleu-Ponty’s critique of Husserl, who whilefounded/constituted epoche [reduction] a step in right direction, an advance over Descartes and Kantianapproach to nature, but missed out something regarding the relationship between natural andtranscendental attitudes. What is missing is a `tissue’ connecting the natural and transcendental attitude.Thus Husserl does not complete the `region of pure consciousness’ in `Ideen’10 . In such a region, asubject without intended objects is just off-base or limited by the idiom of layers, beset with the priorityof intentionality. Naïve or natural consciousness is not so bounded in the dialectical form, which showsthe transcendence of pre-critical understanding within and beyond the verticality of natural experience.The `lower’ and `higher’ gravitate around one another as high/low variants of the side/other-sidevariation. As Merleau-Ponty says so clearly, `I bring the high low distinction into the vortex where it joinsthe side/other-side distinction, where the two distinctions are integrated into a universal dimensionality’for understanding something like Hegel’s spirit that is active both as self-diremption [ involution] andself-transcendence [evolution].11This re-signifies the self-active concept because it is spirit’s own activity,which is grasped in ancient dialectic in the first place as both preserving and transcending < sublation>.The argument is that slavery was not the sole but the defining form or the flesh of labour determination interms of historical emergence and duration whose visibility and noise does not obfuscate side/other-siderelations of labour, though its reduction to binary, keeping high/low apart may correspond to the invisiblepresence and the apparent silence of ruling consciousness on the economy. When we speak of the flesh ofvisibility, this is not meant to do anthropology, but to indicate a prototype of our body-subjectivity wherethe sensible and sentient is the most exemplary. Slavery and economy existed as concepts of `objectivity’,experience and facticity. Philosophy and forms of knowledge examined their facticity of existence in alayer of the vertical reality of classified / hierarchical historical societies, situated in depths and layered byother surfaces thus rendering them opaque. Philosophy as dialectical self-interrogation can only showhow the world is articulated by starting with the body-subject, which is not nothingness and by installingitself at its edge, which is neither in or for itself, but are joints [ so central to Plato’s dialectic] where themultiple entities of the world cross.

Let us take a look at the form that work took in the Ancient world, in terms of their self-consciousness.How was work defined in relation to other human activities? In the first place, the Greeks had no termcorresponding to `work’. A word such as `ponos’ is applied to any activity involving laborious effort, notsimply to productive tasks that are socially useful i.e it is a. a simple abstraction. The word `ergazesthai’was applied to two sectors of human life : 1/ farming or laboring in the fields [ to erga] and 2/ in completecontrast, financial activity [ ergasia chrematon], earning interest from capital. Nevertheless, the term alsoused to describe to `any activity in its most general form’12 Going beyond the simple, natural activity orconditions of labour in general, arate also refers to the product of an artisan – or an activity that is similarto poiein, i.e., technological manufacture, not necessarily as artifacts, and opposed to prattein, whose end

10 Merleau-Ponty M,, Nature: Course Notes from College de France [tr] Villier Robert, Evanston, N-W University,2003

11 Merleau-Ponty M. The Visible and the Invisible, N-W Univ., 1982, p. 265

12 Vernant J-P, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, Zone Books, N Y 2008 [reprint], p. 275; `..the argon ofeach thing or being is a product of its own excellence, its arate’.

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is not to make an external object separate from the act of production’, but to perform an action in order todisclose what is hidden in nature. However Aristotle translates this disclosure as techne, or in technicalterms, he creates an artificial area. But this is not the sole definitive view, for techne or technical termsalso hide nature. There is a level of `invisibility’ of both techne and nature, or something incomplete,which raises the question: to what extent is nature active therein? This is not the way Vernant formulatesthe problem, but perhaps the Greek notion of activity, as the relation between technology and nature gaverise to the term `bios’ and artifacts. It is also possible that the Greeks at a certain period [certainly withPlato] the notion of `mixing’ the natural and artificial was put as a question. The answer or the solution tosuch a problem may be emerging later in the 20 th c., in the form of `bio-facts’. In Aristotelian terms allthat grows is natural while technology impacts from the outside, its movement concerns causality. Next isthe physical concept of the shape – from the shape plant is of nature, or nature is a plant. But the shapewould become a bio-fact with inserted genes with their bio-information. They also grow but notautomatically. Yet there is a phenomenal identity with conventional plants. The public is not told aboutthe imitation or resemblance since what is stressed straightaway is natural production. Bt. Corn looks as italways looked, but what is new is the supply of greater yields, which is not a novelty but a function. Thismakes the Aristotalian view of nature disappear from the production of Bt products .and the term techne[technology] becomes unclear because it is no artifact in the sense of its past. A grey area opens upbetween nature and technology as their nature and `things’ [beings] no longer appears clear. Humans needto subject bio-facts to itself with restraint, 13 This could be the reason why Plato prohibited any practicalapplication of his theories [including geometry], while the Neo-Platonist went into application adexperiments, discoveries without much haste and with restraint. What remains is mostly theoretical,nothing much practical or artifacts. Vernant talks about two `uses’ of the word `ergon’: to mark theaccomplishment of praxis and the product of the creative work of the artisan [ a poietic] Plato alsoclarifies the distinction between doing and making –prattein and poienin – through Critias.14 .In theirtimes, Homer and Hesiod did not use these terms to refer to an artisan as a worker or a producer, butdefined all activities outside of oikos for the benefit of demos. It referred not only to artisans, carpentersor blacksmith but also bards, diviners and heralds who did not produce anything material at all.According to Vernant, such linguistic evidence suggests that among the activities constituting the `singlecomplex of working behaviours, there are different levels, multiple aspects and even oppositions.15 Nogeneralized, instead of `true’ as Vernant has it, concept of work existed.

Agriculture is not considered a trade any more than waging war. `Can it be called a techne?, asks Vernant.We have argued before, from the standpoint of our age of bio-technology and bio-facts that it could wellhave been regarded as such but Vernant takes a typical Aristotelian inspired `official’ modern view; in hisinterpretation techne `implies specialized knowledge, apprenticeship and secret [?] ways to ensuresuccess.’16 Surely this is a moribund and a demeaning view of the agricultural practices of our ancientancestors who selected, domesticated, hybridized and bred many cereals, animal and vegetable aggregates

13 Karafyllis, `Was ist labour?’ or What is laboratory?, incorporating arguments from Kristian Kochy and GregorSkinman [2006], and Knorr Cetinas [2002]

14 Vernant Op Cit, p. 276

15 Ibid. p. 276

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that continue to form the basis of dietary habits, ever since till the modern age. Thus one wonders whetherVerant produces a brief from Xenophon, who Marx thought had characteristic bourgeois instincts, to theeffect that Xenophon’s `descriptions of sowing, breeding, harvesting, thrashing, winnowing andcultivation of fruit trees are aimed showing not human skills but nature at work.’17 According to Vernant,work is participation in an `order both natural and divine’, which seems closer to the Mesopotamian view,which is `superior to men.’ He theologizes work, which makes limited sense by comparing work to divinenecessity, as merit in the most general sense. For Vernant, though `this theme counterbalances theassertion of the supremacy of pure thought over action in Greek moral speculation’. This view isessentially incorrect, said without citing any evidence, since the division of mental and manual labour wasexplicit in Greek `slave/ menial labour society. The citizen stood apart from any manual labour, whichwas the rationale behind the Greek city-state/ polis. Turning to agriculture, Vernant thinks that n `this typeof agriculture’ there was little evidence of economic aspect of work [whatever that means] as there is of`its instrumental and technical sides, since oikos is supposed to provide for all needs of the family, self-sufficiency remains an ideal for peasant life’. This makes nothing out of the Greek economy and bigmarkets [as in Athens] for some cereals, vegetables, pickles, sea-food and fruits. Vernat seems to interpretmore in the lines of what Marx described as oriental communes, rather than Greek polis.. Actually there isvery little point in perusing Vernant’s arguments on this score.

Basic Greek political Trajectory – Theseus and Solon

Yet, it should be considered whether `between the time of Solon and Cleisthenes, `there was a change inthe terms in which conflicts dividing the city were expressed’. `The most significant shift of emphasis,economic preoccupations were superseded by a concern for civic institutions’`18 It begs the question ofcomparability, besides being an overstatement and oversimplified manner of stating the changes, whichwill be taken up for whatever its worth when we come to the subject of Greek democracy and therevolution in which Cleisthenes played a major role, having much to do with his rational reforms in placeof archaic arrangements. To state that in Solon’s time, `debts and land tenure were in the forefront whilein the times of Cleisthenes, the problems were associated with institutional system to make it `possible tounify groups of human beings of different territorial, social familial and religious status, as Vernant makesthe distinction means little, once the import of both Solon’s and Cleisthenes’ reforms are taken intoaccount. Taking a long view, it was Morgan who on the basis of the sketch provided by Thucydides ofGrecian power in the long transitional period, understood that the old system – based on gentileinstitutions was failing, and a new one was fundamental for further progress. It was Theseus who foundthat the Greeks cities, when not in fear of dangers did not consult their basileus [on whom military powerfirst devolved] but governed their own affairs separately, through their own councils. Theseus persuadedthem to break council house and magistracies of their separate municipalities and come into relation withone council house [ bouleutroes]. This provided a picture of Attic people as self-governing societies whoconfederated for mutual protection. Under Theseus they were coalesced into one people, with Athens as

16 Ibid., p. 280

17 Ibid., p. 280

18 Ibid., p. 236

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their seat of government. The centuries which passed from Theseus to Solon [594 BC] is important aboutwhich little is known. The office of basileus was abolished prior to the first Olympiad [776 BC] andarchonship established its place. Which was initially hereditary but in 711 BC archon was limited to 10years and later to 1 year, bestowed by free election.19 This must be regarded as proof of advancement ofknowledge at this early period for Athenian tribes to substitute a term of a year for the most importantoffice, allowing for competition of candidates. This is near the `historical period’ and the threshold wherewe get the elective principle with regard the highest office. . The aristocratic principle also increased itsforce along with increase in property, the source of hereditary rights. In the time of Solon, the court ofAreopagus composed of six ex-archons with the power to try criminals and vested with censorship overmorals. More important was the institute of Naucratis. , 12 in each tribe and 48, all of which was a localcircumspection of householders from which levies were drawn into military and navy and taxes collected.The naucrary was a principle `dem’ or township which when the territorial basis was fully developedbecame the second `plan’ of the government. They existed before the time of Solon and Solon expressedthat this should be understood as their confirmation by the political constitution of Solon, the `germ of thecountry’. Before Solon no person could become a member of society except through connection withtribe or gens. It was the prerogative of the council of chiefs to submit public measures before the peoplethat shaped policy and administration of finances. But the rise of the assembly as a power of thegovernment is the surest evidence of progress of Athenian people in `knowledge and intelligence’. 20

Solon also revived Theseus’ project of dividing society into classes on the basis of property At the sametime Servius Tillus of Rome was trying experiments for the same purpose. Solon divided people into 4classes according to the measure of wealth. Going beyond Theseus, he vested these classes with certainpowers and obligations. He transferred a portion of powers of gentes , phratries and tribes to thepropertied classes, classes composed of persons, which meant that the government was founded on aperson. But the idea of property as a basis of government failed to reach the idea of a political society.Among the four classes the most significant was the fourth, light armed officers [ hoplites] They were thenumerical majority, though disqualified from holding offices, they didn’t pay taxes, but in popularassemblies in which they were members They possessed a vote upon election of all magistrates andofficers with powers to bring them to account. They also had the power to adopt or reject all publicmeasures submitted by senate for their decisions. All freemen not connected to gentes or tribes could bebrought into government by becoming citizens. . But Solon’s scheme made imperfect provisions –without granting direct religious privileges- brought an element of discontent among them. The idea of a`foreigner’ as the `other’/ alien remained which brought in numerous disorders in Athens..It is true thatamong Solon’s greatest measures was to free the numerous indebted in agriculture, like the Roman plebsunder Servius, to annul the debts which was a great relief and a source of perpetual tensions. But there aremany other constitutional reforms carried out by Solon which falls in the Greek trajectory towards theestablishment of a political society. Morgan thought that Cleisthenes was the genius who embodied thatidea. At any rate, the economic was no means excluded from the aims of the political revolution inAthens that enabled the redistributive `reforms of Cleisthenes. Besides, Solon was not the product ofGreek political rivalry and any revolution. Around his time similar measure were taken in Rome underServius, but they did not last because the Aristocracy returned and placed the equestrian order to the fore,whereas in Greece the Hoplite reforms were firmly established and lasted long.

It would be tautological to say that the Greeks were not only among the first to write on politics, but alsoheld politics in the highest esteem, and economy was always a subordinate moment, as in Aristotle’s

19 Morgan L H, Ancient Society, first published 1877, reprint, Calcutta, 1944, passim

20 Ibid., passim

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Politics. In no case was economics superior to politics at Solon’s time as it was in the times ofCleisthenes. Solon is remembered and noted as a `sage’ for giving a radical, reformist constitution, whichwas aimed more at reducing the possibility of conflicts and stasis, which was a kind of a permanentlooming shadow hovering over Greece. Going by Herodotus, the idea of democracy was at first discussedin the Persian side, in which Darius participated. Otanes, speaking in favour of democracy put is case asfollows:

The rule of the people…has the finest of all names to describe it – isonomy [isonomia ] - and secondly, people in power donone of the things that monarchs do. Under the government of the people, the magistrate is appointed by lot and is heldresponsible for his conduct in office, and all questions are put up for open debate…For these reasons I propose that we doaway with monarchy and raise the people to power; for everything resides in number.’21

Though Leveque and Vidal-Naquet, are rather one-sided and very formal in their research on the termisonomia, they posit from the passage that isonomy is `identified with democracy’ or isonomy meantopposition to tyranny’. 22 Yet in one passage on changes occurring in 6th-early 5th c., isonomy, as `thefinest of all names’ comes across:

Finally, around 500 BC, on the eve of the Ionian revolt, Aristagoras `abdicated from tyranny and established equal rights[isonomie] in Miletus…’ 23

However, the conditions for Aristagoras `abdicating’ tyranny’ in favour of democracy is more complexand often not discussed, but it was linked to the events surrounding the great Ionian revolt. He was afterall responsible for calling a council of supporters and friends, who with the sole exception of the historianHecateus, all supported and recommended revolt to throw off Persian yoke.24 He sought the help of theSpartans but was not diplomatic enough, though dealing with the eccentric Spartan King Cleo- manes,and then in Athens he made a democratic appeal to the Athenian crowds of 30,000 Athenians, who passeda decree dispatching 20 warships to Ionia. But the `blunder’ committed by the troops of Aristagoras atSardinia, led to the Athenians’ decision that they would have nothing to do with the Ionian revolt25 afterthe Ionians were defeated on land by Persians because of the blunder at Sardis.. They refused help despitenumerous requests for help from Aristagoras After the attack on Ionia from the Persian side under Otanes,who took Clagonianae and parts of Aeolis, Herodotus thought that Aristagoras was after all a poorspiritual creature. Nevertheless, the Ionians possessed on with war with Persia, without Athenian aid andwith no less vigour. They decided to raise no troops on land, but on the sea, which would man every

21 Cited and translated in Pierre Leveque and P Vidal- Naquet, Cleisthenes the Athenian, in Nicole Loraux, GNagey, et al, Antiquities, Postwar Drench Thought, vol 3, N Y, 2001, p. 50

22 Ibid., p. 50

23 Ibid., p. 51

24 Herodotus Histories 5:36

25 Herodotus, Histories, 5:104

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available ship that numbered 353 triremes, seeing which the Persians officers in command were shocked.Nevertheless, splits during crucial moments dispersed the Ionians and they retreated.26 However thequote in bold, cited by Pierre Leveque and Vudal-Naquet, we get to learn why isonomie was the `finestname’ to describe the rule of the people, namely political equality for all in the polis, where, in everyassembly each members voice or vote counted equally, as the self-same , though only with regard tocitizens and not the women, foreigners and slaves. Yet the principle of self-equality [ one man, one vote]was revolutionary in its very early phase, in so far as Cleisthenes’ reforms reorganizing the entirepopulation into demes extended greatly the democratic scope for many more people who had beenexcluded. Victory in democracy resided in `numbers’ because only the self-same or self-identical could beadditive and then the one having more numbers on his side became the deputy or the magistrate of thepeople. To this extent the quantitative dimension of the arithmos monadikos was well understood, asending up in respective assemblages, or gathered together, it took the form of the ideal `arkhe’/ genos ,arithmos eidetikos, [Plato].27 In a meeting prior to war between the Spartans and Greeks, the CorinthianSoklas, the `only one to raise his voice in protest’ says:

Upon my word gentlemen, he exclaimed, this is like turning the universe upside-down. Truly the sky will sink beneath theearth, and the earth will hover above the sky; men [anthropoid] will make their home in the sea, and fishes will residewhere men [anthropoid] once lived, because you Lacedaemonians have laid waste to egalitarian regimes [ isokratias], areready to restore tyranny in the cities, tyranny that is the most unjust and bloodiest [adikoteron, miaiphonoteron] thing thatis there among men [kat anthropous] Believe me, there is nothing wickeder or bloodier in the world than despotism’28

While making the contrast, Soklas is very clear about defining democracy as isokratias, or egalitarianregimes in which the citizens are equal. To the extent that exchange had developed in the limited sense, atleast in Athens, a world from which slaves were excluded, exchange relations are `a good indicator ofsocial relations toward one another. Each has the same social relation towards the other that the other hastowards him. AS subjects of exchange the relation is that of equality. It is impossible to trace anydifference, leave alone contradiction between them. Commodities exchanged are equivalent exchangevalues and count as such [most that could happen are subjective errors in appraisal of values]. Differencesowing to natural origins are irrelevant to the nature of relation as such...equivalents are objective relationsof one subject for another, i.e., of equal worth. The fact that the need of one can be satisfied can besatisfied by the product of another, that one is capable of producing objects for the need of others, each

26 Herodotus Histories 6:6; 6:11;Also, surprisingly ignoring the Ionian initiative to focus on sea-power,,Momigliano A, Sea Power in Greek Thought, The Classical Review, May, 1944, Vol 58, No 1

27 The most repeated perplexity of Aristotle was that he thought that Plato taught that eidos were numbers[arithmos eidetetikos]. But nowhere in the dialogue does Plato identify eide with numbers. Some have suggestedesoteric Platonism known to Aristotle; others see eide-arithmos theory in reduction of bodies to geometricalshape [Timeus]. Still others say Aristotle confused Plato’s position. For Aristotle number is always mathematicalnumber, the product of abstraction - mathematika aphaeresis – perceived not by a single sense but a commonsense. For Plotinus, number has a transcendent position among intelligible- arithmos eidetikos [ideal number].`That there are eide of numbers in Plato just as there are other entities is not a matter of dispute [ Phaedo] andAristotle is incorrect in saying that they are singular and incomprehensible – not addable or subtractable.According to Aristotle Plato said that ideal numbers go up to 10. Peter F E, Greek Philosophical Terms, pp. 26-27

28 Herodotus 5:91/92, cited in Nicole Loraux, Greek Civil War and Anthropological representation of the WorldTurned Upside Down, in Loraux N, et al, p. 55

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confront each other as owners of object of the others need proves that each of them reaches beyond itsparticular needs and as human beings they relate to each other as human beings and that this commonspecies being is acknowledged by all. Each becomes the means for other [being for another- sein furandres] only as an end in himself [being for self – sein fur sich] reciprocity of means and ends each attainends insofar as each becomes means , only insofar as it posits itself as an end, each thus posits himself asbeing for another insofar as he is being for self – this reciprocity is presupposed in the naturalprecondition for exchange and as such irrelevant for the subjects of exchange. This common interestworks behind the backs in antiquity, or exchange developed in a limited sphere.’ 29

According to a work by Richard Seaford, `exchange-value is one of the `series of factors’ for the makingof Greek metaphysical representation of reality’. It strikes one as immediately odd that `exchange value’is some sort of representation of reality, at least from the Marxist standpoint. Moreover, for making suchbold statements one needs sources, since, just in case, Greek metaphysics is itself well sourced and it isnot possible to find the notion of `exchange-value’ in it. But Seaford seems self-impressed as he goes onto state that the `abstraction’ money and philosophy is also related to a number of innovations, actualizedin the `Greek miracle’ – democracy, tragedy comedy’. 30 This is an outrageous and not a provocativeview, and unsubstantiated. Maybe its alright as a Marxist to degrade the money abstraction, but to statethat philosophy can be understood as an `abstraction’ of social developments and class struggle, makes nosense because of a very poor understanding of Greek historical thematic and totality. There is nothingconcrete about philosophy in the least concerned about `class struggles’. To look for that one needs toexamine the Greek anthropological and historical discourse. Like Sohn-Rethel, Adorno over-emphasized`exchange-value’ as a `social a priori’, but this tends to overlook completely the sharp distinction Marxmade between concrete labour and abstract labour, and between use-value or quality and exchange valueor quantity. Besides, the money abstraction, still undeveloped, was social or anthropological, but not aphilosophical abstraction. From the side of Greek anthropological side, Herodotus describes trade andbargaining practices between Carthaginians and a race of men who lived in `a part of Libya beyond thepillars of Heracles:

On reaching this country they unload their goods, arrange them tidily along the beach, and then, returning to their boatsraise a smoke. Seeing the smoke the natives come down to the beach, place on the ground a certain quantity of gold inexchange for the goods and go off again to a distance. The Carthaginians then come ashore and take a look at the gold;and if they think it represents a fair price for their wages they collect it and go away to a distance; if, on the other hand itseems too little, they go back abroad and wait. And the natives come and add to their gold until they are satisfied. There isperfect honesty on both sides; the Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals in value what they have offered forsale, and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been taken over.31

Now, this could also curiously be read as a wage bargain, and the term wage and `value’ are used ratherthan price or sale; but of course a sale and exchange is involved, in which it seems that the Carthaginiansdo the work of making and transporting the goods, perhaps after being asked for delivering these goodsagainst money payment in gold. Besides a bargain is involved, which instead of the traders bargain looks

29 Marx k, Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital, pp. 239-289

30 Seaford R, Money and the Greek Mind, 2004,

31 Herodotus, The Histories, 4:196

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like the workman’s bargain based on their valuation of goods. However, in Herodotus, the discourse isclearly anthropological with the emphasis on ethical dimension, or fairness in the dealing. It was notpossible to narrate this in the language of political economy, since it is the qualitative dimension thatreally mattered. The amount is left as hypothetical, and exchange value is implicit not an explicitabstraction. Yet the mode of exchange is archaic, wherein the economic surplus is too small, unlikeregular, fixed time based commerce.

`Yet the last Helladic phase there was already a richly differentiated spectrum between the free and slave:at the bottom of hierarchy was chattel slave, as an object or thing and on the upper end, the ruling classwith power. In between there were several categories of the `un-free’ whose `status’ was definedaccording to a differentiated pattern of obligations and rights. This plurality of `status’ or personal statuslimited by particular groups affected the `value’ of freedom as a sociopolitical concept. But the historicaltendency moved in a direction that eliminated intermediate, social subdivisions so that in 5 th-4th c. BCAthens, the intermediate sphere defining the non-free was virtually eliminated. 32 As Athens started gettingimperialized by means of warfare, increased manpower needs favoured recruitment of slaves in the navy,and helots by the Spartans in army Earlier chattel slavery had already contributed to economic or asprimary producers and their labour became a huge source for extracting surplus resulting in hoplitereforms and professionalization of Spartan army, in which the helots carried the arms, the ratio being 7helots to one hoplite, but the slaves too often played a decisive role during the classical period, epigraphicevidence suggests that the Athenian naval power rested on as many slaves as Athenian citizens. 33 As wewould see, even wage-labour appears as an `abstract’ theoretical category within a dynamic sector of theRoman world, which is different from empirical characterization of what `free labour’ in general denotedin its determinateness, such as hired labour employed in manufacture and agriculture for periodsexceeding 100 years, not evenly distributed and then vanishing from records/sources. For instance, the`Oxyrhynchus Papyri’ excavated in 1896-97, which is considered to be the most coherent and extensivebody detailing the history of the Apion family, holders of aristocratic estates in Egypt regarded as `distinctsocial elite’ in late antique Empire, according to the author of `Secret History’ Procopius have leftaccounts of their estates with wage payments, capital expenditure, etc.34 It has been largely known since1931 that papyrological evidence recorded existence of large estates, the best documented belonging tothe Apion family from the middle Egyptian city of Oxyrhyanchus. Letters between Apion family estatemanagers refer to contracts detailing the terms on which the estate labour force was employed,presumably under private, non-actionable contracts indicates the substantial presence of waged labour,The contracts found in the papyri records related to the Apion family in the Egyptian city,Oxyrhnyanchus were not very novel in the context of the Egyptian-Babylonian historical space. Thesecontracts, in Babylonia [6th-4th c. B C], were used by businessmen, at times mentioned under two namesin the records, for leasing to private contractors for collecting state taxes. This system effectively sparedthe authorities to `pay wages’, or supplement subsistence rations of the workers, in a non-monetized[circulating coins] though business oriented society.35 Or again, in the 4th c. BC, the principle of workcontracts was commonplace among prebendaries, who could grant for the performance of monthly

32 Raalfaub K, Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, p. 14-15, Chicago, 2004

33 Hunt P, Slaves, Ideology and Warfare in the Greek Historians, p. XX, 1-2, Cambridge,1988; G E M de St Croix,Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, p. 39-40, N Y, 1981

34 Sarris P, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, Cambridge, 2006, p. 18, 22, 25-26

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services to the college in the `form of a work contract or transferable lease’.36 Jairus Banaji noted thatleases in late antiquity take on the appearance of labour contracts detailing individual tasks to beundertaken and completed. A contract known as a vineyard lease was an agreement that had the`peculiarity’ that `the owners were leasing out not the land itself but the jobs connected with it, so that thelessees were as much workers as self-employing contractors’. The peasantry employed in such estates,highly commodified and monetized enterprises, `was a largely proletarianized labour force.’37 At the sametime, there was the continued existence in the 5th-6 th c Egypt the substantial presence of autonomouspeasant communities, recorded in the extant papyri from the settlement of Aphrodito.38 Besides, in theargument by Gascou, i.e., elites like the Apion family were essentially tax-raising institutions – eventhough Apion estate accounts clearly distinguish rents and taxes collected from estate employees –essentially employed for the purposes of the state.39Clearly, the Apions were flourishing at a time whenthe estate owner, Flavius Apion was appointed praetorian prefect for overseeing the provision of grainfrom Edessa and Alexandria to one of the largest ever armies ever mobilized for a single campaignagainst Sassanian Persia in 503/04 for feeding the army.40 This was a weakened military compared toearlier times, yet it had to be paid in grain and cash. In a not too distant period in late mid 4 th c., whenJulian [the apostate] was the emperor, high-minded about civic values, he had to sacrifice the life of hisfinance minister Ursicinus to appease the wrath of the army, for protesting publically that the army’s paywas bankrupting the treasury.41 This brings out the central position occupied by the institution of the army`as regards economic development. It was in the army that the ancients fully developed a wage system.’ Itwas in the army that movable property, belonging to others instead of paterfamilias as a legal formdeveloped. The use of machinery at a large scale started in the army. Most important, the exclusive value

35 `The benefit of this arrangement was that ‘benefit seems to have passed from the office to the person.’ JoannesF, The Age of Empires – Mesopotamia in the First Millennium BC, [tr],Antonia Nevill Edinburgh, 2004, Document,pp. 222-225

36 Ibid., Document, p. 258

37 Banaji J, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity – Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance, Oxford, 2001, pp. 190-212

38 Banaji’s book reviewed by P Sarris, Historical Materialism, vol 13:1, 2005, p. 213

39 Ibid., p. 215

40 Sarris P, Op Cit, p. 16-17

41 Williams S, et al, The Rome that did not fall : the survival of east in the 5th c., p. 228

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of metals and their use as money owed its beginnings to its military significance. The division of labourwithin a single economic branch of production was also carried out in armies. Marx found the `wholehistory of the `forms’ civil society was’ epitomized by the army. 42 The army exemplified the connectionbetween developing productive forces and production relation based on wage labour.

Early initiators and Innovations of Economy

Though outside the Mediterranean region, the Sumerian city complexes, emerged all of a sudden in therevolutionary sense, and besides being `creative incubators’ of `culture’/civilization, they were among thefirst to develop economic space around the city palace and temple complex with surplus production`efficiently mobilized’, traded and redistributed for an administrative and religious establishment. 43

Neolithic Asia Minor, Early Bronze Age and Mesopotamian civilization where the earliest cities havebeen found, served as centres of government, undertook commerce and industry, reflected economies ofscale resulting from population growth. Political and military dynamics were recognized later. Citiesbegan as gathering places. Although Jerico happened to be walled city from 9000 BC the walls were notfortifications, but served as flood walls. The next archeological encounter with the city, Catal Hayuk inthe 6th millennium maintained cosmopolitan neutrality.44But the Sumerian cities fought among themselvesin the 4th, 3rd and 2nd millennium BC. Yet acquisitions of foreign materials had to be organized reciprocallyand on a voluntary basis with Anatolia, Iranian plateaux, with trade with Indus valley was conducted onthe island of Dilmun. Peaceful trade and enterprise went together, meaning Sumer had exports to offer.Large town had city temples and palaces, which played an important role as producers and suppliers ofgoods. Ships and caravan’s leaden with textile and other products in exchange for raw materials lacking in

42 Marx to Engels, 14/7/1958, in Marx-Engels Correspondence, Moscow, 1975, p. 91

43 Louie Baeck, Greek Economic Thought – Initiators of a Mediterranean tradition; though the title itself indicatesthe `western’ Greek bias, she does mention Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria and Persia as distinct civilizations, of theMediterranean region. Pp. 140-142; Sumer is excluded, though that is where a great number of things began anddiffused over time from the 4th millennium BC. ; For that matter, something moré than comparable may havebegun in eastern north America, beginning c. 6000 BC and culminated during 250 BC-250 AD, namely an economyinvolving as system of exchange, `involving circulation of an astonishing variety on a truly continental scale’.`Busycon shells from the gulf coast are found 1,500 km. in burials throughout the great lakes region; native copperfrom the north side of lake Superior in village sites and burials throughout the mid-west; Mica from mines inVirginia found its way all the way up and down the Mississippi valley; little buttons and other trinkets made frommeteoric iron from the margins of plains turn up at sites all over Midwest; Obsidian from Yellowstone NationalPark in the Rocky Mountains is found from Wisconsin to Ohio. This is an enormous system for circulation formaterial goods’, long lasting and mainly over land, but nothing comparable to the Near East or the Aegean, thoughMore work needs to be done into the complexity of such a fascinating area. Cf Binford R. In Search of the Past –Decoding the Archeological Record, Berkeley, Calif., 2002, pp. 229-230

44 Hudson M, From Sacred Enclave to Temple City, in Hudson and B Levine [eds]Urbanization and Land Ownershipin the Ancient Near East, Cambridge, Mass., 1999

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Sumerian core. In southern Mesopotamia, fortifications appeared `rather late’, in 2800 BC. Centred oninner city temples, these public sites served as bridges for diverse groups to congregate and conduct armslength commerce under agreed upon rules. Comparable sites from classical antiquity are Delphi andDelos where diverse groups met without fear of an attack.

Cylinder seals – Sumerian clay tablets were used for writing, cuneiform style 45 There was an amazingdegree of continuity in the method of writing and numbers. Business terms were used in businessdocuments in the kingdom of Lagash and Akkad; in the tablets of Kish settlers properties are recorded,provisions of gift in addition to price paid. Legal procedures were uniform in both Sumer and Akkad.Magistrates occupied prominent positions, with streets named after them.46However, serious warfare andmilitary campaigns began from 21st c. BC. Freedom loving Lagash was destroyed by the people ofUmma. We know that Saragon was the first known military conquerer. He attributed his ascension to theaid of Ishtar, identified with Sumerian Innini. He defeated a coalition of governors of 50 cities and carriedaway the king to Nippur. His son sings praise of his father for destroying Ur and giving `liberty to thekingdom of Kish.47 Sargaon seems to have begun with organizing a rebellion before choosing his capitalat Agade. He rebuilt Kish and resumed the title `king of universal dominion. He invaded Elam, by Tigrisin the north, and then turned west and turned towards the sea, the Mediterranean and occupied Cyprus..Silver was found in the mountain of Taurus in 21st c. BC;.. and thus began the great age of silver miningin Asia Minor, in the Cedar forests of Lebanon. A seal mentioning the divine Naram Sin was found inCyprus.

Wool was a source of revenue. Letters in the time of Amis-Zadugga announce the event of sheep sharing.Value of wool varied from time to time. Coinage,of course, did not exist. And the method of payment wasby mannas and shakels. Of silver weighed out. Gold came much later than silver, from the mines ofBulgar maden in Asia Minor. Copper was found in considerable quantity in Elam and copper workingindustry was carried on at Verma. Lead came from mines in Anatolia. 48 In Isin, Larsa and Babylon, moreattention was paid to the worship of Gods than to the army. Consecration of high priest is recorded butnever the promotion of a general; temple gifts mentioned but never anything which showed the king

45 Cuneiform, Latin for wedged shaped Sumer science and math; the cylinder was divided into 12 months basedon cycles of moon – 12 lunar months were considerably shorter than a solar year. So a leap month was addedevery three years in order to catch up with the sun. Inventions included the Zodiac, record-keeping [archives],calculating with numbers, completely new, unseen math on human landscape, law, administration, writing,Hammurabi’s Code, etc., etc.

46 Bury J B, et al, [eds] The Cambridge Ancient History, vol 1, Egypt and Babylonia to 1580 BC, Cambridge, 1928, p.378 [ Bury, I must add was influenced by Hegel]

47 Ibid.,p. 404

48 Ibid., 451

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taking interest in providing his troops with weapons. 49 `The temple was the great monetary centre or bankof the community’. Temples attracted foreign investors with coffers of gold and silver. In times ofemergency – famine, etc., - they were open to the king of the land. In the first dynasty of Babylon, thetemple was of high religious and political significance, ready to lend out money or arrange loans in seedto prospective cultivators. The great cattle centres for the temple of Enlil at Nippur have numerousaccounts of temple gifts. . Cattle and sheep were driven across Nippur for different feast days and receiptskept.50 According to Hudson, bronze age counterparts and temples were not governing centres to establishgeneral laws. and policies for local communities. Even less were they military centres. Beyond theenclaves they didn’t have any taxing authority. Major Mesopotamian cities were freed from imperialtributes. In mid Bronze Age, Nippur, for instance, was `tax free’. Mesopotamian authorities exempted itfrom tribute. We find `free cities’ similar to modern tax havens. This could apply to some of antiquity’strade enclaves that were literally islands of free enterprises. These islands were anything but states.Modern political theorists miss out the key characteristic of archaic urbanization and Bronze Age publicinstitutions. Mesopotamian temples and palaces were economic producers before production passed intoprivate hands. As these towns developed into trading centres, it courted alien raiders.51

By the time the Assyrians developed far flung trading relations with Asia Minor in the 19 th c. BC, privatemerchants had come to play a much larger role in the south , Sumer and Babylonia. Assyrian trade was a`venture’ – shipments sent abroad without the sender guaranteed a price and an advance wasn’t given.Trade was organized by a large number of organized groups, organized as `Houses’ or `firms’. Mercantileguild functioned as trade associations representing merchants. Larson cites that the terms of commercialdealing in Babylonian times was the prototype for classical antiquity as also commercial loans in middleages. Loan combined interest-bearing debt with a profit sharing partnership agreement. Often the seniorpartner was the palace or the temple, the relevant civic authority. 52 Creditors shared the debtors riskaccording to Hammurabi’s. Hannurapi’s code. Partnership agreements governing trade, merchants had tosplit their profits 50/50 with their backers in books recording their activities.

If a merchant gives silver to trading agent for conducting business and sends him off to a business trip, and if he shouldrealize a profit where he went he shall calculate the total interest , per transaction time elapsed, on as much silver as hetook, and shall satisfy his merchant. If he reports no profits he had to return the original capital. If he is robbed or theship sinks and its cargo is lost, he shall be free of debt, according to legal stipulation. But the merchant was liable to tripledamages, if witnesses claim he has testified falsely. Most commercial loans were shipping loans.

49 Ibid., p. 540

50 Ibid., p. 540

51 Hudson M, Music as an analogy for Economic order in Classical Antiquity, in Backhaus G, [ed] Theory, History,Anthropology – non-market EconomiEs, Marburg, pp. 113-135

52 Hudson M., From Sacred Enclave to the Temple City, Op Cit.

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Veenhof describes the drive for commercial gain by Assyrian caravans bringing fur and woolen textilesinto Anatolia in order to convert them inadvertently into silver, which was shipped back to Assur. Afternecessary payments had been made – expenses, tax, debts, interest, and dividend] what remained wasagain used for commercial purpose, either directly, by contributing to or shipping a new caravan, orindirectly by investing in a firm or issuing a loan to a trader. Trade developed modern innovations likepromissory notes which do not mention the lender by name but refer to him as merchant/creditor in somecases these notes end with the phrase: the bearer of this tablet is a merchant or a trader.

Hammurabi’s code made possible for three orders or classes. 1/ the amelue or nobility; 2/mushkanu orPlebeian and 3/the slaves./

The nobility came from the conquerors – in view of intense and frequent warfare that erupted in thesecond millennium.

The mushkanus [ a word ultimately reached Europe – mesquin in French] were labourers, workmen,school-masters, courters, beggars; these were the proletarians who had no right to carry arms, could notorganize under the command of nobility – meaning that there must have been numerous attempts to formcombinations, calling for such strict strictures. Certain gains may have been made by the mushkanus –namely, the punishment for the nobility was severer than mushkanu. The latter may be simply fined, butthe amelu was dealt with an eye for eye, tooth for tooth. The mushkanu were liable for conscription forthe army and could often own slaves. Of note is that women were not debarred from carrying trades, eventhat of scribes. They could act as witnesses to a deed of rent property. As a rule, women were generallyattached to a temple. Even the kings daughter could be a priestess. a profession ranked very high inBabylonian society. Social custom allowed women great independence, as early as the first dynasty.Babylonian law recognized in a free woman a broad capacity in legal matters. We are not aware ifmarriage altered their status. . Husband and wife could make contracts for purchase of slaves. 11 out of 16purchase tablets from Nippur from the period of first dynasty, women are buyers and in 6 they aresellers.53

The institution of slavery dates back to earliest times. In 2800 BC we find slave girls worth 13.5 shekels,while 9 other slaves – male and female are reckoned for a third of a menna each [ mina or menna= 500grains= 60 shekels] According to the code, the slave was a personal property of the owner. A slave wassubject to levy or forced labour; he might be sold or placed for debts. However, a slave could marry a freewoman, their children were free; a slave and his free wife could acquire property54 From late 3rd and 2nd

millennium, captives taken in battle became slaves. An Elamite at the time of Kessite king was worth 10shekel in gold; a tablet from north Babylonia mentions a slave girl from the town of Ursum worth 51shekels of silver; a man slave reached a price of 90 shekels. Native Babylonians might be made slaves ifthey transgressed certain laws; an adopted son could be sold if he repudiated his parents. A maid wasordered by the king to bear children for her husband and if she didn’t bear children she could be sold offas a slave and otherwise she could arrogated equal status as the mistress.55

53 Bury J B, et al, p. 520

54 Ibid., 520

55 Bury J B, et al, Op Cit., pp 520-521

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`Asiatic modes of production’, `hydraulic society’, etc., are some of the modern interpretations of thepolitical and socio-economic state of Mesopotamia but they are frequently ideological, primarilyassociated in neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian empires; but proclamations of absolute royal power asfound in Mesopotamian official texts are not an accurate reflection of reality. It has also been pointed outthat the involvement of authorities in the use of irrigation did not mean an absolute and centralizedgovernment control over the country’s agricultural activity. The most organized attempt to exploit datechiefly to the Achaemenid period, and it was only under Sassanid’s that the network of irrigation canalswas completely hierarchisized and interconnected.. There were also cycles of development which lasted along time , showing that after a period of heavy decline , covering a greater part of second millennium BCand the beginning of the first , farming of land and urban population experienced a boom which beganaround 7th c. and lasted for almost a thousand years. Upper Mesopotamia was subject to political vagaries’with spectacular consequences, after the period of the Assyrian empire and its fall seems to havetransformed the country into a human desert, but that also had to do with the way territory was occupied,oscillating between nomadic practices and established settlements.56 However, a certain accidental state ofhistory must be taken into account: the development of the neo-Assyrian empire seems to have resulted incountry’s militarization in response to Aramaean incursions early in the first millennium and thespectacular growth of royal ideology that accompanied it. 57 A certain number of structural weakness,however, provoked a crisis that shook the Assyrian empire and resulted in catastrophe in 614 AD; in amatter of four years , the empire crumbled under assaults of the Medes and Babylonians and its capitals[ Assur, Nineveh and Harran] were captured a destroyed.58 A question that comes up is what is distinctly`western’ about classical Greece and Rome in contrast to Near East?59 This is actually a problem posed bythe Greek sources, because they emerge from the ideological vision of the East that was coming intobeing in the context of the confrontation between Greeks and Persians. Herodotus is of course the mostfamous instance: it is difficult to reconcile the few pages he devotes to the country, its capital and customswith the reality revealed to us by local sources to the extent that it may well be doubted if the historianreally undertook a journey to that region. The result is the depiction of the sovereign’s unbridleddespotism and the absence of any personal worth of individuals on the political plane.60The Bible madethe first millennium the paragon of multi-ethnic eastern metropolis, devoted to worldly pleasures andlucrative activities, simultaneously splendid and terrifying. The Greek knowledge of eastern reality priorto Achaemenid was poor, often indirect as a result of contacts with the contacts with the Mediterraneancoast of the Near East, and their reflections were often mythical and ideological. This is shown by the

56 Joannes F, The Age of Empires, Edinburg, 2004, p. 23

57 Ibid., p. 23

58 Ibid., p. 27

59 Such as put by M. Hudson, Music as a Chronology for Economic Order in Classical Antiquity, in Backhaus G, [ed],History, Anthropology and non-market Economies, Marburg Verelag, 2000, pp. 113-135

60 Joannes F, Op Cit., p. 210

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success of the `novel’ Theogenus and Chariclaea by Iamblichus in the second c. AD. 61 Hudson’sinterpretation carries another sort of a bias, which is concealed by the question asked. According toHudson, `what has been viewed as a `free spirit’ [how come In a slave society – DB] of individualismturns out to be a product of the breakdown following the devastation that swept the eastern Mediterraneanafter 1200 BC. The ensuing interregnum brought a free for all that never developed an ethic of gainseeking along productive rather than extractive and predatory bases. This may be a fine ideologicalcounter argument but untenable in historical terms. As we get from the long history of the Greek politicaltrajectory that is frequently filled with stasis or politically oriented civil wars, nothing like that is found inthe Near East, where civil wars, especially in neo-Assyrians broke out from the side of nobility and moreimportant, during moments of succession, when long lasting military campaigns, and unsustainable siegetactics brought no gains but increasing uncertainty with the result that the gigantic Assyrian began tocrack up and a civil war broke out, lasting for 15 years before the Assyrian empire disappeared. Similarlyin neo-Babylonia, it was at the time of the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s 15 month long siege of Babylonthat several Babylonian towns rebelled with the support of Chaldeans and mainly Elam, which provided aretreat base for rebels. A violent Assyrian counter-attack followed after the 15 month siege when Babylonwas systematically pillaged and destroyed under Sennacherib, who personally `resumed’ the title of kingof Babylon.62 There was a qualitative difference here with the political and continuous nature of Greekstasis, which was more of a class conflict between the aristocracy and the citizens of the polis forhegemony.

Both in Babylonia and Greece, slavery and wage-labour existed or probably intermeshed, conceptuallyspeaking both presupposed systems and constructs with their characteristic specific to historical levels ofdurations, and both forms of labour-appearances would be seen to enter into a process of withering andeven disappearing in the long-term and conjunctural dynamics for entirely different reasons. This co-existence of the most abstract and the simple was basically conditioned by consciousness of the timeswhen slavery and lordship depended on regarding human being as a natural being `whose existence is notin accordance with its concept’63. This renders futile any discussion of freedom as derived from thenature of man’, but that too runs contrary to facticity of freedom, in that only some were free, an ideaoriginating in ancient Greece where freedom got transformed into substance and determination. However,both forms – slave and the waged - had their irruptions that were contingent, in the matter of their comingto fore historically and this makes them objects of phenomenological enquiries. Their position asphenomenological objects is historical, explicable spatio-temporal consciousness, rather than understoodabstractly in terms of labour-substance that is [a-historically] compatible with any type of production evenextending into the future, an abstraction that may be considered outside history. Phenomenologicalobjects are inseparable from processes, hence transitional, intelligible within the space-time fabric; toelaborate, while production and labour-process in general is trans-historical [ omni-temporal] it can only

61 Ibid., p. 22

62 Ibid, pp. 42-47

63 Hegel quoted by Richter J, Person and Property in Hegel’s Philosophy, in Pippin R [ed] and Walker N, [tr], Hegelon Ethics and Politics, N Y, 2006, p. 110

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be grasped when located in a space-time or historical phase as it is involved in particular cognitive andphysical processes, i.e., its historical specificity is what characterizes its formal dynamic. Historically theprocess falls under laws of finitude, by coming to be and ceasing to be, but finite objects or thingsinvolved in the process need not be historical. The objects employed and results produced or products ofthe dynamic are abstract, like microliths or figurines or thought-forms, which mean that information asproduct / result is not necessarily historical; the objects they involve are a-historical by their nature, in themanner of assumptions or beliefs or theories which are outside the schemes of history. 64 `Though learningand imparting of information is always historical, the information that we learn and absorb need notalways be so.’65 This view contrasts with historicist and cognitive relativism by paying heed to thedialectic of the process and product, e.g., different processes, papyri based and paper based printproduction can print the same text since the product as information / data that existed on papyri scroll hasescaped the limitation of their productive origins. Historical data is accessed cross-temporally through itsexemplification and manifestation at different times and places, or any complex concept scheme hasinternal resources and structures through which materials of another conceptual scheme, from anotherspace-time fabric can be captured even minimally in a rudimentary and descriptive way so as to makecommunicative contact possible.66 Slavery, viewed as natural consciousness, existed as the pre-criticallayer of naïve realism in the philosophical thought of antiquity justified as an anthropological exercisefor projecting a subordinate level for the economy by naturalizing labour and production, much likeethnographic data, while from the standpoint of economy `natural’ labour is seen in terms of commodityproduction, above all in extracting metals like silver and gold or producing money. They were placed onthe flat horizontal 2-D level used for projections, by philosophers or jurists or playwrights that lay belowand differentiated from the vertical plane of law [logos] prescribed for men, that is transcendental justice[dike]; as natural things slaves would inhabit the zone of non-transcendent body-objects, the anthropoi,almost allusive, serving as examples in philosophers discourse or interpolated in another discourse andalways scattered through texts and documents in which they never constitute their sole register. 67 Inclassical Greco-Roman thinking, references to slaves are always relative to citizens and `person’designated as a particular class of human beings with the `right’ to own slaves; two models of humanity

64 Rescher N, Philosophical Dialectics : an essay in metaphilosophy, N Y, 2006 , see Ch VII – Process philosophyand historical relativism, also p. 113-115

65 Ibid. p. 114

66 Rescher N, Process Metaphysics : An introduction to Process philosophy, N Y, 1996, note on Heraclitus, p. 9-10,where reality is not at bottom a constellation of things but the process.

67 In Thucydides, civil wars [stasis] are blamed on `phusis anthropon’ / human nature for degrading men byreducing them to their nature as anthropoid; Xenophon clearly refers to helots as anthropoi alone or in discussingstrife in other cities it is always the anthropoid who are blamed in contrast to citizens or Andres. Laroux N, GreekCivil War, in Laroux N , et al [eds], Postwar French Thought, vol III, Antiquities, p 66-67, N Y, 2001

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separated by a constructed linear barrier between natural and human consciousness but it is subject to thelatency of historical oppositions, whose meaning expressed by Bruno Beaur when he was a Hegelianresulted from separating `the historical man from the natural man’ which showed man as the product ofhis own struggles, citing the `struggles of Roman plebeians’68, in other words what Greeks named stasisor revolts, when presented as paradigmatic by a historian like Polybius, the opposing poles are couched interms of `savagery’ [agriotes] and humanity [philanthropia]. 69Contemporary reflection on that historyrejects the `incommensurability’ between two `orders’ or `models’ and brings in consciousness that `goesdown all the way’ into the verticality of natural consciousness for capturing the dialectic that self-transcends beyond anthropoid instead of viewing the vertical literally as regression that can be found in`Greek anthropological discourse’, especially with reference to stasis [civil strife] or polemos associatedwith vile beastly deeds; there is a looming threat and fear of a threat that wasn’t executed. The problemremains complicated, a tension internal to the Greek man but to judge by its recurrence within citythinkers, it is basically political that can be traced to remote periods even before Hesiodic discourses onthe `human condition’ touching on the question of justice, to the traditional `Dark Ages’ following theclose of Bronze Age associated with the destruction of Troy. However, the assertion by Heraclitus aloneof the equivalence between strife and justice70 clarifies the political nature of stasis underpinned byhistorical memories of a theological-anthropological kind where the invisible presence of fear remains aprominent figure, whose consequences may have served dike or transcendent justice rather than animmemorial threat of allelophagia [`eating each other’].

Lingering Historical Disputes & New Findings

Rather than actual regression, there remains the possibility that is internalized and imaginary / figurative,which is to say that the possibility is kept as a negative self-relation within the human collective [koinon]and that can be an effective field too. We can understand this imagination at work by referring to Bronze

68 Massimiliano Tomba, Exclusiveness and Political Universalism in Bruno Bauer, in Moggach D, [ed] The NewHegelians –Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, p 111-112, Cambridge, 2006; Bauer would shift towards`aristocratic’ positions of freedom that looks with indifference upon those lacking sufficient courage to seize theliberty that lies at hand, a position close to Nietzsche

69 Cited Nicole Laroux, Op Cit, p. 56, for `just humanity’ [ ta diakaia philantropa] and `bestiality [ theriodes bios ofAetolians, 68

70 Ibid, p.66

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Age, middle to late Helladic Greece though discontinuous evidence renders the explanation somewhatriddled. The archeological finding of shaft graves at Mycenae show men buried in shaft graves were tallerand broader than the typical resident of middle Helladic Greece, who were also charioteers, invaders, as amatter of evidence who `took over’ Greece around 1600 BC.71 Possession of chariots was basic to theshaft grave Mycenaean’s for doing whatever they did which would be warring and conquering. The`coming’ of these warriors was an `event’ fraught with no less significance for Greek history than forIndia. That the chariot loomed large in the imagery of Aegeans is shown by glyptic art where the chariotappears dramatically in moments of war [one chariot with single occupant is shown drawn by lions in theArgolid]. Figures of chariots in action from many fragments of frescoes abound from 1500-1300 BC inaddition to their appearance in terracotta figurines and vase paintings throughout the Mycenaean Ageincluding Linear B tablets from late Helladic Aegean.72 The vocabulary that was specific to `assembledchariot’ [ the spook, the nave, the cab, the rail, etc] are PIE [proto-Indo-European] terms, which led Wyattto propose that along with chariot warriors came the Greeks, ca 1600 BC.73 It turns out that the firstcharioteers were rulers of a large state, indexed by the enormous wealth and treasures, mainly the goldfound in shaft graves remains unmatched in the history of archeology and before them Mycenae was nocentre at all. The fortification constructed by the rulers at Mycenae would last for four hundred yearswithout interruption. It has also been established that they came from the east, bringing a remarkablediscontinuity from early Helladic period; the main continuity appeared in pottery items. This was madeavailable to the rulers by the `subject’ population or existing `natives’ going by linguistic evidence whereall the words for pottery do not come from a PIE vocabulary. Besides, the shaft grave dynasts delighted inthings foreign and exotic [going by the catalogue of items] and it is clear that it was not a localizedprovincial ruling class, but belonged to an `international elite’.74 They also came from the sea other thantheir dependency on sea. There is found a sudden and unprecedented abundance of monumental numulitholos tombs suggest that beyond Argolid, six other plains were subjugated before 1500 BC, where again,though dwarfed by the range of goods found in shaft graves nevertheless held an impressive array of gifts,ornaments, weapons, and a cosmopolitan taste though it appears that the Messenian coast was especiallyaffected by the sixteenth c. takeover. The least affected was the northern Mycenae border at Thessaly withits exceptionally fertile plains which seemed to have supported a large population through the Neolithicperiod and Bronze Age, like the Egyptian delta. Funerary architecture indicates an early takeover, thoughmore anomalous has been a large thalos tomb found in the interior on the rim of Thessalian plain made

71 Drews R, The coming of the Greeks – Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East, Princeton,1989, The distribution of graves within circle A covers the century from 1600-1500 BC, p. 158-159

72 Crouwel J H, Chariots and other means of land transport in Bronze Age Greece, Amsterdam, 1981, p 129-132

73 Wyatt Wm F Jr, The Indo-Europeanization of Greece, cited in Drews R, Op Cit, p. 170

74 Ibid, p.179-180, the items came from Crete Egypt, Anatolia, and the fertile crescent where there is gold.

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during the close of middle Helladic period. A case can be made that PIE speakers first settled in Thessalyand then took over southern Greece. The place is considered something of a Hellenic cradle with manymyths having Thessalian connections, heroic genealogies proceed from here and Mt Olympus regarded asthe home of gods is located in Thessaly. More crucially, Linear B southern Greek dialect was distinctfrom the northern one that was linguistically conservative, a residual area from where speakers movedout. The earliest extant piece of Greek literature, the catalogue of ships in book two of Iliad says thatalmost a quarter of Achean ships came from Thessaly.75 It is probable that their form of PIE, muchaffected by the pre-Indo European languages of the Aegean differentiated from other forms of PIE andevolved into proto-Greek. There would have been a large migration of PIE in thousands, not hundreds ofthousands and took over the best part of Greek mainland and controlled an alien population perhaps tentimes as large as their own.

Eduard Meyer – who turned anti-Semitic after WW1-had provided a compelling image the end of theBronze Age in Greece around 1200 BC with the `Dorian invasions’ similar to the barbarian invasionswhich brought down Rome, suggesting the Dorians constituted a part of a general movement ofbarbarians. Just as the foundations of modern Europe were laid in middle ages, the institutions ofClassical Greece took place in the Mittelalter that began with the fall of Mycenaen world.76 By this logic,the Dorians become destroyers of one world and creators of another. That catastrophe overwhelmedGreece at the end of the Bronze Age was beyond question, the difficult part was that it was not a result ofinvasions or newcomers, and it extended over a period of time around a century [ from 1225 BC]. Nointrusive artifacts – tools, weapons, ornaments, pottery – have been found above the destruction levels.Vincent Desborough’s magisterial account of destruction says that the Dorians couldn’t have done it ,there was no evidence for the arrival of new population in the twelfth c.. In fact there was hardlypopulation at all in the Peloponnese, none at all in central Greece, which would characterize the period asdreadfully dark and desolate. But well after the Mycenaean world was ruined innovations in burialpractices suggest the arrival of newcomers. In 1971, this conclusion was opposed by Snodgrass on theground that there were indigenous precursors to the burial practices that made it plausible that it did notmatter whether the new comers had come in the 11th or the 12th c. 77 He argued that the very destruction ofMycenae was the most visible fact and sign of intruders while the absence of any visible things orproducts over destruction levels only showed that the Dorians had come from nearby and their materiallife was no different from Mycenae. This was disputed by J Chadwick who proposed that Dorians didn’tenter as conquerors or infiltrators; they had been in Peloponnese along in a subordinate position, as a

75 Ibid, p. 194

76 Meyer E, Geschichte des Alterthums, vol 2, Stuttgart, 1893,

77 Desborough V, The last Mycenaen and their succors. An archeological survey ca 1200-1000 BC, Oxford 1964,Snodgrass A, The Dark Age of the Greece, Edinburgh, 1971, p. 296-317

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lower class. Doric was a orthodox descendent of common Greek before innovations produced southernGreek: what made the difference was not geography but class. The linguistic difference corresponded toclass differences and what happened was that the palace class was displaced, in part by attacks fromabroad but also by revolution from below. Theoretically the idea of class revolution may soundanachronistic in the absence of explicit source since such an occurrence did not take place anywhere inthe Bronze Age. Yet, analysis of the `bureaucratic’ language of Linear-B tablets for late 2 nd millenniumBC from the palaces of Knossos and Pylos there are numerous attestations to the word demos that refersto allocation of land from demos in Pylian cadastres while in Knossos , da-mo wergatai refers to smallanimals allocated from inventory of `draft oxen’ to subaltern or servile personnel, where the recipient ismarked by two characteristics , po-ku-te-ro , an obscure term and da-mo-doe-ro or damo doelos or da-mo-jo MAN, in which the ideograph, MAN is reserved especially for servile personnel, of the same kindas da-mo do-e-ro found from few scant fragments.78 Lajun proceeds as far as assuming the followingpropositions valid for Mycenaen kingdoms ca. 1200 BC : 1/ “ At the lowest level of production inMycenaen society seems to have relied on slavery. The existence of slaves, do-e-ro, do-e-ra, is attested bysources as well as their character as entities of sale and by hereditary transmission of servile conditions ;2/ “Free population was divided into three classes corresponding to three functions that Dumezil saw asdefining the hierarchy of Indo-European society”. The first function being political and religioussovereignty conjoined around a complicated administrative and cult apparatus. Though this does notprove their existence as class as such, nevertheless the state was ruled by warrior-priests. The secondfunction associated with waging wars by a warrior aristocracy in chariots comes closest to the definitionof `class’ and the third performed by peasants and artisans leaves open the question to what extent thenon-slave population constituted a class.79 However the existence of a compound anthroponym withdemos running parallel to the compound lawdokos seems to prove that for Mycenaen society in general, anotion of `civil class’ existed parallel to with that of a military class [lawos]. Da-mos appear as a localadministrative entity with agricultural functions. Their land ownership was the outcome of as a portionallocated to individual beneficiaries enjoying rights to whatever their land produced, while the remainingpart was the property of individual communities/ tribes, which was exploited collectively. It is possible toimagine `slaves of damos’ and `beasts of burden of damos used on it since both were objects of collectiveproperty. It is equally possible that the produce of the communal portion went on to meet tax obligationsand make religious contribution. The damos, managed by a council of farmers under the supervision of apalace functionary and endowed with legal personality were among the taxpayers who also assured thepalace of supplies of farm products.80

78 Michel Legune, Damos in Mycenaen society, in N Loraux, et al [eds] Op Cit, p 225

79 Ibid., p. 226-227

80 Ibid., 229-231

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Without ruling out the prospects of a long drawn out internal strife based on class antagonism, this doesnot rule out that linguistic evidence remains problematic besides leading away from Greek traditions, or amisunderstanding of these traditions. Herodotus had written that the Dorians lived in Thessaly beforecoming down to Peloponnese. Two assumptions are made by Drews : one, that the Greek speakers did notsurvive the destruction in late 13th c., leaving a rural populace few of them speaking Greek and two , sometime elapsed before the second coming of Greek speakers to Argolid, the arrival of Doric conquerors fromthe north. On this view the Dorics did not come as conquerors or infiltrators; they `took over’ just as theshaft grave dynasts had done in 16th c. This position would separate the time between destruction ofMycenae and the take over, though the destruction had certainly been perpetrated by raiders and `citysackers’ as mentioned in the Iliad. This reconstruction fits the evidence. Destruction of these richsettlements began shortly before 1200 BC and continued through the century, not long after the sack ofThebes and Troy. Many Greek speakers in this land were killed when the Towns were destroyed andsurvivors seemed to have gone off to safer places, sailing off to Cyprus and withdrawing into Arcadianinterior, according to archeological evidence. It is crucial to also suppose that what brought about theruination and collapse of Mycenae was not so much the actual destruction of towns and cities, but thefear of such things a fear sufficient to motivate migration to more secure though less attractive lands. Atthe beginning of Doric occupation a non-Greek speaking population was present, presumably the helotsof Archaic and classical Laconia who were distinct from their Doric superiors but picking up the languagein course of time, so that by the fifth c. they spoke Doric.81 Even the men who sacked Troy and Thebescame from the Thessalian coast, ancestors of Aeolic speakers, that `sacker of cities’ was a proud epithet inthe thirthteenth and twelfth century BC At any rate the argument postulated is that there was a historicalbasis that explains the persistence of fear in later historiographic discourse of Xenophon and Polybiuswhere the political relevance of stasis is undermined by anthropological discourse, represented throughmetaphors of savagery and cruelty/crudity [omotes].82

To have reached such levels of classification-complexity and strife presupposed a long history beginningwith the neolithic agricultural revolution that took off with the transition to the warmer Holocene climateunder two hypothetical conditions: 1/ cultivation starting under the stress of the last mini glaciationstowards the close of Pleistocene and 2/ the close relationship between rising temperatures and cerealproduction. It may be argued that sedantism emerged before the agricultural revolution among `foragingsocieties’ including hunter-gatherers having figure out exploiting resources such as seeds, tubers, smallgame, fish, down the food chain. The term Mesolithic refers to hunter-gatherers who lived in permanentsettlements during winters. These were village settlements which interacted with mobile and nomadicbands through trade/exchanges and warfare. The most well known settlements were the Natufian cultureof Levant, eastern Mediterranean that existed 9000 BCE years ago. Lager villages reached population sizereduced to lognormal scale of hierarchy or rank-size distribution according to urban geographers,

81 Drews R, Op Cit, Appendix 1

82 Loraux N, Op Cit, p 56-57 for Polybius and p. 58-59 for Xenophon

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reaching up to 250 people.83Assuming models of high density settlements as the result of `upward sweeps’where inventory reports do show a dynamic when larger settlements increase, yet the process of urbanemergence followed a non-linear logic from settled agriculture and mixed domestication of animals in thecity of Ur in the fertile crescent, Jerico in the West Bank and Catal Hayuk in Anatolia around 4000 BCE.These cities developed on a place that had already seen hierarchical settlement systems of villages basedon complex chiefdoms. It has been estimated that from 4000-3100 BC, these cities had a peak populationat around 50,000. Any large city would be surrounded by smaller cities and villages forming a 4-tiersettlement system plus a combination of settled agriculture, ideo-grammatic systems of writing and ideo-ontological system of arithmetic.84 For our purposes, what is more significant is that the layout,decoration, and evidence for ritual in all the sites reveal societies obsessed with the interplay between thedomestic and wild. Archeological finds at Catal include female figurines, such as an enthroned womanflanked by two lions. Murals on interior and exterior walls depict groups of hunting men, hunted animalsand vultures swooning down on corpses indicate not only co-evolutionary patterns between nomadism,hunting and sedantism but the longer term Neolithic preoccupation with the interplay of the wild and thetamed. Within such preoccupations, there may have been a noticeable absence of abstract thought but theseparation domestic/wild does provide the condition for an apprehension of `immediate being’ as `wildgame’ , which Schelling put down in his science of reason in it’s a priori conception.85

The persistence of the Neolithic bias may be seen as reflective results of even older long-term dynamicsor the process that separated the `human state of nature’ from its `non/extra-human animal history’referring to the late Paleolithic phase. Iterative models to explain the expanding scale of humansettlements out of `non-human animal history’ can account for morphological shifts from bands/camp tosedentary forms of settlements according to Turchin. It is a model with a positive feedback loop thatexplains the growing scale of human settlements since late Paleolithic phase. That is because of anegative feedback loop, or the nasty bottom which functions as the human demographic regulator. This isa regulator that humans shared with other animals, stuck in a bounded, small bands with a technologicalconstant. The way out was human migration towards warmer areas. But the negative feedback loop ismade up of two vicious cycles 1/ local resource depletion and 2/ intra-species and group conflicts. Theirconjunction means short life-span and increased mortality. In re-settled areas the first order feedback actson a faster scale: all available land in occupied, and excess individuals or floaters emerge, who don’t have

83 Chase-Dunn C, Institute for Research on World System, The Role of Ecosettlements in Human social Evolution,2005; Inone H, Apkharian, et al, The Human Demographic Regulator, JWRS, 2/9/2009; Chase-Dunn C, Alverez A, etal, Unswept Inventory : Scale of Shifts of Settlements and Politics Since the Stone Age, project; Sanderson S, SocialEvolution, Cambridge, 1990

84 Chase-Dunn C, The role of ecosettlement systems in human social evolution, Institute for research for worldsystems, 2005

85 Rozenkranz F, Hegel’s Relation to his Contemporaries, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, St Louis,

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the same access to resources narrowing their survival and reproductive rates. When carrying capacity ofthe settlement reaches maximum, the population growth rate is reduced to zero without any time-lags.Thereafter shorter number iterations of resettlements relative to available food resources show anormalization of stochastic birth, death and reproduction rates but when the iteration is one time or <1,the model is non-stochastic and population does not recover. 86 Repeated iterations that shorted thenumbers of resettlements starts the positive feedback and the number re-iteration is a conscious responsewhereas automatic response [to resource/food availability] lack the dynamic making up non-stochasticmodels that leads to demographic collapse and the nasty bottom of the population regulator whichhumans share with animals. The point is that overcoming the demographic pressure leading to `upwardsweeps’ in human settlement morphology is a sublation of natural barrier by understanding which learnsto keep a count of the number of times repeated on a shorter time span. This understanding as a form ofconsciousness is clearly found in Chinese legends that talk about depletion of food resources [animals andbirds] and increasing population leading to domestication of rice and settled agriculture.

At a conceptual level, Marx offered few insights, long neglected by historians. In the Grundrisse, Marxprobed the materialist basis of historical dynamic: ` once `settled peoples’ are taken into account’, hebegan, `only barrier which the community can encounter in its relation to natural conditions of productionas its own, to land, is some other community which has already laid claim to them as its inorganic body.War is therefore one of the earliest task of every primitive community of this kind, both for the defense ofproperty and its acquisition. In general property in land includes property in its organic products’, e.g.,sheep is at the same time the property in pastures. Where man himself is captured as an organic accessoryof land, and together with it, he is captured as one of the conditions of production, this is the origin ofslavery and serfdom, which soon debase and modify the original form of all communities, and themselvesbecome their foundation. As a result the simple structure is determined negatively…Consequently tribesconquered and subjugated by others become property-less and part of the inorganic conditions of theconquering tribe’s reproduction, which that community regards as its own. Slavery and serfdom aretherefore further development of property based on tribalism. They necessarily modify all its forms.’ 87

Dissolution of `common property in its primitive form’ or `property based on tribalism’ is the self-negation of primary global formation resulting from changing relations of production that causes furtherdevelopment of property in secondary global formations. Conditions of community differ in the historicalprocess of self negation. Modification of common property is least observed in Asiatic forms because ofthe unity found between agriculture and manufacture conquest is not so essential in contrast to wherelanded property and agriculture predominates.88 Once the surrounding countryside of Rome was

86 Hiroko Inone, et al, The Human Demographic Regulator, JWRS, 19/2/2009

87 Marx K, Grundrisse, p. 89, 91

88 Ibid, p. 91-92

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cultivated by its citizens, as the conditions of community were different from later when the `productionof individuals as proprietors became the basis of relationship between members of the community’.Instead of the original negation of the natural community, what we have is changing social relations ormodification of the negation. Early private property is modified as ownership of land size show variationsmostly due to demographic pressure leading now to `wars of conquest’ and increasing numbers of slaveson the one side as well as `the enlargement of ager publicus and hence the rise of patricians who representthe community.’89 Private property is clearly shown to be a self-changing and expanding process underrelations of production that are mediated. Thus `slavery, serfdom, etc., where labourer himself appearsamong the natural conditions of production for the third individual or the community and where thereforeproperty is no relationship of the independently laboring individual to the objective conditions of labour,is always secondary, never primary, although it is the necessary and logical result of property founded oncommunity and upon labour in that community.’90 The primary system self-negates into the secondarysystem, the individual private proprietor of slaves is also the `logic result’ of the negation of propertyfounded on community. This is clearly the process of modification within class society in which man asthe individual emerges `through the process of history’. Whereas he `originally’ appears as a `generictribal being, a herd animal’, `exchange is a major element of this individualization.’ Similarly, therelation, labour too is `initially undertaken on a certain basis, first primitive’ among the natural conditionsof production, `then historical. Later, this basis or presupposition is cancelled or tends to disappear havingbecome too narrow for the progressive’ or self-expanding `human horde’.91 The logic is based on thegrowth of social –human productive forces of reproduction, in demographic terms cancels out the naturalrelations of labour upon which production was based as much as the basis and development of slavery,itself founded on that negation is historical and secondary.

From a Hegelian-Marxist [modified] `philosophical’ theory of history which covers long periods of timealso has often put forth the necessity to foreshorten certain durations by abstractions, no less thanconducting criticism of abstract historical not in order to force facts into a priori abstractions. Thinking interms of the long term implies the sublation, if not transcendence of the short time spans, mainly signifiedby `events’, which are currently entities [ event+entities] or objects of certain kinds of philosophy. Asinformation products from the past there is a level where they exist outside history. We would considerabstractions that appear on a singular plane with presuppositions or with vertical depth both throughthinner or thicker `layers’ / encrustations of material reality, and other, more profound types ofabstractions thrown up by historical realities as unities, the relationship between the dimensions ofhistorically real and the invisibles captured by thinking as much as reflecting the contents of reality intoself while outwardizing as concepts.92 All of the above qualifies abstractions differentially, examined orunexamined, grounded or ungrounded, but defined as unities as mediated and unmediated, of abstract and

89 Ibid., p 92-93

90 Ibid. p. 95

91 Ibid., p. 96-97

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concrete, the visible and invisible without any strict equivalence/ co-homology or incommensurability orstaticity. In his more theoretical reflections, Braudel would write that `omnipresent history’ raisesquestions about society as a whole, on the basis of the very movement of time that carries life and alsosteals it away, `extinguishing and rekindling its flames’. Thus `history is a dialectic of the time span’;through it, history is a study of whole society, and `thus of the past, and equally of the present, past and[present being inseparable.’93 In his engagement with Jean-Paul Sartre, Braudel concurs with Sartre’sprotest against what is `oversimplified and ponderous’ in Marxism that in the name of the biographical isfull of `teeming reality of events’. He views Sartre’s research `move from the surface to the depths, and solinks up with my own preoccupations’, further qualifying, `from the event to the structure and model backto the event.’94 However, Braudel also proceeds further, presumably in favour of the `universal’ thoughagainst the use being made of Marx’s `models’ or the universal by Marxists, if not Sartre’s preoccupationwith the `individual and the particular’, which are intrinsically linked up with the concrete universality ofboth Hegel and Marx. For Braudel, `Marx’s genius, the secret of his long sway, lies in the fact that he wasthe first to construct, true social models on the basis of historical longue duree’. Unfortunately, a gooddeal of Marxist historiography had frozen and simplified these models, giving the status of laws with an`automatic explanation’, which would be valid for any society at any time. Braudel is interested inenlivening these `models’ dynamically, putting them `within ever-changing stream of time in which they`would constantly reappear, but with changes of emphasis, sometimes overshadowed, sometimes throwninto relief’ by other models with their own rules. It was indeed regrettable that `the creative potential ofthe most powerful analysis of the last century had been stymied.’95 Braudel proceeds in a conceptualcritique of model and model-logic, applicable to Marxism and in any social science of succumbing to the`danger’ as it is wholly taken up with the `model on its pure state’, an abstract universal, with model formodel’s sake?’

92 In history, it may be useful to to understand the word `concept’ in the Latin form, which has a `semantichalo.’ The term` conceptus’ differs from the German `begriff’ : The latter refers to `grasping’, the former to an entity that is con-cave [concave], that being concave canfunction as a basin; the use of the verb `conceptio’ means to be pregnant, but also receiving somethingonto one’s `spirit’, ones `thought’, ones `senses’. It is useful to recall Braudel: ``If I am not mistaken, thefundamental movement of history today is not one of choosing this or that point of view, but of acceptingand absorbing all the successive definitions in which, one after another, there have been attempts toconfine it. For all the different kinds of history belong to us.’, Braudel F, On History,[tr] Sarah Matthews,London, 1980, p. 66 ; Marx emphasized the abstraction involved with the `concept; `To be able to studythe phenomena in their fundamental relations, in the form corresponding to their concept, i.e., to studythem in abstraction from the immediate appearances..’ Marx K, Capital, vol 3, p. 263

93 Braudel, F, History and Diversity of Human Sciences, Op Cit., p. 67

94 Braudel, History and Social Sciences, Op Cit., p. 50

95 Ibid., p. 51

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Returning to ancient Greece, we have evidence that takes up the unity of time as equivalent and coherentin relation to length, which can be found in one excerpt from Derveni papyrus by its author who belongedto the school of Anaxagoras in late 5th c. BC. He wrote: ` Olympus and time are the same. Those whothink Olympus and space are the same are mistaken because they do not realize that heaven / sky cannotbe long rather than wide, while if someone were to call time long, he would not be mistaken; whenever hewanted to say heaven/sky, he would add wide but whenever he wanted to say Olympus he never called itwide but long.’96 Though this is considered as the way early science criticized religion, the formulationwhere time is unity with length is a real abstraction. Reason is internal and relational to reality whileexisting in bodies on a active/passive axis; it is itself the infinite free energy, movement [durational] ofthe complex of things as process that is the activity of essence positing the world of appearances. Reasonis the self-movement by which its own material works up its self-active energy. As self active, even theabstract form is not fixed but negatively related to sensuousness and isolated random ideas. Consider thefollowing mode of critical apprehension, again from Derveni papyrus, `air existed long before it wasnamed, then it was named. For air existed both before the present were set/brought together and willalways exist. For it did not come to be but existed. But after it was named, Zeus it was who thought it wasborn, as if it did not exist before.’97 At the same time reason is self-determining, self-distinguishing, self-defining and self-identical in the other and also in difference. We go by Plato’s insight 98 that reason is theactive determinator, the potentiality of unlimited infinite and formless substance to pass over to a finite,free form of activity that equally return to itself, to another un-hypothesized arche, the `return to point atwhich we began [ ep’arkhen], and then endeavor to add a suitable ending to the beginning’.99 This wouldbe consciousness of one’s being or self-consciousness in which that I know is merged with what I know initself, self-active free energy that actualizes itself, or ideation as a temporal-historical process, ametamorphoses of the `arkhe’ that renews itself, like nature communing with itself in Whitehead’scategory of the ultimate – creativity, novelty, and emergence.100 This may be considered somewhatenigmatically as another theme, more Heraclitean, more diachronic [less synchronic], as the enigma of

96 Kouremenos Theokritos, Parassoglou G, Tsantsanoglou, The Dervani Papyrus, [ed, intro & commentary], Leo SOlschki, vol 13, p 1-19, column 12, 3-19, Florence, 2006

97 Ibid., col 17, 1-11

98 The Sophist, where the dialectic is made the pure activity of reason comprehended in thought which isdistinguished from the dialectic of ordinary perception as well as the dialectic of argumentation and refutation.

99 Timaeus [tr] Derrida J, Khora, in Laroux N, et al [eds] Op Cit, p. 467; Plato refers to `birthing’ [receptacle, bearer,mother, nurse, etc], which is not open to Derrida’s interpretation in terms of a dualist ontology, or doublebeginning, p. 466

100 Cited in M Merleau-Ponty, Nature : course of notes from college de France [tr] Villier Robert, Evanston ,Northwestern University, 2003; for Merleau-Ponty language itself is a metamorphoses that renews the carnalconfiguration of the mute world, but in another `flesh’.

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`auto-kinesis’ at the heart of Plato’s dialectic, as the self-induced motion of the self as an entity or objectas it occurs in Phaedrus’ as soul’s self-motion’.101

The consciousness of freedom, which is man, as found among the Greeks and Romans was partialreferring to some, or few. “Even Plato and Aristotle did not know this”,102 as they had slaves and theirwhole life was implicated with the institution of slavery, a fact which made their liberty and freedomtransient and contingent. Stasis was very much a part of the Greek idea of the political, when citizens arenot as much disciplined as politicized, when foremost among values affected by a general and destructiveinversion would be inversion of meaning of words and primarily citizens and soldiers would come underattack, this was certainly a looming threat, and sober historians like Thucydides put the blame on the doorof `human nature’ [ phusis anthropos], then rather than get swayed by the Greek anthropologicaldiscourse, it is primarily the kind of politics which made freedom contingent. 103 This may sound as aknown truism, a settled fact but its consequences for history is of interest to us insofar as Plato andAristotle knew that their life was implicated, and what this meant would be elucidated. To be sure, wefind that in Plato and Aristotle there are instances where slaves and slavery are talked not only withconsiderable ambiguity or `paradoxology’ in Plato’s case but also leaving their own margin of error, as aratio of difficulty. With Plato, there is virtually none of the anthropological presumptions such as inAristotle’s one `definition’ as `slaves by nature’ that `justified’ slavery at the level of domestic householdssince the principle of war for Plato is not only `applicable’ to states but `in the village and war of familyagainst family’. Slavery is suggested to occur as a `necessity’ arising from `poverty’. 104 In his lastconversation [as the Athenian], The Laws Plato mentions slaves who have proved to be `better ineveryway than brothers or sons’ having saved the lives and properties of their masters’, though mastersrelationship to slaves is said to veer from the extremity of treating them like `wild beasts’, `making theirsouls three times or rather many times as slavish than before’ whereas as `others do just the opposite.’ Herecommends that the `right treatment’ to them would `be to do more justice to them than to those who areour equals’ but `not admonished as if they were freemen’.105 The freeman happens to be by his ability ofcommand. It has been argued that the philosopher `type’ had no interest in social status and Diogenes is

101 Plato, Phaedrus [tr and Intro] Hamilton W, p. 99, 101 London, 1975 talking about the dialectic `originating withinself and `in the secondary sense, `come to birth, as they should, in the minds of others’.

102 Hegel G W F, Philosophy of History, p. 18

103 Laroux Nicole, Op Cit, p. 66, in the Peloponnesian war, the Athenian citizens, for all their bravery are reduced totheir all too `human nature’ when plague befalls upon them, which makes human nature the both the area andsource of regression.

104 Plato’s, The Laws, Digital Publication, Bk IV, 2006

105 Ibid., p. 89

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cited as a philosopher among others [including Plato, based on Diogenes Laertius’ accounts] enslaved, `awise man serving the other’.106 However, the defense of philosophers by Page DuBois, following the earlyargument by Vlastos in his `Slavery in Plato’s Thought’, does not go beyond admitting the slave ashuman being [anthropoi] or in metaphoric terms. There is nothing that talks about slave’s title to authorityby virtue of possessing logos or the freedom to command, in fact she ends up saying that Plato`acknowledged the ephemerality of freedom and slavery and mutability for both conditions.’107

Consciousness and Slavery

Consciousness of freedom remains contingent in history, thus a term open to numerousmisunderstandings, even contentions, but the same cannot be said about slavery as it got institutionalizedwhere even in terms of Roman private law, the slave could be fitted into the way sons were legally treatedwhen he was considered practically rational, or he could fit into the legal treatment of animals if he/shewas thought of as property.108 While there was no ambiguity in the term slavery, its `emergence’ wascontingent, in case when the result of a combat need not be known in advance. Viewed retrospectively,the `master’s’ victory is decided beforehand, whose nature is such so as it make it look the sameprospectively; otherwise there is no necessity why the master should emerge victorious. Rationalization ofcontingency did not transform slaves into a `decisive feature’ or work organization such as stipulated byWeber, or taken for granted in the thesis of `domestic/household economy’ of Bucher.109In the Germanhistoriographical tradition, Eduard Mayer, like Vogt, only had a negative interest in slavery; both wereconcerned about repudiating or rejecting conceptions of history that assigned any important role toslavery in historical evolution followed by eliminating slavery from ancient history. 110Some of thesepositions define slavery as dispersed in micro-structures, as anthropological objects, or samples forstudying mentalities, but psychologically unfit, as though deranged subject from a relativist perspective.Being limited to the economy, care and consideration of the house, the corpus of `Hausvaterliteratur’/household economy is more restricted and conservative than literature on `oeconomia’ of the Greek

106 Page DuBois, Slaves and other Objects, p. 154; Chrysippos a Stoic, when sold as a slave is reported to have saidthat `these things are not in our control and all that is not in our control is immaterial’, p. 156,, 154 Chicago, 2003

107 Ibid, p. 166-167

108 Robinson O F, The sources of Roman Law : problems and methods for ancient historians, London, 1997, p. 118

109 For a critique of Weber’s misconstructions on the entire work regime in the Roman world, Banaji J, AgrarianChange in Late Antiquity, p. 24-26, London, 2003

110 Shaw B and Finley M I, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Princeton, 1988, p. 267

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world, which neither overlooks the market/s, even when it is not at the heart of the subsistence economy.Certainly, slavery was not a `primordial fact’, taken for granted by 19th c. historians like Fustel deCoulenges, though it is true that slavery was `a decisive invention of Greco-Roman world’, as Marx hadput it.111 The emphasis on `invention’ is significant. That the non-satisfactory explanation of this inventionseems to have persisted has been reiterated by Claude Meillassoux in terms of the absence of `formalcriteria’, or even a `general theory’ which permits a categorical distinction between slaves and others. Theslaves may be seen as a logical [economic] class, even a pseudo-juridical class in `the view of others’ whoaccording to Aristotle, asserted slavery as a `convention’ and `violated the nature of law’, but not a socialclass in the usual sense of the term.` The relation of master and slave is based on force, and has nowarrant in justice’ [Aristotle], or Ulpan stating the duties of pro-counsels [early 3 rd c. AD], `the power ofmasters over slaves should be unimpaired and no one should suffer any reduction in their authority.’ 112 Tobe sure Ulpan also talks about the `dignitas’ of slaves, made further distinctions in terms of rank andstatus which had emerged by his time when slaves were `upgraded’ by their masters to supervise, like thevilicus [bailiff] the affairs of their estates, this does not indicate any `social shift.113 Roman law wasessentially about private laws, the functioning of which needed different perception of the role of the stateand that of citizens, but there was no law specific to slaves, despite the enormous social and economicimportance of slavery with the sole exception of manumission.114 As a matter of fact, slavery was a lateand infrequent form of labour in the ancient world that could co-exist with non-slave, individual labour ina symbiotic relationship, such as in Italian agriculture115, which does not displace the pivotal role of slavesinto defining the basic characteristic of labour throughout antiquity. From the standpoint of the employer,

111 Shaw B, & Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Princeton, 1998, p. 135

112 Garnsey P, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, Cambridge, 1997, Digital Print 2001, p. 75, 91

113 Vilicus only supervised slaves, not `free tenants’ and juridically the master were liable for actions of the`manager’/ vilicus’ conduct; Cicero made it clear in letters that the title of slaves were unimportant, not theirtasks; similar specific tasks of the administrative managerial type were performed in late Hellenic period, but theGreek titles – cheiristes, epitropes, oikonomos did not delineate specific functions but were synonymous with themeaning manager; in Roman Agricultural writers, Cato, Varro and Columella, mention of the workforce is statedgenerally, difficult to distinguish the descriptive from the normative, Carlson J, Vilici and Roman Estate Managersuntil AD 284, Rome, 1995, p. 167, 15-17, deals with the subject of slave-managers/supervisors based on epigraphicevidence, which sheds light on `mentalite’, as defined by J Carlson ; Columella has an advisory on the kind of slavewho should be appointed manager, Wideman T W, Greek and Roman Slavery, London, 1981 p 135-136

114 Robinson O F, Op Cit, p. 118, The `primary definition of Roman Law is the one created by lawyers. The bulk ofsources deal with private laws, and those mainly interested were those who wrote, compiled or preserved them.’P. 104; In the Digest, sacred law hardly appears; one book out of fifty devoted to criminal law and some can beheld to deal with public law. Even the codes treated private laws as the largest single field. This was becauseprivate law was the source of income at any point in Roman legal history and further, this was also the mainconcern of propertied classes who wielded power in society. According to Robinson, the weight of legal sourcestransmitted has a bias that does not correspond to the knowledge and interest of a non-lawyer. Political andconstitutional doctrines – Public law – have been dragged from sources that dealt with concerns of individuals. p.104

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there was a shifting relationship between different types of labour, also in the way particular types oflabour were organized and exploited, though the question pertains to the dialectic of the process by whichchattel slaves became the dominant labour force while later their dominance was getting loosened.116

Stated more precisely, like the category citizen who was intimately linked to the city / polis, the samecould be said about the slave. The primary condition for the growth of slavery was the world of polis orcities.117Though the subject of cities turned somewhat controversial would be taken up later, towns, asBraudel stated `are like electrical transformers’, the source of Greek colonization and as Leveau showedlong ago, the nature of towns `profoundly affected the pattern of rural settlements’ in western Romanempire, `from Algeria to Britain.’118 The distinction that defined slaves was no less the deep dividebetween the social status between slaves and free men, but it has also been studied as a distinction amongclasses, between slaves and slave-owners, who were related antithetically.119 Slave was a property withoutrights; who’s self was a commodity, the labourer was bought as commodity, like a thing. Pliny talks abouttenants [coloni] who `had to sell their slaves as a part of farm tools to pay off their debts [ for slaves werea part of equipment entrusted to the tenants.’120 “The word `power’ has many meanings…in the person ofthe slave it means ownership’, according to Paulus a Roman Jurist in early 3 rd c. A D. 121 As noted byanother `jurist’, Aelius Marcianus, `the power of owner over slave ought to be absolute; and no man’sright should be impaired.’122 Yet none of the above explains the occurrence of slavery.

The slave was the result or product of the master, the vanquished in wars. It is through the master-slavedialectic that the master brutally accesses itself in history. In the time of Roman republic many [not all]

115 Shaw B & Finley M I, Op Cit, p 137, 145

116 Ibid, p. 273

117 Yvon Thebert, The Slave, in Andrea Giardina, The Romans, Chicago, 1993, p. 138

118 Drawing on Vernon Harris’ critical review of Pergerine Holder and N Purcell’s, `The Corrupting Sea ; A study ofMediterranean history, in Vernon H, Rethinking Mediterranean – The Mediterranean and Ancient History, N Y,2005, p. 33

119 G E M de ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, N Y, 1981, p. 39

120 Letters in Wideman T, Op Cit, p. 146

121 Garnsey, P, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine, Cambridge, 1996, p. 1

122 Wideman T E J, Greek and Roman Slavery, p. 189

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slaves were prisoners of wars, those militarily defeated. The Romans signified the slave with a wordderived from this fact. The etymology of the term `survus’ is explained in the legal digest as, `slaves[ servi] are so called because commanders generally sell people they capture and thereby save [ sarvare]them instead of killing them. The word for property in slaves [ manicipia] is not about the essence, butrather the facticity of existence in its historical context that they were captured from the enemy by forceof arms [ manu capiantur]. In other words, slaves were people who otherwise would have been killed.’123

Peter Garnsey makes it a `relevant factor, yet the decisive point made is, namely, chattel slavery includemilitary strength, or the capacity to capture slaves as booty from other weaker communities and anydefeated population was enslaved.124 Livy while discussing the background to slave revolts after thesecond Carthaginian war [219-202 BC] refers to the `unprecedented number of slaves resettled in Italyand Sicily, bought by the local people `out of booty from recent war with Carthage.’ 125The outcome or theresult of a combat unto death that is sketched in Hegel’s Phenomenology involves dialectic at the veryzenith, which is the point of entry of the brutal consciousness of the master into the Phenomenology,whose truth is that of an impossible relationship to the real. It is not at all clear why a master shouldemerge from a combat to death that is staked on pure prestige, though the meaning of the outcome inimmediate terms is the return to life of the slave [his abandoning the combat, arising from fear ofidentifying with death] that is dependent on the master and in mediated terms, he would work, by virtueof forced labour to produce the master’s truth. For that the slave traverses by means of dialecticalsupersession the entire development of culture to end up knowing itself as absolute knowledge, or self-consciousness that is completely the other of itself. This process is actual, the truth is also a concrete unitywith historical reality, but to make the master’s consciousness display itself as a signifier, its identificationwith death was necessary. In history the master is not the `free’ and the distinction in real terms was notbased on the status between the slaves and free, it was the relation between slaves and owners mediatedby sale in most cases. It is a history of domination, whose arche, dynamic moment inscribed in themaster-slave dialectic is certainly true whereas domination appears as so many moments of fictions thatmade up its own reality and history. A story of domination is involved together with its juridical fictions,especially with Roman Laws onwards, to legitimate the result of the combat.

§

At the historic-phenomenological level, human slavery as the result of war and strife appears at the planarlevel of justice, as a moment of discontinuity of `natural life’. There is no slavery – for about 90-95% of2.5 million years of hominid evolution, there is no slavery by nature; but if we take a not too arbitrary buta critical turning point, beginning with the Neolithic `[self]-bifurcation’ 126after the last [Wurm] phase of

123 Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity, p. 7, Berkeley Calif., 2008

124 Ibid, p. 3

125 In Wideman T E J, Op Cit, p. 191, 193

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glaciations, from 12000 B P – 8000 B P, it is with the development of the notion of surplus 127that one cantrace the precedent notion of slavery. There occurred incessant advances by multiplication of humanspecies, a demographic advance which diminished the availability of land. Groups pressed against eachother to get the most out of diminished land. In certain regions there were retrogressions though somecauses for reversals mainly due to exogenous factors such as one sided propagation of certain plant andanimal species at the expense of surrounding floral and faunal system meaning interference withecosystem leading to unsustainable conditions for meeting subsistence requirements has no idea aboutintra/inter-human/social relations, or the inner structures because of limits imposed by empirical data. 128

With the rise of agriculture and stock-breeding basic changes followed in regard to society on an axiswhere conjugated the play of divergence and convergence. What happened was interaction, peaceful, non-peaceful or the process of mutual permeations of psychisms combined with significant interfecundity. Thehistory of hunter-gatherers, some natural communities/tribes and more specifically nomads show thatsome basic social institutions have developed without slavery.129 Complex and super-complex societiestoo have grown without slavery. Consequently, it is not the external fact of surplus which would accountfor slavery. Surplus as a differentiating process, when socially generated also exists in the practice ofappropriation. `Internal’ application of the notion of surplus means that part of `individual man’s labour’is reserved for the benefit of others while the `external’ application of surplus is used by anthropologiststo mean something set aside by entire society, or those who decide, calculate the surplus above needs soas to make that available to some for specific purposes. Obviously exploitation is involved, as ananthropological study from west Africa says, “ exploitation exists when the use of surplus product by thegroup which has not contributed to the corresponding surplus of labour reproduces a condition of a newextortion of surplus labour from the production.”130 From the standpoint of the propertied owner often theruling class, the possibility to extract the maximum surplus out of an existing surplus extracting regime

126 “Bifurcations provide a mechanism for appearance of novelties in the physical world. In general, however, thereare successions of bifurcation, introducing an historical element…Neolithic bifurcation coming from the discoveryof agriculture and metallurgy, ultimately led to a complex hierarchical society. I have always found remarkable thatNeolithic bifurcation emerged everywhere about the same period about ten thousand years ago, but that itemerged in different forms in middle-east, or China or in pre-Columbian America. This is similar to the branches ofbifurcations which appear in chemical and physical systems.” Prigogene I, The Networked Society, JWSR, vil IV, I,Spring 2999, Pt II, P. 894, 896

127 The notion of surplus, out of production, to be specific without implying that it provided the basis for intellectualactivities, leisure time for freemen, etc, and without dismissing the notion, to explain `accumulation’, as it occursin the neoevolutionist argument of Binford L R, In Pursuit of the Past, Berkeley, California, 2002, p. 215

128 Kohler-Rollefson I, The aftermath of Levantine Neolithic revolution in the light of ecological and ethnographicevidence, PALEORIENT,Vol 14/ 1, 1988, p 86-88

129 Kardin N K, The Cultural Complexity of Nomads, JWSR, steppe nomads did not have any caste division and slaverywithin their community organization and when it does appear slavery is undeveloped and in case of its widespreading, slavery was never hereditary. But nomads had their social stratification, noyons [aristocracy] andkarachu [commoners] among Mongols.

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from primary producers once they have been commodified and owned added to their wealth, prestige andpower. The use of slave labour increased the surplus in the hands of propertied classes, basically, `urbancategories of landowners’131 in a way otherwise unattainable. 132 What is indicated is the interiordimension of surplus through relations of appropriation/expropriation, from a self-expanding monad/[unit] of addable qualified quantifiers, when different units of measure were applied to different objectsand out of this practice in barter trade, with the establishment of the market site/ place of exchange,money emerged as a synthetic-qualitative measure in metals.133 Established markets created the potentialfor transforming the produce of slave labour into something actual as commodities [exchange-values] inthe markets, or the conversion of produce by commodity into further commodities as a process of autoexpansion. Physical surplus may well explain the process of early exchange, barter and even`accumulation’ of `tokens’, such as shell-necklaces found in the caves in south Africa going back to75000 B C, but that would tell as little about money and markets any more than they are recentlyobserved in hunter gathering societies.134

Contextualizing the Mediterranean in the Ancient World – A Synoptic View

Late Paleolithic assemblages from cites in eastern Aegean islands, the Cyclades, the Balkans confirm theexistence of large cultural interaction sphere. Assembleges from Gulpinar, Kuratepe, dated first half of F5TH Millennium BC – middle stage in Chalcolithic in western Anatolia and late Neolithic in Greece[ archeologists however, prefer the Neolithic over Chalcolithic for 5 th millennium C. The lack of uniformchronology in Aegean Neolithic causes problem in Chronological terminology. Previous knowledge aboutlate Chalcolithic in western Anatolia and late Neolithic in Greece derived from excavations at Tiganion,Samos, Emporio, Chios, sites at Dodecense, while Delos and Lemnos have been mute Geomorphological

130 Dupre and Rey quoted by G E M de Ste Croix, Op Cit, p. 37

131 Cf Anderson P, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London, , p. 19

132 G M E de ste Croix, Op Cit, p. 39

133 Kula W, Measures and Men [tr], Richard Szreter, London 1986, specifically emphasizes that early `primitive’ mindconceived objects in a synthetic-qualified manner, whereby quality would synthesize the properties of its objects.But measures in market societies were concrete representations, so that different measures were applied todifferent objects.

134 www.metrum.org/money ; for the `absence of any separate institution based on economic motive’ in earlysocieties, Polyani K, The Great Transformation, London 1957, p. 27

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excavations in the plains of Troy recently identified asite belonging to 5th millennium Neolithic Gulpinarin western Anatolia. It provides the settlements in this part of the Aegean during an obscure period.Analysis of remains from site – pottery, stone artifacts and architecture show parallels with sites fromCyclades [ e.g., Saligoas, Mykonos, Zas, Grotta, or Noxos] and eastern Aegean islands [ Samos,Empirios, Chios], connected with Bulgaria, Macedonia and Balkans. Though located on flat ground , onekm east of coast/seashore, Gulpinar, located between to plateau ridges, extended towards the Aegean.Originally volcanic depression filled by alluvial deposits.. During Neolithic sea levels were lower andcoastlines more distant. Rising sea reached its peak 6000 years ago. No prehistoric architecture remainsover the earth floor to associate with living units.Closly spaced pits have been found [ from 0.60-1 metrein diameter and 0.30- 0.8 meters in deapths] covered 0.60-1 metre in stones. Tiny swellings are foundnearpits. . Pits have fragmentary and complete pots, bones from cattle [ sheep . goats, marine shells,chipped stone tools, saddle querns]. They served a special function- storage pit. Similar pits have beenfound in Aegean Thrace – floors with pits, or post holes, type of architecture common to all Balkansettlements during this period. And presence of Samos suggests same tradition in eastern Aegean.Bowles with steep or slightly convex sides with various types of handles, knobs, are found in greatquantity. Stumps of bowl handles with knobs recovered in great quantity. The knobs and twisted uprisinghigh handles reminiscent of types found in eastern Aegean islands [ Empirio on Chios, Tigrini in Samosas well as in western Anatolia.

Haphazard configuration of continents on earth has made some regions more favourable than others forhigher levels of human concourse, transfers, inter-mixing. These `privileged’ places have seen a naturaltendency towards settled life, human mass to concentrate and to fuse, causing temperatures to rise. Mainfoci with some variations in chronology would be Mayan civilization, Polynesia, river valleys in Indiaand China and Nile valley with Egyptian and Mesopotamia with its Sumerian civilizations. In course oftime, however, it is around the Mediterranean where an exceptional occurrence of people and places thatproduced a blend over time, that thanks to which reason –nous – could be harnessed to facts and religionto action. The process was chronologically an upward thrust, or directed acceleration of time. There was atime when the human process of anthropogenesis [ de Chardin] passed through Mediterranean Europe. Inthis ardent zone of recasting of reason, a universal process of incorporation of major civilizational andcultural processes took on a definite human value. A neo-humanity had been germinating around this areasince the Neolithic bifurcation and after absorbing the last vestiges of the Neolithic mosaic startedforming another level of `noosphere’135, most dense and complex. Slavery and slave societies belong tothe internal process or the production process of the densified noosphere that witnessed two majorirruptions of human-social formations, both confronting the prior phases as opposed, at the same timebeing their progenitors having the potential for such `emergence’.136 The first of these irruptions would be

135 “The noosphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. It is for the first time man becomes manbecomes a major geological force. He can and must reshape the area of life by his labour and thought..” VernadskyV, IN Balandin, R K, V Vernadsky, Moscow, 1982, p. 136

136 Harris Errol E, Formal, Transcendental and Dialectical Thinking, Part 3, Dialectic, Ch 14, Value, IV Mankind andNature

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the city-states out of the self-proliferation of `Auto-Catalysis’ or expanded self-reproduction of the<monadic> population of chiefdoms / super-chiefdoms that reached a critical self-density, or from theself-densification of the chiefdom <arithmos> associated with critical density, the emergent city-statewould be a socio-ontological innovation of the nucleated zone. The next irruption in terms of historical-dialectical meta-monadology would be empires from the self proliferation of Auto-catalysis or expandedself-reproduction of <monadic> population of city-state < arithmos> associated with critical density, theemergent empire would be a social ontological innovation nucleated / meristemal zone. Self-densificationof city-state / super chiefdom <arithmos> may be seen on the side of synchronic direction through meta-fractal / self-similar escalation for reaching the critical density in the advanced, nucleated [meristemal]zone. This can be modeled under the Historical Dialectic of Human-Social relations, and of human-socialforces of human-social [re]-production.

As regards the elites, at a deeper level Homeric feasting and its association with singing of tales, anddancing in general, the epics may be mirroring the context of their own performance as they had beenperformed in a superregional sanctuary such as Delos. Homeric feasting may be said to encapsulatevalues to create and confirm a collective ideology and values of companionship, equal sharing andindividual esteem , reciprocities, [ obligations owed to hospitality and duties owed to feastingcommunity] of which one is a member. In the Homeric terminology, `feast’ means `share’, `portion’,`divide’, distribute’, etc. 11th-9th c BC practices predominantly reflected those of early iron age warriorelites, supported by Bronze Age archeological record. Relatively deep tripod cauldrons as well asrepresentations in linear--B lists are decorated with portable hearths and other palatial cocking equipment– meat for human consumption was prepared in Mycenaean palaces by boiling or stewing Results fromorganic residue of clay versions of these tripod vassals indicate that meat was cocked in this way from atleast the middle to late Bronze Age from at least the middle of late Bronze Age in the Aegean area ingeneral and particularly in ritual contexts. As for the humble folk meat was cocked in humble clay pots,which might have become an item of diet of a progressively wide section of the population from the 13 thc. onwards., constituting the counter-response from exclusive warrior feasts, based on spit roasting ofhunted meat. Meat and olive oil was an extremely rare and costly commodity throughout the early IronAge.

Evidence for liquid preparation of opium in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean as early as mid secondmillennium is available but its use is considerably older. Its use from late 2nd millennium went intoalterations – with doctored wine with medicinal properties, etc. With such practices begins the spread ofcivilized wine consumption, even though such use was prevalent in the East from the 3 rd millennium. Butin 2nd millennium Aegean, `civilized’ practices may have subsumed the pre-existing custom of drinkingother psychoactive substances. In Homeric epics wine use had supplanted social and cultural use of otherpsychoactive substances – a purely aristocratic reaction against the poor man’s pleasure principle thatsubsists till date – with invention of various types of wine mixtures – for the sake of higher profits – with`foreign connection being actively excluded from normal Greek perception of wine use. Yet these mattersjusrt don’t vanish.Association of Ivy with Dionysus symbolism remained from the archaic periodonward., though the association of Ivy with wine drinking in Mediterranean goes a long way back in theAegean. The epics preserve a dim reflection of Ivy decorated vassals of late Bronze Age; it was possibly

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borrowed from Creteand Egypt. Dionysus is a deity of considerable antiquity in the Aegean with deeproots in Crete, who may have been associated with Ivy before wine.

The changes brought by the Homeric warrior aristocracy characterized wine-use with a predominantlymale universe with regulated social norms while other psychoactive substances were relegated for strictmedical use or to the `twilight realm of female witches.[ or witch goddesses and foreigners].

In the Mediterranean, self-expansion leading up to densification was projected through maritime,commerce and mobility from early 2nd millennium B C E. It can be argued that at first the Aegean enteredthe periphery of the greater near eastern and Laventine world when bronze started to be imported to theregion from Anatolia. This is when seafaring in the eastern Mediterranean was based on maritime`visibility’, within the sight of land. The entire Aegean offered the sight of land, and initially voyage fromthe Aegean lands took the easier, though the longer route, via Rhodes along north coast of Cyprus andthen down the Levant, and then finally to Egypt at no time leaving the sight of land.137 Similarly Pharonictrade also had to move through the Levant and maybe southbound trade from Cyprus or Crete required asmaller leap of faith for ships to fetch up on the north African coast. There was certainly some high levelgift exchange between great powers / complex super-chiefdoms but this could not , in strictly commercialterms account for the bulk of trade to provide the `engine for social change’. Certainly a commercialnetwork operated at times on a considerable scale. This is the level of self-expanding reproduction ofhuman-social productive forces. Thus merchants could operate on their own account. `State’/ruling eliteand freelance trade can be distinguished by the type of shipping utilized –long boats for the former andround, shorter vassals for private ventures.138 The break from this pattern may be dated 1700 BC whenthings begin to change in the near east and it is not Minoan but mainland Mycenaean objects that heraldthe change. The innovation in shipping belonged to Egypt, which built deep hulled sailing ships whichwere coasting in the Levant in 3rd millennium B C E, and in the 2nd millennium these ships began to crossopen seas,139 possibly linked up with the Hyskos dynasty’s [17th c. BC] military ambitions in Greece,which we have discussed earlier. Distance across the sea is annihilated in the late Helladic period [1600-1500 B C E] with the scale and range of commoditization of exchange stretching from near-east to theAegean indicating an entirely new reality, with central and western Mediterranean becoming newperipheries. One may visualize region-wide organized commodity exchanges, when `foreign’ and `exotic’objects became `currency’ only in terms of the external context and not in their own terms. 140 This was

137 Linda Hulin and Manning SW, Maritime commerce and geographies of mobility in late bronze age of easternMediterranean : Problematizations, in Emma Blake, Knapp A B [eds],The Archeology of Mediterranean Prehistory,Cornwall, 2005, p. 278-279,

138 Ibid., p. 273

139 Harris V, Rethinking the Mediterranean : The Mediterranean in Ancient History, N Y, 2005, p. 4-5

140 Ibid, p 279

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the kind of `inter-regional trade that made possible ecological varieties and heterogeneity to come intocontact and inter-relate, such as caravan cities like Aleppo or Palmyra, ports on the edge of the desert,where it met the sea.141 On the Levantine coast during 2nd millennium B C E, local communities wereengaged in landscape engineering, not only to drain the coastal plains but improve access for incomingvassals to the havens at the mouth of streams, otherwise impeded by aeolionite karkar ridges. Small portscame up at the mouths of rivers, providing access to inland communication networks while getting linkedto Mycenaean settlements linked to trade.142 Colonization followed in the wake of city-state irruption.

Horden and Purcell do not address the central questions of economic history in their work onMediterranean as pointed by Vernon Harris’ critical review of the book. Obviously, covering the period,2000 BC – 1000 AD, for most of the early part power centres such as Mesopotamia and Egypt up the Nilewere far from the Mediterranean, though both these civilizations met overland, Mesopotamia wascertainly engaged in maritime trade along the Indian Ocean coast. Long distance traffic in theMediterranean was spurred on in the quest for metal resources, since they were unevenly distributed.However, it is with the Greeks that the second < meta-ontological> irruption from city state to Empirestarted which was completed by the Roman world. The centre piece of ancient Mediterranean was thepolis. The term `oikoumene by the Greeks meant the `entire world’, in which the sea was plainly at thecentre and proximity to the sea an essential condition of economic and civilized life.143 At the same time,this attitude would not characterize or get duplicated by the rest of Mediterranean coastal populations,where the transition to city-state systems had not taken place. One finds the development and innovationof technical means to deal with the nuts and bolts – including nautical technology, diffusion ofinformation, spread of skills in textile production and mining- as large portions of the coast was gettinginterdependent, by people of all regions.144 Bronze age Greece initiated efforts to obtain specific materialssuch as copper, tin and obsidian far off. This is what had led them to Melos for its obsidian in the firstplace. Search for metals in antiquity could only mean power [ of arms or money/gold] and this translatesto the fact that peoples of the Mediterranean were linked by warfare, at least until Caesar invaded GalliaComata. This had very severe impact on the environment, as the records say, ancient Mediterraneanwarfare was carried out in a manner as to destroy as much of enemy’s natural resources as could possiblybe achieved with the level of technology and the vanquished captured to be naturalized as slaves, with athought to gain from future productivity from their future putative subjects.145The havoc and destruction

141 N Purcell and P Horden, The Corrupting Sea : a study of Mediterranean history, London, 2006, p. 393

142 Ibid., p 393-394

143 Harris V, Rethinking the Mediterranean, p. 16

144 Ibid, p. 19

145 Ibid, p. 24

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upon ecologies that fell in the way of marches of very large armies as well as the escalation in warfare,threatening to tear cities apart has been discussed by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon’s owninvolvement in the Persian civil war [ Hellenica].146In course of prolonged military wars with the Greeks,especially the Roman wars with Macedonia, its ruler, Philip hastened his retreat accompanied with alimited `scorched earth’ policy when he heard about the approach of Aetolians. Livy says that they beganravaging the country nearest to theirs around Sperchiae and Maera Cume, and then crossing `the frontierof Thessaly they gained possession of Cymene and Augea at the fist assault’ while devastating the fieldsaround.’147 With the costs of warfare extremely high – showing up in diminished trade and agriculturalproductivity, destruction of fixed capital – this did not preclude regular trading networks produced by thephenomena of Mediterranean colonization, associated with the Greeks. One striking example ofestablishment of emporia [ trading places] would be Nauratis on the western-most distributaries’ of theNile, where the Saite pharos had licensed a community of Greeks from 11 homelands to settle down.Herodotus had visited the place and from him we learn the many crucial details of its diverse institutions.They were mainly involved in trade including the redistribution of Egypt’s Nile-borne grain to needycommunities in the Aegean.148 However, the wider point regarding colonies was that notwithstandingsome of these juridical institutions providing a background of legal framework, there existed anotherphenomenon, the `opportunistic intrusion of outsiders not all had come to settle but engage in slave tradefor pirates and merchants quite indistinguishable from each other given that they would gather`merchandize’, including human beings for opportunistic exchange.149 At any rate, it would not have beenpossible for either the Phoenicians or Greeks to colonize the Mediterranean if they did not possess urbansettlements or the polis with its chora for food supplies.

Purcell and Horden do recognize the validity of an `idealized image’ of Polybius, who wrote towards theclose of 3rd c. BC that when Rome survived the threat of Carthaginians and Hannibal’s invasion thatmarked the irruption of empire in terms of its `universal’ affects throughout the Mediterranean world, 150

though the count of city-states <arithmos> had already reached their critical density, the source of thenucleated, innovative zone to irrupt as empires <genos> of the neo-ontology from the self-densification ofthe `city-state’ . Before the close of 3rd c. B C E, writes Polybius, `the doings of the world – oikumaine –had been, as one might say, dispersed…but as a result of these events – Roman conquests – it is as if

146 Hunt P, Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek historians, Cambridge, 1998, p. 2

147 Livy, History of Rome, vol IV, 2004, p. 296

148 Horden P and Purcell N, Op Cit, p. 397

149 Harris V, Op Cit, p. 17; Horden P and Purcell N, Op Cit, p. 397 , the work of Purcell and Horden is marked by thegeneral reluctance to draw the right and self-evident historical conclusions or give shape to historical change

150 Horden P and Purcell N, P. 27

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history had come to acquire an organic unity and the doings of Italy and Libya are woven together withthose of Greece, and the outcome of that tends towards an end.’151

Co-Abstraction and Philosophical Paradoxes-The Beginning of Dialectic in the GreekWorld

Early humanity, barely cast away from instinctual activity [Marx] probably `discovered’ the reductionistshadow of dialectical principles in the least discernable exchange-value expression, as a purelyquantitative expression as it discovered the purely quantitative operation by counting as A, all the A’s orplacing the 0 as a value-principle, and ideographic-linguistic notation of numeral systems. Here `reason’was understood in the least dialectical, exchange-value form and expressed by dianoetic’ humanitythrough unreasoned `first principles ‘.152 Early history of human social formations passed through anaspect of the dialectic of nature – the dialectic of human-social formations in terms of monads [ units] andthe count [ arithmoi] of human settlement structures, enabling us to view the successive social formationsas archeological/ meta-geomorphological sedimentary layering’s. Human personality developing withinsocial structures peculiar to its appropriate level in scale, is integral to this whole. In some measurehumanity did apprehend reality, but they could not offer anything clearer than a dream like vision of thereal as long as the assumptions remained unaccounted, unquestioned. If the premise does not show up inconclusion, you really don’t know, instead or in part they would be simple assumptions as in names. Thusthe need for clear demonstrative principles, which show procedural forms of hypothesis, definition,demonstrations by formal proofs, by deductions or derivations from axioms, postulates, etc,. Thisreasoning may well be consistent with itself, yet this does not amount to knowledge insofar as the latterinvolves the process of discovery, formulation, conversion, transformation, selection, refinement,optimization of individual axioms.

The doubling of the arche [ in Plato, doubling is replaced through diaresis / division into parts]153 is also acontinuous movement, or the aspect of meta continuity. There is no ontological incompatibility betweensimple presuppositions, naming things or `what’ it is and demonstrative knowledge of things just as there

151 Ibid, p. 27

152 Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics helps understand whether first principles or unreasonable, ambiguous or aspropositions or in terms of their consistency. Aristotle distinguishes the `principle’ as donating genera / genusdistinguishing primitive [unit, size, length, magnitude, etc] and derived terms, needing proofs, such as `straight’,triangles. The doubling of arche appears in Posterior Analytics [ the principle is simple but not the sameeverywhere –in weight it could be ounce, in songs, semitones, etc]. Orna Harari, Knowledge and Demonstration :Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, in The new Synthese Historical Library, Vol. 56, Amsterdam and N Y, 1994

153 E.g., The Laws, Bk 4

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is no deep discontinuity in transition from primitive social systems to class systems or in the transition tocapitalist system from its becoming process in pre-non-capitalist systems. It is therefore necessary tocritique certain kind of conceptual vagueness in Marxist circles linked to the `incommensurability’ of the[impenetrable] mystery of `transgression’ , supposedly opposed to `transformation’, conceptual leaps;opposed to self-transcendence or self-irruption of new ontology by introducing a facile, metaphysical,radical dualism further tied up to de-evolutionist, degenerative ontology. These self-revolutions can beformulated not only narratively , using phono-grammatic symbols but also more compactly with thesemantic `density’ of syntax mathematically in ideo-grammatic symbols. Since the dialectical processstarts with `Natural’ numbers and the standard system denoted by in, N, in the implicit [ arche/ arkhe ],the meta-system of the [arche] is self-modeled by this very language of the second [doubled] system ofthe explicit dialectical-mathematical ideographic language, denoted by NQ. The capacity to model de-evolutionary conversions degeneration arises within a meta-systemic dialectic of sub-systems productioninside the `third as first’ [also law of excluded middle] synthesis system of arithmetic - the second systemof dialectical arithmetic’s explicit form NU to wU to zU and beyond as per model of U system ofdialectic. The ideographic-linguistic capacity arises from the following arithmetical principle: Negativesubscripts annihilate Positive subscripts, i.e., in the meta-evolution internal to the `!Q!’ standard, there isthe third system of Arithmetic or the first synthesis of Arithmetic. This system is denoted by U. It is asystem of quantifiable [addable, symbolic] ontological qualifiers. It develops dialectically, internallyadvancing from NU system, appropriating and subsuming partial-values derived solely from naturalnumbers [N] system of standard Arithmetic whose value sub-set is { 1,2,3,4,…} to wU, the letterappropriates parameter values derived wholly from whole `numbers’ or [W] system of standardArithmetic, whose number set is { 0,1,2,3,4,..}. Next wU binds zU, appropriating and subsumingparameter values derived from `integers’ or [Z] system of standard Arithmetic, whose number set is {..,-3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3,…}. The dispensation therefore can bridge the most advanced conceptual math withdevelopments of the Ancient world – previously lost to modern comprehension. It leaps upwards into anew dialectical, realistic, holistic, dynamical world, implementing the Marxist programme of immanentcritique and transformation of modern epoch’s capital-value ideologized sciences in the revolutionarysense.

These self-operative, process-languages go beyond the `dianoetic’ or understanding stage or the formallogical into the realm of the dialectic. Many cul-de-sacs and difficulties are encountered as Plato makesthe object of his study as the development of the universal from common consciousness, and it is only inthe speculative form that the change from opinion to thought becomes clear. In Timaeus, the most difficultdialogues are the ones where numbers are introduced. As they show the dialectical movement a briefsummary may be in order. Concrete unity, according to Plato `must’ have a bond or a power that prevailsupon two antithetical extremes, which is the middle term between the antithetical terms. This is aboutgrasping the `syllogism of reason’ speculatively, such as in a:b:c, the middle would be the last [as result]term while the first is takes the middle and conversely, as to the last, the middle term is the first, which islike saying that `three is one’, as a result, a:b::b:c. In this case where the triune becomes fourfold, or themiddle term is broken up in nature where thought falls asunder, whereas in reason the soul is the middleterm between the divided and the undivided. In the syllogism of reason, the point is to grasp the idealityof extremes such as conceived by the subject or the content of the middle term. Here identity appearsthrough and in the other as self-identical, e.g., Plato introduces God as a mere name, synonymous with

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the good without prior definition to make him the subject that can unite itself to itself as a result throughthe `act’ of self-distinction in order to restore it in immediateness by annulling the mediation, after themiddle term unites one concept to the other. Plato is dealing with thought-forms to be precise wherenumbers are used to recognize their speculative significance and the concrete idea. 154Hegel found these`thought-forms’ unused or dormant for 2000 years after Plato. The numbers of arithmetic, arithmoi –abstract, generic, qualitative, addable monads - are not like assemblages of arithmoi of eide; the arithmoieidetikoi – assemblages, ensembles, `sets’ or sub-totalities of qualitatively heterogeneous ideas – cannotenter into community with one another, they are non-reductive, non-linear, non-superimposing, non-additive, non-addable and non-amalgamative. They belong together because they belong to one and thesame eidos, i.e., a singular form of eide, of a `higher class’ or genos [akin to grouping of multiple speciesinto a single genus]. Only if the genos exhibits its mode of being as arithmos with its own structure ofspecial kainon [community] is it then able to guarantee the essential traits of the community of eide asdemanded by the dialectic. The eidetic number is a mode of being of noeton, which exists for thought,unlike the objects that dianoia or understanding find their exemplary fulfillment in reckoning andcounting. 155 This is an exercise of diaresis [division] and classification according to distinction whichdemands that certain things be brought together and others kept apart, excluding all unnatural unions,unions contrary to `the nature of things’, the substrate which is the basis of collective and individualidentity. To this demand, naturalism responds with murderous horror, absolute disgust, metaphysical furyto `The Laws’ that are found in Plato’s `hybrid/mixture / participation zone’, things that are amenable tounderstanding [dianoia] by being brought together for establishing a `mean’ such to re-establish the twoends of the antithesis [ inferior/superior; one/many; health/disease, etc] having broken off from theirabstract unity, the embodied taxonomy of genos that challenges the principle of incarnate social order,especially the socially constituted divisions of sexual labour that would violate the opinion [doxa] of amental order, flouting `common sense’.156 Contrary to the `primacy’ of experiencing the social worldthrough [doxa] knowledge develops dialectically [Hegel] meaning that the justification of knowledgemust be dialectical; this does away with assumptions [Being/Intellect in Parmenides] 157 as in Plato’spractice of dialogues such as the Sophist.158 The system of classificatory schema is opposed to anyexplicitly constructed taxonomy based on principles as dispositions constituting taste and ethos areopposed to ethics and aesthetics.

154 Hegel’s Philosophy of Plato in , Journal of Speculative Philosophy, St Louis, 1870

155 Klein J, Greek Mathematical Thought and the origin of Algebra, N Y, 1992, p, 89-91

156 Bourdieu P, Classes and Classification - Distinction. A social critique of the judgment of taste, Harvard, 1984, p471-475

157 Proclus Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, One Being itself as un-participated/presupposition-less, henad priorto plurality

158 Rescher N, Dialectic : A controversy approach to the theory of knowledge, N Y, 1977

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It is crucial to take note of the `discontinuity’ or a change in Plato’s dialogues from `Parmenides’ to`Sophists’ and `Laws’. We get clear commentaries on the difference from Proclus of Alexandria in lateantiquity. Proclus takes up the method of dialectic from Plato’s Parmenides, calling it a `brilliantinvention’ whence possible conclusions follow as necessary consequences from possible premisesinasmuch as impossible ones follow from impossible premises. Proclus further mentions that `a method ofthis kind does not fall outside the compass of philosophy as does the method of Aristotle’s `Topics’’involving four-fold division that deals with two series of problems but only suitable for those seeking`probable’ conclusions. Aristotle, says Proclus, is talking about `cathartic discourses that must precede`perfective’ ones, which are those that Plato talks through his dialogues. Proclus thought that `inaccordance with the nature of things’ Plato employed different methods at different times required by thesubject. When `in Sophist he brings in the method of division [diaresis] to bind the many-headedSophist.’159, Plato is no longer going by the `nature of things’, but the eidos that is real, outside nature andbody. Bringing in a system of classificatory discretion also makes it a decisive object of struggle becausewhat is at stake in the struggle in human [social] community is power over classificatory schemas andsystems. Initially, the `eide’ for Plato means either the good or beautiful, but by the time we come toSophists, `eide’ is subordinated through division, the method of diaresis whose task is to discern variousgroupings. The `eide’/Idea for Plato is considered most real, in need of no proof of its existence, as theonly real. At times, reason knows `eide’ through the `faculties’ of recollection; the individual soul recallsthe `eide’ with which it was in contact before birth [palingenisia]; but at other times it moves from ahypothesis to an un-hypothesized arche or the formless, unlimited infinite which is determined byreason , having the potential to pass over to finite, and finally, one may approach it through errors. Inearlier Plato, dialectic appears similar to the operation of eros [taken as a force that binds matter intohigher entities]160 and then we are transported to an almost Aristotelian world of classification throughdivision, with ascent replaced by descent. Yet it is clear that a crucial step had been taken in the road toconceptual logic. The eidos is that which distinguishes itself within itself [defines the limits itself] butremains free; the One is self identical in the other, the Many and the Different, as we find in The Sophists.Diaresis’ makes the `eidos’ stand higher than sensible particulars, this is real in the Platonic scheme ofthings, Aristotle reports that eide were numbers in being many and alike while eidos is each by itself onlyand Plato taught that eide were mathematical objects [arithmos eidetikos], homogeneous monadsdifferentiated from objects of senses.161 As the power of sublimation simultaneously de-sublimates byinvalidating the dominant needs and values; the redeeming character of catharsis would transcend theimmediate, socio-historical context without breaking the given’ reality in order to define the real, revealthe essence of reality. So, both the ascending and descending path are as equally relevant, they are the

159 Proclus, Op Cit,

160 Marcuse H, Eros and Civilization, London, 1979, where the `sensuous substance’ of eros preserves aestheticsublimation, p , 66-67

161 Klein J, Greek Mathematical thought and the origin of algebra, N Y, 1992, p 89-91; Peters F E, Greek Philosophicalterms : A Philosophical Lexicon, N Y, 1990

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`same’. Dialectics is the name of self-developing humanized nature, pre and extra-human nature viameta-finite singularities self-bifurcating meta-system or process entities manifesting for all orders of`natural history’, not excluding that part of natural history that may be called terran human history and byhypothesis the history of humanoid species generally throughout the cosmos.

2A

It is not the empirical reference to the presence of slavery, or as the consequence of a `Neolithic bias’ thatis of concern here, though that would be analyzed in its constituting moments, including rise, rhythms,expansion and contraction.162 To be sure, as a subject it connotes an unfolding stage in history, fallingphenomenology within the dialectic of opposed consciousness and subject-object relations, such as atransition issuing from `becoming’. The facticity of slaves returns back to the signification which is thepresence of slavery in the world, the signification of slave society, as such. The `fact’ is just the immediateunity with the other, the inner and outer, the `reflected immediacy of the inner [essence] into the outer[being]. Both are only one identity whose content has both the determinations relating to each otherindifferently. Thus the `externality’ is not a becoming’ or a transition but simple identity, different from itsform-determination or different form determinations with an identical substance, as simple and insofar asthey are opposed, the unity is pure, abstract mediation. If the inner is determined as essence and the outeras being then the fact insofar as it’s essence is immediately being, the consummation of essence in respectto form. When the inner is implicit as essence only then it is defective except in relation with outer, butthis unity then is neither being or existence, except as a negative unity related by immediate conversion,or a link as a simple point devoid of any content, the [sache] fact signifying the point, situation, as whatreally happened.163 This outward determination of form finds itself through the schemas of language,`external or internal, oral or written,164 oblivious of the pre-discursive unity of the one or simply nous orthe essence of man in its activity as social individual. The facticity of slavery would assume this form ofimmediate identity with its outer form, where `force’ relates to the other only to return back to itselfimmediately, devoid of existence but actualized into the identity ever pregnant with content. Consideredhistorically, like surplus, the emergence of slavery can be rendered visible from the conditions of itspossibility and when this condition is transcended, which is the view that slavery is a `productive-economic’ institution, one can only indicate the path of its regression, or its withering away. The point isalso that slavery marks a qualitative break in social evolution that is linked up with the development ofthe notion of finite freedom. Freedom, in the form of absolute otherness of the self is always an emergentmoment. It emerges as a vanishing moment in consciousness, which is itself the dialectical [fuse]/ form of

162 `Neolithic prejudice‘, as taken up by M Shalins, or Hobbsean natural state of war, or `the noble savage’ type either,though not going all the way with his argument Shalins M, Stone Age Economics, London, 1974, p. 3, 169; A worklike `Ecological Imperialism’ carries an unexamined neolithic prejudice at the core of its main argument, Crosby AW, Ecological Imperialism, The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, N Y, 1986, p. 3, 136-137

163 Hegel G W F, SL, p 524-525; Ilyenkov E V, Dialectical Logic, Moscow, 1977, p 179

164 Ilyenkov E V, Dialectical Logic – essays on its history and theory, Moscow, 1977, p. 174

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opposed consciousness, purely as being-for-other. In the vanishing, freedom leaves the result because itsvery presencing occurs in struggle, combat or revolt. Not every combat or a fight stakes freedom, far fromit. A boxing match or a gladiatorial contest does not have freedom as its immediate objective, though thephenomenal `brackets’ makes them resemble models of individual confrontation, these are abstract fightsdriven by physical needs and fear and one of them ends up with murder. The immediate objective ofstruggle for freedom is the same as the result of freedom in its vanishing. Its emergence, in other wordstakes the form of time, or occurs in history. It is consciousness by its finite, one-sided opposition tonature; by no means can slavery be defined as `a primitive, spontaneous element of all societies’,`originating’ with paternal power as the `first masters’ and their children as the `first slaves’. This was oneexplanation for `origin’ of slavery as a `fact’ in the family [pater familias] after which it was generalizedin society as `a right’, that came up in the 19th c. in an otherwise interesting book, but without anyunderstanding of anthropological works, which itself had not advanced in its findings as later. 165 Thisresembles what Bourdieu calls the `primary form of classification’ owing their specific efficacy to the factthat they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the `reach of introspectivescrutiny’ indifferent to the fundamental opposition rooted in the social order, i. e., the opposition betweenthe dominating and dominated `rooted in the division of labour.’166

Here it may as well be remarked that any investigation of ontological structures of existence, where the`dialectic’ is accompanied by `anxiety over nothingness and a struggle for existence has its moment ofphenomenological-historical manifestation with the journey of the unhappy consciousness, as the`dialectic stipulates a condition of `fear and service’ as necessary one for ending slave’s becoming objectto himself,167 or dread and anxiety, as Levinas remarks, find their resolution, not through knowledge butin the sense of mystery and wonderment about the unknown, including death. 168 The alternative tostruggle for survival becomes `eternal imprisonment’. For Levinas, fear of eternal life is as original as thefear of death. In the face of the horror of the mysteriousness of `eternal night’ Levinas substitutes thewonder of the intelligible, luminous being that Plato places at the origin of philosophy. This would be theautonomous realm where alterity looses its sting ; the `ego’s’ knowledge of others `cancels’ the `unknownother’ and returns to creating its `domicile’, establishing its inner life and destiny, satiety and hunger,desire and dread and the possibility of a ethical subject `choosing’ to place life at risk for extending thelife of the other.

165 Cassagnac A G, History of working and burger class, Washington, 1971, Ch 1

166 Bourdieu P, Op Cit, p. 466-468

167 Arthur C, Hegel’s Maser-Slave dialectic and myth of `Marxology’, Op Cit

168 Levinas E, Totality and Infinity : an essay on exteriority

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Bondage and lordship emerge as a major discontinuity of consciousness from biological-culturalevolution, not as metaevolution, neoevolution or metacultural evolution, but as a break that has nopresupposition. It denotes a presuppositionless discontinuity that is indifferent or merely external tocultural/biological evolution. As immediacy, the form of freedom corresponds to reason. Reason is onlyimmediate by drawing the practical or work in order to relate to its immediacy. Struggle is equallyimmediate insofar it draws out the active side of the body, while its substantial aspect, life, is `freely’suspended. It would be intrusive to ask from anthropology that it serve from its immediacies since its`thick descriptions’ / interpretations of `symbolic actions’ or any other border condition of its practice as ascience limits its freedom to shape in terms of its `internal logic’ [zusammenhang].169 Anthropologyattends to behaviour, acts and signs that manifests through human action insofar as they articulate culturalforms and the finest sense it can make when it comes to handling concepts like globalization, power,domination and similar notions would be to show its `limit’ rather than unexamined ideologicalassumptions.170 The study of ideology itself is a fertile ground for anthropology in terms of its pejorativevariations across `cultures’ in order to provide its own criteria of evaluation/nonevaluation. Similarlymisplaced is the attachment of social to anthropology that one finds in Geertz, since it goes against the`particularity’, which Geertz himself considers basic to the science. Peoples and ethnoi can occur in anyor several social formations, whereas the influence of the social remains exogenous. Society has its owndynamic and temporal scales where self-development plays a decisive role. 171Natural variations of`cultural forms’ may be anthropology’s greatest asset but also the source of its dilemma. This is hardly sowith society, because mediated nature has a defining role in the social dynamic. However, as a conceptualform, freedom is not the substantial identity with life but on the contrary, it is the certainty of itself thoughits being or objectivity has a negative significance, just as the ego that is for-itself withdraws fromobjectivity as it relates itself to it as its other172 this identity or the doubling of ego has the show ofillusion. Hence the bondsman discovers that his realization of `himself by himself, that it is precisely in

169 Geertz C, Thick Description and other works, www.scribd.org we take this as said by a clear minded, practicingethnographer/ anthropologist on the internal state of the said science.

170 When one hears of anthropologists opposing the `hegemony’ of Anglo-Saxon in the subject as they are seen to beriding the `globalization’ tide, unexamined ideological assumptions strikes one immediately. `Globalization’ ismainly driven by socio-economic process and markets and it cannot be reduced to culture, far, far less to `ethnictypologies’ like `Anglo-Saxon’. This is also a convenient way of skirting the deeper theoretical and methodologicalproblems of anthropology/ethnography. `Cultural theory’ is not its own master, it needs to draw upon finedistinctions, recombined epistemologies, a more reflexive, hybrid style of writing, not so much with grand,sweeping abstractions. See Foley D E, Critical Ethnography : the Reflexive turn, Qualitative studies on education, v.15, no. 2, 2002

171 Gumilev L, Ethnogenesis and Biosphere, [.pdf format] , states the difference sharply – society develops throughsocio-economic formations and nature does not play a decisive part in social progress. Ethnoi collectives, people,etc., rise and fall in a short time, have their original structure, stereotype behavior, and semiotics within ahomeostatic limit.

172 Hegel G W F, Science of Logic, [tr] A V Miller, p. 781

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his work where he seemed only to have lived a life of a stranger [fremder sinn] that he acquires a sense ofhimself.’173 The negative relation to its object is the necessary illusion as a transient moment of its other,occurring as phenomenological manifestation. Phenomenology falls or lies between the Platonicanthropological’ soul indwelling in the brain, or thought busying itself with the `oscillatory dialectic ofthe unconscious, a private `state of psychic turbulence’174 and the fully awakened concept of self-developing, self-generating science. The negative object, the non-object of phenomenology is resolved inthe non-objective conceived in objective form, not that objectivity that falls outside the immediatepresence of the individual or the person who is immediately bodily objective would be the subject ofscientific logic.175 Here Lacan: `I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’; I think ofwhat I am where I do not think to think.’176 Lacan’s critique of ego-psychology is based on the argumentthat the self or moi, or the subject is historical. This subject, moi begins in history, not coincidentally withits expression, but as the historical element related to prestige of consciousness insofar as it is uniqueindividual experience. The term has a further ambiguity as moi [French translation of German Ich] is botha grammatical and legal category. However, the dualism of moi , that I am equally non-being as mybeing returns us to the Hegelian rendition of `finite being’, which is to say that my non-being constitutesthe nature of my being, or my finitude is negatively self-related as self-termination but the self-relationalso contains the affirmation of itself in the negative, i.e., in terms of self-supersession. The talk of finitebeing amounts to saying that finite beings are self-related everywhere, in the process of change orhistorical dynamics.177 It may be argued that the `inaugural emergence’ or the shift in the definition of thesubject occurs in the 17th c. as much as grasping in the 20th c., within the fluid and fertile borderline areabetween psychoanalysis and philosophy. But life in its natural state must be put to `test’ byconsciousness. Consciousness must validate its being-for-self by risking the self or life. But this struggleis more specifically the means of justice. Heraclitus seems to have grasped this speculatively, when hesays `war/strife is the `father’ of all; some he makes gods others men, some free and others slave’. 178 This,according to Heraclitus, who was by no means a warmonger, is what made strife/struggle necessary for

173 Arthur C, Master-Slave dialectic and the myth of Marxology, New Left Review, Nov-Dec, 1983, p. 67-75

174 See Mills J, The unconscious abyss – Hegel’s anticipation of psychoanalysis, N Y, 2002, p. 32 for the `dialecticinforming internal structures of the abyss’.

175 Marx K, Grundrisse, pp. 293-233, Chapter on Capital, [tr & annot.] Ton Delaney, 1997-1998, immediate objectivity`cannot be separated from the person’.

176 In Macey D, Lacan in Contexts, London, 1998, p. 85-87; `I’ of psychoanalysis representing the continuum ofphilosophy by other means, e.g. as `moi’ occurs in Lacan’s psychoanalysis .

177 Cf Turchin P, Can History become a analytical, predictive science? Univ of Connecticut, personal communication

178 Heraclitus, [Diels-Kranz], [Cosmic] Fragments

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justice [dike] to become an ever-renewing process.179 Obviously, the point here is not about whether `war’is `rooted in human nature’ or a `late cultural evolution’ starting with some hunter-gatherers representingthemselves with bows and arrows pointing at each other in some cave since that would be a dance orritual or a depiction from their `theatre of cruelty, or with `the advent of agriculture’. 180 We know that theupper Paleolithic men were fabulous hunters, makers of fine javelins and spears, dressed in animal skinsand their forms of collective lives may be similar to those known to us but on these bits of information wecannot build any scientific hypothesis on `origins of war’. Mere information is also a source of noise andeven with increased information it remains unclear how a small tribe gained hegemony over half theworld, then increased its numbers and later disappeared.181

Slavery is not rooted in nature though `slaves by nature’ had been naturalized as `inferior set’corresponding to body, not mind or beast not men, such that the sole function of slaves is `use of theirbodies’ and nothing more as stated by Aristotle.182 Similarly, body/mind bifurcation provided a rationalefor Brahmanism to work out a primitive system of division of labour, or, anthropological system of arange of hierarchically ordered mass of the entire range of manual/menial labour issuing from the top,mid and lower section of body made to correspond to the division between mental and manual labour andto complete the picture of classification, sexual division of labour remains the underlying thematic, suchas the comparison and distinction drawn between the labour of slaves and of women. However, Aristotlemakes a fundamental distinction, such as variants of `slaves by nature’ and `conditional slaves’, mainlycaptives of wars who were either enslaved or sold into slavery. Aristotle’s `decision that master-slaverelations were consistent with nature may appear to stand in opposition to the other view that regardedslaves as expedient, justified by man made laws, not nature but it does not go against the attitude of acomplete acceptance of slavery in the period.183 Aristotle then proceeds to generalize, without anyreference to the costs and gains of warfare, saying that `any worker at menial tasks is in a restricted sense

179 Op Cit,§ `you should quench violence more than arson’ ; § `the people should fight for law as they should for citywalls.’; the reference to city walls is significant, as they are associated with `free cities’; more on this later

180 Gat Azar, War in Human Civilization, N Y, 2006, It is a tendentious book, about 800 pages long asking questions like, `is war grounded in human nature ? but how do we observe human nature ? we get the first illustration thatcould be recognized as `war’- some abstractly sketched hunters fighting on a Mesolithic rock, thoughchronologically subsequent to illustrations of the city layout of Catal-Hayuk and Jerico showing `sea peopledefeated in naval battle by Ramsus’ III, Pt 2 Ch 9, Tribal warfare in Agraria and Pastoralia

181 Gumilev L, Ethnogenesis and Biosphere, .pdf

182 Aristotle, Politics, [tr] T A Sinclair, Bk 1, § 2, begins with `nature has distinguished between slave and female…some non-Greek communities fail to understand this and assign to the female and the slave exactly the samestatus. This is because they have no section of the community which is fitted by nature to rule and command; §4,` ..any human being that by nature belongs but to another is by nature a slave..’,`.. He that participates in thereasoning faculty so far as to understand, but not so as to possess it’ `..the use of slaves hardly differs at all fromthat of domestic animals’. London, 1972

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in a condition of slavery.’184 We now get three types of slavery in Aristotle: `unconditional’ slavery <`slaves by nature>, conditional slavery < war captives> and restricted slavery < menial work>. Whereasthe first two types are [human] relational and historically specific, it is the third type that defines slaveryin terms of menial tasks by `any worker’, where we find the main bias in Aristotle’s `evaluation of slave-labour’.185 Implicit in the estimation is something commensurate, like labour in general,186 but thisobjectivity is made to appear in the `natural form’, as a primitive qualifier or `menial tasks’, which is how[human] labour in Aristotle’s time existed. Further, female slavery [household work, baking, textilemaking]187 finds no mention in Aristotle’s `list’, though deployment under a sexual division of labour wasthe norm. There existed a minimally mediated distinction between usefulness of products of thiswork/labour and the historical form of labour expenditure which resulted in naturalization of both in thecommodity `thing’. Slave labour is not `living labour’; the slave, as the property or possession of themaster is regarded as a thing. The slave does not face the market as the independent consuming subject.Moreover, wage-earning industries were understood for making the `mind preoccupied and degraded’.188

On the other hand, the rule of things over waged labour, of dead over living labour, even in the mostextreme version of `real subsumption’ of labour under capital, the rule/domination by the capitalist doesnot appear through ties of personal bondage. Domination by capital takes place in the immediate processof production by alien, reified objectivity as we have argued elsewhere. Aristotle was limited by results ofthe direct kind of work in relation to nature and the equally direct type of the result of work from naturethat makes it simple or naturally understood., though it did not stop him from `dreaming’ that `if everytool when summoned, or even by intelligent anticipation could do the work that befits it…if the weaversshuttles could weave of themselves, then there would be ne need for either the apprentice for master

183 Westerman W L, Slave system of Greek and Roman Antiquity, American Philosophical Society, vol. 40,Philadelphia, 1955, p. 1

184 Aristotle, Politics, Bk 1 § 13

185 On this see Marx, Capital, vol 1, p. 152, Aristotle could not extract abstract-homogenous labor, `that in the form ofcommodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore of equal quality, by inspection ofthe form of value, because Greek society was founded on labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis theinequality of men and labour-powers’.

186 ‘There will therefore be reciprocal proportion’, Aristotle suggests, ‘when the products have beenequated, so that as a farmer is to shoemaker, so may the shoemaker’s product (ergon) be to thefarmer’s product. Kyrtatas D, Domination and Exploitation, in Cartlidge P, et al, p. 150

187 Westerman W L, Op Cit, p. 44

188 Kyrtatas D, Domination and Exploitation, in Cartledge P, et al [ed] Money , Labour and Land –Approaches to theEconomy of Ancient Greece, London, 2005, p. 145-146

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craftsmen, nor slaves for lords’.189 In the real conditions, though the natural form of labour fuses with theuse-value commodity form and becomes the immediate social form here, because social relations appearas `personal relations’ of dependence in slavery. To wit, the statement of Aristotle that the slave is kind ofpossession with a `soul’ remained as the closest expression regarding the legal status of the slave that hascome down from any Greek authority of the times.190 At the same time, `restricted slavery’ arising fromthe nature of work is something that remains in converted forms. 191 Similarly, in Plato’s Republic divisionof labour or separation of different branches of production is seen to prove the whole society natural. 192

Production is viewed with reference to quality and use-values `without a word’ alluding to quantity andexchange values. Here division of labour develops from the `many-sidedness of individual needs and one-sidedness of their capacities. The result of work is better and `more things are produced’ when `oneperforms one’s task according to his nature, at the right moment, at leisure from other occupations’. Hetreated division of labour as the foundation on which society gets divided into estates, as forming basis ofthe state as `an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system, Egypt having served as the model ofan industrial country.’193 No more than model logic is implied here.

In the study of [ancient] slavery, contemporary political views have much more bearing even in academicdebates than many other fields. Nobody works on this subject without personal preconceptions andpreoccupations. Historiography on slavery can hardly be understood without the context, underlyingassumptions and unexpressed debates, the `chronotop’ that Bakhtin defined as X-Rays of forces at work.There was a time when Russian and other Marxists had strong views that defined slavery in terms ofeconomic form and function and class struggles. Now there are very few of them who are publishing onancient slavery. However, something `new’ [as in old wine in new bottle] took place in this field throughthe formulations of `revisionist’ historiography [for want of a better term] in the last two decades thatshould be said. A historian of ancient slavery says from her personal experience while on a Sabbatical inBerlin that she was` asked by a German colleague and advised quite firmly’ that she should change herarea of research away from slave rebellions since people were not interested in slave revolts anymore’. 194

She was suggested that she read Kudlien carefully and `investigate slave mentality’. Now Kudlien doesnot view slaves as insecure, powerless, subjects of abuse and so forth because he reinforces a German

189 F Beise, Die philosophie des Aristotles, vol 2, cited by Marx K, Capital, vol 1, p. 532

190 Westerman W L, Op Cit, p. 16

191 Further on Marx adds that `Aristotle’s genius is displayed by his discovery of relation of equality in the valueexpression of commodities.’ Op Cit, p. 152

192 Plato, The Republic Bk2, § 2

193 Marx K, Capital, vol 1, p 487-489

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historiographical tradition [Mainz Academy] that sees the lives of slaves in a `positive light’. 195 In thisstudy, the only observation would be that Kudlien attempts a displacement of consciousness by mentalitywhen talking about the lives of slaves in antiquity, which was very much in line with reaction inhistoriography writing under the cover of revision at that time. Using mentalitat to project the world ofslaves in a positive light is perhaps only too blatant in the context when historians of France, who hadinitiated the term, collective mentalities as heuristics for comprehending cross-class phenomena weresubject to the most demanding and scathing critique by Carlo Ginzburg that counterposed class and thepopular culture portrayed by M Bakhtin.196 `The crucial argument against following the methods of thehistory of mentalities is its decidedly classless character’.197Without belabouring any further, we proceedwith the process of self-elucidation in a historical context.

Hegel explained slavery through a subjective dialectic, as the necessary condition of an `aestheticdemocracy’, where the duty of citizens to be devoted to matters of state provided the occasion to be freedfrom `the work of daily life’. Even though there was ambivalence towards prima facie indissoluble linkbetween democratic administration, participation and the citizen, which appears in Plato’s Crito,198 thoseengaged with the work of daily life were ipso facto non-citizens and excluded from the political sphere. Itis thus by negating the entire sphere of materializing work that this subjectivity raises itself from natureand manual labour to the form of the self as sublated natural existence. This subjectivity sets to work so asto behold itself in the objects of its production or act. This is the self that produces its shape and thusestablishes its act, but self-consciousness vanishes into `awesome substance’/materiality as it does notcomprehend itself in the incarnations of the outer shapes of self. In the Greek religion of art the selfpasses into the extremes of subjectivity.199 Nature becomes a passive, suffering element in the process oftransformation to aesthetic shapes. This is the unfettered individuality involved in all kinds of activity

194 Theresa Urbainczyk, Dublin, review of McKeown N, The Invention of Ancient Slavery?, London 2007, pp. 144, BrynMawr Classical Review, 2008 .1.54, the book is a general introduction and the reviewer finds it perplexing that theauthor has avoided showing the divisions within liberal Anglophone approach by some twists and stepping back;so what’s going on there ?

195 Kudlien F, Sklaven Mentalitat im Speigel antiker Wahrsagerei, Stuttgaart, 1991

196 Ginzburg C, The Cheese and the Worms –The Cosmos of a 16 th c. miller, London 1981;Bakhtin M, The Dialogicimagination : four Essays, [tr] Emerson C et al, Austin Texas, 1981

197 Ginzburg C, The cheese and the Worms, p. xxiii

198 Kardamitsa A, Eluesina : Theatro mais Antidrastiks Outopias / Eluesis : Theatre of a Reactionary Utopia, Athens, pp1-26

199 Hegel G W F, Phenomenology der Geistes, Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952, pp. 63-75, Ch 7, `Religion‘

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from managing the affairs of the polis to attending games, festivals, theatre, or deliver/listen to somerhetoric, or exercise in the gymnasia. This subjectivity is fleeting, peculiarity, not developed to the levelof abstraction that would determine its absolute dependence on a substantial principle, like equal labouror a subjectivity that gets its independence and resolve from reason, the `infinite self-reflection’ in thereal. The reality of country and family is a customary reality which the very principle of subjectivity,thought and consciousness of activity and deed threatens to rupture.200 As for reflection, which wasintroduced by Socrates this principle progressed through negativity into increasing unreality of a desiringsubjectivity, or in the corrupting whose profounder import is that of subjectivity in the process ofobtaining emancipation for itself. There is substance in which consciousness dissolves, and lowers the selfto a predicate while the self raises the substance to subject. But this `reversal’ does not reinstate thesubstance; that is brought about by self-consciousness which has given up by divesting and emptyingitself, but as self-divested, it is conscious of substance. This results in showing the inequality of valuesbetween subjectivity and substantial materiality; these two moments remain presupposed in the separationbetween natural labour and aesthetic production and between mental and manual labour.

The levity of this subjectivity, expressed in the proposition `the self is absolute being’ refines itself intothe `person’ in the Roman world. The person that was in the Greek world filled up with the life of thepolis is subsequently emptied in abstract universality, having lost all reality and materiality. What the`person’ has in the realm of abstract universality is only the thought of her/him without actually beingthere. This is the person who wants to but cannot exist. The `legal person’ is an unfulfilled abstraction; thevalidity of an abstract person is the validity of its loss, a conscious loss or a divestment of its ownknowledge from itself.201 Roman legal concept of favour libertatis did not reflect any misgivings aboutslavery but served to alleviate some dogmatic strictures or as noted by E Herrman-Otto, the Roman notionof enslavement contra naturam opens up a perspective where loss of freedom would never constitute animmoral infringement of universal rights and entitlements, to make sure that the law erred on the safeside.202 The sort of legal framework went hand in hand with Stoical preoccupation with slavery andspiritual `inner’ freedom that had no relation with the external constraints and fetters of slavery. This iswhere the journey of ancient philosophy stops, with `unhappy consciousness’, what Stoicism finds inskepticism, which Hegel also calls the tragic fate of self certainty that wants to be in and for-itself butends up with the consciousness of the loss of this certainty and also the loss of this knowledge of itself,`the loss of substance as well as self’. Hegel alludes to a passion hymn to express the anguish of this loss:`O great woe! God himself lies dead.’203 Under the legal status, this loss is found both in comedy of`servile irony’ of slave consciousness and realized nihilism at the `abstract plane of the `persons’. Recentworks have shown huge increase in suicide and self-killing from 2nd c. AD and people loosing all faith, go

200 Hegel G W F, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, N Y, 1956, pp. 267-268

201 Hegel G W F, Phenomenology.., Ch 6.A.c , discussion of Roman state [ Rechtzustand]

202 Elizabeth Hermann-Otto, Unfrie Arbeits und Lebensverhaltnisse von der Antike bis in die gagenwart, EineEinfuhrung, Hildesham, 2005

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on to kill themselves by leaping from city walls, as was the case during the terror regime of the deputyprefect Maximus204 but the narrator Ammianus does not provide the details with regard to the story of thesufferings as he did not want to be hated by posterity. The cult of the Christian martyr peaks and thendrops in the 4th c. Africa led the way, `full of the bodies of the blessed martyrs’ as Augustine wrote.African craftsmen turned traditional decorative themes on their lamps and tableware as reminders to theglories of `martyr’s victory over death.’205 Oracles turn dumb, hymns mere words after the spirit hasdisappeared, crushing all the gods and humans. Individuality is completely emancipated from control,inner life, without retrospective or prospective emotions, no hope, repentance or fear except for unfetteredcaprice.

As the maiden gathers and places the fruits before us, they are without any access to the very earth,without the self-surrounding, self-environing, without even the tree of the fruits since the maiden gathersthem in the light of her self-conscious eye and offers them by a gesture of gift. The fruits may well be theproducts of recollection. Unhappy consciousness is the final shape of self-consciousness, the anguish thatstrives to unsuccessfully attain the beyond itself, otherwise this anguish would have found itself in reasonwhich has no religion. In the Roman world individuality is transformed to personality, where acorrespondingly abstract state has the power over concrete individuality. The person constitutes legalright, appearing in the `category of property’, expressing the inherent freedom of abstract individual,stifled by the state based on abstract universality of the political, both indifferent to the concrete contentswhich concerns the individual. The historical element is the abstraction of universality, pursued byheartless severity, the dominium enforces the abstraction. But from this melancholic world, where thefeeling is sunk in unhappiness, conditions give rise to the super-sensuous. The one being in theNeoPlatonic reception has the form of dialectic that confronts the mind directly with the world of forms,moving from form to form, using analysis, definition, demonstration and division till it reaches the firstform of all, the Good beyond Being. The super-sensuous is this Good beyond Being, the celestial God ofProclus, the `un-participated’ guiding the universe, `actively free and unconcerned with materialinquiries.’206 Like the monad Proclus is non-sensuous, eidetic and having the integrity of being untouched.He insists that proportions have their genesis in equality – in geometric progression, the ratio remains thesame; in arithmetic progression numbers differ by same amounts and in harmonic progression one term

203 Hegel G W F, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [ed and tr] Hodgson P C et al, Berkeley, p 163

204 Dagmar Hoffman, Suizid in der Spatantike: seine Bewertung in der lateinischen literatur , Stuttgart, 2007, pp. 188-193, Ammianus Marcellinus compared the terror to the seige of Miletus by the Persians in 494 B C E, Hoffman’smain argument is that there is continuity in assessment of suicide, notwithstanding Christian innovations, likeAugestine, against suicide/self-killing. It was only in 12 th c. did Augestine’s condemnation of suicide become a partof Church law, p. 212

205 Markus R A, The End of Ancient Christianity, 1998, p. 93

206 Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, [tr] Morrow G & Dillon J, p. 10, 17

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exceeds the other by the same part of the preceding term as it is exceeded by the subsequent term. Outsideof sensuous numbers, proportion has its genesis in equality, sameness, i.e. monad, which is the limit,opposed to difference.207 It is the `eikon’ of the individual logoi that is united with the monad is a imageof reality with one-to-one correspondence with what it `represents’. This is God’s gift and it cannot beconferred unless there is a reception, which is analogous to the Christian concept of grace.

Looking back from the terminus of phenomenal consciousness or the object of phenomenal knowledge, itcan be seen as the journey made by natural consciousness through successive configurations as it pressesforward to the knowledge of its self through complete experience. Natural consciousness takes theconcept of knowing and not real knowing, or since it takes itself as real knowing, the path that it takes torealize the concept is marked by an increasing loss and immaterialization of its own self. Though it is thepath of out and despair borne out of its untruth it may also be seen as a conscious insight into the untruthof phenomenal knowledge. But even skepticism does not seem to have the resolve to hold on to its ownunresolved concept along the path whose truth is consciousness at the level of science. What skepticismdoes is to bring out the despair with regard to views and thoughts of natural consciousness, hence remainsimpaired or hampered by its exposition as pure negative procedure or significance. Skepticism cannot seein the results anything other than `pure nothingness’ by disregarding the fact that it is a determinate formof nothingness208, as results from which they are derived. Skepticism that ends up in abstract nothingnesscannot grasp the result as it is in its truth, as a determinate negation provides transition with the means bywhich phenomenal consciousness advances to complete the series of shapes that it passes through. Thiscan only end with the position beyond which the knowing does not need to go; the concept willcorrespond to its object only when it is present to itself as object, no less than sublated object as reflectedbeing for self which was initially in itself. Self-consciousness in its pure otherness or self-recognition ofconsciousness in absolute otherness is the supersensible element into which the journey resolves itself bybecoming transparent in simple immediacy of the universal.209

It is in the conceptual accounting of phenomenological course of consciousness that one may againconsider the relation of science and phenomenology as an investigation testing the reality of cognition,but which cannot be investigated since science comes into the scene as immediacy without havingjustified itself. Testing is not feasible when the decision about the criteria cannot be made. However, whatcan be proved is the `element’, the `something’ with which the journey of natural consciousness began.This starts when natural consciousness tests both itself and the other through a life and death struggle.What each consciousness has as the certainty of being for self must be elevated from privacy in order to

207 Ibid, p 8, 12

208 Hegel G W F, Phenomenology.., Introduction – The Science of Experience of Consciousness‘

209 Hegel G W F, Phenomenology.., Preface, 1807-08 Hamburg

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seek for itself its truth in the other. Only by risking life can freedom be proved. What is proved is theuntruth of natural consciousness as mere being or in the way it appears. Freedom can be proved byshowing that there is nothing in consciousness which does not disappear or gets reduced to a vanishingmoment, by showing the `element’ as `pure being-for-self’.210 If this struggle ends with the death of anyone, this turns out to be murder, as abstract negation. There would be nobody left to prove. Thus, it is atest that is resolved by a determinate negation in which one consciousness realizes that life is not worthrisking, that death is abstract nothingness and cessation of all possibilities. In the name of preserving lifeand out of a fear of death, the defeated consciousness gives up the claim of freedom and submits byrecognizing the victory of the master. The dialectic supporting experience obliges us to understand thatthe ego gets constituted in the movement of progressive alienation in the journey that constitutes self-consciousness. 211Now the master `interposes the slave between himself and things, and can appropriate tohimself only the dependent aspect of things…The independent aspect of things he leaves to the slave whoworks upon ’.212 Slavery takes the form of an economic institution.

But desire cannot find satisfaction from what is dependent in the object. The desire of abstract negation isimmediately satisfied by the master and for this very reason, it is a vanishing. In contrast, the slave’sdesire is a determinate negation; labour is restrained desire as it shapes the objects of desire, it steps backfrom appetitive consciousness, which opens his inner eye to the moment of wisdom or science. Thepossibility of an other desire begins to take shape. Desire is evoked by demanding beyond the need,which is `certainly that of which the subject remains all the more deprived to the extent that the needarticulated in the demand gets satisfied.’ `Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demandbecomes separated from need’ knowing itself to be operative in the realm of essence that appears. This isthe level of aufheben, not as abolition but as the preservation of that which it transcends. By ceaselesslyraising itself as a question or paradox, desire is like the hysteric’s insistent urging demanding knowledgefrom psychoanalysis that subverts the subjectivity of the master. The hysteric is also needed bypsychoanalysis in the reciprocal relationship at the level of science. The discourse of the hysteric andpsychoanalysis `almost’ share the same structure, as much as rigour and clarity of definition, practicedand understood by Lacan is characteristic of both philosophy and paranoia.213

210 Hegel G W F, Phenomenologie der Geistes, § 144

211 Lacan cited in Macey D, Op Cit, p. 97-98

212 Ibid., § 146

213 Macey D, Lacan in Contexts, p 117-120; Freud writes in 1892 of the hysteric, Lucy R, `I have never managed to givea better description than this of the strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know a thing at thesame time. It is clearly impossible to understand it unless one has been in such a state oneself. I myself have had avery remarkable experience of this sort which is clearly before me.’ In Breuer J & Freud S, Studies on Hysteria, vol3, [tr] J and A Strachey, London, 1978, p. 181

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Aristotle finds people captured in war becoming `legal property of captors’ inadequately accounted byconventional slavery since captors include those of noble birth, nobles, etc. who are not `slaves bynature’. This justifies the distinction between expedient and natural, but Aristotle favours the conditionwhere slaves are `fitted by nature for relationship’ with the master.214 The victorious self-consciousnesssucceeds by using force to get recognized after robbing the other self-consciousness of its selfhood. War,therefore, creates the distinction of ego/self whose desire is won at the cost of annihilating theindependent self of the defeated consciousness that is forced to dependency and work for the satisfactionof appetitive desire. Slavery is made `naturally inferior’ in relation to reason, ethical virtue, `deliberativefaculties’ but Aristotle emphasizes the maintenance of `minimal virtue’ in order to perform manuallabour, `not neglect work,’ moral virtues taught or `caused by the master’, as well as reason provided bythe master through inculcation and advice’. Aristotle is saying that slave too has consciousness whichappears divested of self by becoming a working machine or a thing for the master. In other words, theslave is the unessential consciousness as the object for master’s self-certainty, but not an object thatcorresponds to its concept. `What confronts the master is not an independent but a dependentconsciousness’. The master is no longer certain of its pure being-for-self that he finds in unessentialconsciousness and action.215 For the slave is anguished about its entire existence, the fear of death havingshaken it to the core. Loss of selfhood is the basis for the loss of subjectivity and for dependentconsciousness, its freedom is abrogated. The journey of dependent consciousness is its history; byworking though various forms of social labour, it also gains through struggles, combination, cooperativity,its objectivity as class being is gained by common practice. Sartre, in a wildly speculative [ what he callsscience fiction hypothesis] moment characterizes `historical praxis’ that unifies the `organic andinorganic’ relations as `a function of future unities’ to reduce worked matter as a mediation between men,the progressive dissolution of `practico-inert’.216 This is the development of concrete [organic] form thatis open to the action of future on the present in the medium of concrete becoming. It is in the `element’ ofsupersensibility [e.g value-form that transcends sensuousness, the congealed mass of labour;extinguishing the sensuous characteristics] that moments come together and take on the shape of totality,because it is this totality of moments that has the form of pure freedom, a form expressing itself as time.Though the `totalized’ field of slavery in antiquity can be investigated systematically in the sense ofsynchronicity, when abstraction is equally setting the boundary condition as much as a process ofintegration, this cannot be ontologically true, for any ontology includes time. Change acceleratescomplexity and complexity always emerges as a moment. Moment as movement + momentum is a bothemergent and marginal. The moment harbours a momentum that constitutes and reconstitutes the flux oftime.

214 Aristotle, Politics, Bk 1, § 6

215 Hegel G W F, Phenomenologie der Geistes, § 147-148

216 Sartre J-P, Critique of Dialectical Reason, VOL 2, London, 1991, pp 339-340

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Once we see the development of totality in their shapes, these now appear different from the way theyappeared in their own order. In the series we see each moment forming its principle, exploring its depthand cognition that comes forth does not isolate the principles of the moment, i.e., individuality,consciousness, reason or universality. Cognition holds all these moments by gathering them within itself.In its own order, the linear series advances through marking its preceding steps by the knots that is leftbehind in a continuum akin to knots upon knots in a single line. Each of the `threefold knots’ would markout the moments of synthetic resolutions. Upon reconstruction, in the manner of presentation the line getsbroken at the knots and they fall apart as many lines, which gathered in a bundle or whole appear ascombination of the different moments in complex symmetries, as in detail/microstructure of socialclass.217 Now, cognition by virtue of reason has what is common in cognition of all human beings,otherwise knowledge is private.218 Thus the finite gets encompassed and over-reached by infinite, as itpasses over into the passage. This is indeed a speculative insight whose import breaks down any linearfinite shape and discloses finite systems as open and incomplete. Some shapes / systems involve recursiverelations and in open, recursive systems it is impossible to determine causal determinations beyond alimited period of time. On the other hand, some of the bundles or sub-systems are emergent and at thismoment self-organizing shapes with new patterns of coherence emerge. They emerge as aleatoryassociations and unexpected juxtapositions that create difficult wholes/ shapes which cannot becomprehended by formal logic or validated by the logic of non-contradiction.219 The wave packet or pulseor the strip is synthetic, displaying the dialectical logic of `both-and’.

II B

However, the historical distinctions are valid not only for the Greek world but for contiguous areas too inthe sense that slavery was not the only source of wealth and revenues because of other types of subsumedlabour and also due to its uneven spread. Physical labour was at any rate despised because of its proximityto slavery. Labour was dominated and the `free’ worker or the individual came to see his work for othersfor what it stood in reality – the stark reality of personal power exerted over slaves. His much vauntedfreedom to change employers was no more than a freedom to change masters. As a result, nonslaveworkers have universally come to despise working for others in all societies where a `critical mass’ ofslaves were used.220 Slave owning centres like Corinth, Athens related with agricultural Thebes, pastoralAnatolia, helot-based Sparta, cattle-rearing Thessaly and with disintegrating gentile systems ofMacedonia and Epirus but the unit remains Hellas with its specific, idiosyncratic `passionaries’ to use afruitful term of Gumilev, though the `philosophical’ role of passions had been taken up for advancing

217 Hegel G W F, Phenomenology…, Ch. VII, Religion

218 Hegel G W F, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,1824, Introduction

219 Denis A, Dialectics and the Austrian School? The search for common ground in the methodology of heterodoxeconomics, Paper presented at a seminar, Deptt of Economics, Nottingham Trent University, 16/2/2005

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`general principles’ in history earlier by Hegel. 221 This feature at once limits the sphere of commodityexchange precisely because by and large, personal dependence in the case of slave and master is also theimmediate social form. But this is an equally suspended immediacy. Here social relations are founded onindividual immaturity and/or ancient simplicity, which is the basis of direct relations of servitude. InPlato’s Republic, the whole argument about division of separate branches of production and employmentis given to prove society in its natural state. Division of labour in Plato develops out of the communitybecause `different men take joy in different works’ or out of natural inclinations and needs of individuals.It develops out of the many-sidedness of individual needs and one-sidedness of their capacities. `Themore things are produced and better and more easily, when one man performs one task according to hisnature, at the right moment and at leisure from other occupations.’222 The qualitative performance of slavelabour is no different from other forms of labour. 223Though Plato takes up division of labour as theformative phase of the state insofar as it divides society into estates, nevertheless the Athenian ideal withregard to material production would remain self-sufficiency rather than division of labour [Thucydides].224

Yet the position adopted in classical Greece, concerned with quality and use values does not imply beingimpervious to the effects of the market and money on production. During the Peloponnesian war,Thucydides, not given to elevating material production and agriculture beyond its `limited value, makesPericles contrast Athenians to Spartans for the though the latter had plenty of men at disposal, `all of themworked badly’, unable to command money while the Athenian was a superior commodity producer, inaddition to having large financial; reserves.225 He also emphasized that Athenian social formationbeginning with Solonic `ideal’ of balanced production and consumption for maintaining a consistentnumber of small farms [even though during the close of the fall of 30 tyrants, there were less than 5000Athenians without landed property] that yielded to the acquisitive logic of empire culminates in the

220 Scheidel W, The hireling and the slave – a transatlantic perspective, in Cartledge P, Money, Labour and Land,Approaches to the economy of ancient Greece, London 2005, p. 175

221 Gumilev, Op Cit., p. 44, similarly slave owning formations are noticed in Egypt, Hellas, China, Babylonia and Indiaand this makes it possible to put all these civilizations under a self-same Genos / genus, as in taxonomy, but to puteach of them as species marked by slavery as the foundation simply overlooks that they were all treating to eachother in different ways at multi-secular levels.; The curve of `passionary intensity of `ethnos evolution – rise,overheat or acmatic phase, crisis, inertial, obscuration/collapse in al total duration of 1500 years , Korobitsin,Ethnos as a unit of society model, krobits@univer.omsk. ; Hegel G W F, The Philosophy of History, N Y, 1956, p 32-33

222 Plato, Republic, Bk 2, § 2 ; `Those who constantly stick to one operation bring it to highest perfection’ and thosewho change their occupations become skilled in none’. Isocrates, Busiris, § 15

223 Finlay M, The Ancient Economy, London 1992, p. 82-83

224 Marx K, Capital, vol 1, p. 487

225 Thucydides, The History of Peloponnesian war,, Bk 1, § 141

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surplus wealth that accumulated through gifts and tribute. Even though Solon’s reforms eliminated debtslavery, slave labour continued to increase due to constant war drawing out citizen workers from thelabour market and demand for war materials.226 Tribute was a powerful source of wealth [tribute madeAthenian fleet feasible]; the tribute provided the empire with a steady flow of surplus wealth, remainedthe mainstay of its power and domination.227 In contrast Spartan power was based on respect, more or lessfreely given by its allies, not accumulated financial reserves of its own.

However, after the Peloponnesian war, there occurs a noticeable shift from exclusive familial/communalconcerns towards individual and private relations. Thus it is during the moment of Hellenistic transitionthat Xenophon, `with his characteristic bourgeois instinct’228 is already aware of the extent of dependencethat division of labour has reached on the market. Agricultural farmland in Attica, the mainstay ofmilitary power of Athens suffered immense devastation during the Peloponnesian war which led to a lossof agricultural slaves with serious effects. In a context where yearly crop loss had severe effects for thestate, cumulative years of ravaging of state farmlands –chora, the immediate agricultural territory directlyexploited by the city- and increasing slave discontent, desertions, etc., subverted the socio-economicstructure after Peloponnesian war.229 This would create an `agrarian crisis’ in the sense of crisis of foodreserved for the state, but even more the crisis of military recruiting.230 We are talking of a crisis affectingthe very base of an empire, given that most agricultural producers in Attica were self-sufficient peasantfarmers using extra-familial slave labour during `peak seasons’. They did not compete with slave runlarge estates but were given to purchasing slaves very much as a hard-headed prudential calculation. 231

There would have been no need of `slave banks’ run by Pasion prior to his manumission if using slaves ina productive enterprise like farming was not profitable. Rich private citizens, such as Nicias `leased out’1000 slaves to silver mines of Laurium in Attica; so did Hipponicos [ 600] and Philonides [300] against 1oblus per slave a day or 60 drachmas per year. We learn from an inscription of 414 BC regarding the saleof slaves in Ephisus, Byzantium and Tanis on the mouth of Don the price of male slaves [Lydian,

226 Westerman W L, Slave System of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Philadelphia, 1955, p.138-140

227 Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, www.escholership.org/editions/view?/docId=ft767nb497&doc... ; Tributesfor most part were common property of all Athenians. Thus it is conceivable to think of the Athenian small farmerbenefiting from the exploitation of peasants of other cities. Kyrtatas D, Op Cit, p. 152

228 Marx K, Capital, p. 488

229 Hanson V D, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, California, 1990; Josephine C Quinn, Roman Africa?,Berkeley, Digressus Supplement, 2003, p 7-34 , for definition of chora

230 Finlay M I, Ancient Economy, p. 103

231 Cartledge P, The political economy of Greek slavery, in Cartledge P, et al [eds], Op Cit, p. 162-164

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Melitian, Syrian, Ilyarian, Scythian, etc.] varied from 140-200 drachmas, which makes the leasing ofslaves to be a profitable venture. The number of slaves working in Laurium silver mines and the millsprocessing ore has been estimated at 30000.232 Slaves were used in crafts and trades; workshops werefilled with slaves, a shield factory in Lysias was employing 120 slaves. 233 In a context where slaves weremore deeply entrenched in production, forming a major constituent of private property rather than beinglegal and social/cultural phenomena associated with democracy as was argued by positivists like EduardMayer,234 any large scale desertion of slaves `at the right time’, namely a long drawn out war would haveplunged the basic food economy into a disaster zone. This is precisely what happened from 413-404period of Peloponnesian war, when more than twice the number of 10000 slaves, a great part of themmanual workers ran away during the closing phase of the war.235If Athenian slave population is assumedat 80,000 for 5th c., that amounts to an outright loss by 25%.236 Yet with the loss of empire the Athenianeconomy was not eclipsed.

Classical Athens was flourishing in the 6th -5th c. BC during the opening phase of an expanding network ofinter-regional trade in physiologically and socially addictive items such as specie, ceramics, textiles andwine. As a matter of fact, even Pericles says in the funeral oration that `the greatness of our city brings itabout that all good things from all over the world flow into us, so that it seems just as natural to enjoyforeign goods as our own local products.’237 In a comedy Dikaipolis is interested in making peace withenemies to reap the benefits of trade with other polis. The markets in Athens have `mackerels and driedfish from Hellespont, pudding and ribs of beef from Thessaly, pigs and cheese from Syracuse, papyrus,masts and sail from Egypt, frankincense from Syria, ivory from Libya, resins and dried figs from Rhodes,slaves from Phrygia, Pagasae, mercenaries from Arcadia, carpets and pillows from Carthage and fruits,palm from Phonecia.238 There were considerable investments in roads and port facilities and growingeconomies of scale in manufacture and distribution resulting from concentration of production and

232 Westerman W L, Slave System of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Philadelphia, 1955, p 44

233 Ibid, p. 44

234 Garlan Y, Slavery in Ancient Greece, N Y, 1998

235 Ibid, p. 155-156

236 Westerman W L, Op Cit, p. p 44-46

237 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian war, Bk 2, XL

238 Harris E H, Workshop, Marketplace and Household – the nature of technical specialization in classical Athens andits effect on economy and society, in Cartledge P, Op Cit, 78-79

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wholesale operations in a limited number of sites.239 Long distance external trade opened up from 500 BCfollowed a line of economic ascent for above six hundred years at least. This economic boom wastriggered by 1/ growth in demand for silver as a medium of exchange in the economies of the near east 240;2/ technical breakthrough in hull construction and sailing rig in the late bronze age 241 and 3/ considerableperfection followed by diffusion of ferrous metallurgy into the European hinterland. 242 This created thecontext in classical Athens for expressing an attitude of domination in a society with a large number ofslaves, rarity of manumissions, discrimination against freemen and the cult of free male citizen possessedof political rights equal to his peers.243 Consequently the argument is not of an economic decline thatworked behind the backs of people which engulfed classical Athens towards the close of Peloponnesianwar, the last decade of 5th c. BC; rather it is the case that the devastation of agricultural fields, notably thechora in the successive years during the war created a food and health crisis leading to the contraction ofan economy based on ancient simplicity and familial/communal concerns. For instance, the tribute whichwas considered the common property of Athenians had also implied that the Athenian peasant benefitedfrom the exploitation of peasant of other cities paying tribute to the empire. Rural slavery was commonand only the poorest citizens did not own slaves. Not owning a slave was the sign of poverty. When thetribute started to dry out, together with slave flights244 and an under-consumption crises in the basicprimary sector, this adversely affected the macro-structures of Athenian political organization, howevermuch the mechanism of surplus appropriation had obscured the economy by subordinating it to politics.245

The Hellenistic phase [from 4th c. BC] marks a `transition’ in the sense of an expansive Mediterraneaneconomy sustained by increasing numbers of dependent labour provided the bulk of immediate incomefrom property even when peasants and independent producers covered a larger proportion of production

239 Grantham G, The prehistoric origins of European Economic Integration, McGill University

240 Silver coins were issued by Pheidon, the king of Argos from 700 BC; later coined silver was issued from the templeof Athena, www.metrum.org/money

241 Momigliano A, Sea–power in Greek Thought, The Classical Review, May 1944, vol 58, no 1

242 Grantham G, Op Cit

243 Scheidel W, The Hireling and the Slave, Op Cit, p. 182

244 On slaves running off Garlan Y, Slavery in Ancient Greece, N Y, 1988

245 Kyrtatas D, Domination and Exploitation, in Cartledge P, et al [eds], Op Cit, p. 152-153; Westerman W L , Op Cit, p.42

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than the `un-free’ and slaves.246 Imports of goods into Athens increased by 12 times from 401-320 BC.247This would be the phase when the leveling process was most effective, which lowered the legal andsocial value of the `free’ and raised the standard of the slave group.248 Slavery in this phase becomes apurely practical issue, considered only as chattel and subject only to laws governing private propertywithout any moral standards being applied to the consolidation of the slave system. Under conditions ofthe abstract state, policy replaces ancient fate, casting off all moral bonds from its dominium, forenforcing the abstract universality of power.249Slavery gets consolidated in the reality of abstract person inprivate property, held by force in a compulsory condition of subordination. This was the condition for thedevelopment of positive law based on the principle of right, formally elaborated by abstract, finiteunderstanding, but independent of feelings, morals and sentiments and appearing through institutionsstaging the cruel reality of corporeal suffering. Driven by abstract power the state did not recognize,various other peoples or states, nor recognizing the sacra of other nations, the abstract principle appearsas the cold abstraction of power and sovereignty, pure egotism opposed to others, without any moralinhibitions except as individual interest. All distinctions between subjects are abolished or the rights ofproperty limited by distinctions get abrogated, when social unit of property gets recognized by the state asa private right. When social units come to enjoy absolute importance as private persons, the ego getsenabled to assert unbounded claims towards which it strives with complete indifference towards life, onlyyielding to fate. Between 317-307 BC, the tyrant Demetrius Phaderaus ordered a general census of Atticawith astonishing results: 21000 citizens; 10000 matices [manumission[ed]/`freed’ slaves] and 400000slaves.250

It was during the Hellenistic transitional period that the emphasis shifts to individual and privaterelationships. The oikos/domestic economy or production in the private sphere came to occupy a centralposition where the contribution of women, both enslaved and free takes up a predominant place. This partof economy, excluded by Finlay, is equally significant for becoming the basis of Roman privateproperty.251 According to S Pomeroy, the oikos of oeconomicus, was the primary unit that combined the

246 Bradley K, Slavery and Society in Rome, 200 BC-200 AD, Cambridge, 2002, p. 13

247 Harris E M, Op Cit, p. 79

248 Westerman W L, Op Cit, p. x

249 Hegel G W F, Philosophy of History, p. 278-279

250 Westerman W L, Op Cit, p. 169-170

251 Sarah P Pomeroy, [ed & tr] Xenophon, Oeconomicus – A social and historical commentary, Oxford,1994

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characteristics of Chayanov’s family farm and a business dependent on slave labour.252 This is the periodwhen increasing attention is paid to women in the production process in a society where most womenwere excluded from labour market, cash economy and ownership of means of production. Xenophon seesmarriage as a partnership for production. A wife’s education begins to be seen as an investment as shelearns management skills and by instructing slaves she enhanced the value of oikos. Husband and wife areseen to compose the basic unit of household, contributing to its wealth in a complementary way.253

Xenophon was the first Greek author to recognize the use-value of women’s work, to understand thatdomestic labour has economic value even if it did not amount to exchange-value. Hs ideal oikos was tohave 3 slaves per household, in a period when capital investment in slaves for leasing purposes wasgetting superseded by state ownership.254 Thus Xenophon also thought that the city should buy up lots ofslaves whose upkeep would ensure the well being of citizens. In one of his projects, the state would haveto invest capital in mining on which he calculated income derived from slaves working for 360 days peryear.255 He also comes close to describing division of labour in a workshop, i.e., within the oikos, such asshoemaking for men and women, where one man makes a living by selling, another by cutting out theleather and cloth, and another sew the pieces together. Xenophon emphasizes the quality and excellenceof use value, saying `he who does the simplest kind of work undoubtedly does it better than anyone else,as with the art of cooking’.256 Yet the workshop owned by Demosthenes’ father with 52-53 slaves is notdifferentiated by a division of labour by different roles they played in production but are called `furniture-makers’ or `shield-makers’, reflecting horizontal and not vertical specialization of labour. 257 Besides, thefact that Athenians did not make a distinction between the oikos and business enterprise comes out in theinventory of assets bequeathed by Demosthenes’ father, which are divided into productive items, namelyslaves and `passive’/unproductive items such as household goods including raw materials and hismother’s personal belongings, silver, etc, though both come mingled, not separated. 258 At any rate in theearly Hellenistic phase Athens emerges as a network of overseas and polis trade where trade was not toocomplicated and the slave had to carry out the master’s orders; if he did not the master would beat and

252 also Harris E M, Op Cit, p. 81

253 Kyortatas D J, Exploitation and Domination in Cartledge P, [ed], Op Cit., p. 153

254 Westerman w l, Op Cit, p. 9

255 Ibid, p. 15

256 Cited by Marx K, Op Cit, p. 488

257 Harris E M, Op Cit, p. 71

258 Harris E M, Op Cit, p. 82

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torture him for negligence and disobedience.259 Xenophon advises that slave-labour should be flogged,clothing, food and rest controlled, and violence meted out by the master or supervisor. Slaves were inXenophon’s view no more than domestic animals.260 The main form of slave resistance appears as`flights’. It is possible that great number of slaves may have promoted revolts but there are no distinctslave revolts till 2nd c. BC, as opposed to Helot revolts. It is possible that they may have been used in thewarring bodies by citizen’s assemblies.261

259 Ibid, p. 83

260 Westerman W L, Op Cit, p. 170

261 Ibid, p. 9-10

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