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CLASS IN ARCHAIC GREECE
Archaic Greece saw a number of decisive changes, including the emer-

gence of the polis, the foundation of Greek settlements throughout the
Mediterranean and Black Sea, the organization of pan-Hellenic games
and festivals, the rise of tyranny, the invention of literacy, the com-
position of the Homeric epics and the emergence of lyric poetry, the
development of monumental architecture and large-scale sculpture,
and the establishment of"democracy." This book argues that the best
way of understanding them is the application of an eclectic Marxist
model of class struggle, a struggle not only over control of agricultural
land but also over cultural ideals and ideology. A substantial theo-
retical introduction lays out the underlying assumptions in relation
to alternative models. Material and textual remains of the period are
examined in depth for clues to their ideological import, while later
sources and a wide range of modern scholarship are evaluated for their
explanatory power.
PETER w. ROSE is Professor of Classics at Miami University of

Ohio. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Yale for eight
years. His publications include Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth:
Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece (1992), and articles on
Pindar, Sophocles, Homer, Marx and the study ofwomen in antiquity,
Thucydides, Cicero, film and pedagogy, Marxism and ideology.
CLASS IN ARCHAIC GREECE
PETER W. ROSE
...,.:.:._,,, CAMBRIDGE
::: UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8Ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521768764
© Peter W. Rose 2012
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2012
Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group
A catalogue record for this publication is avai'4ble fom the British Library
Library ofCongress Cataloguing in Publication data

Rose, Peter W. (Peter Wires), 1936--
Class in archaic Greece / Peter W. Rose.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-521-76876-4 (hardback)
1. Greece - Economic conditions - To 146 B.c. 2. Greece - Social conditions - To 146 B.c.
3. Social classes - Greece - History. 4. Social conflict - Greece - History. I. Title.
Hc37.R67 2012
938 - dc23 2012002654
ISBN 978-0-521-76876-4 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Irina, Liubasha, and Daniel
"But, as changes do happen, it 1s desirable that they should be
explained."
Arnaldo Momigliano
Contents
Preface page viii

List ofabbreviatiom Xlll
Introduction: theoretical considerations I
1 Class in the Dark Age and the rise of the polis

2 Homer's Iliad: alienation from a changing world
3 Trade, colonization, and the Odyssey 134
4 Hesiod: cosmogony, basilees, farmers, and justice 166
5 Tyranny and the Solonian Crisis 201
6 Sparta and the consolidation of the oligarchic ideal

7 Athens and the emergence of democracy
References
Index
Vll
Preface
The origin of this book is on one level very simple: Kurt Raaflaub asked
me to write a short piece on this topic, then when my first draft was
four times too long, encouraged me to consider writing a monograph. His
fellow-editor, Hans van Wees, though I never had the pleasure of meeting
him face-to-face, also gave much helpful advice - not least with his own
excellent offprints. I am indebted as well to David Roselli, James McGlew,
Virginia Hunter, Page duBois, Mark Golden, Arch Christopherson, Rick
Wolff, Tracy Rihle, Steve Tuck, and David Tandy for helpful comments on
earlier drafts or parts thereof. Since I could not bring myself to incorporate
all of their suggestions, I hereby absolve them of all remaining errors.
Special thanks are due to Steve Nimis, who alone among my circuit of
friends and colleagues has read the whole text and offered other sorts of
valued support. Thanks as well to Daniel Tompkins for his insights on the
works of Moses Finley.
I have a unique debt to Walter Donlan, whose advice and encourage-
ment at an early stage played a key role in my decision to attempt this quite
daunting task. Based especially on a grueling three-hour phone conversa-
tion about a draft of my chapter on the Dark Age, I know that the tragic
death of this very dear man soon after I had sketched a fuller version of that
chapter deprived me of what I'm sure would have been a much-needed and
trenchant critique. At a dinner in 2002 with colleagues after a joint session
of CAMWS on recent developments in Homeric scholarship, Walter com-
plained in his playfully churlish way, "I've learned a lot from you guys, but
you've obviously learned nothing from me." This was of course blatantly
untrue. The problem, which may be relevant in my text as well, is that we
have all internalized and taken for granted so much of his compelling work
that we tend to focus on the relatively few areas where we disagree.
Though my training and teaching have been primarily in ancient litera-
ture, my interest in the history of the Archaic Period dates back to the late
1950s when I audited a lecture course on the period by H. T. Wade-Gery,
Vlll
Preface 1X
who was visiting for one semester at Harvard. I have no recollection of

ever having talked with the great man, but I was totally entranced by his
lectures, not to mention the succinct elegance of his written arguments
about Homer (1952) and the whole Archaic Period (1958). I recall stim-
ulating discussions with Donald Kagan, when, as a young instructor, I
audited one of his graduate seminars. Since then I have read extensively
in other scholars about the period; and my Greek Civilization course,
which I have taught for many years, is shamelessly weighted in favor of
the Archaic Period. In adducing archaeological and art-historical evidence
I am very much dependent on the published works I have been able to
read.
While I attempt in my introduction to offer an overall account of my
theoretical assumptions, I recognize that I cannot count on all readers read-
ing my text from cover to cover and have therefore felt obliged to repeat
or expand on some of those theoretical grounds in analyzing specific phe-
nomena where they seem to me most useful for the convenience of readers
who are only interested in a particular topic. By "theoretical assumptions"
I refer in my introduction primarily to the senses in which my approach is
Marxist. Though I do address the question of the nature of the evidence
briefly at the end of my introduction, more specifically methodological
considerations of approaches to the often radically heterogeneous evidence
for different periods are primarily engaged with in connection with those
periods.
Again on the assumption that many readers may chose to read only
specific chapters, there are pieces of evidence that are relevant to more than
one chapter. A more serious area of what I consider unavoidable repetition
arises from the unique role of Athens in the surviving evidence. I treat
the Solonian Crisis and data about Peisistratos first in connection with the
causes and character of tyranny in general, secondly in a separate chapter
devoted exclusively to Athenian developments down to the end of the
Archaic Age, where the focus is more upon the unique factors that led to
Athenian democracy. There is a chronological regression if not extensive
repetition in the separate chapter on Sparta, where I return to some issues
of polis formation dealt with in an earlier chapter.
Though I address his work more systematically in my introduction and
in passing where relevant throughout my text, I should note here that I
read Jonathan Hall's A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. I200-479
BCE only after I had already completed more than one draft of most of
my text. On a number of issues I was gratified that we had read the same
scholarship and reached similar conclusions. On many other issues Hall
X Preface
compelled me to rethink my conclusions and in some cases impelled me

towards more equivocal formulations than I had initially thought justified
by the evidence. But the most stimulating and ultimately affirming aspect
of his text in relation to my own project was Hall's central focus on
historiography and his militant, scornful dismissal of methodologies that
reflect the "theoretical or ideological preferences of the historian" (2007:
287, my emphasis). His powerfully articulated position on this matter
has caused me to modify significantly my theoretical introduction and
many formulations in the rest of my text, at the same time that what I
perceived as the paucity of explanation in his text as a whole confirmed my
commitment to posing the sorts of questions I pose. In particular, beside his
enviable command of the archaeological data, his minimalist engagement
with the surviving literary remains of the period attests to his relative lack
of interest in matters of ideology: he offers a brief, trenchant critique of
Morris's concept of a "middling ideology" (Hall 2007: 178-9) and presents
scattered, if usually acute, citations from Homer, Hesiod, Trytaeus, and the
Theognis corpus on particular points but does not engage with the more
or less complete texts as such or explore the range of ideas and values that
emerge from the fragments of lyric - in the broad sense of that term. This
relative exclusion of course saves him from engaging seriously with the
mountain of literary and semi-literary discussions of Homer, Hesiod, and
the lyric poets (among whom I include of course the elegiac and iambic
poets).
The second edition of Robin Osborne's Greece in the Making (2009)
appeared when my "final" version was already being assessed by a reader
for Cambridge University Press. Only as I went through a "final" version
correcting typos have I been able to make very selective use of a work
that challenges a number of my assumptions and, for example, appears
to consider discussion of Homeric politics and Homer's class sympathies
as minimally "productive" (2009: 349) and dismisses the existence of an
"aristocracy" as "a modern fantasy" (2009: 209). Overall I have enormous
respect for Osborne's major contributions to our understanding of ancient
Greece and, as my text attests, have made abundant use of his work. But
clearly we view the world and history in radically different terms.
To the extent possible within the limitations of a single book I have
tried throughout to cite and explicate the archaic texts that alone give us
access to what and how the Greeks of this period thought and felt, though
I am well aware that what has survived is not only radically skewed in favor
of those males who controlled the means of ideological production but
also, with few exceptions, radically fragmentary. But since, as I argue in
Preface X1
my introduction, class conflict is most often carried out on the ideological

plane, these texts are crucial to my whole project.
On the assumption that a Marxist approach is likely to provoke a higher
level of skepticism than more traditional approaches like those of Hall
and Osborne, my text engages in a more or less constant dialogue with as
much of the relevant traditional scholarship as I have been able to read.
I try to quote these authorities sufficiently to clarify both my agreements
and disagreements. This may render my text less easily readable than an
uninterrupted account of my conclusions, followed, as, for example, in
Hall's text, by a brief section of "Further Reading" or in Osborne's by
"Bibliographic Notes" for each chapter. However, I do feel that I need to
show very openly the process by which I have arrived at my conclusions,
exposing what I have been able to read and what I have failed to read out of
the usually bottomless accumulation of potentially relevant discussions of
all matters classical. I also believe my readers are entitled to a clear enough
selection of alternative views to make their own judgment of the validity of
my readings. I am painfully aware that I could well spend the rest of my life
trying to read everything potentially relevant to my project. Since alas I can
pretend to no first-hand expertise in dealing with archaeological data, I have
been especially at pains to specify the sources of my necessarily tentative
conclusions. Moreover, since one of my goals in this study is to demonstrate
where a Marxist approach differs from and where it coincides with non-
Marxist approaches, this format best facilitates this goal. Finally, I hope
perhaps too optimistically that my attempt to engage by rather generous
citation of alternative views may free me from the usual charge against
Marxists of a "dogmatic" or "Procrustean" imposition of my conclusions
at the same time that it offers serious students of the period a broad account
of other scholars' diverse approaches to an inherently conflict-laden area of
study.
Translations unless otherwise noted are my own. I avoid quoting Greek
letters except in quoting other scholars who use them. I use capitals to
mark beginnings of lines of poetry only to insist that my sources - not my
translations - are poetry: I make no attempt at rhythm or equal lengths,
and am often awkwardly literal in attempting to convey to my reader as
much as possible of what I take to be the force of the original. Occasional
italics are used to indicate stress suggested by word order or particles like ge.
I give the transliterated Greek for a small number of keywords that change
historically or which have no close English equivalents. In transliterating
Greek, I use circumflexes to distinguish Greek eta and omega, I usually
have k's for Latin e's and -os endings for Latinate -us, but in the case of
X11 Preface
very common names I give the modern form (e.g., Achilles, not Akhilleus,
Archilochus notArkhilokhos, Herodotus, not Herodotos). Moreover, there
is inevitable fluctuation in the practice of the scholars I quote, so that some
confusion about names is unavoidable.
I would like finally to thank the staff of Cambridge University Press who
have been involved in this project. Michael Sharp was both conscientious
and sympathetic in dealing with several readers and to my eternal thanks
found the finest of all possible final readers, Paul Cartledge, who kindly
made his role known to me at a conference on Class and the Classics at
the British Academy in July 2010 organized by Edith Hall. For a variety
of reasons and in view of various commitments, virtually no further work
on the book was possible after that date, but it goes without saying that
his decision that the book was worthy of publishing entails no necessary
agreement with any particular argument of my text. I would like to thank
Josephine Lane and her predecessor Elizabeth Hanlon, who have been
consistently helpful and patient in responding to my many queries. Last
but not least I would like to thank my copy-editor Andrew Dyck, whose
patience, eagle eye, and sensitive ear have saved me from many an error.
Any remaining infelicities are purely mine.
Abbreviations
C Campbell, David (ed., trans.) (1982-91) Greek Lyric.

3 vols. Cambridge, MA.
CAH The Cambridge Ancient History (1923-39 [1st edn.], 1961-2005
[2 nd edn.]). Cambridge.
D-K Diels, Hermann and Walther Kranz (eds.) (1964) Die
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Zurich and Berlin.
FGH Jacoby, F. (ed., comm.) (1923-) Die Fragmente der
griechischen Historiker. Berlin and Leipzig.
G Gerber, Douglas E. (ed., trans.) (1999) Greek Elegiac Poetry:
From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC. Cambridge, MA.
IC Guarducci, M. (ed.) (1935-50) Inscriptiones Creticae. 4 vols.
Rome.
JG Inscriptiones Graecae (1873-) Berlin.
L-P Lobel, Edgar and Denys Page (eds.) (1955) Poetarum
Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Oxford.
LSJ Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott (1940) A
Greek-English Lexicon. New edn. rev. Henry Stuart Jones.
Oxford.
MECW Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1975-) Collected Works.
New York.
ML Meiggs, Russell and David Lewis (1988) A Selection of Greek
Historical Inscriptions: To the End ofthe Fifth Century B. C
Rev. edn. Oxford.
PMG Page, Denys (ed.) (1962) Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford.
w West, M. L. (ed.) (1971-72) Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante
Alexandrum Cantati. 2 vols. Oxford.
Xlll
Introduction: theoretical considerations
CLASSICISTS AND CLASS
To discuss class in any period of classical antiquity- but perhaps especially

in the Archaic Period - is to encounter a paradox: virtually no account
of the period seems able to dispense with the concept of class - even if
it only appears in references to "aristocrats," "nobles," "ruling class," or
"slaves" or the undifferentiated "demos"; yet very few scholars, especially in
the English-speaking world, offer any theoretical account of what such a
concept implies about the nature of the society they are analyzing.'
Latacz, for example, in a popular recent account of Homer, posits a
fully formed class system in the Mycenaean (he prefers ''Akhaian" 1996: 37)
period, a dominant class that survives - albeit initially depressed by-the
devastations of the Sea Peoples (or whoever destroyed all the Mycenaean
centers except Athens). The no longer "Dark" Ages see their reassertion of
leadership in trade and Ionian colonizations laying the foundations of the
prosperity of Ionia, which culminates in the eighth century, during which
' I was in the process of correcting an embarrassing number of typos in my "final" read-through of my
chapter on Sparta when a bibliographic note in A. Powell (2001: 256), which I happened to be using
as a text in a course on the Age of Pericles, warmly recommended Cartledge'sAgesilaos for a "full-scale
analysis of Sparta's political, social and educational workings." I have owned a copy of Cartledge's
book for several years but never read it: "judging the book by its cover," I assumed it was confined
to fourth-century developments. Reading the chapter "Agesilaos and the Spartan Class Struggle," I
encountered the sentence I now quote in Chapter Six note 73. This cites Cartledge 1975, which as
a Marxist and Arethusa subscriber I had of course read when it appeared but completely forgotten.
Reading it over was a strange experience: so many of the issues I address in the following introduction
were dealt with there with admirable concision. At the same time I felt a certain sadness: the implicit
promise of classical historians explicitly engaging with Marx's texts has alas not been fulfilled- with
the great exception of de Ste. Croix's work (1981), which, amazingly, Cartledge cites as "forthcoming"
(1975: 79 n. 35) six years before its actual appearance. In a prefatory note (76) he thanks de Ste.
Croix for inspiration and "devastating criticism" - a blessing indeed. In a more recent work (2002:
3) Cartledge decribes how "my historical interests and researches had opportunely shifted away
from the material (social and economic) and the political (broadly interpreted) to the intellectual or
social-psychological ... I had become especially concerned to interpret and understand the mindset
or the mentality of the Greeks."
2 Theoretical comideratiom
these "aristocrats" virtually "commission" (he uses but also balks at the
word 1996: 66) Homer to "reflect" their self-conscious self-congratulation.
He traces a purely aristocratic audience back to Mycenae, but sees only the
prosperity of the late eighth century as the appropriate context in which the
fully self-conscious and optimistic aristocracy wants to embrace its glorious
past heritage (1996: 63 and passim). The only other class he alludes to is the
class of "merchants," called into being - he argues-by the very success of
what he posits as aristocrat-led colonial and trade adventures (Latacz 1996:
57). So too Ian Morris (e.g., 1986a, 1987) among others finds "class" and
class ideology, and clear evidence of class struggle in burials, but devotes
relatively little attention to theorizing the phenomenon of class that plays
so key a role in his analysis. His influential opposition of "ruling class" and
"middling" ideologies (1996) is posited initially as exclusively within the
aristocracy while the rest of society is subsumed in a vaguely hypostatized
''polis," but he subsequently moves to straightforward declarations that
"Most Athenians imagined themselves as middling men" (2000: 153, my
emphasis). 2
Beyond a general tendency of classicists to eschew theory, I believe
that the more than century-and-a-half-long anxiety ("a specter is haunting
Europe"; MECW 6: 482), culminating in the half-century-long Cold War,
associated in people's minds with Marx's dynamic theorization of class in
1847 (Communist Manifesto) and with the turmoils and tragedies led by
self-proclaimed followers of Marx explains more fully the general reluc-
tance to engage theoretically with a concept that classicists seem so often
to find as indispensable as it is troublesome. 3 Thus, Starr, for example,
2 Morris (2000) seems to me to blur this distinction between a ruling class ideology and what
everyone in the polis believes. Kurke, whose enterprise in Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold {1999)
is explicitly dependent on Morris's ruling class-middling opposition {19--22), has the great virtue
of acknowledging directly her own hypostasis of "the city," but justifies it by "our very limited
real knowledge about who exactly is doing what in this period" {17 n. 46), a genuine problem
to be sure, but one which seems to constitute no barrier to her own very elaborate explorations
of ideological struggles in this same period. In fairness to Morris, whose ongoing quest for new
theoretical paradigms is awesome, I should note that his essay on "Hard Surfaces" (2002) is strikingly
sympathetic to a number ofloosely defined Marxist approaches and even critiques Kurke's approach
as "unable to find an external grounding for economic categories in humanity's ability to appropriate
nature or the equity of the distribution of its fruits" (2002: 18). See below further on Kurke and
Morris.
3 Anton Powell offers a more "delicate" explanation {he is presumably thinking primarily of British
scholars): "Aversion from thoughts of social differences has traditionally been common among
classical scholars, inspired partly by a delicate reluctance {which the Spartan oligarchs might well
have understood) to introduce divisive conversation into their own group" {1989a: 180--1). In another
text he offers a more explicitly political account: "The internal conflict which most threatened Greek
communities was one between rich and poor, and many scholars of recent times have found analysis
in those terms uncongenial because it recalls modern social tensions" (2001: 272). Finley {1967: 201)
Classicists and class 3
whose celebration of the aristocracy of the Archaic Period has much in
common with that of Latacz, goes out of his way to dismiss scornfully any
relevance of "Klassenkampf' (1977: 19). His use of the German term, in a
sense, lets the ideological cat out of the bag: he wants to evoke, without
naming Marx. 4 Another strategy that reveals the same anxiety is the use of
scare quotes around the word "class" (e.g., J. Hall 2007: 127; Foxhall 1997:
120). One of the subordinate goals of the following study is to highlight
on the one hand, the ways in which classical scholars' fear of being dubbed
"Marxists" or - the usual derogatory substitution - "economic determin-
ists" (e.g., Kurke 1999: 12 n. 27) has often mystified the role of class in the
history of this period and, on the other, to emphasize how the analyses of
many non-Marxist classicists both presuppose and confirm some funda-
mental Marxist propositions about the nature and functioning of human
societies.
This is not to suggest that self-proclaimed Marxists have either ignored
classical antiquity or failed to offer theoretical accounts of the nature and
meaning of class in particular periods of that era. On the contrary, Marxists
such as George Thomson (1946, 1955, 1961) and Margaret Wason (1947)
must share a considerable part of the responsibility for non-Marxist ana-
lysts' reluctance to engage in a potentially endless and potentially fruitless
ideological debate about the nature of class and its implications for under-
standing any specific society in any specific historical period. 5 G. E. M. de
Ste. Croix devotes a minimum 6 of ninety-one very large, painstaking pages
(1981: 19-m) to defending the appropriateness of applying Marxist notions
of class and class struggle to the analysis of the ancient Greek world. In
the process he offers not only a detailed exploration of Marx's own texts
but also his detailed critique of what he considers both misguided Marxist
approaches (e.g., Thomson, Wason, Vernant 1988a [1974], cf. Ste. Croix
1981: 41 and 63) and the alternative Weberian focus on statuses advocated
put it more bluntly: "There is effectively a thick wall of silence and contempt which in our world
cuts off Marxist thinking from 'respectable' thinking, at least in the one field which I know well, and
that is the study of ancient civilization." How much the situation has improved since 1967 remains
to be seen.
4 His footnotes (1977: 200---1) do specify Marx. Cf. Donlan, "We must be careful above all not to
import the modern concept of Klassenkampfinto the picture. The Greek tyrant was no popular
revolutionary leading his people against an oppressive aristocracy" (1999 [1980]:189----90, n. 7). For
the context of Donlan's comment see on tyranny below in text.
5 Yvon Garlan (1988: 8---14) summarizes some of the debate over slavery between East and West
German scholars. McKeown (1999: n8---21) treats Eastern European classical scholarship somewhat
more sympathetically.
6 One could reasonably argue that a great deal more of his text is an ongoing polemic for his
methodology.
by Moses Finley (1973, cf. Ste. Croix 1981: 58 and 85-96) and followed by
most classicists. 7
In the following introduction I will try to explore as many of the over-
lapping lines of argument that dismiss a Marxist approach as seems prac-
ticable. While these arguments will gradually contribute to clarifying my
alternative approach, I will then set forth more directly the key theoretical
assumptions of the following chapters.
MOSES FINLEY AND THE DISMISSAL OF CLASS
Given the enormous influence of Finley's approach in the general dismissal

of class among clasicists, it may be useful to explore it in some detail, even
if on some points I necessarily echo de Ste. Croix. I. Morris, in his foreword
to the reissue of Finley's Ancient Economy, declares, "No book this century
has had such a great influence on the study of Greek and Roman economic
history" (1999: ix). Earlier Finley was dubbed by Arnaldo Momigliano "the
best living social historian of Greece" and "the most influential ancient
historian of our time" (Momigliano 1980: 313, cf. Nafissi 2005: 235-6 and,
more cautiously, J. Hall, who calls him "one of the most influential eco-
nomic historians of the twentieth century" 2007: 235). At the same time
the complex problem of Finley's ambiguous relationship to Marx, though
7 Ober (1989: 38) is unusual in that he actually attributes his own usage of the term ideology to Finley
{19826: 17, 1983a: 122-41) and offers his own version of a transcendence of class (see Rose 2006: 106--
11). I. Morris cites the Marxists E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawn for what he calls a "heuristic and
analytical" use of "class" but does not elaborate {1987: 177). Of texts I have read recently Manville
{1990) is perhaps the most adroit is skirting the concept of class and substituting status and privilege
despite the heavy emphasis in his major sources ([Aristotle] Ath. Pol. and Plutarch) on open conflict
between rich and poor (cf., for example, 71, 76--7, 159---60, 190--1). Stein-Holkeskamp also implicitly
endorses Finley, who is the only authority she cites for distinguishing between "'Schicht,' 'Klasse,'
'Stand,' und 'Status"' (1989: 8 n. 3). Keith Hopkins, in a volume dedicated "To Moses," emphatically
endorses Finley's "elevation of status ... at the expense of class," which has "drawn the fire of those
Marxists [he names none] who are still trying to milk the rhetoric of class struggle and the dominant
mode of production." He argues that the great virtue of Finley's approach is that it was a rare attempt
to assimilate cultural value into economic analysis" (Hopkins 1983: xiii my emphasis), a comment
that suggests to me that he had read neither Marx nor any serious Marxists. Van Wees's very title,
Status Warriors {1992), accurately reflects the emphasis of his entire analysis of Homeric poetry.
For his part, Finley got his revenge by referring to Ste. Croix's book as "an eccentric, Procrustean
definition of the essential Marxist categories'' in his contribution on "ancient society" to A Dictionary
ofMarxist Thought (Finley 19836: 22). Most recently J. Hall, though he does occasionally offer useful
insights on class, seems far more comfortable with a focus on "status'': he even sums up his view of
the sixth-century emergence of an aggressively self-conscious merchant class by declaring, "While
earlier, landed wealth had- at least in part - derived fom status, there was now an increasing demand
that the acquisition of wealth from other sources should be recognized with a concomitant status . .. "
{2007: 284, my emphasis).
Moses Finley and the dismissal ofclass 5
significant for my project, would entail a very long digression. 8 In 1967,
for example, after a correspondent accused a review he had published of
"ill-applied Marxism" he offered a terse but eloquent - even courageous at
that historical moment - defense, e.g., (1967: 202): "Properly understood,
Marxism is not a dogma. For an ancient historian, it is a way of looking at
men [sic] and events which helps to pose fruitful and significant questions."
I. Morris in his Foreword (1999: xvii-xviii) essentially finesses the problem:
''As a serious student of Weberian sociology, Finley would have made a
strange communist." Momigliano (1987) addresses the problem briefly (see
below) as do Shaw and Saller (1981). My own sense, to be very brief, is
that Marx's own writings deeply impressed Finley, but that the stigma of
Marxism arising from Cold War hysteria and the sheer stupidity of some
Marxist and anti-Marxist polemics - not to mention his own painful expe-
rience with the Internal Security Subcommitte of the U.S. Senate aka the
McCarran Committee (Tomkins 2006: 95) - led him to distance himself
as far as possible from the label and to seek in Weber an acceptable the-
oretical framework for addressing questions raised by Marx such as the
necessity of a proper theory in the writing of history (1981: 3-23, 1985a
[1987] and passim), the role of slavery in ancient society (Finley 1936, 1981:
97-198, 1983b, 1987, 1998 [1980]), the relationship of political to economic
structures (e.g., 1973a, 1981: 24-40, 1983a, 1985a), the nature of imperialism
(1981: 41-61 [= 1978], 1985a: 67-87), etc. While more than half of Weber's
The Agrarian Sociology ofAncient Civilizatiom (1976 = Agrarverhiiltnisse
im Altertum, 1909) is devoted to ancient Greece and Rome, Marx's more
sustained discussion of precapitalist forms in the Grundrisse was first pub-
lished in Moscow in 1939 and only became available in the west in 1953
(Marx 1973: 7). Though Weber categorically dismissed any comprehen-
sive theory of history - Marxist or Hegelian (cf. Giddens 1971: 163, 194,
F. Jameson 1988: vol. 2: rn)-the temptation to separate Weber too radically
from Marx must also be resisted: as Finley himself pointed out, "Marx was
the specter haunting Weber" (1981: 18). Moreover, as Giddens repeatedly
stresses, the Marxism against which Weber reacted most rigorously was
Engels's pseudo-scientific transference of the dialectic to nature, which
"thus obscures the most essential element of Marx's conception" (Giddens
1971: 189, cf. xiv-xv). Giddens is then at pains to stress the fundamen-
tal harmony between much of Weber's analysis of religion and ideology
with Marx's dialectic of subject and object (Giddens 1971: 2rn-12) Finally,
8 In thinking about this problem of Finley's relation to Marxism, however, I would like to acknowledge
again the great help offered by Daniel Tompkins in sharing with me his ongoing work on Finley,
some of which has appeared in print (2006 and 2008).
Finley himself had some serious criticisms of Weber (1985a: 88-rn3).

Jameson (1988c vol. II: 4), I think, hits the nail on the head in terms
that apply perfectly to Giddens as well as Foucault - and I would even
add Polanyi: "In reality, Weber's most influential legacy to the anti-Marxist
arsenal lay not in some idealistic reaction against a materialism he himself
clearly shared with Marx but rather in the strategic substitution, in his own
research and theorization, of the political for the economic realm as the
principal object of study, and thus, implicitly, as the ultimate determining
reality of history." More specifically, the focus on "power," which Giddens
(1981: 3) claims Marx undertheorized, is part of this heritage.
To focus on what is most relevant to my project, I quote in full Finley's
initial discussion in Ancient Economy of Marx's conception of class:
There is little agreement among historians and sociologists about the definition of
'class' or the canons by which to assign anyone to a class. Not even the apparently
clear-cut, unequivocal Marxist concept of class turns out to be without difficulties.
Men are classed according to their relation to the means of production, first
between those who do and those who do not own the means of production;
second, among the former, between those who work themselves and those who
live off the labor of others. Whatever the applicability of that classification in
present-day society, for the ancient historian there is an obvious difficulty: the
slave and the free wage labourer would then be members of the same class, on
a mechanical interpretation, as would the richest senator and the non-working
owner of a small pottery. That does not seem a very sensible way to analyse ancient
society. (Finley 1973a: 49)
I resist the temptation to italicize, as does Ste. Croix, "on a mechanical

interpretation." I am struck earlier in the passage by the rhetorical antithe-
sis between the confusion of (ordinary? real?) historians and sociologists
and "even the apparently clearcut, unequivocal Marxist concept of class."
While any reader of Marx would agree that the "relation to the means
of production" is a decisive component of Marx's concept, among people
who take Marx seriously very few indeed would call his concept of class
"clearcut and unequivocal." 9 The fact is he used the term class in more than
one sense, and his concept of class developed over many years. Most serious
accounts of his concept tend to begin with a lament over the fact that the
third volume of Capital breaks off after a page and a half of introductory
matter in a chapter entitled "Classes" (1967: 885-6). 10
9 Finley (1985c: 183-4), without acknowledging how misleading and purely rhetorical his earlier
characterization of Marx's view of class was, focuses on the different senses in which Marx, in the
course of his long career, uses the term as further grounds for dismissing it.
10 Beyond Ste. Croix's fairly elaborate efforts at extricating a definition of class from Marx, see (for
an almost random sampling) Giddens (1971: 36--38), Bettelheim {1985), Resnick and Wolff {1987:
Finley's second distinction, between those owners of capital who work
themselves and those who live off the labor of others, is rather ambiguous.
If Finley is referring to capitalists who also work at their own factories
beside their workers, Marx dismisses their claims to be "workers" as pure
mystification (e.g., Marx 1976: 300). Presumably Finley is referring to
independent and individual producers, who have no one else working for
them. For Marx this is essentially a precapitalist phenomenon, although of
course he was aware that such individuals continued to exist in the margins
of capitalist society. His whole concept of "alienated" or "estranged" labor
is based on the assumption that under fully developed capitalism "the
distinction between the capitalist and the land rentier, like that between
the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and ... the whole
of society must fall apart into the two classes - the property owners and the
propertyless workers" (MECW3: 270, his emphasis). Finley's phrase, "those
who live off the labour of others," is as close as he comes to the decisive
concept of exploitation. While earlier, in discussing the distinction between
the Greek words ploutos and penia, he cites with apparent approval Veblen's
distinction between "exploit and drudgery" (Finley 1973a: 41; Veblen 1934:
15), yet the rest of his discussion of Marx completely ignores the category
of exploitation (cf. Ste. Croix 1981: 91).rr
Ste. Croix also attacks Finley's reductio ad absurdum in accusing Marx of
implicitly offering no basis for distinguishing "the slave and the free wage
labourer." In a special appendix on the matter (1981: 504-5) Ste. Croix
initially has recourse to a highly technical distinction in Marx between
"constant capital," according to which the slave is simply and literally a
"tool," 12 and "variable capital," the category to which the free wage-earner
belongs. 13
109-63), Bendix and Lipset (1966), Wright (1985 and 1989), Poulantzas (1973: 58----98; 1978: 13-35),
Bottomore (1983 s.v.), Carver (1987 s.v.). Chilcote (2000: 89-132) offers a particularly full romp
through the whole range of theories of class, starting with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As Eric
Roll observes in his history of economic thought, "As ... these doctrines [the theory of classes and
the class-struggle, etc.] have become parts of fiercely-held and as fiercely-attacked, political dogma,
it is not easy without becoming involved in doctrinal battles to formulate them in a manner which
is understandable and makes some sense" (Roll 1992: 231). Thus even the most "neutral" of scholars
would never call Marx's theory of classes "apparently clearcut, unequivocal."
n As Kyrtatas (2002) emphasires, the very concept of economic exploitation was alien to the Greeks,
but that does not mean that the phenomenon did not exist.
12 The image, of course, comes from Aristotle, Pol 1253632-33, "the slave is a living [soul-possessing
empsychon] possession, even as every servant is an instrument taking precedence over [inanimate]
instruments."
'l Applying a term like "variable captital" to antiquity strikes me as hopelessly misleading. Throughout
his varying analyses of capitalism Marx is constantly at pains to historicire the specific preconditions
of the capitalist mode of production by repeated specific contrasts to earlier modes, most commonly
Despite the enormous ideological enforcement of the notion of "free-

dom" in Classical Athens (e.g., Raaflaub 2004: 227-35, 243; Cartledge 1993),
I suspect that the "free" laborers working alongside slaves, though receiv-
ing perhaps twice the pay of a slave (Jones 1956: 190),14 might nonetheless
feel great bitterness at their own lot. Though the phrase "wage-slavery" is
a modern coinage, we cannot assume that the ideological distinction for
these workers between "free" and "slave" was always a sufficient consola-
tion for sharing with slaves a similar relation to the process of production.
Moreover, if they worked full-time, they would have no leisure to partici-
pate in the political life of the city, a major component of their "freedom." 15
Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that ancient aristocratic atti-
tudes viewed those who worked for others as little different from slaves -
as Finley himself spelled out (1973: 40-41). To the extent that free work-
ers did have a sharply different sense of themselves from slaves - and we
have no direct evidence from such workers - it attests to the success of an
ideological offensive surrounding the category of slavery.
To support his dismissal of Marx's relevance to antiquity Finley has
recourse to a further rhetorical gesture: to cite a Marxist against Marx:
Half a century ago Georg Lukacs, a most orthodox Marxist, made the correct
observation that in pre-capitalist societies, 'status-consciousness ... masks class
consciousness'. By that he meant, in his own words, that 'the structuring of society
slave labor and serfdom. The following is perhaps the most concise of many formulations: "This
transformation [into capital] can itself only take place under particular circumstances, which meet
together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds
of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of
susbsistence, who are eager to valorire the sum of values thay have appropriated by buying the
labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power,
and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part
of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they
own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors" (Marx
1976: 874, cf. Marx 1973: 463 and 471-72). It is only within this specific market and production
relation between capitalist and worker that the latter can be viewed as "variable capital." What
the capitalist expends on raw materials and instruments of production remains a constant, whereas
"that part of capital which is turned into labour-power does undergo an alteration of value in the
process of production. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value and produces an excess, a
surplus-value, which may itself vary, and be more or less according to circumstances" (Marx 1976:
317). See below for Marx on Greek slavery.
14 This refers to the end of the fifth century. Elsewhere (189) he suggests that free laborers in mines
might have received a bit more than twice the wage of a slave. However, the inscription for the
building of the Erechtheum for this same period indicates slaves and free workers received exactly
the same pay for the same work (Finley 1982a: 100-1).
15 In another context Finley quotes with apparent approval Sir Keith Hancock: "'The Boers very soon
convinced themselves that the artisans' work and slaves' work were the same thing"' (Finley 1982a:
194). Kyrtatas (2002: 143) states of the Greeks themselves (especially Aristotle): "whenever human
beings worked in a way that the product of their labour belonged to another human being, they
were regarded, for all practical purposes, as slaves." The issue in my view, however, is not ancient
attitudes but the actual relations of production.
into castes and estates means that economic elements are inextricably joined to
political and religious factors; that economic and legal categories are objectively
and substantively so interwoven as to be inseparable: In short, from neither a Marxist
nor a non-Marxist standpoint is class a sufficiently demarcated category for our
purposes. (Finley 1973a: 50; Lukacs 1971: 55-59, Finley's emphasis)
In his footnote Finley cites the opening essay of Lukacs's text as support for
his hyperbolic description of him as "a most orthodox Marxist." The title
of that essay is indeed "What is Orthodox Marxism?" What Finley does
not indicate is that at the time of its publication (1922, see the 1967 preface
reprinted in Lukacs 1971: xvi) it was a radical defense of the Hegelian
element in Marx, a daring attempt to counter what became the dominant
Stalinist orthodoxy of Marxism as "science," an attempt that led to the
book's condemnation by Bukharin, Zinoviev, and others (Bottomore 1983:
291). 16 But a more relevant omission by Finley is the fact that the primary
goal of the essay from which Finley takes his quote is precisely an analysis
of class consciousness. The chief point of Lukacs's discussion of precapitalist
societies is to stress the reasons why class consciousness did not arise in the
past but can arise under capitalism and must arise if real human liberation
is to be achieved. Lukacs is, however, far from suggesting the irrelevance of
Marx to the analysis of these societies:
Status-consciousness - a real historical factor - masks class consciousness; in fact it

prevents it from emerging at all ... Thus class consciousness has quite a different
relation to history in pre-capitalist and capitalist periods. In the former case the
classes could only be deduced from the immediately given historical reality by
the methods ofhistorical materialism. In capitalism they themselves constitute this
immediately given historical reality. (Lukacs 1971: 58, his emphasis)
What Finley ignores is that status consciousness is precisely conscious and

subjective: the relationship of individuals to the mode of production is
objective whether they are conscious of it or not. Thus, as de Ste. Croix
(1981: 58) points out, when it comes to discussing class struggle, Finley can
'6 In his deathbed interviews Lukacs was asked why he thought History and Class Consciousness still had
an international impact. He replied, "The book has a certain value because in it questions are raised
which Marxism evaded at the time" (1983: 77, my emphasis). Martin Jay also cites the following from
Luka.cs's Preface to the reissue of the text in 1967: "It is undoubtedly one of the great achievements
of History and Class Consciousness to have reinstated the category of totality in the central position
it had occupied throughout Marx's works and from which it had been ousted by the 'scientism' of
the social-democratic opportunists" (Jay 1984: 85; Lukacs 1971: xx). In explaining why he was not
eliminated during the Stalinist purges, he notes among other reasons, "In addition - and this is
perhaps a cynical observation - I had very inferior living quarters that were less attractive to the
NKVD" (1983: 97). This speaks volumes about the mentality of many of the prime movers of those
purges.
IO Theoretical comideratiom
see only conscious, political struggles. 17 The slave who does the minimum
amount of work that will evade punishment or who runs away is, in Marxist
terms, engaging in class struggle - albeit without class consciousness in the
strong sense of the term, a struggle which in certain circumstances (e.g.,
during the Peloponnesian War, cf. Thucydides 7.27.2) may have political
consequences, but by no stretch of the imagination could be termed a
specifically political struggle.
It is also striking that Finley's use of Lukacs aims at supporting his
own version of Polanyi's focus on the "embedded" economy: 18 he seems
to be arguing that if the economy is inextricably conjoined with political,
religious, and legal categories, this somehow invalidates a Marxist approach.
This is a particularly odd use of Lukacs, who is especially concerned to
use Marxism to elucidate the "social totality," i.e., "the concrete totality
of the historical world, the concrete and total historical process" (Lukacs
1971: 145, cf. Jay 1984: 81-127). 19 Moreover, Polanyi himself credits Marx
with an important role in the development of the distinction between
embedded and disembedded economies: "Its [the distinction's] sociological
background was first mooted by Hegel in the 1820s and developed by
Karl Marx in the 1840s" (1968: 82). Reading over Polanyi's broad-view
essay "Societies and Economic Systems" (1968: 3-25), I was struck by how
little of it - though based on a great deal of anthropological research
of the twentieth century - Marx would disagree with. Both Marx and
Polanyi are concerned in a major way (see further below) to attack the
ahistoricism of capitalist economists who either project capitalist views of
human nature into the past or simply dismiss the past. Both stress that
'7 In a later work Finley returns to class, and class conflict, and alludes scornfully to "the current bad
habit of pinning the Marxist label on any and every political analysis that employs a concept of
class" (1983a: 9-10). A footnote (10 n. 29) alludes to his earlier case for "status" and assures us, "My
return in the present work to 'class' (in the sense intended in ordinary discourse, not in a technical
sense, Marxist or other) does not imply a change of view." The fact is, however, that the kind of
class conflict he discusses (loosely that of "the rich and the poor") has nothing to do with any sort
of status conflict, which operates primarily within a given class.
'8 "To employ a metaphor, the facts of the economy were originally embedded in situations that were
not in themselves of an economic nature, neither the ends nor the means being primarily material.
The crystallization of the concept of the economy was a matter of time and history. But neither
time nor history have provided us with those conceptual tools required to penetrate the maze of
social relationships in which the economy was embedded" (Polanyi et al. 1957: 242). This seemingly
utterly despairing view of the fruits of "time and history" are then triumphantly answered by the
following: "This is the task of what we will here call institutional analysis" (ibid.)
'9 F. Jameson's chapter (2009: 201-22) on Luka.cs's History and Class Consciousness is particularly
eloquent in sorting out the distortions involved in the postmodern "war on totality" and emphasizing
that in Lukacs "'totality' is not ... a form of knowledge, but rather a framework in which various
kinds of knowledge are positioned, pursued, and evaluated. This is clearly the implication of the
phrase 'aspiration to totality'" (210--n).
Moses Finley and the dismissal ofclass II
an all-pervasive obsession with profit-making is not a primary or eternal

human characteristic but a product of capitalism. 20 A key difference is
Polanyi's (like Finley's) awareness of but lack of interest in exploitation:
"We deliberately disregard in this presentation the vital distinction between
homogeneous and stratified societies, i.e., societies which are on the whole
socially unified and such as are split into rulers and ruled" (1968: 16,
cf. 13-14). Polanyi is well aware that his key "institutions" of reciprocity
and redistribution can entail gross inequalities:
Obviously, the social consequences of such a method of distribution may be

far-reaching, since not all societies are as democratic as the primitive hunters.
Whether the redistributing is performed by an influential family or an outstanding
individual, a ruling aristocracy, or a group of bureaucrats, they will often attempt
to increase their political power by the manner in which they redistribute the
goods. (1968: 13)
Finley's primary grounds for allegiance to the concept of status are para-
doxically based on a special application of the Marxist concept of social
relations that become a "fetter" 21 on the development of productive force.
The ideological commitments of the ruling classes in Greece and Rome,
Finley argued, blocked them from the fullest exploitation of their own
resources and political power: "They lacked the will; that is to say, they
were inhibited, as a group ... by over-riding values" (1973a: 60). 22 To be
20 Polanyi: "it is on this one negative point that modern ethnographers agree: the absence of the
motive of gain" (1968:8); Marx: "Among the ancients we discover no single inquiry as to which form
of landed property, etc. is the most productive, which creates maximum wealth. Wealth does not
appear the aim of production" (1965: 84).
21 ''At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict
with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms -
with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From
forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fitters" (MECW 29:
263). Lekas {1988) turns this formulaic statement into a central ground for his critique of Marx's
comments on antiquity. See Konstan's excellent review (1990), which nicely refutes a reading of
Marx as dogmatically committed to "a linear development of forces of production within a given
society such that they come ultimately into conflict with the prevailing form of economic and social
relations" {84). Marx, in a famous passage to be discussed later, certainly laid out such a scenario,
but in the Grundrisse {1973: 106--7), Konstan points out that "Marx, even when he was thinking
of universal history and not just of ancient societies, could produce a sequence of historical stages
that correspond in a broad way to an increase in the forces of production (however loosely defined),
without insisting that each stage causally determines the transition to the next by an evolution of
the productive forces specific to its form of labor" {1990: 87).
22 The relative failure of Greco-Roman civili7.ation to advance technologically is similarly presented
by Finley as due to the ruling class's attitude toward manual labor as a consequence of slavery
(Finley 1982b [1965]: 176--95). See, however, Cuomo {2007: 3-4) for an explicit critique of Finley on
this point and Oleson (2008: 5-6), who refers to Finley and "this now discredited interpretation."
Greene (2000) offers a more sustained focus on Finley and ancient technology.
sure, Marx in general envisioned this sort of blockage as triggering an "era

of social revolution," whereas Finley saw in these status-specific values an
explanation of the stable but inherently stagnant character of the ancient
economy. At the same time this focus on the self-conscious values of the
ruling class blocked Finley himself from exploring the unconscious, struc-
tural shifts in a period of some fifteen hundred years ("the period between
1000 BC and AD 500" 1973a: 29) that he chose to homogenize. Indeed, as
his long-time friend Arnaldo Momigliano observed shortly after Finley's
death, "he was never a Marxist in any ordinary sense" (1987: 3): "Finley,
because of his increasing distrust of the Marxist categories, had become
reluctant to enter into questions of change: he liked analysis of situations
rather than explanation of change" (6). Momigliano adds charmingly:
"But, as changes do happen, it is desirable that they should be explained"
(ibid.).
FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF CLASS
A more substantial objection to class as the primary focus of analysis is

raised by feminists arguing that gender is a more elemental consideration
for the study and understanding of society. This is an enormously complex
issue. 23 Unquestionably an adequate account of any society must include
a full assessment of the available evidence for gender relations. 24 For this
period, with the exception of Sappho, all the evidence is male and mostly
hostile, as Sue Blundell (1995: 10) starkly puts the problem of evidence:
"the women of Ancient Greece are to a large extent creatures who have
been invented by men." The struggles of contemporary feminists for equal
2l For a sampling of the debates over the relationship of class to gender - mostly with a contemporary
focus - see Brenner 2000, Vogel 1983, Saf!ioti 1978, Meulenbelt et al. 1984, Mies 1986, Scott 1988,
1996a and b, Okin 1979, Butler and Scott 1992, Hansen and Philipson 1990, Hennessy (1993). On
women in antiquity Pomeroy's classic {1975) is still an excellent starting point, but see Arthur's
[Katz's] thoughtful and learned critique (1976). There are some excellent essays in the two Arethusa
special issues (Sullivan 1973 and Peradotto 1978). In particular Arthur's [Katz's] article {1973: 7----58)
addresses directly relations of class and gender. See also Duby and Perrot (1991), Rabinowitz and
Richlin (1993), Hawley and Levick {1995), Loraux {1995), Humphreys {1993). Apart from Arthur
[Katz] 1973 and Rose {1993), I am aware of very little sustained focus directly on the relationship of
gender to class in recent feminist scholarship on ancient Greece. DuBois 1995: 2, 32 raises the issue
of class, but it does not figure prominently in her analysis of Sappho. So too in duBois 1988: 13, she
makes this tantalizing observation: "The views of Marx and Lukacs on production in capitalism
coexist with and illuminate the theories of gender proposed by psychoanalytic theory and lived by
all of us."
24 Cartledge (2002: 78---104) offers an admirably concise synchronic overview of Greek ideologies of
gender, but does not raise questions of class apart from a parenthetic "women like the wife of
Iskhomakhos are clearly represented as belonging to the Athenian ruling class" (102).
Feminist critiques ofclass 13
rights, equal access to jobs with equal pay, control of their bodies, sexual
freedom, daycare, full political participation, etc. only highlight the severe
constraints under which ancient Greek women lived. More relevant, my
more limited goal in this text is to explain change. 25 In that context I
will argue that class, whatever its inadequacy for explaining everything of
importance about a society, provides the best vehicle.
Departing from the pervasive gender-blindness in Marxist approaches,
Ste. Croix makes a sustained argument for viewing married women at least
as a separate class: "married women (who may be regarded in principle as
monopolizing the reproductive function), have rights, including above all
property rights, markedly inferior to those of men; and they have these
inferior rights as a direct result of their reproductive function, which gives
them a special role in the productive process and makes men desire to
dominate and possess them and their offspring" (1981: 100). 26 He goes on
to insist that many individuals belong to more than one class and that a
woman's class position needs to take account of "whether her economic
and legal condition is very different from that of her menfolk" (ibid.). The
complexity of this formulation, which plays a very small role in his vast text,
suggests some of the difficulty of a merely token effort to combine class and
gender. I also find it hard to move from this more-or-less exclusive focus
on female reproductive power to female slaves, free-born metic prostitutes,
or property-owning Spartan women. Moreover, in this connection (but cf.
180-1) Ste. Croix makes no mention of the very substantial contribution
to material production women characteristically were expected to make
through spinning and weaving27 - not to mention in farm work (e.g.
Hesiod WD 405-6). While I will try to take account of relevant evidence
where issues of gender are clearly implicated in those of class, I make no
pretense to an adequate focus on gender as such.
25 Both Osborne (19976) and Patterson (2007: 168---174, cf. 1986) have argued compellingly that Pericles'
citizenship law of 451 BC had a significant impact on the status of women in classical Athens. But
even this change was a consequence of a male initiative.
26 His argument bears some affinity with the theorization by Harwood (1994: 96), who argues, on
the analogy of Marx's account of the emergence of classes, "Gender arises and individuals become
engendered in the course of struggle for the child. And just as the yarn is also labor (alienated labor
when the yarn is viewed as the capitalist's private property), so is the baby."
27 I like to think that Marx's extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin classics with their repeated
allusions to women weaving at least partly inspired his declaration in The German Ideology that
"slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule jenny [a machine for spinning
textile fibers into yarn], serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and ... in
general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and
clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is a historical and not a mental act" (MECW
5: 38).
TOWARD DEFINING "MARXIST"
Though I do not agree with all of Ste. Croix's arguments, much of his
overall argument for the usefulness of Marxist approaches seems cogent
to me. In any case the work of explicitly Marxist classicists by no means
exhausts the possibilities for a broadly "Marxist" account of antiquity. By
"Marxist" I refer not only to the works of Marx and Engels but as well
to the whole vast body of thought that derives from and is inspired by
the surviving writings of Karl Marx - and to a much lesser degree of
Frederick Engels, whose attempt to present Marxism as a "science" (Anti-
Duhring, 1878, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880) was responsible for
many intelligent readers rejecting "Marxism." 28 Since the work both of
the founders and the followers is, like any serious body of theory, full of
ambiguities, errors, and divergent developments, 29 I feel free to pick and
choose what makes most sense to me in what I know of this body of
thought. I accept the potential inconvenience of labeling myself a Marxist
in lieu of the drawbacks of having others pin on me a label I might otherwise
be tempted to avoid. This enables me to emphasize openly what I find most
compelling in this tradition rather than devote my primary energies to the
tedious task of spelling out all my disagreements with or qualifications of
this or that statement by any thinker in the tradition. Rather than embroil
myself in all the polemics within Marxism, I will follow my own path and -
to echo Marx echoing Dante - fascia dir le genti. At the same time, the
reader is entitled to some specifics about what to expect from a "Marxist"
account of class in the Archaic Period. This will take the form of addressing
first some of the other serious objections leveled against a Marxist approach
28 The essay "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" was excerpted from the former, fuller work. See
the Tucker Anthology (Marx-Engels 1978: 683-717). Stalin embraced and imposed the idea of
Marxism as a "natural science" in his - alas - widely read pamphlet, "Dialectical and Historical
Materialism." It opening sentence gives the whole flavor of his approach: "Dialectical Materialism
is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because
its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them is
dialectical while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena,
its theory, is materialistic" (1940: 5, his emphasis). Though Marx followed developments in the
"hard" sciences, in no sense did he ever assert that his own "scientific" discoveries about the
inner workings of capitalism were applicable to "the phenomena of nature" - a truly preposterous
move! Nicolaus rightly comments, "Marx was sparing to the utmost with the adjective 'scientific"'
(1973: 53).
29 For example, Sahlins (1976: 55-125) offers a compelling analysis of the history of anthropological
theory in precisely these terms. Bettelheim (1985) offers a useful overview and meditation upon
the various shifts, contradictions and errors in Marx's conceptuali7.ations of class and class struggle
through his long writing career. But Bettelheim does so from within a Marxist perspective. So too
Nicolaus in his fine foreword to his translation of Marx's Grundrisse (1973) notes significant shifts
in Marx's formulations.
Marx and precapitalist societies 15
and secondly, a brief summary of what I take to be essential components
of such an approach.
MARX AND PRECAPITALIST SOCIETIES
If one leaves aside the output of the Cold War cottage industry devoted
to proclaiming Marx was wrong about everything, 30 many readers of Marx
have found his analysis of capitalism compelling but argue that applying
Marxist ideas to precapitalist societies entails an unwarranted imposition
of contemporary conceptions on societies that both conceived of them-
selves and operated on radically different bases. Marx himself responded
to an early version of this critique. In a long footnote to Capital Vol I,
Marx writes, "I seize this opportunity of briefly refuting an objection made
by a German-American publication to my work Zur Kritik der Politischen
Okonomie, 1859." He goes on to quote his now famous/notorious decla-
ration (see below for a fuller account) about "the economic structure of
society" constituting
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness ... In the opinion of the
German-American publication that is all very true for our own times, in which
material interests are preponderant, but not for the Middle Ages, dominated by
Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, dominated by politics. In the first place,
it strikes us as odd that anyone should suppose that these well-worn phrases about
the Middle Ages and the ancient world were unknown to anyone else. One thing
is clear: the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient
world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their
livelihood which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism
played the chief part. For the rest, one needs no more than a slight acquaintance
with, for example, the history of the Roman Republic, to be aware that its secret
history is the history oflanded property. And then there is Don Quixote, who long
ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible
with all economic forms of society. (Marx 1976: 175-6)
This attempted refutation, with its heavy sarcasm, cryptic brevity, and
apparent crude reflectionism, while it does raise a valid problem inherent
3° A student of mine once quoted his economics professor announcing, "Next time we'll spend fifteen
minutes on Marx. It's more than he's worth, but what the Hell: it's in the textbook." Such a
dismissive attitude toward so rich and influential body of thought is the consequence of many years
of industrious Cold War efforts to demonstrate its absolute irrelevance. Even an author who devoted
a great deal of time to Marx takes a characteristic Cold War patronizing tone: "In fact, by and large
it will appear that strictly speaking Marx was almost never 'right.' His facts were defective by the
standards of modern scholarship, his generalization reckless and sweeping" (Elster 1986: 3). He does
go on to concede, "we may find that a theory can be shot through with errors of detail, even have
basic conceptual flaws, yet remain immensely fertile in its overall conception" (ibid.).
in the Hegelian habit of trying to understand previous eras exclusively in
terms of their own dominant self-conceptions and in complete neglect of
their mode of production and general social organization, does not directly
address the question of Marx's relevance to precapitalist societies. It is cer-
tainly true that analyzing capitalism was the major focus of Marx's life-work
and the explicit goal of the first volume of Capital - one of the relatively
few works he actually published in his lifetime: "it is the ultimate aim of
this work to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society" (1976:
92). But the subtitle of that work is ''A Critique of Political Economy," by
which he means both serious investigators of the functioning of capitalism
and vulgar apologists of capitalism.31 One of the most consistent targets of
his critique is the attempt by capitalist ("bourgeois") economists to present
capitalism ahistorically as "natural" - as "eternal." Thus he is constantly
insisting that "the bourgeois mode of production [is] a particular kind of
social production of a historical and transitory character" (1976: 174 n. 34,
my emphasis);
these formulas [propounded by bourgeois economists], which bear the unmistak-
able stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production
has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists'
bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity
as productive labour itself. Hence the pre-bourgeois forms of the social organiza-
tion of production are treated by political economy in much the same way as the
fathers of the church treated pre-Christian religions. (1976: 174-5)
He is constantly citing examples from pre-capitalist societies, to which he

devoted a substantial portion of his preparatory notes for writing Capital
(Marx 1965: 67-120, 1973: 471-514). In a note to the passage just cited he
quotes his own earlier critique of precisely the ahistoricism of bourgeois
economists:
The economists have a singular way of proceeding. For them there are only
two kinds of institutions, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism
are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this
they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every
l' "Let me point out once and for all that by classical political economy I mean all the economists
who, since the time of W. Petty, have investigated the real internal framework [Zusammenhang]
of bourgeois relations of production, as opposed to the vulgar economists who only flounder
around within the apparent framework of those relations, ceaselessly ruminate on the materials
long since provided by scientific political economy, and seek there plausible explanations of the
crudest phenomena for the domestic purposes of the bourgeoisie" (1976: 174-5 n. 34). The most
amusing and - alas - the most tedious portions of the Grundrisse are focused on detailed critiques
of Darimon, Proudhon, Bastiat, Malthus, Ricardo, the Physiocrats, Carey, Rossi, Gallatin, Wade,
Wakefield, as well as Adam Smith, et al.
Economic determinism? 17
religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation
of God ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any. (1976: 175 n. 35
citing MECW 6.174, my emphasis) 32
Marx, whose knowledge of the classics of Greece and Rome and of
medieval history was absolutely extraordinary (Prawer 1976, Lekas 1988:
55-56, McCarthy 1990) peppers the text of Capital and his Grundrisse with
contrasts between fundamental aspects of capitalism and those of earlier
societies. Contrasting, for example, the mystification oflabor embedded in
capitalist commodities, he points to medieval Europe: "The corvee can be
measured by time just as well as the labour which produces commodities,
but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord is a
specific quantity of his own personal labour-power" (1976: 170). In the
Grundrisse, for example, he is at pains to historicize the category of money:
This very simple category, then, makes a historic appearance in its full intensity
only in the most developed conditions of society. By no means does it wade its
way through all economic relations. For example, in the Roman Empire, at its
highest point of development, the foundation remained taxes and payments in
kind. (1973: 103)
The whole burden of his critique of "bourgeois" political economy is that
it, not he, imposes on the past its own historically contingent categories of
analysis, that his own goal is precisely to appreciate the historical specificities
of the capitalist mode of production by contrast with a wide-range of pre-
capitalist social formations.
ECONOMIC DETERMINISM?
Nonetheless, however carefully Marx seeks to historicize his accounts of

different modes of production, his very focus on this aspect of societies has
long provoked the dismissal of his approach as "economic determinism." 33
32 This last comment eerily anticipates Francis Fukuyama's The End ofHistory and the Last Man (1992).
33 Giddens in 1971 wrote: "This [Marx's use of the term "materialism"] definitely does not involve the
application of a deterministic philosophical materialism to the interpretation of the development of
society. Human consciousness is conditioned in dialectical interplay between subject and object, in
which man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time as it shapes him" (21). Yet in 1981
he wrote: "If by 'historical materialism' we mean the conception that the history of human societies
can be understood in terms of the progressive augmentation of the forces of production, then it
is based on false premises, and the time has come to finally abandon it. If historical materialism
means that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles', it is so patently
erroneous that it is difficult to see why so many have felt obliged to take it seriously" (1-2). He,
however, lays the foundation for his later "third way" with this sop for Marxists: "If Marx's project
be regarded as the furthering, through the conjunction of social analysis and political activity, of
Quite apart from those ready to dismiss Marx on the basis of second-hand
Cold War assessments, this issue is still hotly debated within Marxism.
Reading over the famous essay on "Contradiction and Overdetermina-
tion" (in Althusser 1969) and the long, Althusser-inspired discussion of the
issue by Wolff and Resnick (1987: 38-108 and passim) - the fullest of which
I am aware - I am struck by what seems to me the impossibility of any
straightforward resolution of the issue. It seems to me that there is a strong
tension in Marx's own words throughout his life between a polemical insis-
tence on the priority of the economic sphere and his nuanced appreciation
of the impact of political, cultural, and ideological elements upon the func-
tioning of what may only analytically be isolated as "economic" elements.
The earliest version is from The German Ideology of 1845-47:
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real
premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are
the real individuals, their activity and the conditions of their life, both those which
they find already existing and those produced by their activity. (MECW 5: 31)
He goes on to specify "producing the means of subsistence." But even here
there is room for emphasizing the potential range of what those "conditions
of their lives" include and a strong emphasis on the dialectical interaction
of inherited conditions and potentially transforming human activity. The
mature Marx of Capital I (1867) - the only "real" Marx for Althusser -
still speaks of the "economic law of motion of modern society" (1976: 92,
my emphasis), though he is at pains in his second preface to insist that
economic "laws" are fundamentally different for different historical epochs
(1976: 100-102) and, being historically contingent, are thus fundamentally
different from the laws of nature. The Critique of the Gotha Program
(1875) and the famous posthumously published fragment from Book III
of Capital on the "Realm of Necessity and the Realm of Freedom" are
primarily focused on economic issues. 34
At the same time, for all the obvious appeal to Marx of metaphors from
the hard sciences ("laws of motion," etc.) and his strong polemical sense
of the neglected role of material production, of class, and of the relations
of production, his analyses of concrete historical situations (e.g., The Class
Struggles in France (1848-49), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
forms of human society in which the mass of human beings can attain freedoms and modes of
self-realization in excess of any they may have enjoyed before, who can dissent from it? Certainly I
do not" (24-5). Divorcing Marxist social analysis and activism from a focus on modes of production
and class struggle is a nice trick. See below on the postmodern dismissal of Marx.
34 These late texts, not published before the project of MECW collapsed, are perhaps most easily found
in the Tucker anthology (Marx-Engels 1978: 525-41, 439-42).
Base and superstructure 19
(1851-52), The Civil War in France (1870-71) display a highly nuanced sense
of the mutual interplay of a whole host of "determinations." Indeed, at the
outset of the Grundrisse, in discussing the method of political economy, he
counterposes to its false procedures "a rich totality of many determinations
and relations" (1973: rno).
BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
Let us look briefly at the key passage by Marx which he himself cites in his
refutation (quoted above) of the charge that his approach is only relevant to
the capitalist era. In the Introduction to his 1859 book, A Contribution to the
Critique ofPolitical Economy, Marx offered in summary form an account
of his study of political economy and, most famously or notoriously,
the general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the
guiding principle of my studies ... In the social production of their existence,
men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will,
namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of
their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their
consciousness. (MECW 29: 262-3)
It would be hard to exaggerate the amount of ink devoted to these few

sentences. In no small measure because so much of Marx's surviving texts -
few of which were polished for publication - are so complex, multidimen-
sional, and in many cases exploratory, 35 both critics and followers of Marx
have fastened on this passage as Marx's own magic key to all his thought.
As Althusser has pointed out, however, Marx's spatial metaphor of base and
superstructure is merely suggestive and descriptive: it by no means spells
out the actual nature of the relationship between the economic structure
and all the other facets of the social totality (Althusser 1971: 135-36). Indeed,
I would argue that what is perhaps unique to Marxism is not that it offers
a pat amwer to this question, but that it insists that we confront and
take seriously3 6 the nature of the relationship between the specific mode
35 Gayatri Spivak has a wonderful discussion of the differences between those texts (a majority) of
Marx in which he explores issues in quest of self-clarification and those polished for publication, in
which he assumes a more pedagogical stance (Spivak 1987). See also Nicolaus 1973.
36 F. Jameson (1989: 383) puts this especially well: "'Base and superstructure' is not really a model, but
a starting point and a problem, something as undogmatic as an imperative simultaneously to grasp
of production, the relations of production and the whole range of other
elements that constitute a specific social formation. 37 Let me stress that
even in this passage about base and superstructure, Marx claims initially
only that the base "conditiom (bedingt) the general (uberhaupt) process of
social, political, and intellectual life." These two equivocations are impor-
tant in suggesting his discomfort with a simple determinism. "Conditions"
is not the same as "determines.'' 38 Moreover, the obviousness of this point
would I think not be disputed were it not for the assumption of danger-
ous political baggage accompanying any central proposition of Marx. Few,
for example, would raise objections to the following statement arising out
of the same principle by classicist Stephen Hodkinson (who, as far as I
know, claims no interest in Marx): "In most societies whose economies are
dependent primarily upon sedentary agriculture the distribution of land
and the rules governing its tenure and inheritance exercise a fundamental
influence upon the nature of the social system" (1989: 80, my emphasis).
In his magisterial Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000), Hodkin-
son's sole reference to Marx appears to dismiss his work as merely another
example of "ideologically-linked perceptions of Spartan property owner-
ship" (14). But Hodkinson's rationale for his whole project - one might
well say his life's work as a scholar - strikes me as a perfect example of the
usefulness of the base-superstructure model: "In studying property and
wealth, one is consequently penetrating into almost every facet of Spartiate
life and tackling directly the fundamental questiom posed above regarding
the success and crisis of the classical Spartan polis" (4, my emphasis). So
too Oswyn Murray- not, as far as I know, a self-proclaimed Marxist -who
nonetheless cites Engels's straightforward version of Marx's starting point:
"The origins of social structures are almost infinitely varied, but there are
certain basic constraints. One of the most important of these is economic.
culture in and for itself, but also in relation to its outside, its content, its context, and its space of
intervention and of effectivity. How one does that, however, is never given in advance." This is not to
deny that sociological approaches such as Bryant's (1996) consider this relationship and occasionally
offer useful insights that go beyond simple refl.ectionism, but there is a residual Hegelianism in the
priority that Bryant grants to ideas ("moral codes," "the 'Spirit' of Hellenism," etc.).
37 The term "social formation" rather than "society" is warmly endorsed by Finley (1983b: 21) who
takes it from Perry Anderson (1974: 22 n. 6), who takes it from Poulantzas (1978: 15-16 [French
edition 1968]), both of whom explicitly define themselves as Marxists. In those authors the term
social formation emphasizes that any mode of production entails some combination of different
modes in which one mode is dominant. Thus, for example, in antiquity independent small farmer
production continued alongside production in which slaves were decisive. At a certain point (to be
explored below) the impact of slave production on other aspects of the social totality is such that it
can reasonably be called dominant in the mode of production.
38 In this context I especially like Bruce Trigger's distinction between "constraints" and "determinants"
(1991: 555-61).
In order to survive, a society must produce a sufficiency; in order to cre-
ate a culture, it must produce a surplus, as Engels explained long ago"
(Murray 1990: 3). Walter Burkert, clearly no Marxist, takes for granted in
an almost "vulgar Marxist" way the obvious relevance of beginning with
the economic and technological base and moving from there to a polit-
ical and economic superstructure: "The economic base for the advance
in the third millennium was the intensified cultivation of the olive and
vine, which moved the centre of gravity from the fertile plains of northern
Greece to the mountain slopes of southern Greece and the islands; at the
same time, the art of metal-working arrived from the East. Both innova-
tions demanded and strengthened a central organization of exchange and
political administration" (1985: 20).
Marx does go on to speak of "determination" apropos of consciousness
in a polemically anti-Hegelian formulation, "It is not the consciousness
of men that determines (bestimmt) their existence, but their social exis-
tence that determines their consciousness" (ibid.). This formulation is an
emphatic repudiation of what was at the time the dominant Hegelian model
stressing the priority of ideas and consciousness over specific historical real-
ities. But a clearer version of Marx's conception of the relation of material
conditions to historical developments is the more dialectical formulation
in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), "Human beings (die
Memchen) make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the
past" (MECW 11: 103). These "circumstances" are never conceived of by
Marx as solely "economic."
Engels, in a much-discussed late letter (1890) attempts to counter the
charge of simple economic determinism by what many have seen as a series
of equivocations: ''According to the materialist conception of history, the
ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduc-
tion of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.
Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is
the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaning-
less, abstract, senseless phrase." Echoing the passage of Marx on base and
superstructure quoted above, he continues:
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure-
political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established
by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms - and even
reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political,
juristic, philosophical theories, religious views, and their further development into
systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical
struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. (Marx-Engels
1978: 760-65, emphasis in the original}
Still he goes on to assert repeatedly that "the economic movement finally

asserts itself as necessary;" "the economic ones [assumptions and condi-
tions] are ultimately decisive." He goes on at some length to illustrate how
the roles of state power, law, ideology/philosophy can "react back as an
influence upon the whole development of society, even on its economic
development. But all the same they themselves are again under the dom-
inating influence of economic development." He argues, "I consider the
ultimate supremacy of economic development in these spheres too, but
it comes to pass within the conditions imposed by the particular sphere
itself'' (my emphasis). This nod to the relative autonomy of the various
ideological spheres is important. But to the extent that Engels succeeds in
rescuing his apparent equivocations, it is by his final emphasis on dialectics:
What these gentlemen [sc. the simple economic determinists and those who accuse
Marxism of mechanical determinism] all lack is dialectics. They always see only
here cause, there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction, that such metaphysical
polar opposites exist in the real world only during crises, while the whole vast
process goes on in the form of interaction - though of very unequal forces, the
economic movement being by far the strongest, most primeval, most decisive -
that here everything is relative and nothing absolute - this they never begin to see.
Hegel has never existed for them. (Marx-Engels 1978: 765)
What differentiates Marx's approach from the vast majority of his critics is a
radically different and dialectical epistemological position, nicely summa-
rized by Giddens in his more sympathetic phase: "Human consciousness is
conditioned in dialectical interplay between subject and object, in which
man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time that it shapes him"
(Giddens 1971: 21). This epistemological position precludes the simple cause
and effect analyses of traditional empiricism, but it does not - cannot -
predict the specific weight of any given factor in a specific historical devel-
opment, which can only emerge from a concrete analysis. Thus "economic
determinism" in Engels's formulation seems to emerge as both "sometimes
yes, sometimes no" ("everything is relative") and somehow "ultimately" a
stronger element in the interplay of various other determinants. But for
those readers looking for straightforward "causes" impacting on a passive
society of human beings, readers committed to an empiricist cause-and-
effect determinism, no dialectical explanation will ever prove satisfactory:
hence my initial pessimistic declaration that no "straightforward" solution
to the "economic determinist" debate is possible. 39
Althusser's brilliant critique of Engels's letter attacks precisely the notion
of the "ultimate" - or in his translation of the letter "the last instance" -
status of the economic. In a famous line he argues, "the lonely hour of the
'last instance' never comes" (1969: 113). His alternative, "overdetermina-
tion," a term drawn from Freud's analysis of dream elements, stresses that
the economic contradictions of a society never operate in any independent
or straightforwardly determining way but interact "dialectically" with a
whole array of other factors. What seems to disappear in this otherwise
compelling analysis is any specific analytic value to a focus on class, the
mode of production, and its relations of production.
Resnick and Wolff, inspired by Althusser, offer their own dense formu-
lation of overdetermination as the path out of determinism:
Marxian theory ... is motivated by, focused upon, and aims at an ever deeper
knowledge of a selected subset among the many aspects of the social totality. These
are economic aspects and, in particular, the class processes and their interrelations
within the social totality ... This knowledge aims to specify both how the class
relations it designates as its objects are overdetermined by the nonclass aspects of the
social totality and how these class relations participate in the overdetermination of
those nonclass aspects. This knowledge aims, by means of exactly this specification,
to determine the contradictions in those class relations and the dynamic motion
that those contradictions produce. (Resnick and Wolff 1987: 96-7)
As I read this, what appears a potentially mutual process of "overdeter-

mination" by economic and non-economic elements acquires a "dynamic
motion" arising from the knowledge of "class relations." Thus I still want
to argue that a Marxist approach to the analysis of any social formation, of
any period of history does entail attributing something unique to the move-
ment arising from class relations viewed as a consequence of an ongoing
struggle - now hidden, now open - over the means of production.
In Engels's letter cited above, at one point he acknowledges, "Marx and I
are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes
lay more stress on the economic side than is due it. We had to lay more stress
39 Nicolaus (1973: 26--36 and passim) offers a particularly succinct distillation of Hegel's relation to
Marx, a topic scattered through virtually every serious account of Marx (e.g., McLellan 1973, whose
index has thirty-six references to Hegel, mostly with an 'f."). Marcuse's major engagement with
Hegel's philosophy (1960: 3-248) aims "to elucidate those implications of Hegel's ideas that identify
them closely with the later developments in European thought, particularly with the Marxian
theory" (xv). F. Jameson 2009 devotes more than a hundred very heavy pages (3-123) to a defense
of Hegel's dialectic as an essential prerequisite to grasping Marx's use of dialectic.
on the economic side vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it ... " (Marx-
Engels 1978: 762). While few today would actually "deny" the economic
aspects of ancient society, I am struck by the degree to which so many
classical scholars still appear anxious to minimize their importance. 40 As
indicated earlier, in the following text I will try in passing to pinpoint
the rhetorical strategies by which classical scholars have shied away from
concepts of class and class struggle - even when their own analysis points
inexorably in that direction.
CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS DETERMINANTS
As noted earlier in connection with Finley's preference for status over

class, one key aspect of Marx's focus on the economic is his emphasis on
its uncomcious character: in contrast to capitalist economists' tendency to
see conscious human greed as the eternal motor force of human nature,
Marx stresses that normally people are uncomcious of the functioning of
the mode of production into which they are born, nor do they normally
register consciously the slow changes that may take place in that mode
of production but which nonetheless condition their lives. The mode of
production 41 in Greece during the period discussed in this book consisted
of all the factors affecting how human beings produced their means of
survival and the disposable social surplus. Specific constraints were the
whole range of ecological factors (see Snodgrass 1982: 657-95 for Central
Greece and Thessaly, Hammond 1982: 696-703 for the Peloponnese) such
as the scarcity and extreme quality variations of arable land, the depen-
dence on rain rather than irrigation, which in Egypt and Mesopotamia
imposed forms of cooperation not relevant for Greece.42 A number of
4° Finley, in the introduction to the collection he edited on landed property in Greece, remarks
sarcastically on "the curious predilection of students of classical antiquity for not studying in depth
some of the most fundamental aspects of ancient society" (1973b: 9). Seaford, in his dazzling review
of Kurke 1999, points to precisely this gaping lacuna in her elaborate exploration of ideological
struggles in the Archaic Period (Seaford 2002: 158---59). It is symptomatic of J. Hall's gingerly
handling of economic aspects of Greece in the Archaic Period that he takes up the topic of "Making
a Living" in the tenth of his twelve chapters (2007: 235-54), focusing on the issues of peasantry,
trade, and coinage.
41 Marx admittedly used the term in more than one sense, but each sense is compatible with the others
and I believe compatible with the sense in which I use it here. G. A. Cohen (1978: 79-84) offers an
elaborate overview of these different senses.
42 Mann (1986: 185) rightly stresses the difference between rain-watered soils and those of Mesopotamia,
but it is unclear to what extent the shift to iron led to dramatic increases in agriculture: Hesiod,
some two to three hundred years after the introduction of iron to Greece (Snodgrass 1971: 217-
22) still urges on his audience a plow made entirely of wood - as did Thomas Jefferson in 1795
(see discussion in Chapter 4). In defining class relations, can we really say with Mann, "iron plowers
Comcious and uncomcious determinants 25
changes during this period - some, as we shall see, still hotly debated,
such as a gradual shift in emphasis from herding to more intensive agri-
culture, the use of fallow fields vs. more intensive manuring, long-term
deforestation or erosion - were probably not consciously or only dimly
perceived by the producers even as their very engagement in productive
activity impacts upon and eventually transforms their environment. 43 It is
at least debatable how conscious Greeks were of the gradual change from
bronze to iron tools. At the same time, every one involved in and affected
by production must have been acutely aware of who controlled what sort
of productive land and how much land, and what specific crops, were
possible and desirable. This ongoing tension of conscious and unconscious
factors central to Marxist approaches is often ostensibly endorsed by cit-
ing with approval Marx's dictum quoted earlier, that "people make history
but not under conditions of their own choosing," but immediately these
authors are at pains to emphasize "knowledgeable agents" (e.g., Giddens
1981: 16). 44 At the same time, while revolutionary changes in the economic
base may occur with striking and devastating rapidity - as for example
the destruction of the whole Mycenaean redistributive system 45 - Marx
insists that it is in "the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in
short, ideological forms [that] men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out" 46 (MECW 29: 203, my emphasis). This emphasis on the more
restrained aristocrats by a loose, communal, and even democratic structure of power" (Mann 1986:
197)? I find it amusing that Mann describes his initial inspiration as the desire to "refute Karl Marx
and reorganize Max Weber" (vii) but ends up offering a most mechanical technologism to explain
historical change. The idea of iron's democratizing potential originates, as far as I know, with the
Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe (e.g., 1954: 191) and proved unduly optimistic.
4l Many have commented, for example, on the gradual deforestation of Greece as a consequence not
only of the conscious act of cutting down trees but of raising goats - probably without registering
consciously that the goats ate the new trees' shoots and thus precluded natural reforestation (e.g.,
Osborne 2009: 22).
44 I. Morris even goes so far as to endorse Stedman Jones's triumphalist dismissal of Marx, "Marx
famously observed ... that 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it under circum-
stances chosen by themselves, etc... : The great contribution of cultural historians like Stedman
Jones lies in showing how often people have made history as they pleased, with discursive forces"
(Morris 2000: 16). Stedman-Jones ends his article by calling for clearing away "the unsorted debris
left by the death of Marxism" (1996: 33). As Niall McKeown points out, "few theories have had their
death announced quite so often as Marxism" (1999: 103).
45 I am of course using the word "revolutionary" here as Marx usually does in the sense of fundamental
structural change, which may be very rapid or in some cases may take centuries (e.g., the agricultural
"revolution"). I do not mean to imply that the end of the Mycenaean period was the consequence
of a specific political revolution (see Chapter 1).
46 Marx's sense of the power of ideas is well illustrated in one of his earliest published texts: "The weapon
of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by
material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses"
(MECW 3: 182). "As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds
Theoretical comideratiom
conscious aspects of class struggle operating in conjunction with the uncon-

scious factors is another way of understanding a dialectical view of deter-
minations rather than a mechanical model of economic determinism: 47
Marx insists that historical change must be understood in relation to
the whole range of factors summed up in the notions of "culture" and
"society" as well as specifically economic factors. Complaints about Marx-
ist "reductionism" thus ignore how fully Marx's own analysis assumes as its
real object the "total social phenomena" (cf. Mauss 1967:1), "the concrete
totality of the historical world, the concrete and total historical process"
(Lukacs 1971: 145). 48
SEPARATING OUT THE ECONOMIC
A subtle variation on the idea of economic determination implicitly fused

with the concept of the "embedded economy" is the recurrent complaint
by many critics of Marx about the separating out of an economic sphere
in discussing societies which did not themselves separate out such a sphere
and societies in which the areas we may think of as "economic" are so
thoroughly integrated with culturally symbolic systems such as kinship and
religion. There are two analytic problems here. One is the issue whether
it is legitimate to ask questions about a society the members of which did
not ask of themselves. Here I would assert that the answer is clearly, yes. 49
its spiritual weapons in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this
ingenuous soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into human being.r will take place"
(ibid. 187, emphasis in original).
47 I find it rather ironic that people who have read very little or no Marx are quick to dismiss him as an
"economic determinist," but feel very comfortable in appealing to Weber, who so much more justly
fits the label: "The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism
was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did
its part in building the tremendous cosmos ofthe modern economic order. This order is now bound to
the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives ofall
individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic
acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized
coal is burnt. In Baxter's [a seventeenth-century Presbyterian writer on Puritan ethics] view the care
for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be
thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage" (Weber
1958: 181, my emphasis) .
.S As noted earlier F. Jameson 2009 (210-14) focuses on the postmodern critique of precisely this
aspiration to totality; see also below. Postmodernist theorists who passionately denounce the existence
of"extra-discursive domains" (e.g., Stedman Jones 1996: 30) seem to ignore as well a whole range of
unconscious behaviors and developments. Stedman Jones grudgingly acknowledges that phenomena
like urbanization or population growth "far exceeded what could be grasped by an examination of
individual intentions" (27-8), but instead of seriously theorizing such phenomena he simply returns
to his diatribe against Foucault.
49 Here I fully agree with Finley: "we have the right to study such economies, to pose ques-
tions about their society that the ancients themselves never thought of" (197µ: 23). Marx,
of course, went further and argued that only the historical process makes some key analytic
Separating out the economic 27
Any analysis of the past that is to be relevant to our era is bound to pose
the questions that are meaningful to our era whether or not they attracted
the attention of the periods under consideration. The alternative, after all,
is to take the past at its own word. 50 More specifically Marx attacked the
readiness of Hegelian historians - and they are still around 5' - to
detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to
them an independent existence ... If we thus ignore the individuals and world
conditions which are the source of the ideas, then we can say, for instance, that
during the time the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts of honor, loyalty,
etc., were dominant ... Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling
individuals and, above all, from the relations which result from a given stage of
the mode of production ... it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas 'the
Idea', the thought, etc., as the dominant force in history ... Whilst in ordinary life
every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes
to be and what he really is, our historiography has not yet won this trivial insight.
It takes every epoch at its word and believes that everything it says and imagines
about itself is true. (MECW 5: 60-62)
concepts - e.g., the concept of labor in general as opposed to specific types of labor, or the
concept of value - available. He cites Aristotle repeatedly in this connection, e.g.: "Aristotle there-
fore himself tells us what prevented any further analysis: the lack of a concept of value ... The secret
of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour and because
in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human
equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes
possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour,
hence the dominant social relation between men as possessors of commodities. Aristotle's genius is
displayed precisely by his discovery of a relation of equality in the value-expression of commodities.
Only the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived prevented him from finding
out what 'in reality' this relation of equality consisted of' (Marx 1976: 151-2). The passage is also a
good example of Marx's conception of the intimate but not mechanically determinist relationship
between a mode of production and the production of concepts (c£ his more elaborate comments
in the Grundrisse 1973: 103--6). Polanyi, without mentioning Marx, is clearly following his lead in
his focus on Aristotle (1968: 17-18, c£ 78---n5).
50 J. Hall's normative dictum that "it should be the specific character of the available evidence rather
than the theoretical or ideological preferences of the historian that dictate the most appropriate
method to apply to a body of material" (2007: 287) is on one level merely common sense: one
cannot, as he well argues, build an account around a series of events if there are virtually no reliably
attested events. But on another level Hall comes perilously close to falling back on the empiricist
delusion that the data speak for themselves. At the same time he himself in fact eloquently defends
the use of anthropological theoretical models to make plausible reconstructions from very partial
data (e.g., 2007: 283).
51 I. Morris 2000 struck me as peculiarly "Hegelian" in the sense that he repeatedly gives priority to his
alleged concept of to meson. He claims, for example, "to meson . .. provided the values which made
democracy thinkable. To understand Greek democracy, we must first understand this worldview"
(2000: n3). This appears at least to dismiss both politics and economics as relevant contributing
factors, considerations of which are largely absent throughout Morris's text, which bizarrely, in my
view, projects the middling ideology back into the early Iron Age. To be sure, I also suggest that
the origins of democracy might be seen in a putative egalitarian, meritocratic phase of the early Iron
Age. But one would still need to account for the emergence of a whole array of social, political, and
economic factors countering that phase. Moreover, such a phase is at best one possible inference
from the spotty archaeological record (see discussion in Chapter 1).
Theoretical comideratiom
This is not to deny that discourses construct versions of reality. But their
power in context does not exempt them from critical testing in the light of
material realities they are often designed to obscure.
The second analytic problem is a consequence of separating out for anal-
ysis any aspect of what one recognizes as a complex totality, which of course
any human society is. While Marx unquestionably placed heavy emphasis
on material production, even in the first early sketch of his overall concep-
tion of society and history, the German Ideology (1845-47), he is careful to
insist that what he sets out analytically first among three "premises of all
human existence" is not temporally separate from the other two: "These
three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different
stages, but just as three aspects . .. which have existed simultaneously since the
dawn of history and the first men, and which assert themselves in history
today" (MECW 5: 41-43, my emphasis). Yet even a generally sympathetic
critic of Marx can cite the first sentences of this section of the German Ide-
ology to indict Marx for granting primacy to the economic: "Experience is
first of all, and always primarily, the production of necessities: 'life involves
before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many
other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means
to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself'" (Sahlins 1976:
140, his emphasis). The analytically first premise is transformed by Sahlins's
context and emphasis into an absolute and temporal priority. Sahlins fails
to point out that the second premise "that the satisfaction of the first need,
the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been
acquired, leads to new needs" is also called by Marx "the first historical act"
(loc. cit.). Moreover, the third premise, sexual reproduction and the family,
has obviously just as clear a claim analytically to "priority'' as a premise of
human existence.
Sahlins, like Finley (as noted above), Donlan, I. Morris, and many others,
was heavily influenced by Polanyi's notion of an "embedded" economy
(Tandy and Neale 1994: 16) and seems to consider the embeddedness of an
economy to constitute a ground for dismissal of Marx. Yet no less a figure
than Levi-Strauss rightly defended Marx and Engels's clear understanding
of this phenomenon:
Actually Marx and Engels frequently express the idea that primitive, or allegedly
primitive, societies are governed by 'blood ties' (which today we call kinship
systems) and not by economic relationships ... The temporal category applicable
to them has nothing to do with the one we employ to understand the development
of our own society. Nor does this conception contradict in the least the famous
dictum of the Communist Manifesto that 'the history of all hitherto existing society
Foucault and the limits ofoverdetermination 29
is the history of class struggles.' In the light of Hegel's philosophy of the state, this
dictum does not mean that the class struggle is co-extensive with humanity, but
that the ideas of history and society can be applied, in the full sense which Marx
gives them, only from the time when the class struggle first appeared. (1967: 333) 52
FOUCAULT AND THE LIMITS OF OVERDETERMINATION
As noted above, embracing an analytical model committed to giving equal

weight to every possible contributing determinant risks either the silliness of
Forrest's embrace of "confusion" (see below) or the bewildering sophistica-
tion of Althusser's strong version of"Overdetermination." This embracing
of the sheer complexity of causation in Althusser's pupil 53 Foucault takes
the form of what seems to me, for all its brilliance, the abandonment
of any goal of explanation in history. ''Archaeology," Foucault's metaphor
for his new approach, 54 "tries to define not the thoughts, representations,
images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses;
but those discourses themselves, those discourses as document, as practices
52 Elsewhere in the same text Levi-Strauss comments bitterly in response to a critic named Jacques
Revel, "Marx and Engels knew incomparably more anthropology almost a hundred years ago than
Revel knows today" (1967: 336).
53 In a 1983 interview Foucault declares categorically, "I have never been a Freudian, I have never
been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist" (1988: 22). James Miller notes apropos of
Althusser: "He nevertheless proved to be a spellbinding teacher, a quality that helped him recruit
an unprecedented number of normaliens [i.e., his students at the Ecole Normale Superieure],
including Foucault, into the Communist Party." He goes on to quote a comment by Foucault:
"In the immediate postwar period the Communist Party exercised ... a triple legitimacy: historical,
political, and theoretical. .. Over anyone who pretended to be on the left, it 'laid down the law'.
One was either for, or against; an ally, or an adversary" (Miller 1993: 57).
54 I well understand that this apparent dismissal of Foucault constitutes a heresy. Robin Osborne, for
example, in his introduction to a collection of papers from Past and Present, writes: "This volume
records the impact made, directly or indirectly, upon Greek and Roman history by the work of
Michel Foucault ... It is Foucault's more general influence on the field that is at issue here. That
influence stems from his perception that all social relations are power relations" (Osborne 2004:
2). First of all it strikes me that only a group of scholars who have never troubled to read Marx
seriously would be surprised to learn that "all social relations are power relations": this is implicit and
explicit in all of Marx's analyses of relations of production. But as F. Jameson has argued apropos
of Foucault, "For Marxism, indeed, the categories of power are not the ultimate ones, and the
trajectory of contemporary social theory (from Weber to Foucault) suggests that the appeal to it is
often strategic and involves a systematic displacement of the Marxian problematic. No, the ultimate
form of the 'nightmare of history' is rather the fact of labor itself, the intolerable spectacle of the
backbreaking millennial toil of millions of people from the earliest moments of human history.
The more existential versions of this dizzying and properly unthinkable, unimaginable spectacle -
as in horror at the endless succession of 'dying generations,' at the ceaseless wheel of life, or at the
irrevocable passage of Time itself - are themselves only disguises for this ultimately scandalous fact
of mindless alienated work and the irremediable loss and waste of human energies, a scandal to
which no metaphysical categories can give meaning. The scandal is everywhere known, everywhere
repressed - un secret de tous connu" Qameson 1988c: II 162).
obeying certain rules ... It is not an interpretative discipline" (1972: 138-9,
his emphasis). He declares, "In our time history aspires to the condition
of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument" (1972: 7, my
emphasis). 55 Foucault's notion of "description" presupposes the immense
glut of data from or about all levels of society surviving from the seventeenth
century to the present. At the same time his emphasis on "discontinuity"
seems to displace or at least defer the question of explanation.5 6 Lemert and
Gillen are at pains to warn us against seeing Archaeology ofKnowledge "as
Foucault's methodological program" (1982: 48) and point out that "most
of its vocabulary disappears thereafter" (ibid.: 55-6). To be sure, at other
times Foucault's model seems to be a Nietzschean "genealogy'': "One has
to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself,
that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution
of the subject within an historical framework. And this is what I would
call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the consti-
tution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having
to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to
the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of
history" (1980: 117, cf. 1977: 139-64).
At the same time Foucault's thought is so permeated with Marxist
thought, with which he is in a more or less constant polemical dialogue,
that it would take at least a book-length study (e.g., Poster 1984, 1989, who
is a strong partisan of Foucault) to sort out what is in the spirit of Marx
and what entails a radical rejection of Marx. I will give only one exam-
ple. For all his emphasis on the centrality of discourses, repudiating the
"linguistic turn," he argues in terms very congenial to a Marxist approach:
"I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of
language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history
which bears and determines us has the form of war rather than that of
55 I found quite amusing Stedman Jones's ferocious denunciation of Foucault's residual Marxism
(1996), cited with apparent enthusiasm by I. Morris (2000: 15-16), who nonetheless returns to a
more "Marxist" position by citing a study ofland distribution and invoking Geertz's "hard surfaces''
(16--17). Stedman Jones, as noted earlier, is scarcely the first or doubtless the last to proclaim
triumphantly "the death of Marxism" (1996: 33).
56 In the famous interview entitled "Truth and Power" Foucault expresses his shock and annoyance at
being characterized as "a philosopher who founds his theory of history on discontinuity." Offering a
sophisticated account of a "whole new 'regime' in discourse and forms of knowledge," he argues, "it
was these different regimes that I tried to identify and describe in The Order of Thing.r, all the while
making clear that I wasn't trying for the moment to explain them, and that it would be necessary to
try to do this in a subsequent work" (1980: n1-13, my emphasis). Yet he did not, as far as I know,
write this subsequent work of explanation. Nonetheless he does hint at various points that the needs
of capitalism required new regimes of medical practice, discipline, and sexuality.
The postmodern dismissal ofMarx 31
language: relations of power, not relations of meaning" (1980: 114). Later
in the same interview he returns to the idea of war only to distance himself
from unthinking Marxist invocations of "class struggle": "it's astonishing to
see how easily and self-evidently people talk of war-like relations of power
and class struggle without ever making it clear whether some form of war
is meant, and if so what form" (ibid. 123). Still later in the same interview,
asked about the role of intellectuals, he argues in favor of abandoning
a "universal" focus and concentrating struggles "within specific sectors,
at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate
them ... They have met with problems that are specific, 'non-universal',
and often different from those of the proletariat or the masses. And yet
I believe intellectuals have actually been drawn closer to the proletariat
and the masses, for two reasons. Firstly, because it has been a question of
real, material, everyday struggles, and secondly, because they have often
been confronted, albeit in different form, by the same adversary as the
proletariat, namely, the multinational corporations, the judicial and police
apparatuses, the property speculators, etc." (ibid. 126).
In dealing with the Archaic Age, and especially with its immediate
antecedents, the evidence is so sparse, fragmentary, and ambiguous, that it
is perhaps impossible to talk of "explanation" but rather what one hopes are
not completely implausible conjectures that do not violate that evidence.
Yet the kind of "archaeology" of knowledge advocated by Foucault (e.g.,
1970, 1972) - for all its appeal to a "post-structuralist" sensibility - entails
a fundamental break with the notion of historiography as explanation
and comes perilously close - for all its sophisticated theorization - to
Henry Ford's vision of history as "just one damned thing [or episteme]
after another."57 While the injunction to avoid superficial totalizations is
salutary, to me a conception of history as the deployment of the "space of
a dispersion" (Foucault 1972: rn) is not enough.
THE POSTMODERN DISMISSAL OF MARX
While there is a very full and complex body of work - much of it also
inspired by Althusser - that defines itself as "postmodern Marxism" (e.g.,
Resnick and Wolff 1987, Callari et al. 1995, Kellner 1989a), Foucault
57 For an enlightening overview of fundamental problems ofhistoricization from a Marxist perspective

see F. Jameson 1988a. I at least find it ironic that at a time when some of the wisest archaeologists of
our era (Daniel and Renfrew 1988 and Snodgrass 2006, a reprint of earlier articles) were calling for
a revolution in archaeology- a decisive shift away from description toward explanation - Foucault
invoked archaeology as pure description.
represents perhaps the most compelling of so-called "postmodernist" dis-
missals of Marx, what Fredric Jameson has dubbed the "demarxification"
of France (1989: 374). Jean-Frall<;:ois Lyotard in defining the "postmodern
condition" reduces Marxism to the practice of self-styled "communist"
countries: "in communist countries, the totalizing model and its totalitarian
effect have made a comeback in the name of Marxism itself'' (1984: 13, my
emphasis). The implication seems to be that any effort to offer a "totaliz-
ing" - i.e., comprehensive - account of society leads, via a silly pun of a
Cold War type, to a totalitarian society. As Fredric Jameson points out in
his introduction to Lyotard,
Lyotard is, after all, writing in the wake of a certain French "post-Marxism,"
that is, an enormous reaction on all levels against various Marxist and Commu-
nist traditions in France, whose prime target on the philosophical level is the
Hegel/Lukacs concept of 'totality' (often overhastily assimilated to Stalinism or
even to the Leninist party on the political level). (F. Jameson 1984b: x)
It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of Jacques Derrida on the

whole range of discourses that call themselves or are dubbed by others as
"postmodern." As with Foucault, a full, fair assessment of Derrida's rela-
tion to Marxism would merit at least a book-length study. 58 My more
limited purpose here is to signal both my awareness that for a considerable
period many of the most sophisticated and influential figures of Western
intellectual life felt the need to distance themselves from what they per-
ceived as "Marxism." In a 1989 interview with the American Althusserian
Michael Springer, Derrida offers a fascinating picture of the tight little
world of high theory at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where Althusser
was a professor and Derrida first a student in 1952, then himself a professor
for nearly twenty years. Derrida attempts to explain how it was possible
to have cordial relations for twenty years, to have deep reservations about
major elements of Althusser's intellectual project, yet never to have argued
them out openly:
I wanted to ask questions. At every step, I would have liked to have had a long
discussion with him and his friends and asked them to respond to questions I
felt necessary. The fact is - as strange as it might seem - this discussion never
took place. And yet we lived in the same "house," where we were colleagues for
twenty years and his students, and friends were often, in another context, mine.
Everything took place underground, in the said of the unsaid. It's part of the
French scene and is not simply anecdotal. (2002: 158)
58 Jameson (2009: 102-12, 127-80) goes a long way in this task.

The postmodern dismissal ofMarx 33
As he explains elsewhere in this interview, the key source of the "unsaid"
on his part was the fact that Althusser and his friends were members of
the French Communist Party, that Derrida was not, but felt that what
Althusser was trying to achieve within the Party was positive and that
any attempt to challenge it on intellectual grounds would inevitably be
interpreted as simply anti-communist (152). For Derrida, the ultimate
Socrates of our era - relentlessly questioning the presuppositions of all
propositions - Marx was no less "metaphysical" than Hegel (159-60).
Derrida insists, however, "I did read Marx, you know" (159), though his
great translator and disciple Gayatry Spivak does declare, "Derrida seems
not to know Marx's main argument" (1993: 97). At the same time, both
the earlier interview, which indicates that Derrida read all of Althusser's
work and Derrida's moving tribute (2001: 111-18) at Althusser's funeral,
which speaks of the ways in which Louis was "inside" him, suggest that
the appearance of simple indifference or hostility to Marxism may be very
misleading. What is perhaps most significant, however, for understanding
the widespread French disenchantment with Marxism was the disgraceful
role of the French Communist Party, which supported the repression in
Hungary in 1956. 59 In any case, for many years followers of Derrida did
not seem to feel a need to read Marx and rejected a focus on class as old-
fashioned essentialism. 60 After the collapse of the Soviet Union Derrida
did indeed exhort us to read Marx in very strong terms: "It will always be
59 Derrida (2002: 164), tells chis damning anecdote about Alchusser and the Party in 1956: "With the
repression in Hungary in 1956, some of chose communist intellectuals began to leave the Party.
Gerard Genette, who was a Party member until 1956, told me chat he went to see Alchusser after the
Hungarian revolc to impart his distress, anguish, reasons, and probably to ask his advice. Alchusser
supposedly told him: 'But if what you say were true, then the Party would be wrong!' This seemed
to Alchusser to be precluded, and he proceeded to demonstrate ad absurdum chat what Genette was
saying needed to be corrected." J.-P. Vernant, who fought in the Resistance and had been a member
of the Jeunes Communistes, also left the Party at chis point (personal conversation).
60 I base chis in part on many conversations over many years with pupils of Derrida. It is striking chat
in Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader (1991) of more than 600 pages, there is one footnote reference to
Marx (481 n. 14), where he is lumped with Socrates, Descartes and Freud as a seeker after "truth."
Michael Ryan's heroic effort to fuse Marxism and Deconstruction (1982) notes chat "in early texts he
[Derrida] suggests chat Marxism itself is subject to deconstruction, chat it belongs to the metaphysics
of presence" and traces a gradual process by which Derrida expressed more sympathy for Marx.
Spivak in two extremely difficult essays (1984 and 1993) explores some grounds for parallels. In the
earlier essay she cites an interview from 1980 in which Derrida declares "though I am not and have
never been an orthodox Marxist, I am very disturbed by the antimarxism dominant now in France
so chat, as a reaction, through political reflection and personal preference, I am inclined to consider
myself more Marxist than I would have done at a time when Marxism was a sort of fortress" (Spivak
1984: 245 n. 14). This last phrase of course alludes to the dominant role of the French Communist
Party in the years following the end of World War II. Poster (1975: 36-41) underlines both the
post-war prestige of the Party due to its wartime role in the Resistance and its positivistic "scientific"
and Stalinist orientation.
a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx - which is to say also a
few others - and to go beyond scholarly 'reading' or 'discussion'. It will be
more and more a fault, a failing of theoretical, philosophical, and political
responsibility" (1994: 13). Was this a sincere change of position, or was
this perhaps only said in the confidence that Marx's "grand narrative" and
insistence on the primacy of production will be easily recognized as the
illusions of an era safely dismantled by floating signifiers, absent centers,
chains of arbitrary contingencies, and the irreducible plurality of struggles?
Whatever Derrida's own final position was on the relevance of Marx as
an analytical approach, the political influence of deconstruction is most
obvious perhaps in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985).
They describe their project with a rhetorical question:
Why should we broach this task through a critique and a deconstruction of the
various discursive surfaces of classical Marxism? Let us first say that there is not
one discourse and one system of categories through which the "real" might speak
without mediations. In operating deconstructively within Marxist categories, we
do not claim to be writing "universal history," to be inscribing our discourse as
a moment of a single, linear process of knowledge. Just as the era of normative
epistemologies has come to an end, so too has the era of universal discourses. (1985:
3, my emphasis)
Their intentions, like those of Anthony Giddens with his "third way"
(1998), are admirably directed toward bringing about a better form of
society on the assumption that Soviet Marxism, which is so often mis-
leadingly described as "classical Marxism," was so total a failure 61 that
virtually nothing beyond a vaguely conceived project of human liberation
is worth salvaging from the vast body of Marx's work, while accepting as
"realistic" the dominant structures of modern capitalism. As Slavoj Zizek
has rightly observed, the proponents of this dismissal of class, "as a rule,
leave out the resignation at its heart - the acceptance of capitalism as 'the
only game in town', the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the
existing capitalist liberal regime" (Zizek 2000: 95). Subsequently he makes
perhaps the more relevant point that this very shift in perspective on class
requires historicizing: "The passage from 'essentialist' Marxism to post-
modern contingent politics (in Laclau) ... is not a simple epistemological
progress but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society"
61 The brilliant work of Boris Kagarlitsky (e.g., 1988, 1995, 1999, 2002), who was jailed under Brezhnev
for "anti-Soviet" activities, as well as under Yeltsin, offers a more balanced and complex insider's
critique and evaluation of the Soviet experience than is usually available in the West. See also
F. Jameson's thoughtful chapter on "Actually Existing Marxism" (2009: 367-409).
The Archaic Period: attempting explanation vs. radical skepticism 35
(ibid: 106). 62 Fortunately my own project does not entail charting the future
course of capitalism, which happens not to look very bright at the current
moment. But Zizek's approach has some affinity with Jameson's somewhat
different analysis, which is precisely to historicize the postmodern turn by
the application of Marx's fundamental analytical concept of the mode of
production, as is clear from his subtitle, Postmodernism, or The Cultural
Logic ofLate Capitalism (1991). It is the work of Fredric Jameson, beginning
with his Marxism and Form (1971) - primarily focused on the Frankfurt
School and Sartre - that perhaps more than any other contemporary work
has convinced me that the Marxist categories of mode of production and
class, whatever the complexities and valid questions raised about their
application to contemporary capitalism, offer viable modes of analysis for
precapitalist societies.
THE ARCHAIC PERIOD: ATTEMPTING EXPLANATION

VS. RADICAL SKEPTICISM
Though conclusions about a period as inherently murky as the Archaic

Period must all be inherently provisional, I hope the effort is worthwhile
to look for a meaningful pattern of development that goes beyond, for
example, George Forrest's perhaps slightly playful declaration, after explor-
ing various examples of Greek colonization, "These examples show how
foolish it is to generalize about colonization. We must argue for confusion,
a confusion which by 600 BC found Greeks established in southern France,
northern Africa, Egypt, etc." (Forrest 1986: 26, my emphasis). Similarly,
J. K. Davies (1997) has raised such a host of provocative questions - not
least about the very term polis - about the endlessly debated "rise of the
polis" as to make Forrest's caution here too seem the only safe path. In
the same vein Jonathan Hall brackets his recent overview of the period
with cautionary tales demonstrating why he believes it is not possible to
say anything securely about either the alleged Lelantine War (1-8) or the
alleged First Sacred War (276-81). His fundamental creed seems to be,
"agnosticism is to be preferred to credulity" (2007: 106) - a formulation
with which it is hard to argue. But caution too has its price. Though Hall
notes changes that take place and opts for a "processual account, focusing
on spheres such as society, economics, and culture" (2007: 282, cf. 16) - he
summarizes these processes as "shifting residence patterns, land use, social
62 For a fuller discussion of the relation of Marxism to postmodernism see F. Jameson 1991 and 1988c,
Wood 1986, Wood and Foster 1997, Eagleton 1996a.
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not in his or her “line of business.” The hero had to be given to the
“leading man” and the heroine to the “leading woman.” The villain—
and in the dramas of those distant days there was likely to be a
villain of the deepest dye—was assigned to the heavy man; while
the brisk young fellows fell to the lot of the juvenile lead or of the
light comedian. The broadly comic parts were assigned to the low
comedian; and there were frequently two of him, the first low
comedy and the second low comedy. Strongly marked characters
went to the character-actor, who had to be a master of make-up.
The elderly characters were in the hands of the old man and the old
woman; there was sometimes also a second old man, altho if the
character-actor was both versatile and obliging he could be prevailed
upon to play one of the more aged characters. The serving maids
were attributed to the singing chambermaid, who would have her
best chance when a farce or extravaganza was in the bill.
VII
The stock-company system had its advantages and its

disadvantages, both artistic and economic. The actor—sometimes
under contract for several years—could settle down and have a
home where he could bring up his children; he was not a tramp,
ever on the go and not knowing where he might be one week from
another. He was informed as to approximate length of the theatrical
season, and he was not in dread of being thrown out of an
engagement in the middle of the winter or of being stranded on the
road with his salary unpaid for a month. There was a certain stability
and security in his position, altho there was also always the
possibility that the manager might exhaust his often meager
resources and so find himself unable to keep the theater open or to
meet his obligations to his company.
With its incessant changes of bill and with the unending variety of
the plays presented, the actors had far more practise in their art
than the performers of to-day. With the frequent production of
Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, even the minor members of the
company had at least an opportunity to learn how to read blank
verse. The permanence of the organization enabled the inexpert
young people to become familiar with the methods of their more
skilful elders; and it also tended toward the development of that
harmony of effort, that team-play, which is of prime importance. On
the other hand, the haste with which the constant succession of
pieces had to be prepared interfered with thoroughness and with
delicacy of interpretation. When a drama was pitchforked on the
stage, so to speak, for only half-a-dozen performances, as was often
the case, the actors had neither time nor energy to do their best;
and they were tempted to fall into the habit of happy-go-lucky
slovenliness.
Then the symmetry of the performance was not infrequently
blemished by the fact that there was often in the company no
performer really capable of acting a salient part in the play about to
be produced; and yet this part had to be undertaken by somebody,
however ill at ease he might be. There were round pegs in square
holes; and this was unavoidable since it was impossible, more often
than not, to engage outside performers, even if the manager had
desired to do so,—which he rarely did.
If I may be allowed to call myself as a witness I can depose that I
have seen not a few performances of the well chosen company at
Wallack’s Theater forty-odd years ago which were far less effective
than they might have been because one or two prominent
characters had to be assigned to performers who were good actors
in their own lines but who were hopelessly unsuited to the parts
forced upon them because they alone were available. In the
‘Shaughraun’ of Dion Boucicault, for instance, by the side of
Boucicault himself and Harry Beckett, Ada Dyas and H. J. Montague,
John Gilbert and Madam Ponisi, who were all admirably adapted to
the characters Boucicault had composed for them, there were also
Joseph Polk and Ione Burke, who were entirely unsuited to the parts
they were forced to play. And there were two equally unfortunate
miscastings in ‘Diplomacy.’ If this was the case not infrequently at
Wallack’s with its long prestige, how much more frequent and more
flagrant must have been the misfits in the performances in theaters
of inferior grade?
Professor Phelps tells us that all would go well if there could be
established a stock-company in every city and even in every large
town; but Professor Phelps—fortunately for him—was not born long
enough ago to have seen the artistic inadequacy which is inevitable
in the stock-company, inadequacy in the acting, in the stage-
management and in the mounting. The productions of the managers
of traveling companies have set a standard to which no resident
stock-company can hope to attain. And the cost of an ambitious
attempt to satisfy the expectations of the playgoing public would be
prohibitive to any intending manager of a stock-company. He would
not dare to undertake the task unless he was supported by an
endowment, by a subsidy, or by a large body of subscribers, who
being sharers in the enterprize might be more tolerant of relatively
unimportant deficiencies in acting and in mounting.
There is no doubt that a repertory theater is highly desirable. It
might be of inestimable service both to the author and to the actor.
The actor is very unfortunate if, in the malleable years of his youth,
he finds himself appearing in the same part for two or three hundred
nights; and the author is unfortunate when his play has had its two
or three hundred nights and then drops out of sight forevermore. A
repertory theater would provide varied experience for the performers
and afford them opportunity to acquire versatility; and it could do a
great service to the reputation of the playwrights by reviving and
keeping on hand, so to speak, the plays which deserve to be seen
again and again.
But under present conditions a repertory theater is economically
impossible. The rent of a building and the salaries of actors are now
prohibitive. A repertory theater in New York, even if it did not aspire
to be a rival of the Théâtre Français, must be described as a luxury,
—and like all luxuries it would be expensive. It can come into
existence, and it can have a chance to continue to exist, only when a
group of lovers of the arts of the drama shall combine to provide the
theater itself and to make the path easy for its manager.
(1920)
XIV
MEMORIES OF ACTORS
XIV
MEMORIES OF ACTORS
A playgoer from my youth up, a playgoer in Paris and London as well

as in New York, I have had the good fortune to be on terms of
friendly intimacy with not a few of the leading actors of the past
half-century, French and British and American. I have elsewhere set
down my memories of Edwin Booth and Henry Irving, Joseph
Jefferson and Constant Coquelin, four of the foremost figures in the
theater at the end of the nineteenth century. There are a dozen or a
score of other players with whom I foregathered at one time or
another, less prominent in their profession but not for that reason
any less attractive in their several ways and not less companionable.
Most of the actors with whom I have had relation were good
company; they had seen many men and many places; and their
journeyings had worn off any abrading angularities their
personalities may have possessed. They had mixed with all sorts and
conditions of men; and they thereby gained the shrewd knowledge
of human nature which they needed in their art. They had acquired
polish even if they did not always possess culture. They were no
more likely to be bookish in their tastes, or even to be widely read,
than are the practitioners of the other professions, painters and
musicians, most of whom are probably too alertly interested in the
immediate present to be tempted into dusty exploration of the past.
They were often apt in anecdote and quick of wit, with a wide
command over words, the result of their acquisition of the sharp and
swift dialog of the stage. In no other calling have I found men
swifter to make a joke or to take one, even if it happened to be
pointed against themselves.
It is sometimes asserted that actors as a class are inclined to be
unduly aware of their own excellence in the quality they profess and
even unduly inclined to communicate to others their own opinion of
their own achievements. My experience, such as it is, does not
support this assertion. I have found the men of the stage at least as
modest as the men of the studio and the men of the study. Over-
swollen vanity is not the exclusive property of any one profession,
and I doubt if it is more frequent in actors than in authors or artists.
Where I comb out my memories the two most exuberant examples
of ingrowing and outflowering self-appreciation that I ever had
occasion to observe were both of them physicians, who were also
authors and who were wholly unable to resist the ever present
temptation to dilate upon their own triumphs and to confide to all
listeners the frequent compliments they had gluttonously accepted.
There was nothing of this sort in Booth or Irving, in Jefferson or
Coquelin; they were far above it; they were free from self-assertion
and even from self-consciousness,—altho of course they could not
but be aware of their own outstanding position. In fact, I cannot
recall any successful actor of my acquaintance who was abnormally
self-centered, or who took himself too seriously. Sometimes, it is
true, I have found an actor who had not yet established his position
and who now and again seized a chance to let me know that he had
played this or that important part not unsuccessfully. But this was
not boastful self-praise, even if it might so seem to the uninformed
listener; it was only a supplying of information not otherwise
available. A writer or a painter has no need to call attention to his
book or his picture, because these survive to speak for themselves,
even if there are only a few who have them in mind. But the work of
the actor has no permanence; it perishes as it comes into being; it
instantly ceases to be, except as a memory; and it is as a memory
that the actor feels himself called upon to revive it. The difference is
that whereas the book of the author, the picture of the artist may be
only overlooked, the performance of the actor might be actually
unknown to us if he himself did not tell us about it.
II
The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most
companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had
been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief
management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind
the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became
the Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as
the Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I
had seen his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he
himself was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later
burlesque of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he
was an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I
was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was still
an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest
opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.
He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a
competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when
he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality
coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared to
best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s ‘Arrah-na-
Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and above all
Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir Lucius has
been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of the
second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham. I
have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat
Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham,
yet neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the
gentlemanly simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too
completely an American of the nineteenth century to be able to
assume the part of an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century;
and Florence, excellent as he was in Irish characters of another kind,
bestowed on Sir Lucius a rather finicky affectation, quite out of
keeping with the part.
In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid.
Brougham told me once that his price for writing a play for a star
was three thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a
sum smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day.
And yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for
this modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of
the ‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the
Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and
only less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he
composed for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs.
Florence. These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish
themes, more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’
Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering,
Brougham was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement
over the authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their
professional association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was
revived in 1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady,
supporting Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as
Arrah. And when Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to
undertake ‘Louis XI,’ in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir
Delavigne had made out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was
Coitier; and I can testify that on this occasion the honors were
divided, or at least the laughs, for I never listened to any dialog
more ludicrous than that between a French king with a pronounced
Irish accent and a French physician with an equally persistent
brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s valet explained, “these are our
failures.”
Brougham had his full share of Irish wit, more spontaneous than
Boucicault’s and less likely to be borrowed. He had also the more
English delight in punning. In ‘Pocahontas,’ after the opening song
Powhatan thanks his attendant braves:
Well roared, my jolly Tuscadoras!
Most loyal corps, your king encores your chorus.
And in the same burlesque when John Smith is tied down and
about to be put to death, Pocahontas rushes in, crying, “For my
husband I scream!” Whereupon the endangered hero raises his head
and inquires “Lemon or vanilla?”
These be but airy trifles floating like bubbles atop the dark wave
of forgetfulness, which has engulfed many things far more precious.
An airy trifle also is Brougham’s remark when Pat Hearn (a once
notorious gambler) drove past the Ocean House at Newport one
summer afternoon with a very pretty woman by his side. “Isn’t that
Pat Hearn and his wife?” somebody asked; and Brougham replied at
once, “That’s Hearn, I know; but I can’t say whether or not she is
his’n.”
III
It was also at the Lotos that I got to know John T. Raymond. This
was probably in the fall of 1874, when he was appearing as Colonel
Sellers in Mark Twain’s ‘Gilded Age.’ The actor and the author
quarreled after a while, quarreled bitterly and never made up their
quarrel. No doubt, Mark knew his own creature better than any one
else and certainly better than the rather shallow Raymond. But
Raymond gave us at least all the external characteristics of the
inspired visionary with his inexpugnable optimism, always about to
acquire wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and yet for the
moment reduced to a frugal dinner of turnips and water, with only a
candle to light up his modest store. I have an impression that the
cause of the breach with Mark was Raymond’s unwillingness to
forego two or three easy effects which were always rewarded with
thoughtless laughter but which were not really in keeping with the
character. Raymond was unduly inclined to skylark even on the
stage; I have seen him, in the last act of the ‘Gilded Age,’ match
silver dollars with a friend he had recognized in the audience. Of
course, he chose a moment for the flip of his coin when the
attention of the spectators was bestowed upon some other
performer, and only a few of them detected his inexcusable
pantomime. These lapses from the standard of propriety may not
have been frequent, but they occurred far too often; and they could
not but be offensive to the author of the play in which the actor was
appearing.
When Raymond indulged in tricks of this sort he displayed a lack
of respect alike for his audience and for his art. The art had to suffer
in silence; but the audience might at any time be moved to protest. I
recall that when Raymond was playing Ichabod Crane in 1879 he
sent me a box, to which my wife invited three or four of her young
friends. In the last act Ichabod comes out into the garden to ask
Katrina into the house, where there was merrymaking. To the
startled astonishment of our party, Raymond said “Come on in,
Katrina! There’s lots of fun! Brander Matthews has brought a whole
boxful of pretty girls!”—a speech which nobody in the house—except
the boxful—seemed to hear or at least to apprehend, probably
because it had no relation to the story being acted on the stage.
None the less was Raymond an accomplished comedian, brisk,
lively, laughter-compelling and authoritative. Like many another
comic actor, he longed to play pathetic parts; and unlike most of
those who have this ambition, he did possess the power of drawing
tears. I had first seen him as Asa Trenchard in Paris during the
Exposition of 1867, when Sothern had ventured across the Channel
to disclose Lord Dundreary to the unresponsive French; and I have
never forgotten the simple and manly pathos of the scene in which
Asa burns the will leaving him the fortune which would otherwise go
to the girl he is in love with. Audiences are always ready to
appreciate a brief pathetic episode when the comic character
unexpectedly turns his serious side to the spectators. But they are
resentful when the funny man whom they have gone to laugh with,
and even to laugh at, is presented in a play wherein he is
persistently pathetic and not even intermittently humorous.
Raymond lost money for himself and for his managers when he
impersonated a dreary sobseeker in a dull domestic drama, ‘My Son,’
derived from a tearful Teutonic tale of woe.
In collaboration with H. C. Bunner I put together a rather
boisterous farce called ‘Touch and Go,’ which Raymond liked enough
to contract to produce but not enough for him ever to set about its
production. In its place he had brought out in succession two plays
in which the fun was less acrobatic—‘In Paradise’ and ‘For Congress.’
After these pieces had run their course, G. H. Jessop (who was a
part author of ‘In Paradise’) came to me with an idea for a comic
drama for Raymond and asked me to join him in working it out. It
was to be called ‘A Gold Mine’; and having in mind Raymond’s Asa
Trenchard in the ‘American Cousin,’ I suggested that we lay the
scene in London, so as to repeat the contrast of an American with
the British. We also decided to develop our plot so that at the end of
the second of our three acts Raymond should have a chance to be
pathetic if only for a brief moment.
When our play was read to Raymond he was delighted with it; the
character suited him and he rejoiced that he was to have an
opportunity to show that he could be serious when the situation
required it. During his annual tour he tried out our comedy in one of
the smaller Western cities on a Friday night. He sent us a glowing
report of the reception of our play and of his own triumph at the end
of the second act. And in less than a fortnight thereafter we read in
the morning paper that he had had a sudden seizure which had
carried him off within twenty-four hours.
IV
Fortunately for the authors, thus unexpectedly bereft of the actor

for whom the piece had been composed and to whose personality it
had been adjusted, Helen Tracy, who had played the heroine in the
single performance which Raymond had given, wrote at once to Nat
Goodwin, advising him to secure our play, as it had made a hit and
as the star-part would just suit him. Goodwin asked us to let him
read the piece; he liked it and we soon came to terms with him,
both Jessop and I believing that he was an actor of promise, altho
up to that time he had never undertaken a part demanding any
subtlety of treatment or any veracity of characterization.
When he was a very young man, Goodwin had made his first
appearance in a variety-show, giving imitations of the actors then
prominent. It is a curious fact that even the most adroit mimics are
rarely able to become accomplished actors, competent to sustain a
character consistently throughout a play. Goodwin was one of the
few exceptions to this rule. He soon gave up mimicry for burlesque,
succeeding that fine comedian William H. Crane, in the chief comic
part of the perennially popular ‘Evangeline’ and playing it in careful
imitation of his predecessor. As Joseph Jefferson—who had often
appeared in burlesque early in his career, notably in a parody of
‘Mazeppa’—once said to me, “burlesque is a very good school for a
young comedian, as it tends to give him breadth of effect and
certainty of execution.”
From burlesque Goodwin progressed to farce; and when he came
to us for ‘A Gold Mine,’ he was playing the part of a drunken
undertaker in ‘Turned Up,’ a robustious piece of British manufacture.
As the attraction of this whirlwind farcicality was not exhausted,
Goodwin arranged with us to postpone our play for a year; and he
utilized the delay to prepare the public to accept him in a comedy of
a more refined type. He added to his bill the ingenious and
whimsical piece called ‘Lend Me Five Shillings’ which Jefferson was
still acting occasionally. As he said to me, “I’d sooner finish third to
Jefferson than run a dead heat with Dixey!”—Dixey having just made
a great hit in ‘Adonis.’
Goodwin also appealed to us to modify the entrance of Silas K.
Woolcott, the American who had gone to England to sell a gold
mine. “That entrance is all right in itself,” he explained; “and it was
all right for Raymond, because he had played parts of that kind
before. But I haven’t; and it’s too quiet for me, since they’ll be
disappointed if I don’t make them laugh with my first half-dozen
speeches.” So we brought Woolcott in through the conservatory,
instead of through the front door, and we contrived a very brief
episode of equivoke in which Goodwin mistook the butler for a
certain Sir Thomas Butler whom Woolcott had been invited to meet.
‘A Gold Mine’ was a more or less artificial comedy with a
complicated plot and with dialog as brilliant as the combined wits of
the two collaborators could compass. For the part of the fascinating
widow with whom Woolcott was to pair off at the end of the play
Goodwin engaged Kate Forsythe; and the rest of the cast was at
least adequate if not entirely satisfactory. McCarty of the Boston
Theater produced the play most judiciously, making a valuable
suggestion for heightening the effect of the pathetic speech at the
end of the second act. When we asked Goodwin if he was certain
that he could play this serious bit and carry the audience with him,
the actor answered modestly, “Yes—at least I think so. You see, I’m
going to do it in imitation of Charley Thorne.”
This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of
straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is
profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern by its
experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another craftsman
and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many masters,” so the
actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating the performances
of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave to any one of
them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing and combining
the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example, played one of
his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would have been played
by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself more or
less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to achieve the
airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this assertion
without misgiving as my information came directly from these four
comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied and
versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told me
that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by
incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method
wholly different from Regnier’s.
It was by his performance in ‘A Gold Mine’ that Goodwin first
established his position as an actor of indisputable promise; and in
the remaining thirty years of his life he gained in power and in
authority. ‘In Mizzoura’ was written for him by Augustus Thomas, on
purpose to display the more serious quality the actor had exhibited
in ‘A Gold Mine’; and it was this more serious quality, strengthened
by exercise, which enabled him to rise to the noble dignity of the
final episode in Clyde Fitch’s ‘Nathan Hale,’ a tragic character which
Goodwin portrayed with beautiful fidelity. He became one of the
foremost figures on our stage; he even adventured himself in two
Shaksperian parts, Shylock and Bottom, in neither of which was he
considered to have been entirely successful; and yet despite his
prosperity in the theater he never attained to the commanding
position his native endowment would have entitled him to, if only it
had been sagely administered.
In fact, Goodwin, so it seems to me, threw away a golden
opportunity. After the retirement of Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett
and John McCullough there was an opening for an ambitious actor to
win recognition as their worthy successor; and this was an altitude
to which Goodwin could have aspired, if he had not been deficient in
that intangible and indefinable quality which we call character and
which for success in life is really more important than ability. Ability
he had in abundance but he did not husband it. He did not take life
seriously enough; and therefore his art suffered and failed to mature
as it might have done. He dissipated his ardor and wasted his
strength in default of the implacable ambition which compels self-
control. Nature had bestowed on him a richer gift than on Lawrence
Barrett, who had made himself what he was by stern determination,
whereby he overcame his disadvantages. Goodwin had more
intensity, more power, more resources; and he might have carved a
name for himself as Shylock, Richard III and Iago.
But it was not to be; and he made shipwreck of his career. I failed
to see him when he attempted Shylock, for which he ought to have
had the fire and the passion, but for which he lacked the training he
might easily have attained, if he had forced himself to acquire it. I
did see him in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’; and altho my
memories of George L. Fox and of James Lewis as Bottom are still
vivid, they are not as gratifying as my recollection of Goodwin in the
same part. This revival of Shakspere’s most fanciful and most
humorous comedy failed to attract the public, and the blame was
currently laid upon Goodwin. To my mind this was unjust, since his
rendering of the part seemed to me excellent, firmer in outline and
richer in color than that of either Fox or Lewis. I can never forget the
delicious self-sufficiency of his performance in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe,’
his exuberant vanity, his adroit suggestion of the eternal
complacency of the self-satisfied amateur.
I may be wrong, of course; I may be crediting Goodwin with more
than he possessed, as I am certainly ascribing to him more than he
ever displayed. But I think he had it in him to do finer and stronger
things than he ever aimed at. “The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!”
It would be difficult to find two careers in sharper contrast than

those of Nat Goodwin in the United States and of Beerbohm Tree in
Great Britain. As there was a vacancy at the head of the procession
in America after the withdrawal of Booth and Barrett and
McCullough, so there was one in England after the decline and
disappearance of Henry Irving. Goodwin was unable to seize the
occasion, even if he saw it; Tree saw it and seized it. Altho nature
had been niggardly to Tree where she had been bountiful to
Goodwin, Tree had the inestimable advantage of a resolute will and
of the innate power which impels a man to master the many
difficulties besetting our paths in life. It was by sheer force of
ambition rather than by assured skill as an actor that Tree forged to
the front and took his place as the leader of the profession in the
British Isles, catching the mantle of Irving as it fell and wearing it as
best he could.
When I first knew Tree he had recently graduated from comic
opera to farce, making his earliest hit in the ‘Private Secretary’ and
replacing Arthur Cecil in the ‘Magistrate.’ From farce he turned to
melodrama and advanced his reputation as an actor by the
versatility he displayed in ‘Called Back’ and in the ‘Red Lamp.’ For
two reasons this versatility was more apparent than real; in the first
place because the methods of farce and of melodrama are closely
akin, and in the second place because the differentiation of the parts
Tree was then playing was largely external, being mainly a matter of
make-up, which incompletely disguised his own rather thin and
brittle manner.
In time he assumed the management of the Haymarket theater;
and still later he was able to build the spacious and sumptuous His
Majesty’s. At the Haymarket he produced more than one interesting
modern comedy and he made more than one interesting revival,
notably of W. S. Gilbert’s ever-delightful ‘Engaged.’ At His Majesty’s
he was soon forced—somewhat to his surprise, so his half-brother,
Max Beerbohm once told me—to abandon the more refined types of
comedy and farce, simply because the house was too large for any
form of drama demanding delicacy. He found himself compelled to
rely on more strenuous plays, which permitted elaborate spectacular
adornment. He brought out the ‘Herod’ of Stephen Phillips and he
imported the ‘Darling of the Gods’ of Belasco and Long. Thus it was
that both this necessity and his lofty ambition led him to a series of
elaborately pictorial revivals of Shakspere’s tragedies, histories and
comedies.
As a producer he continued the tradition of Irving, bestowing upon
Shakspere’s plays superb settings, rivaling Irving’s in their splendor,
their expensiveness and their taste. For ‘Twelfth Night,’ for example,
he designed an Italian garden, rising terrace upon terrace to the
very back of the stage, a scene so exquisitely beautiful in itself, so
completely satisfying to the eye, that—so Sir Martin Conway told me
—some spectators felt it to be an intrusion when the actors entered
and distracted attention from the lovely vision. Tree displayed his
scenic dexterity and his artistic invention in a dozen or a score of
other Shaksperian plays, notably ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ produced
while Queen Victoria was still upon the throne. There is an anecdote
which is doubtless familiar to many, but which I feel I have no right
to omit here, to the effect that as the amorous adventures of the
serpent of old Nile were unrolled before the entranced audience, one
British matron whispered to another British matron, “How different
to the happy home life of our dear Queen!”
Of course, Tree reserved for himself all the great Shaksperian
characters, tragic and comic, Mark Antony, Macbeth and Hamlet,
Falstaff and Malvolio. For the loftier tragic parts he lacked the
physique and the temperament. He had not the beauty of person,
the grace of gesture, the princely bearing, the appealing voice,
which the performer of Hamlet ought to possess. He had not the
power, the passion, the largeness needed for Macbeth. He had not
the elocutionary skill required for the proper impersonation of Mark
Antony in ‘Julius Cæsar.’ But he was intelligent, untiring, strong-
willed and self-willed; and he was able to get the British public to
accept him in these unsuitable parts, perhaps in some measure
because there was then no actor on the British stage who could
contest its chieftainship with him.
It is reported that Gilbert said to him after seeing his Hamlet,
“Very good, Tree, very good indeed. You were funny without being
vulgar.” And when Gilbert went around to Tree’s dressing room after
his exhausting performance of another of Shakspere’s tragic
characters, a performance which had left the actor weakened and
perspiring, the pitiless wit remarked, “Tree, how well your skin acts.”
Altho Tree took himself seriously he had a keen sense of humor; and
even if he winced under the satiric lash of Gilbert, he could take the
joke without offense.
In fact, his sense of humor often came to his rescue, as another
anecdote testifies. He was once acting Hamlet in the provinces when
his friend, John Hare, happened to be in the same town. He sent
Hare a box; and the unwilling Hare felt that as a fellow-manager he
could not refuse this unwelcome invitation. Hare sat in the box in
solitary state; and after the curtain fell, he was about to escape
when Tree’s secretary caught him at the door with the request that
he should come to supper. Again the kindly Hare felt that courtesy
demanded his acceptance. At table Hare did not mention ‘Hamlet’
nor did Tree. As soon as he could, Hare bade Tree good night. Tree
saw him to the door, and they parted without a word about the
performance. Before Hare had gone half-a-dozen paces, Tree called
him back. As Hare returned sadly, Tree said with a smile, “I say,
Johnny, it is a good play, isn’t it?”
We may be sure that Tree appreciated the merry jest of his half-
brother when at last he attained the honor of knighthood, the final
reward of every British actor-manager. As usual the announcement
preceded by several days the actual ceremony; and in the interval a
friend asked Max Beerbohm as to the actor’s exact status during this
awkward intermission: “Is your brother a knight now, or isn’t he?”
And Max answered that he supposed his brother in the eye of the
law was still Mr. Tree,—“but he is Sir Herbert in the sight of God!”
Tree’s disqualifications for the mighty characters in Shakspere’s
tragic plays were obvious, but his histrionic limitations were less
apparent in the chief characters of the comedies. I did not see him
in ‘Twelfth Night’ but I should conjecture that he gave a not
unsatisfactory interpretation of Malvolio, altho it probably lacked the
gentle dignity and the melancholy humor which Irving bestowed
upon the part. I did see his Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’
and it seemed to me altogether the best of his Shaksperian
experiments. After all, the ‘Merry Wives’ is only farce, brisk and
bustling; and Tree was experienced and skillful in farce, with no
objection to getting all the laughs that the lively situations might
authorize. Yet, as I watched his dextrous efforts, I was conscious
always that Tree’s Falstaff was not really fat; he might be padded
out to his proper proportions, but he did not move like a creature of
portly figure; and his humor was devoid of unction. He disclosed
himself as a clever thin man trying to pass himself off as a humorous
fat man.
And in his latter performances of Falstaff he yielded more and
more to his besetting temptation to overdecorate a character with
petty ingenuities and with finicky details, which came in time to
detract from its broad outlines. He had an inventive mind and he
was continually in search of novelties of gesture and of business.
Even in his tragic parts he was prone to obtrusive pettinesses. Often
at the end of the run of a play, and sometimes even at the
beginning, he seemed to act outside the character rather than inside
it.
Yet, when all is said, it remains that Tree deserved well of the
playgoing public of London; and this public could not well help being
grateful for the many opportunities he had provided for it to behold
Shakspere’s plays, always beautifully and tastefully mounted. It had
become accustomed to his mannerisms and it knew what to expect
when it flocked to His Majesty’s Theater. But in the United States,
Tree was never able to establish a position comparable with that
which he held in Great Britain. On our side of the Atlantic he was
only a wandering star; he was not the manager of the foremost
theater with the credit of a score of Shaksperian revivals; and we
Americans had not become habituated to his defects, and therefore
we could not be expected to be as tolerant of them as were his
British followers. He was well aware of this atmosphere of
indifference, so to speak, in America, an atmosphere he could never
dispel. When I saw him last in London, ten or fifteen years ago, he
told me that he was thinking of crossing over again. “But you don’t
like my acting in New York,” he added sadly; and I could not
honestly contradict him, as perhaps he hoped that I should.
VI
Where the performances of Shakspere’s plays at His Majesty’s

were sometimes insufficient was in the acting; and this was not
Tree’s fault, for he was always eager to strengthen his cast by the
engagement of the best actors available. At more than one of his
revivals of the ‘Merry Wives’ he persuaded Ellen Terry and Mrs.
Kendal to emerge from retirement to disport themselves as the
joyous dames who delight in befooling Falstaff. The fault lay in the
fact that fine performers were not to be had. Actors who were good
in Shaksperian parts have always been scarce, and they are now
steadily becoming scarcer.
Even fifty years ago, when Edwin Booth opened the stately
theater he had built for himself, there arose a loud outcry against
the mediocrity of his company, an outcry which rankled in Booth’s
memory and which led him a score of years later to explain to me
that he thought the complaint, even if justified, was unjust to him,
since he had secured as well equipt a company as it was then
possible to collect, with Edwin Adams and Mark Smith at the head of
it. This came back to my memory when Henry Irving a little later
spoke to me about the difficulty he had had in getting fit performers
for Laertes and Mercutio and the other important parts of youthful
buoyancy. “I engaged Forbes-Robertson and George Alexander and
William Terriss, one after another, and I tried to tempt them to stay
with me,” so Irving said to me. “But they preferred to set up for
themselves. I don’t blame them, of course; but it is now almost
impossible for me to find anybody whom I can trust with these
important parts.”
It was sometimes meanly suggested that Booth and Irving were
each of them unwilling, and perhaps even afraid, to surround
themselves with first class actors. The suggestion is as absurd as it
is unworthy; and it is plainly contradicted by the record. In the
sixties of the last century, when Booth was consolidating his
reputation by the earliest hundred night run of ‘Hamlet’ that any
actor had ever achieved, Bogumil Davison came to New York; and
the young American promptly invited the German tragedian to play
Othello to his own Iago. More than a score of years later Booth
again appeared as Iago to the Othello of Salvini. At one time or
another he joined forces with Charlotte Cushman and with Modjeska.
Henry Irving was equally free from petty jealousy; he always treated
Ellen Terry as a co-star; and when he engaged Mrs. Sterling for the
Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he advertized her name as prominently
as his own. No actor ever displayed more generosity to a friendly
rival than Irving did when he invited Booth to come for a fortnight to
the Lyceum to alternate Iago and Othello.
It was never difficult for Jefferson to find competent actors to
support him as Rip Van Winkle; and he always rehearsed the piece
carefully to make sure of the needful unity of tone. But it was very
hard indeed to find performers of presence, of authority and of the
sweep of style required by the boldly contrasted and highly colored
characters of a rich old comedy like the ‘Rivals.’ At one time or
another Jefferson secured the companionship of Mrs. Drew, of John
Gilbert, and of W. J. Florence, gladly sharing his glory with them. He
was delighted with the brief tour of the ‘Rivals,’ when a galaxy of
stars deserted their orbits to twinkle by the side of his Bob Acres.
Mrs. Drew was Mrs. Malaprop, Julia Marlowe was Lydia Languish,
Robert Taber was Captain Absolute, Nat Goodwin was Sir Lucius
O’Trigger, Francis Wilson was Fag and William H. Crane was Sir
Anthony Absolute. Here was truly an all-star cast; and the
combination was triumphantly prosperous. I saw it at the sole
performance in New York, a matinee at that; and it was perhaps the
best all around rendering of the ‘Rivals’ that I have ever seen, altho
several of those who took part in it, accustomed to the more modern
methods of our latter-day dramatists, were not quite at ease in their
efforts to catch the tone of artificial comedy.
It is true, alas! that there are actors, and some of them are expert
and accomplished performers, who when they rise to be stars not
only seek to grasp all the good things for themselves and to
monopolize the spot-light, but who even go so far as to begrudge
any laughter or any applause which may be evoked by the members
of their companies. Forty years ago one of the most prominent
comedians on our stage had this pitiable characteristic. At the first
performance of a play specially written for him, this star was
standing in the wings waiting his turn to go on. Suddenly there was
a roar of laughter and a round of applause. “Who’s that?” cried the
star, “What did he say?” And at the second performance the line
which had been so well received was cut out. And twenty years ago
there was an American comic actress of robust force and wide
popularity who slowly lost the favor of the public because she
insisted on producing plays in which she never left the stage and for
which she engaged actors and actresses who were feeble and
colorless.
It is not only natural, it is also wise, for a star to see to it that his
part is interesting and that it holds its interest from the first act to
the last. He cannot help knowing that he is the lodestone which
attracts the audiences. They pay their money to see him; and they
are not getting their money’s worth if they do not see enough of
him. But the spectators are best pleased with the star himself, they
are most likely to hold him in delighted remembrance and to want to
see him when next he comes to town, if he has given them a well-
balanced play, in which every part is filled by a performer who can
get out of it all it is worth. There are some stars who are almost self-
effacing, and who do not even care whether or not they have their
full share of the emphatic situations upon which the curtain falls. It
was pointed out by not a few of those who saw ‘Leah Kleschna,’
when Mrs. Fiske produced it with a brilliant and well-balanced cast,
—John Mason, George Arliss, Charles Cartwright, William B. Mack,—
that the star let Mack have the curtain of the third act.
VII
If it was difficult for Booth fifty years ago and for Irving thirty
years ago to find well-graced and well-trained actors to sustain the
secondary characters in Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, it is far
more difficult to-day, when our dramatists, even when they are
poets, are rarely tempted to write plays in five acts and in blank
verse. Our modern drama is composed in pedestrian prose; and the
men and women of our theaters have little or no occasion to speak
the language of the gods. They are used to a dialog which aims at
an apparent reproduction of the speech of everyday life; and
therefore they have not been called upon to acquire the art of
delivering the rhythmic utterance of tragic heroes and heroines.
They are all striving to be “natural,” as befits a stage whereon the
scenery and the furnishings are as far as may be those of real life.
They are likely to have a distaste for blank verse, which cannot but
seem to them artificial, stilted, “unnatural.”
Of course, no stage-dialog can be natural, strictly speaking. It
must be compact and significant; it must flow unbroken in the
shortest distance between two points. But to-day actors and
audiences alike are so accustomed to the picked and polished prose
of Barrie and Pinero, of Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas, that this
appears “natural” to them, because they do not note its divergence
from the average talk that falls on their ears outside the theater,
whereas they cannot help feeling that the steady march of ten-
syllabled iambics is a violent departure from our habitual manner of
communicating information and of expressing emotion. In other
words, even if our stage-dialog to-day is “unnatural,” as stage-dialog
always has been and always will be, it is far less obviously
“unnatural” than blank verse. A long and severe self-training is
necessary before a performer can feel at home in blank verse, and
before he can impart colloquial ease to it.
Yet it is a fact that we who speak English have a tendency toward
the iambic rhythm when we seek to move an audience. This rhythm
may be unconscious and it may be irregular; but it is unmistakable in
the death-bed scenes of Dickens, for example, where he was
insisting on the pathetic, and in the orations of Ingersoll, where he
was making his most powerful appeal. The Kembles were so
subdued to what they worked in on the stage that they were prone
to drop into blank verse on occasions when it was not appropriate.
Mrs. Siddons is said to have startled the salesman who was showing
her a piece of goods by asking, “And will it wash?” The first time she
met Washington Irving after he had published the ‘Sketch-Book,’ she
said to him, “Young man, you’ve made me weep”; and when she
next met him after he had published another book, she said “Young
man, you’ve made me weep again!”
Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was a great friend of Sir Walter
Scott; and once when they were crossing a field together, they were
chased by a bull. “Sheriff,” said the actor to the author, “methinks I’ll
get me up into a tree.” Fanny Kemble, whose reading of Shakspere’s
plays Longfellow commemorated in a noble sonnet, was the
daughter of Charles, another brother of Mrs. Siddons. Once when
she went on the platform to read, she found that a cane-bottomed
chair had been provided for her. She turned majestically to the
gentleman who was escorting her and inquired, “And would you give
my velvet gown the small-pox?” When her remote kinswoman, the
fragile amateur, who called herself Mrs. Scott-Siddons, came to
Fanny Kemble for professional guidance, she begged for advice
about making points; and she was not a little frightened by the force
of the swift retort: “Points, girl? I never was a point actress!”
This, all this, was long, long ago; and a great deal of water has
gone under the bridge since those distant days. I have to confess
that I never caught Edwin Booth or Henry Irving lapsing into blank
verse off the stage.
(1920)
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after
careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of
external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a
predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and
inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Pg 46: ‘were also accusaable’ replaced by ‘were also accusable’.
Pg 59: ‘Racine, immitagably’ replaced by ‘Racine, immitigably’.
Pg 78: ‘had helpt to’ replaced by ‘had helped to’.
Pg 133: ‘two diferent tongues’ replaced by ‘two different tongues’.
Pg 141: ‘first apparance as’ replaced by ‘first appearance as’.
Pg 142: “Flore et Zephyr” replaced by ‘Flore et Zephyr’.
Pg 144: ‘qualties of the’ replaced by ‘qualities of the’.
Pg 152: ‘if may be recorded’ replaced by ‘it may be recorded’.
Pg 217: ‘unpublisht, and I’ replaced by ‘unpublished, and I’.
Pg 269: ‘or less Shakespere’ replaced by ‘or less Shakspere’.
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Preface page viii

Introduction: theoretical considerations I

1 Class in the Dark Age and the rise of the polis

6 Sparta and the consolidation of the oligarchic ideal

who was visiting for one semester at Harvard. I have no recollection of

compelled me to rethink my conclusions and in some cases impelled me

my introduction, class conflict is most often carried out on the ideological

C Campbell, David (ed., trans.) (1982-91) Greek Lyric.

CLASSICISTS AND CLASS

To discuss class in any period of classical antiquity- but perhaps especially

MOSES FINLEY AND THE DISMISSAL OF CLASS

Given the enormous influence of Finley's approach in the general dismissal

Finley himself had some serious criticisms of Weber (1985a: 88-rn3).

I resist the temptation to italicize, as does Ste. Croix, "on a mechanical

Despite the enormous ideological enforcement of the notion of "free-

Status-consciousness - a real historical factor - masks class consciousness; in fact it

What Finley ignores is that status consciousness is precisely conscious and

an all-pervasive obsession with profit-making is not a primary or eternal

Obviously, the social consequences of such a method of distribution may be

sure, Marx in general envisioned this sort of blockage as triggering an "era

FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF CLASS

A more substantial objection to class as the primary focus of analysis is

TOWARD DEFINING "MARXIST"

MARX AND PRECAPITALIST SOCIETIES

He is constantly citing examples from pre-capitalist societies, to which he

Nonetheless, however carefully Marx seeks to historicize his accounts of

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE

It would be hard to exaggerate the amount of ink devoted to these few

Still he goes on to assert repeatedly that "the economic movement finally

As I read this, what appears a potentially mutual process of "overdeter-

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS DETERMINANTS

As noted earlier in connection with Finley's preference for status over

conscious aspects of class struggle operating in conjunction with the uncon-

SEPARATING OUT THE ECONOMIC

A subtle variation on the idea of economic determination implicitly fused

FOUCAULT AND THE LIMITS OF OVERDETERMINATION

As noted above, embracing an analytical model committed to giving equal

THE POSTMODERN DISMISSAL OF MARX

57 For an enlightening overview of fundamental problems ofhistoricization from a Marxist perspective

It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of Jacques Derrida on the