Ancient Greek society was much more unequal and hierarchical than the idea of democracy suggests. It was better to be a man, rich and a citizen.
We are clearly not done with the Greeks. It is clear that we are still busy fashioning, from Aegean sand, mirrors that are constantly repolished, but often distorting. Several recent works bear witness to this, which, despite their common scientific rigor, present very different faces of the ancient Greek world. When J. Ober brings the Greek miracle back to life, J.-M. Roubineau strives – brilliantly – to shatter a certain myth of the egalitarianism of the Greek cities.
Behind the Greek mirage, unequal cities
Also a specialist in ancient sport (you will read his beautiful Milo of Croton), J.-M. Roubineau uses his work on social issues in Greek cities (cf. p. 467) to offer a book that is as much a synthesis as an essay intended to fuel the debate. The thesis of these Greek cities is in fact announced from the first lines of the introduction:
The Greek cities, often celebrated by modern thinkers for the egalitarian political ideals born within them, are nevertheless highly hierarchical societies. In this, they are no exception to a condition of social life that borders on the universal (p. 5).
This postulate being stated without ambiguity, the author supports it by following four axes: in the Greek cities of VIe At IIe s. av. J.-C., 1. several factors found social inequalities 2. which manifest themselves by various vectors; 3. therefore, it is the strategies of reproduction and social mobility that should be questioned, 4. as well as the links of sociability and solidarity which could compensate for these inequalities.
In Greek cities, inequalities – of law, gender, wealth – accumulate and form a system. The increasing impermeability of legal statuses contributes to polarizing these societies between citizens and slaves: when the former confiscate civic territory and political power, the labor force of the latter is appropriated by the free. Between these two poles evolve foreigners with statuses that vary according to the distance that the city wants to mark with them and the usefulness that it can recognize in them. Greek cities are also characterized by a strong male domination, the manifestations of which are expressed differently according to the status and wealth of women. Those of wealthy citizens, on whom issues related to the transmission of a heritage weigh, are more closely monitored than those whose labor force is necessary for their male guardian (father or husband).
This male domination is also perceptible in the field of sexuality, the place where male power is exercised over bodies, as well as in the discourses – both mythological and biological – that support it. Finally, the possibility of conforming to civic ideals of status and gender is all the greater when one has significant economic capital: for the citizen, wealth allows an idle lifestyle that goes hand in hand with the full exercise of political power; for the foreigner, it allows one to be generous with one’s city of residence, which, in return, will be all the more inclined to improve one’s status. However, between the archaic period and the Hellenistic period, Greek societies experienced changes characterized by the increasing weight of wealth in this system of inequalities; as the author summarizes:
In a way, between 600 and 100 BC everything changes and nothing changes: a society where it was preferable to be a man, a citizen and, ideally, wealthy, is replaced by a society where it is desirable to be a man, rich and, ideally, a citizen… (p. 396)
A daily life of the Greeks 2.0
The presentation of these three structuring factors of inequalities in a system is one of the great merits of this book. But these Greek cities find their originality above all in their description of the “structures of everyday life”. Indeed, far from limiting himself to an exercise in exposing the “daily life” of the Greeks of the cities, J.-M. Roubineau shows us how clothing, food, housing, funeral practices, are all markers of social inequalities; he thus refutes the thesis of a “generalized frugality” of these societies of which he paints, along the way, a very lively picture. Through the example of “these coats that are stolen” (pp. 141-146), the author gives us a very concrete view of clothing inequalities, while clearly showing that they relate more to clothing than to costume. Indeed, they betray differences in wealth and activity rather than strictly reflecting status.
In fact, it is more generally in bodies that inequality and social distinction are inscribed. In this regard, it is gender distinctions that are the clearest: an uncovered, naked and tanned masculine (citizen) is opposed to a covered, veiled and pale feminine; in other words, the strategies for shaping a strongly gendered body involve clothing, but also cosmetics or body hair (on which we will read Les sens du poil by P. Brulé). Similarly, if the plate, the house and the tomb are above all revealing of economic disparities, they are also the place of domination of masters over slaves, as much as of fathers and husbands over wives and daughters. On this subject, we will appreciate the accuracy of the focus on the historiographical myth of the “gynaeceum”: rather than a reserved space of confinement, the “women’s space” (gynecologic disease) is the inverse reflection of that of men outside the house (andronitis); more concretely, depending on the context (and the number of rooms available in the house), the ideal of separation of the sexes could be put in place in a more or less flexible way, the same space being able to be sometimes “accessible, reserved or forbidden to women” (p. 188).
The dynamics of reproduction and social mobility also highlight inequalities of gender, status and wealth. Marriage being above all a means of reproducing the civic body, statutory endogamy is established as a rule by the cities. But it also allows the transmission of a heritage, both economic and symbolic, and proceeds from strategies developed accordingly – divorce and remarriage, although rare, also constituting an alternative. Birth control completes the arsenal available in this area, the issue being, in the words of Plato in The Republic, to be able to adjust one’s “resources to the number of (one’s) children” (p. 235). Here again, a strong male domination is evident: a thirty-year-old often married a young girl half her age; abandonment and infanticide mainly affected girls, while adoption allowed one to have a son. Gender also greatly determines the duration and purposes of education: a horizon limited to the domestic sphere and rapid access to marriage for girls; for boys, a longer and more diversified education, which could include the stage of pederasty, a pedagogical and sexual relationship. In a world without public education, mastery of letters was essentially the preserve of the elite, even if literacy was far from being restricted to a caste of scribes.
Although unequal, these societies were nonetheless fluid. While there are few cases of spectacular social advancement, “small steps” and “opportunities” can be observed. The possibility for a slave to build up a nest egg in order to buy back his freedom was not uncommon. It is even likely that emancipation was, in fact, the “normal” horizon of the master-slave relationship – which, moreover, contradicts a discourse of reification of the slave necessary to slave societies. The risk of decline was nonetheless real, including for the powerful, whether it came through status degradation or the squandering of assets. This is evidenced by a relatively high turnover of families dominating the social and political game: few were indeed able to remain at the forefront for several generations.
Could it be this relative fluidity that explains the stability of these societies over half a millennium? Places of sociability were probably not unrelated to this either. While some, such as gambling dens, could be the subject of discourses of social contempt, others could transcend certain social divisions; at least, the framework of the city and its subdivisions contributed to uniting communities characterized by a rich interlocking of affiliations. Solidarity mechanisms also contributed to this relative stability, even if only orphans and war-wounded seem to have been systematically taken care of by the city. For the rest, clientelism, friendly loans and associations seem to have constituted other means of escaping economic decline and begging, an absolute deterrent in societies for which reciprocity (in the absence of equality) of exchanges was not one of the weakest pillars.
The Greeks, inequality… and us
J.-M. Roubineau offers a synthesis that is now indispensable and all the more remarkable because it is written with a real concern for clarity, pedagogy and accessibility to a wide audience. Specialists will not be left out, even if they may regret a few blind spots, such as the absence of considerations on the transmission of (land) heritage in the “making of heirs” located at the heart of the book, or a diachronic perspective that is a little too discreet. The fact remains that this real contribution of sociology to the writing of Greek history is too rare (at least in general works in French) not to be warmly applauded.
In fact, the scope of these Greek cities goes beyond the sole field of ancient studies: if the “egalitarian political ideals” attributed to the Greeks can still inspire us, we can only take advantage of them by taking the right measure of the inequalities that characterized the societies that saw them born. Including to think, contrary to the author, of social hierarchies other than as an anthropological invariant. It is therefore also by its capacity to provoke debate that this essay on social history is transformed.