The tendency of the mark community1 is to disintegrate and to make room for new relations, though always according to milieu or to other conditions and consequences.
The oldest form to establish itself after the mark, to a greater or lesser extent in the ancient world, is slavery, the oldest form of class domination and economic exploitation.
Engels says in his Anti-Dühring (this page–this page)2 that after the emergence of private property, the opportunity to employ foreign labor arose. But war supplied them; prisoners of war who were, until this period, slain, and even earlier, eaten, were now used as laborers. (See Anti-Dühring, this page–this page.)3
This explanation cannot, strictly speaking, satisfy us.
We are far too inadequately informed about the facts of the slave economy and its origins. Even until recently there have been disagreements among the bourgeois researchers about the meaning and the extent of slavery and the ways it emerged. We are more or less dependent on hypotheses.
It is necessary that one trace out the manner in which slavery emerged out of the mark and the gentile constitution.4 If we search for the point after which we see the mark and the gens exhibiting the oldest forms of exploitation and servitude, we will not immediately encounter slavery, but other forms, which might lead to slavery.
Unlike Engels, we do not need to place exploitation after the emergence of private property. The mark itself allows for exploitation and servitude. The grafting of a foreign mark onto another allows for and creates a relationship of exploitation and servitude toward the outside. (In fact, the mark ensured communism internally, but not externally.) An example of this is the Inca Empire. Moreover, the Inca Empire teaches us something else: although the conquerors, the Incas, themselves lived together in municipalities, we find in their case four ruling lineages, whose representatives governed the four provinces into which the country was divided. The Incas also had a standing army, necessary for maintaining domination. Thus, there was already a certain aristocracy within the mark. How did this develop?
The four lineages would have taken control of the conquest. These four houses would have probably held an even greater position had the Spanish conquest not put an end to this process.
Similar examples that correspond [to] [MS. Illegible] the mark, [of which] there are many. E.g., the oldest historical reference from the island of Crete is that it was conquered by the Dorians.5 The Dorians were one of the main tribes of Greece. The conquest took place in prehistoric times.6 We do not know who lived on Crete. The conquered people on Crete must have handed over the yields from their crops, excluding the necessary sustenance for themselves and their families, to the conquerors. From these contributions from the subjugated people of Crete, the costs of the common meals of the free people were determined. This is due to the fact that the Dorians lived under communism. An example that the mark was compatible with the exploitation of other marks. The land continued to belong to the Cretan population; they only had to be able to afford the tribute. (The Greek legend of the Minotaur7 that ate young boys and virgins can be explained by the fact that the subjugated had to hand over their young boys and virgins to the conquerors, similar to the Quechua tribes in the Inca Empire.)
Similar relationships existed elsewhere in Greece.
In Thessaly, the early inhabitants, who lived there before the Greeks, were conquered by the Aeolians and forced to become tenant farmers. They had a name that meant “poor people.” Originally, this was one of their folk names. The [MS. Illegible] are from [MS. Illegible] wandered to Asia Minor, conquered Bithynia8 and similarly subjugated the people living there and forced them to pay tribute.
The most interesting and fruitful example is Sparta itself. In Sparta, we still find a strong tradition of gentile law. The Spartans used the peasant population of the Helots as state slaves. They were handed over by the state, that is, by the mark community, to individuals. The individuals were not allowed, however, to kill or sell them to the outside, because the slaves remained communal property. The Helots constituted the landless [agricultural workers] among the Spartans and had to relinquish a certain portion of their yields. Whatever they obtained beyond this amount belonged to them. The land still belonged to the Spartans. It was taken from [the Helots] by the Spartans, so that they now worked on a foreign land that had previously belonged to them. They also had military obligations.
The Spartans also married the Helots. The children of these marriages were, if they were raised as Spartans, not only free, but also citizens. For that reason, their education determined their fate. They were called mothaken: half-breeds.
Aside from the Spartans and the Helots, there was another population, that of the Periokoi, e.g. those that lived around the city (thus the word [related] word “periphery”).9 The Periokoi had no political rights, but were personally free.
The Spartans continued to live in the gens. Marriage was forbidden within the gens; the gentile law of inheritance was in effect, and thus the wealth remained in the gens. Marriage within the gens was only allowed to heiresses, in order that the wealth remain in the gens. From the dues of the Helots, the Spartans ran a communist economic organization. Bourgeois historians construe the communist meals in Sparta as militaristic club feasts.
In Crete, the land remained the property of the inhabitants, even after the conquest by the Dorians, who only demanded tribute from the subjugated.
In Sparta, the Spartans took the land from the Helots and the Helots were forced to work this land for the Spartans. The Helots could therefore subsist only if they fed both themselves and their masters. They were dominated completely by the mark community of the Spartans and were assigned to individuals, that is, treated like objects. They therefore worked as labor power on foreign soil. They have no social cohesion of their own anymore; they are integrated into the mark of the Spartans. But they are not an active part of the mark of the Spartans, only the labor power for their subjugators. They have no more land, which was the basis of their social cohesion. They can only become Spartans if they are children of Spartans and Helots, and if they are in such a way raised as Spartans; apart from this, they can only become fully entitled members of the Spartan mark through distinction in military service. Thus they are already slaves; they live in a class state.
If we compare the Peruvians, Crete, and Sparta, we would have to locate the Peruvian and the Cretan forms as the older forms and the Spartan as the newer one. In Peru and Crete, the subjugated are not yet slaves. They are members of the mark as before. There is no class domination, no class society in effect here. A class society is the grouping of classes within a given society. In Peru and Crete, it is a matter of the exploitation of one society by another society.
However, the Helots form a social bond with the Spartans. Therefore, they live in a class society.
Slavery accelerates the dissolution of the communist association and goes hand in hand with the rise of private property. This stands in contrast to Engels, who saw slavery as arising only after the introduction of private property.
Slavery appeared naturally in several phases, depending on the level of development of the specific society.
The first beginning of slavery is a kind of tenant relationship. Communism is carried over, except that a certain tribiute has to be paid. This has a corrosive effect on the conquered, as well as the conquerors. In a later stage, the land is taken from the conquered, and already slavery has arrived. But the conquered are still being exploited communistically. Then the disintegration of communism. The rise of private property. Thereby the slaves also become private property. While before the slaves were not to be killed or sold, because they were communal property, once private property arose, the individual could do with the slave what he wanted.
The exploitation of one mark by another has a corrosive effect on the exploited [and the exploiting] mark, something we see already with the Incas. The disintegrative process is accelerated. First the conquest occurs and then a reconfiguration of the organization takes place. In order to fortify this, a specific class develops, the military, and thus inequality in the mark. Domination from above evolves faster when conquests and wars occur.
At the moment the Greeks enter history, their situation is that of a disintegrated gens. Though there are strong vestiges of the gentile law remaining, nevertheless there already exists a rural system of private property and the free right to dispose of that land. The peasantry is already in a state of deep indebtedness. Along with them, there is an aristocracy. Its representatives can already be found in the gentile constitution. The aristocrats are the descendants of the public officeholders in the gentile constitution: chiefs of the mark, [chief] herdsmen, etc. In the mark, they generally emerge from the undivided mark and over time, they confiscate more and more from it. In this way, they obtain greater assets and with the advent of hereditary power, they develop more and more into a stratum that is supported by the peasantry. In this way, a minor aristocracy develops, one that already possesses privileges and goods. The earliest members of the mark are now the indebted peasants, who have to pay fees to the aristocracy.
These relationships were strongly influenced by the culture of the Orient, which was older and more prosperous. In order to be able to understand all the events of the ancient world in Greece and Rome, the influence of the Orient must, generally speaking, be taken into account, such as in the Near East, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. Historians and scholars of prehistory place great emphasis on the influence of the Near East. In particular, the oriental technologies of war were especially influential. The Greek war chariot originated in the Near East.
Exchange of goods with the Orient was critical. Luxury items were exchanged for the refinement of [the upper strata’s] way of life. The reason for the exchange was in order to get their hands on these items. In the old empires, there was already a strong differentiation among classes and the upper strata lived quite luxuriously. Already in the ninth and tenth centuries before Christ, there existed a strong disintegration within the society.
Exchange with the Orient led to two things:
1. Provided an incentive to the [Greek] aristocracy to have various products manufactured, which could be exchanged for luxury items from the Orient. Among these items were oil, wine, and metals.
2. Spread, in association with exchange, the money economy in place of the earlier natural economy, since metal as a means of exchange comes from the Orient.10 In a natural economy, all goods are produced only for subsistence and in fact mainly by the people who themselves consume, sell, or exchange them. The leader of the mark receives foodstuffs as income. Yet, once the leaders become an aristocracy and the money economy is in place, the fees had to be paid in money and in kind. This creates a situation wherein the peasantry falls increasingly into debt [to] the large landowners.
In Homer’s time, around the same time as the great migration of the Germanic peoples,11 raising livestock prevailed over agriculture, which was [already] important in this period. At this time, the aristocracy themselves took part in production, which ended after Homer. The aristocracy provided the fighters; it had trade with the Orient in its hands. This can also be deduced from the mark itself. The mark itself engaged in trade, but with the outside, not within its own borders. The mark as a whole was engaged in trade. Since the mark as such could not carry on trade, it came about that the natural or customary public officials became, at the same time, the natural public organs of trade. And it is from these public officials that the aristocracy was later derived.
As seats for the reigning military aristocracy, there were castles that served as permanent constructions of militarism. Building the castles was a form of compulsory labor for the surrounding peasantry. The more hereditary the mark’s earlier leadership positions became, the greater the fees paid by the peasants. Instead of money, the only thing they could afford was compulsory labor. It was compulsory labor for them, because the peasants no longer paid their fees to an elected organization. An historically handed down inverted relationship from the past.
The refinement of the lives of the aristocracy led to an increasing division between them and the peasantry. It developed into, on the one hand, the mass of peasants, who bore the brunt of the work, and on the other hand, the small body of aristocratic families, who saw as their only occupations the conduct of war and trade, with the latter helping to enhance their way of life. Eventually, the aristocracy ceased to participate in the production process. This increased their standard of living even more. This increase resulted in an even greater trade, and in order to support it, production had to be adapted for trade.
Passive trade gave way to active trade. That is, while the aristocracy originally needed a surplus for trade, it later had goods manufactured for the sole purpose of exchange: oil, wine, and metals. These items were exchanged for fine linen, perfumes, purple robes, etc. With increasing trade came a growing use of precious metals. Increasingly, the peasants had to pay their fees in money; they fell more and more into debt.
This leads to the establishment of debt slavery. Peasants who cannot afford their fees are turned into slaves, who thus give over their life and death to the aristocracy. All of their labor is now performed for the aristocracy.
In conjunction with this, a new social form emerged, the ancient city. This was the area in which the aristocrats lived. Within the city they had their houses and outside of the city they kept their goods. Living in the city meant that one was not a participant in the production process, since the fields, the key source of production, lay further out.
In order to be able to live in the city, it was necessary for the aristocracy to have artisans living around them as well as city merchants, who acted as brokers for them, and in addition there were a whole series of personal servants. Here for the first time the foundations of a true slavery begin to take shape, one that we also see later in Greece.
Already during the time of Homer there were traces of slavery, though only in aristocratic families and in small numbers. In this first phase of slavery, there was a preponderance of the female element. Female slaves were used as concubines, wet nurses, and maids in the house, who worked next to the housewife and under her direction.
Then, adding to the decline of the peasant class, came debt slavery.
As early as the sixth century, these circumstances led to revolutions in Greece.
The ruined peasant class rebelled and called for new allocations of land and soil, a utopian demand to turn back the wheel of history. Although this call during the Solonian Revolution12 of 594 would die away without being heard, the rebellion precipitated one thing: the abolition of debt slavery. (See “[Karl] Ploetz”)13 (Solon was the legislator, the Solonian Revolution is to be understood here as upheaval.)
The remarkable course of Greek history can be explained by these circumstances, where class domination took on the original form of domination by the city over the land.
Slavery and trade evolved at the same time as the aristocracy.
After slavery was initially adopted for personal service, the aristocracy reached the point where, in order to keep up with the increase in its living standards, it had to buy slaves in order to create products for exchange. For the first time, in Greece, we see workshops that are established specifically for slaves to produce goods for exchange. The use of slaves in oil and wine plantations and the massive use of slaves in mines. The slaves became direct competitors to the proletarianized peasants, and they eventually could be used by the aristocracy in their larger enterprises. In the mines, free labor was displaced completely by slave labor. Initially peasants doing compulsory labor carried out craft production for the aristocracy. As the needs of the aristocrats became more refined, however, the peasants were no longer adequate. Specialists emerged who could do much more refined work in their craft. In the end, the free artisans were largely replaced by slaves.
Thus we see in Greece, namely in Attica, that wealthy Greeks established entire workshops in which slaves manufactured products for exchange. Demosthenes, the father of the famous orator, had a workshop in which 30 slaves worked under supervision as sword-sharpeners and armorers.
As a result of the Solonian Revolution, not only was debt slavery abolished, but military obligations also came to affect the peasantry. They became, so to speak, full citizens. Under the circumstances, however, this contributed to an even more rapid disintegration of the peasantry. As a result of the development of trade, which in Greece was comprised of sea trade, a merchant fleet and a navy emerged. Thus there was a large military burden upon the entire people. The burden of the navy was one of the greatest burdens on the peasantry.
After debt slavery had been abolished, prisoners of war increasingly became material for slavery. Later, in the seventh century, slaves were increasingly purchased. The purchased slaves were the peoples who lived around the perimeter of the Black Sea. Some of them also came from less civilized regions in the West such as what is today Spain and the Gaul of that time. The Greeks kept colonies all around this region. Colonization was one of the causes of the disintegration of the peasantry. Wherever a group of Greeks conquered a speck of land, usually along the shoreline of the sea, they established themselves there with their facilities and it became a Greek city. This was the case with Chios, an island and a Greek colony, where there was a large slave market.
The slave trading economy was especially large in centers where the large mines and plantations were concentrated, such as Sicily and Attica (Attica is Athens with a certain perimeter), in Corinth and elsewhere.
Thus, after the Solonian Revolution, there were slaves who were captured, purchased and who were born into the household.
The question of the size of the slave trade in Greece and in the ancient world is generally a point of contention among scholars, economists, and historians.
[Karl Johann] Rodbertus made himself well known for the portrayal of the ancient Greek oikos economy (oikos is the house, the family, together with the bondsmen, maidservants, and slaves).14 With this description, he created the impression that the whole of economic life in the ancient world rested upon slavery. This view was accepted by Professor [Karl] Bücher,15 for whom the first phase of economic development is the closed, household economy, based on slave labor. According to Bücher, this domestic economy predominated up to the Middle Ages.
Recently, Professor Eduard Meyer has strongly contradicted this view. Two works by him can be recommended:
1. Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Altertums. Ein Vortrag [(The Economic Development of the Ancient World. A Lecture) (Jena: G. Fischer,] 1895).
2. Die Sklaverei im Altertum [(Slavery in the Ancient World) (Dresden: Zahn & Jaenisch,] 1898).
The first work was cited heavily by [Karl] Kautsky in The Origin of Christianity.16
There are also numerous articles by Professor Eduard Meyer and his views (under “Population in Ancient Times”) published in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften.17
Unfortunately, Professor Eduard Meyer advocates the opposite extreme. He mainly demonstrates that slavery played a rather marginal role in antiquity and he bases his assessment on the fact that the number of slaves was either the same or smaller than the number of free laborers (with the exception of a few periods).
His rationale does not hold water. In contemporary society, capitalist production is dominant. Within it are the industrial workers. The farm laborers, the small craftsmen, the layers of educated professionals, etc., do not belong to it. But they, the industrial workers, stamp the conditions of their existence on the other classes. Contemporary society is formed by them although they are in fact a minority in the population.
It follows that the slaves may have been a minority of the population and yet all of the economic life in antiquity could have rested on them. It is not the numbers that are definitive, but the sum total of the tendencies that result from them that is definitive.
([…]18 Eduard Bernstein came up with the idea, after the census of 1905, that there were thus so and so many craftsmen, tradesmen, etc. But that in no way disproves the fact that the proletariat is the foundation of today’s society. It is not possible to arrive at that with numbers.)
The first detailed evidence concerning slave labor comes from the fifth century, the time of Pericles, who lived between 444 and 429 [BC].19 He was prominent in Attica and had a great influence. According to [Karl Julius] Beloch’s20 latest figures, in Attica, there were 130,000–150,000 freemen, 100,000 slaves at that time. The total population of Greece amounted to 2,250,000. Among them, Beloch counted 850,000 slaves in the same Periclean period.
Professor Meyer revised the numbers further. According to him, in the year 431, in the time of Pericles, there were 170,000 freemen, 40,000 metics,21 descendants of mixed marriages of slaves and citizens, and 150,000 slaves. (Contemporary Greece has over two million inhabitants, remaining more or less stable.)
Afterwards, the worsening of conditions in Greece, after the turning point of Pericles’ time. 431–404 BC, the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens. In this war, a sizable number of free peasants perished because they formed the infantry. Later, slavery increased even further. For Attica in the fourth century, 317–307, the following statistics: 90,000 free citizens, 40,000 metics, and 400,000 slaves.
Professor Meyer does not dispute these numbers. They prove that after the war the number of slaves exceeded that of the rest of the population. He only claims that this was not the case before and, even then, not in all of Greece, but in a few centers. Furthermore, Professor Meyer speaks of industry and factories in Greece, a typically bourgeois bias.
Thus, where slaves predominated, they were not only used in crafts, mines, and on plantations, but also very much in personal services. Slaves were seen as belonging to the estate of a free citizen. Certain citizens owned 50, and others had 1,000. It became fashionable in the fourth century [BC] for free citizens to set foot in the city only with a drove of slaves in front and in back of them. When dandies appeared in Athens, slaves carried chairs for the dandies, letting the master sit down every few steps to shoo away the heat with fans (fanning cool air towards him).
Through Aristotle (born 384 BC, died 322 BC), we have a strong impression of the circumstances of this period. In his Politics, which comprises 8 books, he writes:
It is a complete household only if it contains slaves and freemen.22
The essence of the science of being a master has to do with using his slaves correctly. He is the master, not because he is the owner of a person, but because he avails himself of it. The slave comprises a part of the wealth of the family.23
From Book III of Politics:
Nature itself created slavery. Animals divide into male and female. The male is the more perfect one, it dominates. The female is imperfect, it obeys. Now, there are individuals in humankind who are just as subordinate to others, like the body to the soul, like the animal to man. These are those beings that are only good for manual labor, and are not suited for anything more perfect than that. These individuals are destined by nature to be slaves because there is nothing better for them than to obey. Is there then, in fact, any real difference between slaves and animals? Their services are similar to one another; they are only useful to us through their bodies. From these principles we can conclude that nature created some people for freedom and others for slavery, so that it is beneficial and just that the slave obeys.24
There is a complete split between mental and manual labor. According to Aristotle, nature created slaves; and physical labor, the basis of production, is according to him, the basis for bondage.
The free peasants were both members of society and citizens, and they took part in many aspects of public affairs.
With time, it transpired that every aristocrat lived in the city and his main concern became dealing with affairs of state, aside from the concern with science, art, and military service. The peasants were proletarianized, were unable to find work, since there were slaves everywhere. They became superfluous, did not count.
As a foreigner, the slave had no opportunity at all to take part in public life. He had no public obligations. Therefore, the master had the complete right to dispose of him, since there were no citizenship rights, no protection by the state.
Even if the slaves were the smaller group, they were nevertheless the principal focus. They proletarianized the peasants. The separation of intellectual life from the production process.
These are the fruits of slavery. This resulted in the disintegration of Greek society as well as the Roman one.
In Greece, slavery led to the separation of knowledge from the process of production. Before this, knowledge was not separate from productive labor. Knowledge was collective and concentrated in production. Everyone worked, and everyone worked together. Knowledge remained necessary. In order to cut a stone, in order to manufacture tools; for that, scientific understanding was necessary. In order to undertake the organization of the mark, quite a bit of knowledge was required.
The next form is that knowledge rested with the priests. As in India, they were not allowed to work in the fields. Because of this, they acquired time for extensive mental labor. This was necessary, for example, in the Orient, since organizing the construction of the large waterworks came to be carried out not only by the mark, but also by many others as well. The priests were in intimate contact with nature, because they had to support the cult, which at that time was a nature cult.
The next form in which knowledge was disconnected from production was slavery. And in fact, within slavery, total separation of manual and mental labor likewise took place.
This benefited science and art. Free from being bound to production, they could now float freely in the air, hurry ahead of time. Art succeeded in blossoming in Greece to a point that has not been reached in our time. Aristotle would not have been capable of becoming what he was without slavery. Everything that exists today is bound up with the ancient Greek world, with Aristotle. In this sense we could even say: without slavery, there would be no socialism.
Knowledge was also beneficial to the production process.
The exclusion of slaves from mental life led of course to the rulers creating laws that benefited their own interests, yet these also had to be honored by the slaves, although they did not take part in their enactment. It is not much different today. There were laws and a dominant class that did not take part in the production process. Those who created all the assets had to submit to them.
In socialist society, knowledge will be the common property of everyone. All working people will have knowledge.
The history of Roman slavery is a later one than that of Greek slavery, just as Roman history as a whole is a later history. Rome was first founded in the eighth century BC.25 In Greece, prehistory—that is, the era of Homer—reaches back to the tenth or eleventh century BC, in which slavery already existed, if only to a limited extent.26 It was from Greece that Rome borrowed slavery, so to speak; from there it came to Rome in already finished form.
In general we distinguish three periods of slavery in Rome:
The first goes back to the Punic Wars,27 that is, to the third century BC;
The second dates from the Punic Wars down to the era of the Caesars, that is, until shortly before and/or shortly after the birth of Christ (the first century AD);
The third dates from the first century AD, that is, from the time of Christ’s birth, to the fall of the Roman Empire.
The First Period
In the first period the type of economic life in Italy was peasant agriculture. There was obviously a nobility already present, land ownership on a large scale by the nobility, [that is] differentiation is already present. The nobility and the peasantry we derive, as in Greece, from the mark; the peasants were previously members of the mark community; and the nobles were the ones who held public offices within the mark.
The mode of production on the estates owned by the nobility [at first] was hardly distinguishable from the mode of production on the property owned by the peasants; the difference was only in the size or scope of the landholding. There were no larger bases than these for an economic transformation.
Slavery in this first period has already been introduced, but still [only] to a limited extent. On the landholdings of the nobility the number of slaves was somewhat greater, and on peasant land, smaller. Many of the poorer peasant farmers had no slaves at all. Here [in this situation] slaves were still agricultural workers. Since peasant agriculture was the type of production that only met basic needs, a kind of patriarchal situation prevailed as a consequence for the slaves as well. They worked for the farmer alongside his family, and in the case of the nobles or the tenant farmers [they worked] alongside of other farm laborers. (The nobles leased out a great deal of land to tenant farmers, and that land was worked in the same way as the peasant farmers’ own land.)
Thus the slaves were employed as agricultural workers next to the free peasants and together with the free peasants. For the most part they were slaves who had been purchased. Most of them had been purchased for a period of twenty years; if they got old and/or sick, they were mostly sold at a low price. The land owned by a noble in the first period in Rome was called villa rustica, which meant an estate or manor. It consisted usually of a residence for the villicus,28 the agricultural director of the operation, an official of the estate or manor. He had a dwelling place together with the slaves. Next to it were cowsheds, granaries, and so on. For the nobility a special [MS. Illegible]29 was often built. All the slaves at such an establishment received their means of livelihood periodically and in a designated quantity. Clothing and shoes were usually purchased at a market. Every month they received a certain amount of wheat (rye and oats were not yet known at that time), and the recipients had to grind this themselves. In addition [there was] salt, olives, salted fish, wine, and cooking oil. That is how they lived in this first period. It was one and the same kind of life for the slave, the peasant farmer, and with minor differences, for the noble as well.
In addition to the villicus there was a villica, a female economic official, who prepared the food for the entire company, and they all had their meals together. Occasionally slaves suspected of [attempting to escape] or those who had committed serious offences were shackled and left in underground dungeons as punishment, but in the first period that was an exception and happened only in cases when the slave was guilty of a wrong. The son of the family was often punished in the same way as the slave. Both stood under the unlimited authority and domination of the paterfamilias.30 For larger work operations, which required a larger accumulation of labor power in a short time, there were not enough slaves, and free wage laborers had to be hired, who performed the work together with the slaves, for example, during a harvest. Olive picking and the gathering of grapes were usually likewise entrusted to free employees, or free contractors together with slaves; that is, there were people who undertook to carry out that kind of work, and they brought their own slaves with them. For this they received compensation. In general the feeding and treatment of slaves were good. On holidays they were freed from labor obligations. And since they belonged to particular families in Rome, they took part in religious rites, including those of the family cult. (In Rome there were not only official gods of the Roman state as a whole, but each family had its own household gods31).
In the depths of Roman society radical changes began to take place around the third century BC. It began with Rome’s struggle to establish an empire on a world scale. This struggle was initiated by an endless series of wars. The Punic Wars marked the turning point. Hardly a year went by without a war.
Finally came the Punic War with Carthage. This third Punic War, which ended in victory [for Rome], lasted until 146 B.C.
At the same time the wars with Macedonia began. (Macedonia was then a part of Greece, in the north.) There were three Macedonian wars:32
The first, 215–205 BC
The second 200–197 BC
The third 171–168 BC
Then almost simultaneously there was a war with Antioch and Syria, in Asia, to the southeast of Asia Minor, in the years 192–189 BC.33
Then the Greek war with the Aetolian League,34 in 146 BC, [which was] thus simultaneous with the third Punic War.
Then the war in Spain, the subjugation of Spain, 143–133 BC.
Then came the war with Numidia, which is located in Africa, in 111–105 BC.35 (see the atlas of [Friedrich Wilhelm] Putzger, 1909, this pagea36), an eastern part of the ancient world.
Then a war with the Cimbri and Teutones, in 113–101 BC.37 (see Putzger’s atlas, this page, on the northern part of the map).
A war with the kingdom of Pontus in Asia Minor, 69–64 BC.38 (see Putzger’s atlas, this page, in the eastern part [of the map]).
Then a war with the Celts, the Gallic war, in what is now France, 58–51 BC.39
After that came the so-called Alexandrian wars in Egypt in 30 BC.40
Those are the times encompassed by the second period of Roman slavery.
A knotty tangle of wars in ever-wider scope, a collision of Greco-Roman culture with all the surrounding populations, which had remained on a more backward level.
All these wars were victorious for Rome. They ended with the founding of the Roman Empire, the transformation of all these lands into Roman provinces, obligated to pay tribute, and with the introduction of Roman law into those provinces.
The peasant farmers were the great raw material used in these wars. They were the soldiers. This brought with it the complete collapse of peasant agriculture, and yet that had been the cornerstone of the entire economic life of the country. Labor power was withdrawn from peasant agriculture, and it was encumbered with an enormous tax burden. Since the waging of war required monetary resources, which the Roman Empire obtained through taxes, these too fell upon peasant agriculture.
These two operating factors brought to maturity the first phase of the second period, the ruin of peasant agriculture and the establishment of large landed estates. The latter came into existence as a result of the fact that the large landed proprietors separated the peasant farmers from their property when they [the peasants] could not pay their debts.
Since the free peasant farmers had their own land taken out from under them, they could then serve as labor power for the large landed estates. But the peasant farmer was under the constant threat that he would be called up to fight in a war. It was awkward for the great proprietor to hire him—even when he had the possibility of hiring such a free peasant farmer. Even in intervals between wars the peasant farmer faced the danger of being called up for military service.
On the one hand the peasant farmer lost his own land, and on the other he was too unsuitable for the great proprietor as hired labor power.
Besides that, the number of free peasant farmers was reduced significantly because of the wars, so that [for] the large landowner there were no longer enough of them by any means.
The great proprietors thus had to bring in more slaves. And the wars provided them in great quantities.
The incessant waging of war, without exception, led to the subjugation of large new provinces. The conquered populations were transformed into Roman subjects and had to pay tribute, partly in money and partly in kind. The latter consisted above all of grain. They began to import overseas grain. The granaries of Rome were Africa, Sicily, and Spain.
The Roman state used the grain above all to maintain the army; it was exclusively with foreign grain that the Roman army was fed. The plundering of foreign provinces brought ever more grain into the country [that is into Italy], as the army needed it. The state purchased this grain at ridiculously low prices. Soon the grain grown at home became superfluous, and the Roman farmer found no outlet for his grain. He became a proletarian. (The Latin word proles means “offspring.”41)
What could the peasants do? They had lost their own household plots, and the large landowners were employing slaves. The large landowners could obtain everything they needed either by having slaves produce it or by importing from the provinces.
The peasant farmers, being completely deprived of the means of existence, streamed into Rome, and at that time Rome was indeed the city, the center, and at the same time it was the political center. They flooded into Rome to demand the means of subsistence from the state. These peasant farmers were at the same time free citizens. (Rome was a republic. It had made the same kind of revolution as in Greece). The nobility made use of this proletariat in its own internal struggles. It had political rights and influence on the state. This proletariat had to be maintained, because otherwise it would become a constant danger to Rome. It slept overnight in the streets of Rome, literally.
Grain was distributed to the proletarians in the market of Rome at state expense, and this was precisely the same overseas grain.
Thus the importing of grain from the provinces had great significance.
On the basis of these [social and political] relations [Charles Léonard] Sismondi made the classical commentary in his writings dealing with social relations in Rome.
“There was in Rome a proletariat as there is today. But whereas the proletariat today supports society, the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society.” That is the difference between the proletariat of today and of that time.42
Finally there comes an aspect in addition to the others [mentioned above] that closed in on peasant agriculture in such a way as to eliminate it —to wipe it off the face of the earth. That is the rapid development of the money economy. As a result of Rome’s encounter with the countries of the Orient, the money economy in Rome developed very quickly. The Roman state promoted [the money economy] with all its might and in the process implemented all the greater opportunities the state had for various transactions, for example, the levying of taxes, using not only its own people [for this purpose] but also farming out the collection of taxes to rich people, who had to immediately pay the state a lump sum. They were allowed to raise taxes even higher as long as they also handed over the set sum to the state.
The money economy was at that time just as lucrative a source for rich people as government bonds are today. In the second century [BC] there already existed wealthy bankers who advanced funds to the state when it was necessary and who [generally] looked after and took care of money-related matters.
The ruining of peasant agriculture within a couple of centuries did not of course pass by without struggle and resistance by the peasants. In the second century BC there were big revolutions by the peasants, a cry for a new distribution of the lands, and indeed of state lands. (In the name of the state these lands were given the official names: “common estates,” “undivided estates, or lands,” and “common lands.”)
By what means was this demand defeated? Not merely by the buying up of the household plots [of the peasants] by the nobles, but also as a result of the fact that the nobles had taken control of the state lands. The nobles began to transfer the state-owned domains to themselves at ridiculously low prices, and that was not impossible for them, because they were the rulers. These [state-owned] domains actually passed into their hands, and thus enabled their large landed estates to grow even larger.
Economic relations had advanced too far, and thus the demand of the peasants was retrograde, would have meant a step backward. They had exactly the same aspirations as present-day middle-class people.43
There were earth-shaking revolutions of the proletarianized peasantry in Rome over the question of these lands. The most famous among these is the revolution of the Gracchi of 133–121 BC.44 Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, two brothers from the highest-ranking noble families, placed themselves at the forefront of this revolution. In this connection Tiberius Gracchus gave a famous speech before the senate:
The wild animals of Italy have their places of refuge and their dens. But those who have fought and died for Italy have nothing that they can call their own except the air and the sunlight. Homeless, they must wander around with their wives and children, and the owners of the fields lie when they claim in front of their armies that they are fighting for their ancestral graves and sacred places. For no one anymore has a sacred place of their father’s or an ancestral grave; no one from all the hosts of Rome’s wars has those things. But rather these who are called the masters of the world fight for the wealth and privileges of strangers, while they themselves possess not even a clump of earth.45
The two Gracchi sought to improve the situation with specific reforms. They demanded that the state lands be apportioned out to the peasants, a purely utopian measure.
Tiberius Gracchus in 134 BC pushed through a law, which was intended to take the state domains back from the nobles and which stipulated that [the state domains] would be divided up into peasant household lots of thirty acres each; it also stipulated that large payments should be given to individual proletarianized peasants.
The result was that Tiberius along with 300 of his supporters were murdered by the nobles and their hangers-on. His brother Gaius then placed himself at the head of the movement and sought to carry the reforms still further, because the measure taken by Tiberius could not stop the colossal process of proletarianization. Even leased-out domains were turned into peasant colonies. He then introduced the free distribution of grain, so that the proletarians who were lying around (homeless?) could be fed. Peasant colonies were also established in the overseas provinces. The bankruptcy of the peasants can be seen in the fact that things could not be turned back even in their own country, where the peasants did not even have their own clump of earth.
[There followed] a powerful movement of resistance by the nobles; Gaius had to flee, and his flight ended in his own suicide. Thereupon the entire reform [movement] fell apart.
Professor Meyer states: This reform unfortunately led only to revolutions in which both Gracchi died and the reform was defeated.
The agrarian revolutions only led to upheavals in the state and did not bring about any changes.
There had been a struggle already for centuries to use laws to counter the fact that free workers were more and more being pushed out by slaves. A law of 367 BC that the owners of peasant households sought to establish stated that the same number of freemen should be employed as the number of slaves.
At the time of Caesar, in the first century BC, that is four centuries after the above-mentioned law, a new law was introduced according to which large landed proprietors were obligated to employ at least one-third freemen. That of course had no prospect of being carried out. Economic relations were more powerful than the law. The peasant was still a citizen with rights and duties, but the slave was purely and exclusively labor power.
That is how things went with laws in Rome, as with all laws that try to go against the tide of economic development: they remain a dead letter. Proof of that is that after four centuries this new law came.
In conclusion, we have the large number of proletarianized peasants in the state without any employment. And they remained up until the last period [of the Roman Empire.]
The next form to disappear was the small lease-holding. This was decisive in the sense that economically the large landed estate was still bound by the methods of peasant agriculture. Now we have large-scale cultivation of crops, and indeed this was possible because employable labor power was present in large quantities.
Since grain was imported from the provinces, grain production [in Italy] shrank. The cultivation of grain was forced out mainly by [the introduction of] the raising of livestock (e.g., sheep and cattle), and also by the cultivation of vineyards and olive orchards.
Things were now produced for trade [purposes], no longer for one’s own use, as was previously the case on the peasant household plot.
The raising of livestock yielded wool; it was produced in the largest quantities possible, for trading purposes. Small plots of land, which earlier were intended for the production of grain, were transformed into large ranges for the raising of livestock. Vineyards and olive tree orchards were cultivated on exactly the same large scale.
Latifundia took shape. The opposite side of the coin was the collapse of peasant farming. It goes without saying that [the latifundia] were worked by slaves. Large columns of slaves were formed, under overseers, along with complete separation of their mode of life from that of their masters. The master lived in Rome, but he also had a villa out on the land.
On the rural estates [of the large landowners] the following items were developed: the cultivation of large gardens, and zoos, flowers being part of the luxurious lifestyle in Rome; the breeding of birds for purposes of luxury (peacock tongues and nightingale tongues); also, the cultivation of fruits in the most careful manner was pursued on a large scale and for personal consumption needs.
Chiefly, however, there occurred a depopulation and desolation of the entire land because of the widespread planting of vineyards and olive orchards. There was also a very unsatisfactory development of craft production, only for meeting immediate needs for tools and implements; other than that, everything was imported from Asia Minor; even the best tools and implements were brought from there.
Where earlier there had been 100–150 peasant farms, now there stood one latifundium, worked by 50 slaves. The slaves were not married and were not allowed to marry. The peasant farmers had either been sent off as soldiers to every possible foreign land or they lived as jobless proletarians in Rome.
Finally there remained the wealthy classes and the nobility. ([Theodor] Mommsen and Meyer always speak about Roman capitalists; but by that they understand simply wealthy people.)46
In Rome, in a later period than in Greece, there was so to speak no function for these classes. Greece had been subjugated politically by Rome, but spiritually and intellectually Greece dominated until the Middle Ages. Greek philosophy, art, and everything that could be achieved on the basis of the slave economy of antiquity had already been perfected by Greece. Rome merely had to borrow it, appropriate it, take possession of it. From then on Rome lived, one could say, as a sponger or freeloader.
For this reason the ruling classes in Rome separated themselves from mental labor as well [as physical]. In this second period the slaves represented not merely labor power on the landed estate, but they also undertook all functions in the city; thus there were slaves who performed mental labor. Slaves were bookkeepers, accountants, teachers, artists, actors, dancers, musicians, and architects. There was no sphere of public life that slaves did not engage in. That they could carry out these mental and intellectual functions was due to the fact that in many cases they were prisoners of war who came from culturally developed lands and had previously been free citizens. There were, for example, a great many Greeks formerly of noble descent who later served as slaves in Rome. For work on the plantations [Rome] took from the backward populations, but for work in the cities it took from the intellectually developed populations.
Rome arrived at this conclusion: everything related to work is slave work, both physical and mental. In Greece only physical labor had been regarded as slave work.
The consequences of this development went so far that the following was true: on the one hand, the masses of peasants were superfluous for the production process, and on the other, the ruling classes renounced all forms of labor.
Thus in Rome the entire society lived exclusively on the slaves and the subjugated peoples.
Grain came from Sicily, and there the Carthaginians had already transformed the occupation of grain growing into slave work; the Romans carried this further, to the utmost extent.
Now of course the living conditions of the slaves had to undergo a change. They were now completely reduced to the status of naked labor power. In agriculture they were labor power that was applied for the purposes of trade. In this entire institution, or configuration, everything worked toward a single purpose: to extract the maximum possible from the slaves. A distinction must be made between the slaves in the mines and on the plantations and those in the city. Whereas in the city they represented the only intellectual activity and culture, in the outlying areas [MS. Illegible] on a regular basis they were chained and driven to work with whips and locked up at night in underground dungeons. They were branded on the forehead so that they would be recognizable and identifiable as slaves. They were released from detention only to be driven to work. They were not allowed to marry.
In that period they drove out free labor entirely and produced only for export. These relations inevitably led to slave revolts, particularly because the slaves had previously been free.
In the second century BC Rome was shaken by powerful slave revolts.
In 184 BC there was a slave revolt in Apulia.47 In the suppression of this revolt 7,000 slaves were killed.
In 195 BC there was a large uprising in Etruria.48 In this slave revolt there were pitched battles with the Roman armies.
In 197 BC [there was a slave revolt] in Latium, where Rome is also located.
Later there began the most threatening of all: the Sicilian slave revolts.49
In 143–141 BC, another powerful uprising, in which 7,000 armed slaves took part. Here too there were pitched battles. After the rebellion was put down 20,000 slaves were crucified.
In 130 BC again there were a series of slave revolts in Italy in the course of which 4,600 slaves were executed. In 113 BC occurred the second Sicilian slave revolt, which lasted for two years.50
In 73 BC, the third Sicilian slave revolt, led by the famous Spartacus.51
Then in Greece, in Attica, the slaves revolted. Here they were so rebellious that they could be driven to work only with the use of weapons.
In the first century AD the third period in the history of Roman slavery begins. We need only draw the consequences from the development that has gone before in order to have a the necessary picture before us.
The slaves consisted of prisoners of war. But as a result of all the wars an empire had been founded on a world scale. Now a limit was placed on the wars. When this limit was reached the importing of prisoners of war from other countries dried up.
At the same time the peasant farmers, who had been the economic basis for Rome’s world domination and who had been necessary for Rome’s wars, had been annihilated or ruined. We have seen the collapse of peasant agriculture. The peasantry was transformed from a social stratum that sat on its own plot of land and had an interest in [the functionings of] the state, transformed into a mass that served only as cannon fodder for the interests of the nobility. For war it is not only necessary to have a certain number of soldiers with weapons but also the wars must serve their interests to some degree. The ruined peasant farmer lost his strength both morally and physically. With the downfall of the peasantry the level and quality of nutrition declined. In the second century [AD] meat and milk disappeared from the diet of the peasant farmers. As a result fewer and fewer of them were capable of bearing arms.
The rise of mercenary armies. Foreign, barbarian, mainly German people were recruited. And thus we see hired Germans being led against Roman citizens in time of [civil] war.
A combination of different lands and peoples came together in the Roman army. Only the officers were Romans. There were bound to be dire consequences from the fact that only foreign people who had come together accidentally were waging war. In the end they acquired great power and it was they who finally placed one or another Caesar [i.e., emperor] on the throne. They put one on the throne because he impressed them with his ability to sweat prodigiously. That is a fine illustration of the sanctity of the office of emperor. Those were the ultimate consequences of having foreign mercenary armies.
What results followed from all this for the economy of the latifundia and the slaves themselves?
Above all there was this: a major change was introduced into slavery itself. The mistreatment of slaves that had occurred in the second period was now impossible. Since slaves were no longer to be had freshly from each war, they had to be taken care of, treated differently. In the first century AD and thereafter a much milder form of slavery began. It is constantly maintained that Christianity brought this about. But it is exclusively the consequence of the fact that this labor power now had to be valued more highly, because there was no longer any surplus of it to be had.
Now slaves had to be permitted to marry so that they could reproduce. This fact alone meant a better living situation for the slaves. Also a slave had to be treated differently when he himself had a family, when he had children; he had to be paid as much as was necessary for him to maintain his children.
The more the proletariat gathered in Rome in large numbers, the more soldiers had to be richly rewarded for their services, and the more the proletariat had to be pacified with gifts—all the more had to be squeezed out of the foreigners in the subjugated provinces. That led to the decline of the subjugated populations, so that grain imports suffered.
Thus, Rome had to return to the cultivation of grain. The livestock pastures were turned back into grain fields.
The latifundia were operated with slave labor. However, grain growing was not possible with slave labor [in the form it had] up until then. First of all, the number of slaves was too small, and second, they had already been drilled and trained for work in the vineyards and olive orchards, but grain growing meant a return to a higher form of intensive agriculture.
And thus there came a return to small peasant farming.
The latifundia were broken up into individual parcels that were given partly to slaves with families and partly to free peasant farmers in return for certain payments or taxes, mainly payments in kind; because it was no longer possible to use money to pay farmers. For this purpose they leased land to those who had been hired as a protection against wars,52 and so forth. Thus there was a return to a kind of corvée labor.53
In Rome this was called [land worked] by the colonus.54 (From this we can derive the first beginnings of the corvée economy of the Middle Ages.)
There was one more necessity that forced the return to the colonus. The nourishment of the slaves was too inadequate. In the interests of the economy itself it had to be recognized that the slave took increasingly less interest in the work. Here again this is a very instructive example: It is a mistake to suppose that one needs only to have power and assert one’s [military] might in order to exploit labor without there being any enticement for the exploited.
In Rome the result was a complete ruination of labor power.
E.g., slaves [working] in the mines [MS. Illegible—several lines]
The power of the exploited to do mental labor was also broken by exploitation.
Here the production process necessarily had to break down, because labor power was ruined by exploitation.
Such primitive labor by the slaves could never be carried out without tools. The relations were such that the slaves had a terrible hatred for the tools of their labor. They destroyed them along with the materials to be worked on. Such hatred between the living form of labor and the dead means of production had been created that a constant war between them prevailed.
The slaves gradually developed into the most expensive and least convenient force of production and for that reason there came to be fewer and fewer of them.
So then, to summarize:
The economy of slavery reached rock bottom of its own accord.
In the main, that is how the cycle of the historical development of slavery in the Roman Empire closed upon itself.
In general there was a return to the relations of old. This shows that it was not only the Germans who brought about the destruction [of the Roman Empire]. Rome was already ripe prey for foreign conquest after such consequences had been arrived at as a result of its own development.
Greco-Roman culture is something whole even if we distinguish among particular configurations.
(1) Slavery carried through [conclusively] the division separating mental and physical labor. This has remained true to the present day, and is a fundamental fact, or reality, for the entire forward development of class society. Without it the mental-spiritual development [that we have] today would not have been possible.
In Greece this fundamental fact, or reality, was established as the distinction between freemen and slaves, and then took on various forms. But with the Roman Empire [this distinction] was transmitted to posterity.
Christianity emerged in the Roman Empire (here Rome being taken not as the state). It would not have arisen without Greek philosophy, which is one of the main roots of Christianity. And Greek philosophy rested upon—slave labor. But since Christianity is, so to speak, the legacy of the Roman Empire, it has come to dominate the entire modern era: Without Christianity, which was engendered by slavery, there could be no thought of the Middle Ages or capitalism, nor of the disposition of class forces in the modern world, and without the latter, socialism is inconceivable. The socialist revolution will be the first to eliminate this remnant of the legacy from Rome. (Christianity is one more proof, so to speak, that Rome based itself on Greece.)
The state as the coercive power in class society arose in Greece on the basis of slavery, and in Rome we see its continuation, carried to the utmost extreme. The state apparatus in Rome was much more extensive and more fully developed [than in Greece].
One proof of this is the founding of the Roman world empire.
In Greece, the leading states were Sparta and Athens, but they were cities, covering only a small area of the country.
In Rome, however, [we see] the gathering together of many lands, which as provinces of Rome came under the same binding laws as the Romans did. This was the first time that such a monstrously huge empire was brought together and ruled from a single center in a uniform manner. It was bound to fall apart because of economic reasons, not because of defects in its political institutions.
Such uniform political organization is a mighty step forward. Here too the Roman Empire had much more powerful consequences than Greece.55
Why could the slaves not produce a higher culture, using the concept of culture in the broadest sense, as a whole, since they did constitute labor power?
Since the slaves were already destroying the crudest tools and implements, how could one give them better ones? In the end, the only means of production being used were utterly crude ones.
Slave labor itself was a fetter on technical progress.
The inner tendency of slavery is to develop into the self-destruction of labor power. This is also true today. The most drastic expression of this is the constant struggle to shorten the working day. But other circumstances also bring with them the fact that the condition of capitalist society itself ordains that this will happen.
Otherwise a deadly stagnation would set in that would destroy society.
In the southern states in North America, as a result of the introduction of cotton, sugar, and rice plantations, exploitation on a purely capitalist basis was driven so far and to such an extent that the slaves on average were worked to death in seven years. That is proof that capitalism too has the tendency to destroy labor power.
Since this tendency toward the destruction of labor power existed under slavery, it is therefore a given that economic development could advance no further.
The slave revolts were the first immense, world-historical class struggles against the exploiters. Not the free peasants, not the proletarians in Rome.
The slave revolts (including 70,000 slaves in Sicily) were completely without results. They were smashed by Rome [even though it was] ailing and rotten. The slaves wanted to return to their homelands; they wanted to break loose and get away from society entirely. They were only partly successful, to the extent that they escaped, some to their homelands, some joining robber bands or becoming pirates.
The slave revolts remained without consequence, because any further development of them was not based on any trend of economic development. The development of the economy at that point had ended in a blind alley.
The decline of the Roman Empire meant in the most precise sense that it was compelled to return to previously existing forms. Therefore, the uprisings of the slaves had been futile.
The economic form exhausted itself, it did not allow for a higher form of economic development.
One ought not to forget the great steps forward brought about by Rome, despite its fall.
The entire mental-spiritual [aspect] of life was concentrated in Rome, as was the material [culture].
The gods of all the subjugated peoples56 were dragged to Rome, so that a concentration of all the religious cults and observances were to be found there as well.
The Roman Empire fell back into barbarism, in the literal sense.
Only around the tenth century AD did commerce in Italy begin to rise again.
In the Middle Ages, as soon as dividing lines of class emerged in the new German society, they arose on the basis of those in Rome, [and as a result] when this new society began to flourish, it was receptive to and capable of responding to a higher form of mental-spiritual development, and thus people [readily] took to Greek culture [in] the Renaissance era, [and in] the time of the Humanists.
Nothing was lost from [the heritage of] mental-spiritual culture because of Rome.
Christianity tore the Germans out of barbarism. Despite the fact that the Germans broke the Roman Empire to bits—on the spiritual-intellectual level they adopted Christianity. And this Christianity was the product of the Roman Empire; it had prepared the ground politically for a world revolution.
In Greece, craft production experienced a refinement, which would not have been possible without slavery. In Rome, by way of contrast, it was forced backward by the pressures of world trade, reverting to a kind of lower form. Only the crudest articles for their own use were produced by the slaves or peasant farmers; all finer products were imported from the subjugated lands. In this respect Roman slavery brought no progress.
One forward step was the development of horticulture. Even today we still base ourselves on it. Even today the purpose of horticulture is, as it was in Rome, to provide a finer way of life for the rulers.
The raising of livestock began to take on wider scope. But the crudest elements among the slaves were assigned to it. They were also the first to start slave revolts, because they were left entirely to themselves. Livestock raising became very widespread, but was managed very crudely, mainly aiming at quantity.
Because of livestock raising, agriculture declined; that was a step backward. In Rome the economy of slavery began to have a distinctly reactionary effect.
Poultry farming, in contrast, represented a step forward.
The management of the large estates was exemplary. On the manorial estates of Charlemagne [modelled on those of Rome] we find products that show specifically what progress Rome had achieved in agriculture even with its economy of slavery.
Thus Rome had a progressive as well as reactionary impact.
In the Orient, there was also slavery, but there it remained more or less in the beginning stages. And to the extent that it flourished, it was soon destroyed by wars of conquest. Slavery became highly developed for the first time in Greece and Rome.
| Dietzgen: | Wesen der menschlichen Kopfarbeit57 |
| Vorländer: | Geschichte der Philosophie.58 |
| Engels: | Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft.59 |
| Eduard Meyer: | Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Altertums. Ein Vortrag, 1895. |
| Eduard Meyer: | Die Sklaverei im Altertum, 1898. |
| Eduard Meyer: | Several articles in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften on “Bevölkerung im Altertum.”60 |
| Kautsky: | Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus.61 Erster Band: Plato. |
| Kautsky: | Ursprung des Christentums62 (see note at bottom of page).63 |
| Engels: | Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen Philosophie.64 |
| Beloch: | Griechische Geschichte.65 |
| Prof. Bücher: | Entstehung der Volkswirtschaf.66 |
| Mommsen: | Römische Geschichte (The fundamental work on the subject).67 |
| Prof. Max | In the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, see the article on |
| Weber: | “Agrarian Relations.”68 |
| Paul Ernst: | Article on “Griechische Geschichte” or “Griechische Sklaverei” in der Neue Zeit, 11. Jahrgang, 2. Band (appeared in 1894 or 1893).69 |
| Children’s supplement to Gleichheit Nr. 13, 14, 15, Jahrgang 1908/09: “Aus der römischen Geschicht.”70 | |
| Children’s supplement to Gleichheit: (?? Number): “Der Sklavenaufstand in Sizilien.”71 | |