Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
> You can only row for so long
> before your body gives out. So what to do with all of these ex-rowers
> who are good citizens of the democracy? Why, pay them to serve on
> juries and to do other civic functions of course! Jury duty ended up
> being a kind of social security.
I _think_ most of what Jerry says is accurate, but I am a bit wary. Accounts of Athens often repeat fragments of an account originally designed (by Plato and by modern historians from the 185h c. on (including marxists) to discredit the Athenian democracy. And a good deal of marvelous scholarship of the last 40 or 50 years has strongly questioned many features of that old account. Some of this scholarship would annoy our clarity fetishists -- the authors don't translate their greeek quotations. But it's still worthwhile reading for what one can glean. Two of them are Robin Osborne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika, and Martin Ostwald, Nomos & the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy. See also Wood, _Peasant-Citizen & Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy and the works cited in her notes. She gives an extensive account of the debate over the use of slaves in Athens. They were probably _not_ (contra Ste Croix & Michael Jameson) used extensively if at all in agricultural production, which was mostly carried on in small plots. (Even the large landowners did _not_ own large amounts of contiguous land).
Carrol
>
> Jerry Monaco
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk