On Thu, 19 Jan 2012, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I'm not sure of your time reference, but if I followed this, you are quite
> wrong. The debtors were almost ALWAYS Aristocrats. That's why Plato thought
> the state ought not to enforce debt collection: he favored aristocrats over
> money-lenders.
No, Carrol, you aren't following this correctly. Plato was referring to a an almost unique situation in ancient times: aristocrats under democracy. (And also under an advanced commodity producing and commercial trading economy, which wasn't unique, but still rare back then). In that situation aristocrats are hard to distinguish from large traders, and debts are commercial -- shipping debts.
But when Solon, the "father of democracy," passed the seisachtheia, the "shaking off of burdens" in 594, the crux was entirely about small farmers selling themselves into debt. The standard process was that if they couldn't pay the debt, they would lose their land and become serfs on it, who would owe a sixth of their produce to the lord (hence their name, the "the hektemoroi"). If they fell further behind, they would then pledge their personal freedom and that of their family, and if they couldn't pay, they would become slaves.
Solon's seisachtheia cancelled all these debts; specifically forbade the use of personal freedom as collateral; and made an effort to bring back slaves who had been sold in the past.
Several aristocrats who had been ruined in this process played a key role in uprising over the next century that culminated in Cleisthenes reforms.
This sort of situation was the norm in the ancient world, which extends over several millenia. Ancient democracy was only found in parts of Greece and lasted in all forms less than 200 years. It was natural for Plato to talk about it, since it was the situation he lived in. But you can't generalize about the ancient world by drawing a curve through one (unrepresentative) point.
Michael