Ancient Greece Was A Middle Class Civilization

Ancient Greece has mesmerized modern Westerners for centuries. Enthusiastic scholars went as far as talking of a “Greek miracle,” and even if they went a bit far, it is easy to understand why they were so thrilled: ancient Greece shows us kindred heroes, who cultivated virtues, harnessed individual powers for the greater good of their cities and brotherhoods, worshipped tutelary gods, could switch from war to business, and from toiling the fields to philosophy. Or, at least, this is the feeling their works communicate. Even if we know that time tends to sort things out, and what we’ve got of the classical Greeks was perhaps the best they produced, their writings show a people who managed to unite sophistication with masculine energy.

Greeks knew about castes and Indo-European tripartite organization. Homer and Plato mention these explicitly. However, they had less social classes than other societies. The neighbouring Persian empire had a pyramidal structure, with many slaves, whipped by rather antipathetic small bosses—who themselves could have their heads cut off were the almighty despot to order it. As Leonidas says in 300: “You have many slaves, Xerxes, but few warriors.” For a warrior is not only a man wielding a weapon and the weapon doesn’t make the warrior. Only a free, worthy man deserves the label.

As they lived in city-states, Greeks were not removed from the power centers. Their city could be the vassal or part-dependent from another, more powerful city, yet they knew who was managing it. Men were what the Romans would call pater familias—head of their families, kings in their homes. As power scales remained small and people preferred excellence (arête, ἀρετή) to bullshit games, more or less everyone knew where they stood and those at the middle knew they could trust those above. In some cities, one could try to rise by engaging his own funds to, say, order—and finance—a military or commercial expedition. In others, especially Athens, a random draw would decide who was to be appointed.

In another article I said Socrates, the archetypal philosopher, undermined sociability by attacking several of its core aspects. Aiming at defeating the sophists, Socrates used their own dialectical games against them, but his contrived questions and absurd definitional standards tore common sense apart: Plato shows him rejecting various definitions of piety and bravery until he concludes we have no satisfying idea of these notions. If this is so, do we know what we should respect? Should we really aim at being courageous? Reject all landmarks and what you get is going through life with no compass.

However, when Socrates was trialed and condemned to death for messing with the gods, one of his contemporaries, Xenophon, wrote a touching compilation of Socrates’ “memorable” moments. It is a thinly veiled apology trying to prove the philosophers’ accusers wrong. Xenophon mostly insists on how much Socrates practiced virtue, respected the common gods, encouraged people to act well and taught positively by sheer example.

Indeed: Socrates owned his home, was a full citizen, went to battle at least three times during the Peloponnesian War—which seems to imply he had his shit together. Once, Xenophon recalls, Socrates explained how to gain and care about friends, another time he motivated an able yet shy man to enter politics. He also married an unbearable woman, Xanthippe, who once emptied her pot chamber on his head, just to train his own Stoic ability—the exact reverse of female hypergamy.

Retrospectively, we cannot assess the degree at which Xenophon overstated Socrates’ virtues or overdressed his stories. What we do know for sure is how much Greeks esteemed excellence in practice. It didn’t matter if Socrates wanted people to almost reject all concept and definition, as long as he still had a clear view of practical goodness, fairness, beauty, morality and the like. The city-State was a confederation of kindred small producers and families. As long as they lived the good life, Xenophon suggested, they did not need the clashes of definitions and arguments Greece would become known for.

Later Plato’s Republic extols the idea of an ideal city-State organized around three castes: the philosopher-kings-priests, the guardian-warriors and the craftsmen-growers-producers. This idea is a direct example of the Indo-European tripartition. However, this does not mean having snobbish classes or cliques hovering over the rest.

In Plato’s ideal city, everyone aims at being an aristocrat on the etymological sense—of attaining excellence as to rule, in his own field, as an excellent man. The city may have various castes, it only has one class. Only at a later stage of a degenerative history would the Greek city divide into two classes, abusive oligarchs, and short-sighted poor. What Plato describes as “not one, but two cities, living in the same place and constantly conspiring against each other” (Republic, 551d) shows how “classism” tends to divide what was united: whereas castes are founded on the concordance of inner vocation and outer social needs, not unlike complementarity between the sexes, classes come from some accumulating wealth at the expense of others and of virtue.

The two-classes divide Plato talks about, which is strikingly resembling with Karl Marx’s bourgeois-proletariat diptych, is not necessarily “capitalistic” in character. Both modern bankers and Bolsheviks aimed at maintaining it: either by having a small class owning (privately) everything or by having everything owned by public ownership, both meant dispossessing the wide majority of their own stuff. Managerialism is about stripping people from their means and controlling their life. It does not matter if this is done by a despot, a company manager, or a civil servant—serfdom is always the same.

Well, this is what Greece rejected when their cities united to reject Persian slavery. Later, as the city-states were absorbed by Alexander’s empire, they more or less maintained an organic relationship with each other. However, the empires would fall—Alexander’s was divided, while Rome proved so ripe with internecine struggles it had to transfer part of its power to a soulless bureaucracy.

As the saying goes, small is beautiful. The longer-lasting empires proved able to delegate the maximum they could to the smaller scales. And even then, there was enough space for most individuals to own their field and produce much of their own subsistence—or be self-owned craftsmen.

Only did the modern world make bureaucracy, factories, and a pyramidal structure absolutely necessary by the extant of demand, the sheer volume of goods, information and people that had to be managed. Before that, management could be done at a lower scale—especially the scale of regular men managing their own life. The Greeks talked much of virtue because they were responsible for this—they didn’t have media telling them what to do or oligarchs forcing them into conformism. (Sometimes they had this kind of despot, but these wouldn’t end prettily.) Being less numerous than their Persian neighbors, they did not need bureaucracy or massive factories. Were they lacking something?

Aristotle openly states that the better cities are mostly peopled with middle-class individuals. The wealthy despise and exploit the others, the poor are forced into obsequiousness and resentment. The former need slaves to maintain their lifestyle and haughty behavior, the latter often lack any sense of responsibility: “when poor people become the prevailing bulk, the city deteriorates and dissolves” (Aristotle, Politics, 4, 11). Only those who are in the middle can cultivate temperance and befriend each other. Along with excellence should come friendship (philia, φιλία).

Perhaps only small-scale, self-owned producers, who care about virtues and don’t take orders from either a foreign elite or low-life mobs, cam entertain a fair society. Perhaps only a middle class can entertain an equilibrated sociability.

Read Next: Men Must Be Educated In The Classics If They Wish To Regain Masculine Fortitude

21 thoughts on “Ancient Greece Was A Middle Class Civilization”

  1. The Greeks and Romans were amazing. I don’t think any of the later nations that came out of the West except possibly France (before it was ruined by proto-Marxists) can compare with them. Unfortunately, when I was in school all I remember my textbooks talking about was how Athenian democracy was unfair because women and foreigners couldn’t vote.

  2. Just like race realism and gender realism, it was also common, at least between the phylosophers to believe that the people should be divided into classes, and that not everyone should have the same rights and oportunities under the law.
    This is something that I have being believing for a while. The idea of equal oportunities and equal rights not only never worked in real life, but it never will. Just like socialism, Its a project that never worked… but we must keep trying! /sarc
    I wrote a comment once arguing for nobility classes with judiciary privileges, among other privileges. I also argued that we already have that, but its obscured, and not based on nobility. My comment got disapproved by most. It seems that the old phylosophers would agree with me.

  3. Great post. Love the Greek Philosophy.
    “Perhaps only small-scale, self-owned producers, who care about virtues and don’t take orders from either a foreign elite or low-life mobs, cam entertain a fair society. Perhaps only a middle class can entertain an equilibrated sociability.”
    this is where we are not.
    and need to return.
    “a 5 minute conversation with the average voter will dissuade you from democracy” Winston Churchill
    He could not imagine how worse it got…

    1. Even among the so-called “Red pills” there are plenty of democracy advocates… thats how bad things are.

      1. Hey, it would still be working if only property owners could vote. I bet women would never have got the vote, or the right to own property, if all white men didn’t get that right first.
        But everything degrades over time. Even if you set up a constitutional monarchy, or whatever it is you want, it would become something else in 100 or 200 years. You’d still need to look back and say, “what worked then and what is likely to work if we reimplement it now.”

        1. “I bet women would never have got the vote, or the right to own property, if all white men didn’t get that right first.”
          Exactly.
          And you are right, everything degrades over time, and then it reborn, its the cycle.
          The point is not to make an eternal kingdom, since all kingdoms fall.
          The point is: you start high, and then degrades over time, but at least you started high. And the highest you started, the most you are going to achieve in culture, etc, and you are going to leave a legacy that won’t die with the kingdom, a legacy of culture, a legacy of permanent improvement (be it dna or you name it).
          That is why, despite the certainty that everything eventually degrades, we must still choose to re-start high.

  4. I am a young woman. I love ROK find truth to almost everything, i have been reading for years. i know hoe to live snd live that life, but knowikg all i know i become more and more depressed, it seems as a sin to born a woman and i start wanting to avoid men even my man if everybody think like you, like us. Because i know you are right and i hate that you are right.

    1. “Because i know you are right and i hate that you are right.”
      Indeed ! You know very well that from “ass wipes to tampon to toilet flush”, “electricity/power to elevators”, “telephone to smartphone”, “radio to blue-ray”, “microwave to refrigerator to dishwasher to washing machine”, “transmission/gears/ball bearings to cars”, “television to computer to laptop to ipad”, “antibiotics/antiseptics/anesthetics to medicine to surgery to GYNECOLOGY”, “KFC/McDonalds/Burgerking/Starbucks to Coke/Pepsi”, …..list will NEVER end !!
      99.99% of everything you use, need and depend on; is/are Invented, Innovated and Pioneered by MEN.
      But the females are such a ungrateful creatures that they will never accept and acknowledge superiority of MEN.
      independent, empowered and strong females ! my foot !!

  5. fact is , as long as the womb is always the filter that kids are seen through, men never really have a solid connection to their kids, BECAUSE ITS BY FEMINISMS DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING. once a man gets past that conditioning, then he has an unseverable and meaningful bond with his kids.its why women will kill their kids because they cannot stand that a fathers bond with them is not through her, and is intolerable to feminism conditioning, and results in feminisms true hatred of men, expressed by the womb killing the people most important to a father. that fact is expressed daily through the murder suicides that women do and is reported on daily.
    as long as feminism can hold the position of power over childrens lives HOSTAGE TO WOMEN and their feelings, FEMINISM, will keep its deadly grip on society. otherwise it would be soundly beaten out of it.

  6. Greece and Rome fell a bit behind though. The US has seen many great Italian-Americans but not as many Greeks. There’s been a few but compared to say the Scots-Irish or the Germans the Greeks have not made that big of an impact on the democracy they invented.
    Telly Savalas was cool though.

    1. Because the ancient Greeks where swallowed up by all the invading Empires, especially from the East and their bloodlines thinned out into nothingness.
      Just look at the ancient Greek art and compare the people depicted there with the average “Greek” you see today, it’s like a completely different species.

  7. “You have many slaves, Xerxes, but few warriors.”
    ——————–
    Substitute ‘Xerxes’ for ‘Feminists’.
    btw I’d really like to get a good, solid answer to this question.
    It’s really worth an official post and I don’t think it’s ever been tackled well before.
    Why do females (not even feminists per se) adamantly REFUSE to acknowledge female advantage over men in dating, relationships, sex, marriage, divorce, and etc.?
    And why do they -rapidly- get hostile whenever the point is brought up?
    Defense mechanism perhaps?

    1. good question.

      watched some of this — is too fucked up…attack on redpill from communist news network (CNN). One “expert” adopts the laughing mocking shamming tone when describing men who think they are not privileged…

      1. Wow, that CNN video was hilarious. We’re a dangerous cult! I notice their “cult survivor” had his voice disguised, presumably to protect him from hordes of red pill cultists.

      2. Yes, they misrepresent everything.
        But at least everyone pretty much knows about the Red Pill now.
        So much of feminism and the left’s successes had been dependent on men remaining asleep.
        The slave drums are beating loudly.

  8. England discovered late the withholding land ownership rights to the Scottish not only kept them in poverty but deterred any ambition and productivity. Around 1900, England allowed the Scottish the property they lived on. A huge boost in economic activity followed, benefiting both the British and Scottish since then.

  9. A failed society is one that basks in the greatness of its history – modern day Greece is a basket case.
    Also, to quote Hollywood concocted drivel like 300 is laughable. Anyone who has studied ancient civilizations knows that Persian society under Zoroastrian rule actively discouraged slavery.
    I used to really enjoy this site, but the poorly researched articles and the whinging (allegedly not a trait of the red pill crew??) is making this site go downhill rapidly.
    Roosh, please get some quality control happening!!

  10. I get the sense the author has studied the writings of the Greek philosophers in either philosophy class or political philsophy and also possibly learned a bit about Alexander from an altitude of 30,000 feet in an ancient history survey course. He does not appear to have studied the history of ancient Greece in any detail, though.
    Sparta could afford its society because helots (basically slaves owned by the state rather than individual citizens) outnumbered citizens by 20 to 1. Athens had fewer slaves than Sparta had helots, but still had as many or more slaves than citizens. Other Greek city-states were similar.
    In other words, the Greeks he is talking about only had and talked about middle class virtues and societies because they completely ignored that the whole system was supported on the backs of labor from non-citizens. Slave labor was treated as a natural resource, much as wild animals can be hunted for food. Slaves just were (much like walls of a building exist without really being noticed actively by an occupant) and the goods and services they provided simply existed, too.

    1. All ancient societies had slaves, so your point isn’t valid as those other slave societies did not create such philosophy, science, literature, etc.

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