Labour Monthly
Source : Labour Monthly July 1947, pages 223-224
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML markup: Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2013). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Published here under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license 2013.
The author writes in the preface:
“Ancient history has always had a number of problems which have vexed ancient historians and evaded solution for centuries. A Marxist interpretation provides a new approach. The material takes a different shape, the pieces fall into position, and the problem is convincingly solved.”
This claim arouses some apprehension, not because it is untrue, but because the application of Marxism is a difficult task, in which any shortcomings will be used by our opponents to discredit Marxism as a method. The problems which she claims to have dealt with in this way are the analysis of the Bronze Age; the role of the tyrants; the causes of Roman intervention in Greece; and “the whole question of slavery.”
There is no investigation of the origin of the class-struggle in Greece, and a passing reference to the phratry, which is described as “a local organisation of the citizens” (p.64) suggests that she does not understand the structure of tribal society. Nor is there any mention of the matriarchate, to which Marxists from Engels onwards have always attached great importance. She writes: “The Bronze Age states usually broke up after only about a hundred years” (p.15, repeated on p.249). The Egyptian kingdom lasted, apart from changes of dynasty, for close on three thousand years, and the urban civilisation of Minoan Crete, which she herself describes as “a typical Bronze Age state” (p.17), for at least twelve hundred. While insisting on the importance of the alphabet in determining the distinctive character of Greek civilisation, she seems to be unaware that the Greeks learnt it from the Phoenicians (p.41) and says that “in the scripts of the Bronze Age each symbol or picture represented an actual object” (p. 31). This is not true of the Minoan linear script, or the Egyptian hieratic, or the Mesopotamian cuneiform.
The chapter on the Athenian tyranny contains nothing new. The two chapters on the Spartan tyranny and the Roman intervention are the most substantial in the book. But the role of Philip V is not explained, and the motives of Roman policy are not related clearly to the contradictions inherent in a slave society. The treatment of slavery is confined to incidental observations, not always consistent, until we reach the last chapter, which raises the question “Why is modern society not based on slavery?” Instead of seeking the answer in the development of the productive forces the author offers an explanation which turns on the length of time involved in the decline of the Roman Empire as compared with the supposedly rapid decline of the Bronze Age states; a supposition which, as just noted, does not correspond to the facts.
Why does the author try to answer a difficult question which as an ancient historian she need not have asked? Because throughout the book ancient society is described in terms of modern society, passing through “feudalism” to a “bourgeois revolution” followed by the rise of “a new class of workers.” Apart from the misuse of Marxist terminology, such comparisons may have an illustrative value, if used with caution, but here they are used so indiscriminately that they throw the reader into confusion. Theseus (who is presented without argument as a historical person) is compared with the chiefs of Wessex, Henry 1, Louis XIV, and the kings of fifteenth century Hungary; Solon with Henry VII; Pisistratus with Cromwell; Cleomenes with Napoleon; the restoration of the Corinthian oligarchy with the restoration of Charles II; and Sparta after the reforms of Lycurgus with seventeenth-century Japan. A section dealing ostensibly with Greek science in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. mentions Thales, Anaximander and Heraclitus, but not Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras or Hippocrates, and the hurries on to Thomas Aquinas, Durer, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Bacon, John Dee, Newton, Evelyn, Locke, Ray, Kant, Hegel and the Royal College of Surgeons.
The author leas attempted too much. With a firm grip of Marxist method and a more limited objective she may yet make a useful contribution to the subject.
GEORGE THOMSON.