On March 22, 1775, when Edmund Burke stood up in Parliament to argue against provoking a rebellion on the part of the British colonists in North America, he made an observation that merits close attention. “Abstract liberty,” he told his colleagues,

Burke clearly had early Rome in mind. He had read Livy and Plutarch, and he may have perused Dionysius of Halicarnassus as well. He knew the story of the struggle of the orders. He had traced the stages in which the plebeians, over the course of more than two centuries, had gradually wrested access to high office from the patricians—who had, at the outset, possessed a monopoly on offices and honors, and he may have known about the manner in which plebiscita passed by the Concilium Plebis came to have the force of law. In all likelihood, Burke also had his eye on the gradual emergence of democratic government in early Athens—on the laws attributed to Draco, on the Solonian reform, on the revolution carried out by Cleisthenes, and on the establishment of jury pay by Pericles.

Of course, Burke also knew a great deal as well about English constitutional history—about the manner in which Parliament had insisted on the principle that no taxes that it had not levied could legitimately be collected by the minions of the king and about the manner in which it had leveraged that principle to establish its supremacy step by step. He was also aware of the degree to which the dispute between the Crown and the American colonies turned on the same set of issues—the colonial assemblies’ monopoly on the levying of taxes and the manner in which those assemblies had employed this power to subject to themselves the officials selected for their governance by the Crown.

There is a reason for the sharp difference that Burke discerned between the ancient and the modern understanding of liberty. Political freedom and self-government in modern—by which I mean Christian and post-Christian—times had its origins in a setting quite different from that provided by the ancient Greek pólıs and the early Roman civitas. As Max Weber noted long ago, the ancient republics were predominantly agricultural in character. The ordinary citizens were farmers—while Florence, Venice, Lucca, Siena, and the other medieval communes were communities of merchants and craftsmen, which excluded from citizenship the farmers who lived in the larger territory they controlled. The ancient civic communities had as their focus war. They were chiefly concerned with defending the territory they already possessed and with acquiring more by way of conquest. The medieval communes were far less interested in conquest than in finding and serving markets abroad.^{Footnote 3}

This juxtaposition became even more pronounced with the emergence of the nation-state and the decline of the medieval communes. In early modern Europe, liberty flourished primarily in places such as the United Provinces of the Netherlands and in England, and these two polities were by the circumstances of geography ideally suited for a maritime orientation and for the development of international trade.^{Footnote 4} It was, moreover, in Burke’s beloved England that Sir Francis Bacon first suggested that reason could and should be applied to the mechanical arts for the purpose of subduing the natural world, promoting what he called “man’s estate,” and improving the art of medicine so that human beings could live longer and more comfortable lives. It was there that the patent of monopoly was invented and that a new species of property—property in ideas—first emerged, and, tellingly, Bacon was its first great defender. It was, in sum, in Burke’s England, that technology—the application of lógos or rational speech to téchnē or the mechanical arts—was first advocated, and it was there, with the patent of monopoly, that a marriage was effected between commerce and technology and that civil society underwent a reorientation by means of which liberty came to be seen less as an end in itself and more as a means to the end set forth in Bacon’s tract The Advancement of Learning.^{Footnote 5} It was in the very year in which Edmund Burke delivered his speech arguing that the English government should conciliate the American colonies that his friend Benjamin Franklin remarked in London to Samuel Johnson that man is “a tool-making animal.”^{Footnote 6} As Karl Marx pointed out some decades thereafter, no one did a better job of summing up the distinctively modern understanding of man and his place in the larger world.^{Footnote 7}

As Franklin was perfectly well aware, the ancient understanding was decidedly different. Aristotle identified the crucial issue early on in his Politics when he juxtaposed the pólıs and matters political with the household—the oîkos—and the realm of oıkonomía or household management. It was his claim that human beings are first and foremost by nature political, rather than economic, animals, and he touched on the human capacity for fashioning tools only in passing with regard to his discussion of chattel slavery and the place it ought to occupy within the realm of oıkonomía. As proof for his assertion that human beings are by nature political animals, he pointed to the human capacity for lógos or rational speech. He was, to be sure, perfectly prepared to acknowledge that the pólıs comes into being for the sake of what he calls “mere life” and for personal advantage, and he acknowledged that human beings once all lived in the pre-political condition that Thomas Hobbes would later describe as “the state of nature.” For he celebrated the accomplishment of the man who “invented the pólıs,” and he understood that the city’s genesis had to do with the need for security against invasion from abroad and thuggery at home and that it was sustained in part by the advantages attendant on the division of labor. But the peripatetic nonetheless denied that the pre-political condition was man’s natural condition—for it was his contention that man’s nature, indicated by the capacity for rational speech that distinguishes human beings from the other animals, is fulfilled only in the pólıs. This entity may well have owed its genesis to the longing for mere life, he tells us. But it owes its being and its character to the desire to live a good and noble life. Once human beings have gathered together with an eye to providing for the common defense, he contends, they inevitably go on to consider other matters as well. For they simply cannot help themselves. When they begin to deliberate, they deliberate concerning advantage. Then, as Aristotle points out, they inevitably go on to ponder the dictates of justice and to concern themselves with the good—above all, the common good.^{Footnote 8}

Aristotle’s opinion on this question would not matter very much had it not been in classical antiquity widely shared, but widely shared it was—already, more than a quarter of a millennium prior to the peripatetic’s composition of his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Consider, for example, the way in which Alcaeus of Mytilene in the early sixth century described to his friend Agesilaidas what it meant to be an exile:

Alcaeus does not mention his family or his wealth. What he misses is what distinguishes him from a beast of prey—the exercise of lógos in the arenas of public deliberation opened up by the existence of his city.^{Footnote 9}

One should also ponder what Theognis of Megara wrote not all that many years thereafter concerning the evils associated with poverty:

When this Megarian contemplates penury, he has little to say about the suffering inflicted on the propertyless by a lack of food and the absence of shelter. What irks him the most is that he lacks the independence required to function properly as a citizen. He is interested in property. But, like Aristotle two centuries thereafter, he regards it as a species of equipment (paraskeúē).^{Footnote 10}

Socrates’ disciple Xenophon, in the generation before Aristotle, summed up the ethic animating the ancient city in this fashion:

Like his predecessors, he appears to regard political participation as an end in itself; and, like Aristotle, he links the primacy he accords political life with the human capacity for lógos.^{Footnote 11}

In such an environment, it would make no sense to suggest that the end of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property; and, in classical antiquity, no one said anything of the sort. Property was a means, not an end. In such an environment, it would make no sense to ask whether political liberty was a prerequisite for economic prosperity—for economic prosperity was itself also a means, not an end. Property was thought of, as I suggested above, as paraskeúē or equipment, and it was deemed a necessity for the reasons intimated by Theognis. Only those with landed property capable of producing income had the leisure to fully participate in the governance of the community—for práxıs was, as everyone knew, a time-consumer. One could devote one’s efforts fully to práxıs if and only if one could somehow outsource oıkonomía to hirelings or slaves—in the best of circumstances, to hirelings or bailiffs ready, willing, and able to manage one’s slaves.^{Footnote 12}

It was this set of circumstances that caused Hybrias of Crete in the archaic period to utter this boast:

Ancient liberty had its foundations, as Hybrias implies, in ancient slavery. The freedom of the fully participant citizen required the enslavement of outsiders. The visible pólıs constituted by the citizen-men rested on an invisible and politically inarticulate body of slaves condemned to labor in private so that their masters might be free to devote their time and efforts to speech and action in public. Euripides summed up the situation with admirable precision when he wrote, “As free men, we live off slaves.”^{Footnote 14} Even in the ancient democracies, as Tocqueville would later note, the ruling order was constituted by “an aristocracy of masters.”^{Footnote 15}

One consequence of the primacy accorded práxıs and of the denial of dignity and honor to those in effect excluded by poverty from the political arena was a profound intensification of the tensions that tend to arise in any society between the haves, who were few in number, and the have-nots, who were nearly everywhere an overwhelming majority. The struggle of the orders in early Rome may have mainly had to do with a conflict over the political status of a particular caste. But no one can read Livy without noting the degree to which that struggle was fueled by class strife—for the plebeians were for the most part poor and the patricians, rich.

The conflicts that arose in Greece were of a similar character. This was especially true in the archaic period. The seısachtheía or “lifting of burdens” effected by Solon at Athens liberated ordinary Athenian farmers, who operated as sharecroppers of a sort, from the dues they owed their well-born neighbors.^{Footnote 16} In the fourth century and thereafter, these tensions reasserted themselves; and, though little was done, there were frequent demands for a redistribution of land.^{Footnote 17}

If, in modern times, class strife tends to be less severe than it often was in antiquity, it is because we have profited from waves of technological progress and from the prosperity attendant on that progress. In classical antiquity, there was no such thing as technological progress, and there was no economic dynamism. The opening up of commerce, where there had been no commerce, could produce an increase in wealth. But there was no ongoing process at work by which wealth could steadily, much less exponentially, expand.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville provides an explanation for this phenomenon. There he observes that “the majority of the human beings” who live in the modern democratic republics “dream solely of the means for altering their fortunes and making them grow. For minds thus predisposed, every new method which shortens the road to wealth, every machine which cuts down on labor, every instrument which reduces the cost of production, and every discovery which eases and adds to life’s pleasures seems the most magnificent effort of the human intelligence.” Those resident in the martial republics of antiquity—regimes rendered aristocratic by the ownership of slaves—looked on the sciences in an entirely different way. They turned to such studies, seeking only “gratification for the mind (l’esprit).” Within societies of this sort, “the class which directs opinion and manages public affairs” finds itself placed permanently by birth in a status well “above the mob.” This class is prey to lofty notions, and its members “display a certain proud disdain for the little pleasures at the very moment when they surrender to them.” This set of prejudices, as Tocqueville is at pains to explain, “raises all to a very high level. In aristocratic times, men generally entertain grand ideas of the dignity, power, and greatness of man. These opinions influence those who cultivate the sciences as they do others. They ease the natural impulse of the mind to the higher regions of thought and naturally dispose it to conceive a sublime and almost divine love of the truth.” This ardor ultimately becomes an obstacle to progress in the arts, for “the savants of such an age are drawn towards theory, and it often happens that they conceive an unreflective (inconsideré) contempt for the practical (la pratique).”^{Footnote 18}

Such was the situation within the ancient city. The philosophers of antiquity would certainly have disputed Tocqueville’s contention that the contempt they harbored was unreflective, but no one among them would have challenged its existence or denied its kinship with aristocratic hauteur. If anything, they would have exaggerated its import. Aristotle claims that Thales cornered the olive-press market solely to demonstrate two related propositions: first, “that it would be very easy for philosophers to enrich themselves if they so wished”; and second, “that money-making is not an activity which men of this kind think worthy of serious concern.”^{Footnote 19} Though the skeptic might be tempted to question Aristotle’s imputation of motive, he would certainly agree that this was the attitude of the Stagirite himself—and Aristotle was by no means peculiar in holding this view.

Under the influence of Plato, Archimedes is said to have carried the outlook articulated by Aristotle to extremes. This man was, by all accounts, the greatest mathematician of ancient times. The recovery of his treatise The Method of Mechanical Theorems suggests that he even invented calculus.^{Footnote 20} During the Second Punic War, when his native Syracuse came under Roman siege, he performed wonders, designing machines that frustrated the enemy’s every attack. Despite all of this, however, his accomplishments as an engineer are said to have given Archimedes very little satisfaction. Plutarch reports that he even refused to compose a treatise on the subject. “Archimedes regarded pursuits of a mechanical character and every téchnē intimately bound up with human need (chreía) as ignoble and vulgar,” the biographer explains. “His love of honor (phılotımía) was focused solely on those studies endowed with a nobility (tò kalón) and magnificence (perıttón) to which the demands of necessity had made no contribution.” For this reason, the Syracusan dedicated his writings to pure mathematics alone: “Here, the subject rivals the proof—the former displays grandeur and nobility (tò kállos); and the latter, a precision and power exceeding nature itself.”^{Footnote 21}

Archimedes’ death was, so Livy reveals, in accord with his belief. On the day that Syracuse fell to the Romans, the great mathematician was so “intent on some geometrical forms that he had scratched out in the dust” that he was oblivious to the fact that the city was being put to the sack. As a consequence, he did nothing to protect himself, and a Roman soldier caught him unawares. One version of the story stipulated that the soldier tried to arrest Archimedes and conduct him to his commander, but the great mathematician was so wrapped up in the geometrical problem at hand that he refused to budge until he had finished his proof; in anger, the soldier drew his sword and killed him on the spot. On Archimedes’ instructions, his friends and relations placed a distinctive monument over his grave. On the top, there was a sphere enclosed by a cylinder. Below it was inscribed a formula specifying by how much the volume of the solid exceeded that of the sphere it contained. Archimedes was not a self-effacing man; but despite all the marvelous feats he had managed in that remarkable struggle with Rome, this scientist and mathematician did nothing to ensure that he be remembered for his wondrous machines.^{Footnote 22}

There were others, of course, who had little sympathy for Plato’s crusade to keep mathematics pure. But though Ctesibius, Hero, and the other scientists associated with the Museum at Alexandria were far less contemptuous than Archimedes regarding the status of the science of mechanics, they never applied their expertise to any practical matter other than war. They did devise primitive engines worked by steam, and they used these to open doors and to awe the multitude with magical effects; but neither they nor anyone else ever did anything to apply these discoveries to easing the burdens imposed on their fellow men by the need for endless toil.^{Footnote 23} At the end of antiquity, when the author of the De Rebus Bellicis paused to reflect on the stagnation of technique that characterized the age, he found it easy to pinpoint the cause. “It is agreed by all,” he observed, “that neither noble birth nor abundant wealth and neither power founded on high office nor eloquence acquired by the study of letters has aimed at and achieved (consecuta est) anything of use in the mechanical and industrial arts (utilitates artium). . . . For, though the barbarian nations neither excel in eloquence nor gain glory from rank, they are by no means strangers to mechanical invention when nature comes to their aid.”^{Footnote 24} As Sir Francis Bacon and his disciples (Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison among them) were to recognize, to change the situation identified by this anonymous observer would require a profound revolution in human affairs. In antiquity, such a revolution never took place.

In practice, this meant that the only reliable means for improving one’s lot in life was theft of one sort or another. In the archaic period, the Spartans accomplished this by conquering and subjecting the Messenians, who lived on the other side of Mt. Taygetus. If Plutarch is to be trusted, they carved the conquered territory into allotments, conferred one of these on each and every citizen, and thereby transformed a community wracked by civil strife into a polity distinguished by domestic tranquility. Where there had been rich and poor, there were only gentlemen of leisure equipped with servants.^{Footnote 25}

Athens in its heyday did something similar. After the Persian Wars, it organized a defensive league aimed at preventing a return of the Mede. Those within the league who preferred not to provide triremes and crews for the navy were asked to contribute money instead. The money they pledged was then used to build additional ships and to hire men—poor Athenians in particular—to row in them. Over time, nearly all of the cities opted to provide money, and those that failed to deliver on their pledge were reduced by force to subject communities. In this fashion, what came to be regarded as an empire provided wages for something on the order of twenty thousand Athenians.

That was one way in which Athens profited from the so-called Delian League. There was another way as well. When the Athenians and their allies conquered territory that the Persians or other enemies of the Greeks had controlled, they settled poor Athenians on the land. When they subdued revolting allies, they did the like. In consequence, they reduced class tension at home by making provision for the impecunious.^{Footnote 26}

Rome was in this matter, as in all things, even more systematic. When it conquered a territory, it customarily seized about one-third of the land and settled thereon a colony drawn from its poorer citizens and from those who resided in allied communities who were similarly impoverished. In this fashion, it relieved class tension at home and it established a garrison of its own citizens on the territory seized.^{Footnote 27}

In classical antiquity, as these examples should suggest, war was at least in part an economic enterprise organized in such a manner as to satisfy the acquisitive instinct. It provided men with land to farm, and it produced slaves to farm it for them. As one would then expect, war was the norm in antiquity, not the exception. In The Laws, Plato had the Cretan Cleinias remark that “what most human beings call peace our lawgiver considered to be but a name, for there always exists by nature an undeclared war among all the cities.”^{Footnote 28} This was a presumption shared by the Romans as well as the Greeks.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in antiquity ever asked whether political liberty was a prerequisite for prosperity. But had someone posed the question, I suspect that the standard answer would have been the one implicit in Herodotus’ Histories. If, against astonishing odds, the Spartans, the Athenians, and their allies defeated the Persians, Herodotus indicates, it was because the Greek infantrymen and sailors were free and the Great King’s soldiers and rowers were not.^{Footnote 29} If liberty is a prerequisite for bravery in combat, then, as the testimony of Hybrias of Crete powerfully suggests, liberty was in classical antiquity a prerequisite for prosperity.