The cases referred to in the preceding text concerned population groups that although not formally slaves, were kept apart from the citizen-community and lived in conditions that closely resembled slavery. But in many societies of the Archaic period, it was also quite normal for some citizens who were considered members of the polis, the state, the people, or some other recognized collectivity to nevertheless live in complete dependence and submission to richer or more powerful members of the same community; thus, in practice, they were un-free. Many, if not the majority of the population in most states of the Near East and in Egypt must have lived in these conditions. Certainly, in Egypt, the greater part of the peasant population lived in complete dependence on local potentates who, whether in the name of the king or not, compelled them to provide various goods and services, thereby in practice binding the population to the soil. In Mesopotamia, there existed all sorts of rent or lease arrangements for longer periods that in practice turned the renter into a slave during the period concerned; sometimes, in legal documents, he was even called a slave, although his temporary condition was different from that of a “real” slave. In Greece too, renters were considered persons who were not totally free and were therefore accepted only as second-class citizens in the emerging poleis. We know that at around 600 BC in Athens, poor peasants had to surrender one-sixth of their produce to rich landowners, probably as a form of interest on what they had borrowed with their land as security. When Solon put an end to this, he presented it as a liberation, just as he had liberated other citizens who had borrowed by pledging their own persons as security and fallen into debt slavery. Early Rome had its clientes: persons completely dependent on their patronus, and originally perhaps their renters; but even if this was not the case, they had to obey their lord “as a father” in exchange for his protection. This kind of strong dependency between members of the same political community as we find with the Roman clientela was unknown in Greece, at least in the form of a generally recognized and respected institution, and this may in part explain why in Greece at the end of the Archaic period—and even more so in the subsequent period—the idea of equality among all citizens could re-assert itself, but not in Rome.
World History
