The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World

In The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix's attention was focused narrowly on a few sentences in Thucydides, and his acute and valuable analyses of such broader topics, as the influence of the helot question on Spartan foreign policy were intended (formally, at least) only to intensify the illumination of this small area. In his still more monumental and magisterial new book, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, although many of the same betes noires (notably the persistent and dangerous fantasy of the emergence of an influential mercantile class in Archaic Greece) are pursued with the same vigour, the movement of thought is reversed. The author is engaged in a Herculean wrestling bout with a whole reactionary tradition of historiography; a vast structure is reared on the basis of axioms elicited from a few proof-texts, and if we are to be persuaded, it must be by the moral force of the whole.