Our Brutal Economic Inheritance

The Athenian economy was largely household-based.  And households were structured in rigid rankings of domination.  Athenian children were the property of the male head of household.  He decided if a newborn child should live or die. If it was a healthy boy, chances were he’d be kept. But if it was a baby girl, she could be wrenched from her mothers’s arms and condemned to death.

Outright killing was not legal – although it might have been more merciful. The accepted practice was to “expose” unwanted babies. The child was abandoned to slowly starve, freeze to death, or perhaps replenish the Athenian army of young slave prostitutes.

Although this also isn’t mentioned in most books about ancient Greece, the fabled Athenian democracy was a slave-holding society. Only free men with property could vote or hold office. The rest of the population, slaves and women who were not slaves, had no political rights and hardly any civil rights.

There are accounts of slaves who enjoyed a certain amount of freedom and respect. Yet the lot of most slaves was hard. According to the Greek writer Demosthenes, the Athenians maintained a public torture chamber for the routine torture of slaves in legal proceedings, since a slave's testimony was admissible in court only if given under torture. Slaves worked in their masters’ houses and fields, as well as in mines, where conditions were so bad they often died within a year. Slaves manned the oars of the Athenians’ famous warships or triremes, where they also faced early death should the ship sink in a storm or battle. Household slaves were often put in what Athenians called a “gulp preventer,” a wooden device closing the jaws, which was placed on slaves who handled food to keep them from eating it."

As for women, there are some accounts of women who were poets, philosophers, and even political advisors, like Aspasia, the companion of the famous Athenian ruler Pericles, in the Greek Golden Age. But these were exceptional cases.

As classicist Eva Keuls notes, women were not even second class citizens in Athens. "Like a slave,” Keuls writes, “a woman had virtually no protection under the law except in so far as she was the property of a man." A woman who was left property by her father had no right to use it. That power was in her guardian’s hands. Indeed, “respectable” free women were not free. They were confined to the women’s quarters, or gynakonitis.

There was in Athens an official Women's Police, the gynaikonomoi. As Aristotle wrote, it served to restrict the movements of women to "protect their chastity." Girls were often married off when they were mere children, and they had no access to education. Nor were “free” women permitted to freely associate with men even in their own homes.

Men seem to have relied on “respectable” women largely as managers of their households and breeders of their sons. Men’s sexual relations were often with prostitutes or in homosexual liaisons between older men and young boys. Of course, under the dominator double standard for sex, men had complete sexual freedom. And they exercised this freedom in many ways, including the famous Greek symposia, which – despite the term’s current scholarly usage – were orgies hosted by Athenian men in the andrones or men’s quarters at the front of the house.

Slave girls were often used by men as prostitutes, and, as Keuls writes, "automatically subject to the unfathomable horrors of that institution, which included abuse by their owners, torture, random execution, and sale at any time to the highest bidder." Even those prostitutes who were not slaves were strictly controlled. As Aristotle writes, price control of prostitution was an important Athenian institution. Laws even ensured that "girl flute, harp, and cithara players do not charge more than two drachmas for their services." In other words, the income that women could independently generate through one of the very few – indeed, in some situations only – professions open to them was severely limited.

In sum, only a small minority of the Athenian population enjoyed the benefits of the famous Athenian democracy. The majority – male slaves and both slave and “free” women – were basically there for the use of free men.

So while Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Plato sometimes espoused partnership values, this ancient society, from which we inherited many of our values, oriented largely to the domination system. As we saw earlier, this is also true for Judeo-Christian tradition, the other major influence on Western culture. Caring, nonviolence, and empathy are at the core of Judeo-Christian values. But many biblical traditions came out of brutal tribal societies. And we can still see the effect of these dominator Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions in Western economic systems to our day.

Excerpted from The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics  (2007) by Riane Eisler