The poorer citizens had exhausted their scanty savings

I have mentioned in the past that social hierarchy is simply a means for determining who starves first. In the past dozen decades we have moved sufficiently far from recurring starvation that it is easy to forget that death by starvation was still recently a routine threat because productivity was so low and the capacity of individuals and society to produce a storable surplus was so low.

A reminder comes in John R. Hales' Lords of the Sea, his account of the rise of the Athenian navy. The Athenians are facing the invading Persians. They have already engaged the Persian navy once but have now retreated to Salamis where they await the onslaught of the Persian juggernaut. It is easy to overlook the differences of past and present and overlook the details we take for granted. Themistocles has lead the Athenians over the past three years in their preparations. We remember him for convincing the Athenians to use the money from a newly discovered silver mine to build a navy. We remember his generalship. But in the midst of those strategic issues, he had to look after the critical minor issues as well.

Meanwhile at Salamis, Themistocles faced a new crisis. The common citizens of Athens, the twenty thousand thetes, were running short of money on this, their first campaign on behalf of their city. Themistocles' expanded navy called for the enlistment of all citizens, rich or poor. The horsemen and hoplites were men of means, who could afford to buy their own provisions while on campaign. But after almost a month of naval service the poorer citizens had exhausted their scanty savings. The city had no funds to help them and no stockpiles of food to dole out to relieve the shortfall.

Just imagine a society with insufficient surplus to sustain itself beyond a months' worth of consumption. Such a scenario has slipped beyond our consciousness.

But just because we don't consider such regression possible doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Tim Cavanaugh has an article, Pictures of Afghanistan in the Fifties and Sixties Are Totally Depressing that highlights such a regression. Pictures of Leopoldville in the old Belgian Congo bring home a similar sense of regression. This isn't to say that the old days were always good or right - only that whatever we value is always a lot more contingent than we think.