The Contribution of the Poor
No thoroughly satisfactory alternative or complement to the theory of hoplite
revolution has yet emerged to explain the
rise of the polis as a
political organization that opened citizenship to poor citizens as well as those
better off1. The laboring
free poor—the workers in agriculture, trade, and crafts—contributed
much to the economic strength of the city-state, but it is hard to see how their value
as
laborers2 could have been translated into political rights. The better-off elements in
society certainly did not extend the rights of citizenship to the poor out of any
romanticized vision of poverty as spiritually noble. As one contemporary put it,
“Money is the man; no poor man ever counts as good or honorable.”
One significant boost to extending political rights to the poor perhaps came from the
sole rulers, called
tyrants3, who seized power for a time in some city-states and whose history will be
discussed subsequently. Tyrants could have used grants of citizenship to poor or
disenfranchised men as a means of marshaling popular support for their regimes. Another,
more speculative possibility is that the aristocrats and
hoplites4 had simply become less cohesive as a political group in this period of dramatic
change, thereby weakening opposition to the growing idea that it was unjust to exclude
the poor from political participation. When the poor agitated for power in the citizen
community, on this view, there would have been no united front of aristocrats and
hoplites to oppose them, making compromise necessary to prevent destructive civil
unrest. Or it may be that we underestimate the significance of lightly-armed combatants
in the eighth century, when hoplites were presumably not as numerous as in later times
and perhaps the sheer force of the numbers of poor men—wielding staves,
throwing rocks, employing farming implements as weapons—could have helped
their city-state's contingent of hoplites to sway the tide of battle against an opposing
force.
