Classical Civilization

The Greco-Roman civilization (c. 1100 BCE – 500 CE) — Quigley's other master case for the seven-stage model, the only civilization in his sample to have completed all seven stages

Also known as: Classical Civilization, Classical, Greco-Roman civilization, Greco-Roman world

Classical Civilization is Quigley's analytical unit for the Greco-Roman world that ran from roughly 1100 BCE to 500 CE. Alongside Western Civilization, it is the primary case study in Evolution of Civilizations (chapter 9), used to articulate the full seven-stage model from Mixture through Invasion (EoC 282). Its instrument of expansion was slavery, which Quigley identifies as the social organisation that allowed the slave-owning class to claim most of the production of the slave class and so accumulate the surplus that financed expansion (EoC 138, 288). Classical civilization is the one case in Quigley's primary sample that ran the cycle to its completion — including a Universal Empire (Rome), a long Decay, and a final Invasion that produced the Dark Ages.

Mixture: The Aegean Synthesis

Classical civilization, in Quigley's analysis, arose on the periphery of Minoan civilization, on the shores of the Aegean Sea and especially its eastern shore (EoC 148). Its period of mixture, beginning with the Iron Age invasions of c. 1100 BCE, combined three streams. First, surviving Minoan-Mycenaean elements: the substrate population, the artistic naturalism that Quigley argues resurfaces in seventh-century Greek geometric art, certain religious traditions later visible in mystery cults, and the heroic-epic tradition that Homer would inherit (EoC 288, 282). Second, Iron Age invaders from the north — the Dorians, who came only a short distance from the north but with such force and such destructive violence that the great mass of them ended up in southern Greece (EoC 254). These invaders brought iron-working technique, an Indo-European language complex that became Greek, and the social organisation of warrior-bands which, in the Aegean setting, evolved into the warrior-aristocracy of the early polis. Third, Phoenician (Canaanite) contributions. These, Quigley notes, were extensive: the alphabet, metalwork techniques (including the goatskin bellows in ironwork), mythological material (such as Hephaestus, the god of craft skills), units of weight and measure (including money), and many musical instruments and techniques — generally attributed by the Greeks to Cinyras (the Canaanite Kinnor) (EoC 288). The Phoenicians also restored the basic conditions for civilised life in the west: law and order on the seas, the extension of distant trade, the reappearance of city life, the recreation of an urban class, and the revival of writing. On these foundations, Quigley writes plainly, "ancient society was able to rear a new civilization because it had an instrument of expansion. This instrument was slavery" (EoC 288). The mixture was complete by roughly 800 BCE, when the polis-form, the alphabetic script, and the slave-economy were all in place across the Aegean.

Instrument of Expansion: Slavery

The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization, Quigley argues, was slavery — "a kind of social organization… that allowed one class of society, the slaveowners, to claim most of the production of another class in society, the slaves" (EoC 138). Slavery satisfied the three functional requirements of an instrument of expansion (incentive, surplus, investment) by concentrating economic surplus in the hands of slaveowners, who could in principle invest it in new productive arrangements (EoC 132–133). Quigley dates the origin of Classical slavery to the Indo-European conquest of the archaic Mediterranean peoples — partly in the Bronze Age invasions, but mostly as a consequence of the Iron Age invasions (EoC 288–289). Crucially, slavery's institutionalisation was the cause of Classical civilization's eventual failure to reform: when the agrarian crisis of late-Republican Rome arose, "to reform it would have involved abolition of slavery and division of the large estates. The reformers who wanted to do this were assassinated by the daggers of the landlords, some on the floor of the senate itself" (EoC 117–118). A society based on slavery, Quigley adds, is structurally weak in incentives to invent: the slaves who know the productive process most intimately have no reason to improve it, and the owners are too distant from the work to do so (EoC 133).

The Seven Stages Applied to the Classical World

Quigley maps the seven stages onto the Classical case as follows. Mixture: roughly the Iron Age invasions (c. 1100 BCE) through the Greek Dark Age. Gestation: c. 1000–750 BCE, archaic Greece, during which the polis form, the alphabet, and the slave-economy take definitive shape. Expansion: the Greek city-state Age of Expansion, c. 750–500 BCE, including the great wave of Mediterranean colonisation that planted Greek cities from the Black Sea to Massilia in southern France and Cyrene in North Africa. The Ionian science of c. 600–400 BCE represents the intellectual peak of this expansion, with Hellenistic science of c. 350–150 BCE representing the second peak — linked by Aristotle's Lyceum (EoC 293). Age of Conflict: the Peloponnesian and post-Peloponnesian wars from 431 BCE onward, then the Hellenistic period of dynastic warfare between the diadochi successor-states of Alexander. Universal Empire: the Roman Empire from Augustus onward, brought into existence by a peripheral Italian power (Rome). Decay: the Late Empire from roughly the third-century crisis onward. Invasion: the Germanic invasions and the fall of Roman political power in the West, conventionally dated A.D. 476 (EoC 254). The core area of Classical civilization was conquered by Macedonia about 330 BCE — Quigley's characteristic pattern in which a semi-peripheral power conquers the core before a fully peripheral power conquers the whole — and then the entire civilization was unified under Rome by the late first century BCE (EoC 153–154). Classical civilization is the only civilization in Quigley's primary five-case sample that ran through all seven stages of its cycle, which is why it together with Western civilization constitute his two master cases for the framework.

Ideology, Decay, and the Loss of Ideology

Classical culture, Quigley writes, was mundane in character, organising everything in terms of human aims. It had no real concern with life after death, no real idea of eternity or of reward and punishment in the afterlife, and no real idea of the nature of divinity until very late — when it achieved this idea only as a consequence of an aristocratic, rationalistic pursuit of truth by men of leisure with no real regard for wealth or power (EoC 282). It was extreme materialist in tendency, but escaped the ordinary consequences of materialism through its ideals of aristocracy and moderation (EoC 282). The Classical ideal of the citizen — the free male of the polis, sharply distinguished from slave, woman, and barbarian — was the social-religious form that channelled this materialism into productive civic activity. In Decay, however, the ideology was lost. The conventional-by-slavery sophist ideas, when accepted, combined with Stoic resignation and acceptance of the external appearances of things to a degree that entirely cancelled the dynamic and creative impulses of the earlier Classical culture (EoC 313). The slavery question is critical here: Stoic philosophy, by accepting the sophist position that slavery was merely conventional rather than natural, eroded the ideological scaffolding of the productive system without thereby producing a successor scaffolding. The result was a late Classical culture that had no commitment to either the existing slave-economy or to its reform. Quigley stresses the parallel to the modern Western case: "the loss of the ideology of Western civilization (like the earlier loss of the ideology of Classical civilization) will rest rather on the overemphasis on materialism and selfish individualism than it will on overemphasis of rationalism or spirituality" (EoC 347). The Classical case is therefore a structural warning to Western civilization: the danger is not too much science, but too much consumerism.

Universal Empire, Decay, and Invasion

Rome's emergence as Universal Empire from Augustus onward represents Quigley's textbook case of Stage 5 (EoC 138–139). Yet the very stability and apparent peace of the Universal Empire was, in Quigley's analytical framework, a symptom of the prior failure to reform — the institutional victory of the slave-owning latifundia over any possibility of an agrarian or technological reform that would have abolished slavery, divided the great estates, and re-launched expansion (EoC 117–118). The Gracchi and their reformist successors, who attempted exactly this reform in the late Roman Republic, "were assassinated by the daggers of the landlords, some on the floor of the senate itself," Quigley writes (EoC 118). The triumph of Augustan Rome was therefore the political triumph of the very class whose vested interests blocked the productive reform that the civilization required. What followed was a long Stage 6, characterised by economic shrinkage, demographic decline, intellectual ossification, the rise of magical and otherworldly religions filling the ideological vacuum left by exhausted Classical paganism, falling capacity to defend the frontiers, and the gradual replacement of the soldier-citizen by mercenaries and federated barbarian groups. Stage 7 (Invasion) arrived in waves through the third, fourth, and fifth centuries A.D., culminating in the conventional date of 476 for the fall of the western Empire (EoC 254). The eastern half of the Roman world — what Quigley analyses as Byzantine civilization — survived as something distinct, which he carefully argues is a new civilization (different religion, ideology, social organisation, military and economic technology, and instrument of expansion) rather than merely a continuation of Classical (EoC 330–331). The fall of the West, then, was the close of Classical civilization, not the close of all things; on the Western European periphery, the elements were already gathering for the rise of the new Western civilization.

Why Classical Matters in Quigley's Argument

Classical civilization functions in Quigley's argument as the empirical control case for Western civilization. Because it has run the full cycle, Quigley can use it to identify which features of the Western situation are stage-typical and which are anomalous. The repeated reform of the Western instrument of expansion (three Ages of Expansion rather than one) is the most striking anomaly identified by this comparison: Classical's failure to reform slavery is the contrast that makes Western's repeated reforms visible (EoC 132, 117–118). Equally, Classical's loss of ideology in Decay supplies Quigley's warning to the present-day Western reader (EoC 347). Chapter 9 of Evolution of Civilizations (pp. 269–332) is the chapter-length working-out of these comparisons.

Cited in

evolution-of-civilizations · p. 288 Quigley
On these foundations ancient society was able to rear a new civilization because it had an instrument of expansion. This instrument was slavery.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 138 Quigley
In Classical civilization it was a kind of social organization, slavery, that allowed one class of society, the slaveowners, to claim most of the production of another class in society, the slaves.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 282 Quigley
[Classical culture] explained everything in terms of human aims; it had no real concern with life after death or with the gods, and had no real idea of eternity or of reward or punishment in the afterlife.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 288 Quigley
The contributions of the Phoenicians to the period of mixture are well known. Coming late, they included the alphabet, many techniques in metalwork… a considerable amount of mythology… units of weight and measures (including money), and many musical instruments.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 117 Quigley
The agrarian system of ancient Rome was an inefficient method of producing food… but to reform it would have involved abolition of slavery and division of the large estates. The reformers who wanted to do this were assassinated by the daggers of the landlords, some on the floor of the senate itself.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 133 Quigley
A society whose productive system was based on slavery would probably be uninventive, because the slaves, who knew the productive process most intimately, would have little incentive to devise new methods.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 153 Quigley
In Classical civilization the core area was conquered by Macedonia about 330 B.C.; the whole civilization by the Roman Empire.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 254 Quigley
[The Iron Age invasions on both sides of the Aegean Sea] established the basis on which the subsequent Classical civilization was to rise.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 148 Quigley
Classical civilization was born on the shores of the Aegean Sea, especially the eastern shore, on what was the periphery of Minoan civilization.
evolution-of-civilizations · p. 347 Quigley
The loss of the ideology of Western civilization (like the earlier loss of the ideology of Classical civilization) will rest rather on the overemphasis on materialism and selfish individualism.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 21 Quigley
Classical civilization, running from roughly 1100 B.C. to A.D. 500, is the great precedent that any analysis of Western prospects must engage.