Ascesa e declino dello Stato ateniese

“The large number of slaves is explained by the fact that many of them worked together in manufactories with large rooms under overseers. With the development of the commerce and industry came the accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands; the mass of the free citizens was impoverished and had to choose between going into handicrafts and competing with slave labor, which was considered ignoble and base and, moreover, promised little success – and complete pauperization. Under the prevailing circumstances what happened was the latter, and being in the majority they dragged the whole Athenian state down with them. It was not democracy that caused the downfall of Athens, as the European schoolmasters who cringe before royalty would have us believe, but slavery, which brought the labor of the free citizen into contempt. The rise of the state among the Athenians presents a very typical example of state building in general; because, on the one hand, it took place in a pure form, without the interference of violence, external or internal (the short period of usurpation by Peisistratus left no trace behind it); because, on the other hand, it represented the rise of a highly developed form of state, the democratic republic, emerging directly out of gentile society; and lastly, because we are sufficiently acquainted with all the essential details” [Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 2010]