Prehistoric Eras to 600 C.E xxxiii Classical Greece For all the democratic reforms attributed to the ancient Greeks, only Athens and its allies accepted this form of “equality under the law,” and even then the rights were brief in duration and limited to male citizens Because of the stubborn autonomy that each city-state claimed for itself, it is hard to sum up Greek social and class relationships In general, Greeks despised kings, prized local identities, often quarreled among themselves, and nonetheless cooperated in matters of athletic competition They also agreed about the superiority of the Greek language, religion, and commerce compared with those of other peoples They rarely mixed with non-Greek “barbarians.” Non-Greek slaves, who did the work too undignified for Greeks to do, were grudgingly accepted Family and marriage were valued because survival depended on having enough children so that the next generation would protect the city with an army and take care of the citizens in old age Rome Early Rome overturned its Etruscan kings and became a republic dominated by a group of men who made decisions for all the citizens These leaders were called senators, and they came from an aristocratic class called the patricians Commoners (or plebeians) owned small plots of land and were full citizens of the early republic, but their role in government was limited to veto power of plebiscites and election of their own spokesmen, called tribunes Class struggles led to civil wars and the disintegration of republican institutions As Rome acquired land outside the Italian peninsula, two changes occurred that affected Roman society: First, the patrician class benefited because successful wars increased its wealth and power; second, the old system of running Roman politics failed to cope with the new empire’s demands The plebeians abandoned their small farms and moved to the city for economic opportunities Rome’s leaders were increasingly compelled to provide “bread and circuses” to keep the unemployed citizens content Popular disenchantment with the new arrangements and the leaders’ tendency to foment civil war motivated the likes of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony to experiment with new forms of government Though the office of Caesar (a term that came to mean both emperor and demigod) proved popular, there was still an undercurrent of discontent from classes as diverse as the original patricians of the Republic days and newly acquired slaves, numbering up to one-third of the city’s population Spartacus led a throng of disgruntled slaves in 73 b.c.e., requiring eight legions to quash the uprising Julius Caesar, the hero of the new imperial age, was murdered in the Senate by old guard Republicans on the Ides of March, 44 b.c.e The Caesars adapted by expanding the opportunities for citizenship and by giving slaves and freedmen opportunities to gain wealth and improve their status However, there is no evidence that wealth disparities diminished over the whole imperial period The steady rise of inadequacies of the Roman religion led to the spread of Christianity among all ranks for Roman society The Americas Mesoamerican and Andean peoples became more hierarchical and stratified as urbanization increased Birth, lineage, and occupation determined one’s place in these civilizations The overall class structure was pyramidal with the ruler and nobility on top, followed by a priestly class, a warrior class, merchants and traders, artisans and crafts workers, then agriculturalists, with servants and slaves on the bottom The whole schema was cemented together by a mythology that resembled that of Shang China or pharaonic Egypt: The gods approved of the elites as guardians of the secret lore concerning such things as astronomy, calendrical calculations, and ritual, which enabled them to stay in power While there is some evidence of lowerclass discontent, the preponderance of evidence indicates that wars, invasions, and ecological bottlenecks—not internal class conflicts—were primarily responsible for the decline of classic Mesoamerican civilizations Literary Classics and Monasteries The ability to read and write was considered almost magical by potentate and peasant alike in the ancient world This fascination with the written text explains why those ancient religions that survived are scripture based Reading and writing became particularly useful as cities and civilizations required more complex administration and organization At first, writing was complicated and unwieldy (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese pictographs), and few could master the thousands of symbols in each written language As a result certain societies honored the scholarly class or compelled their administrators to pass literacy tests