Inhabited from the Stone Age to the present, Athens is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. We know it best from the Classical period (500–300 bc), because in addition to its impressive archaeological remains, such as the Parthenon, a vast variety of informative inscriptions and texts, from philosophical dialogues to comic jokes, attests to its importance. The names of its most famous citizens – Aischylos, Aristophanes, Perikles, Plato, Sokrates, Solon, Themistokles, Thucydides – are not unfamiliar to the educated public. Long after Pindar (fr. 76), Athens remained well known in European history as the “bulwark of Greece,” having routed the Persian menace not only once at Marathon, but also a second time at Salamis. Many of the institutions invented by the Athenians – democracy and theater being the obvious ones, but also practices such as jury pay, impeachment, and a ‘tomb for the unknown soldier’ – are still with us today.

We know about the benefactors of Greek cities primarily from inscriptions that mark the honours given to them for their benefaction. But the act of benefaction, which is nothing other than the giving of a gift to a corporate body, existed independently of the honour, and this chapter seeks to turn attention to why it was that institutions needed benefactors, and the different needs of institutions of different sizes. Corporate bodies had a number of ways, including direct and indirect taxation and requiring contributions, to meet their financial and other needs, but the smaller the corporate body, the more important it was for it to cultivate benefactors. The particular need felt by Athenian demes can be seen to be reflected in the indications in the epigraphic record that they were precocious in developing ways of encouraging benefaction. But how a group relates in size to other groups is important in determining the attitudes that potential benefactors take to it, so that relative as well as absolute size matters.

This chapter studies working life at Athens, sketching the range of occupations in the Athenian economy, from farming in the countryside to artisans, vendors, and purveyors of services in the city.

This chapter explores the complex relations between the city of Athens (asty) and its large territory (chora), which formed the two essential entities of the Greek polis.

For most subjects of large, premodern empires, the twin poles of identity and belonging were the family or household at one end, and the imperial system as a whole at the other. Between these two poles there could be several overlapping or nested structures of identity and belonging, of which the locality, often a city or smaller nucleated settlement, was usually the most salient. As a result, when we consider the lived experience of premodern imperial subjects, we tend to think of the household, the city, and the empire (and perhaps the cosmos) as the operative categories within which such individuals lived their daily lives and conceived the world. But in some political systems there existed another level, located between the family and the city, where individual subjects could lead meaningful lives. This is the level of suprafamilial, but submunicipal, groups, associations, corporations, and collectivities of all sorts, inhabited, typically, by what we might call the “middle stratum” of premodern urban societies.

In 22 bce, amidst a crisis caused by an acute grain shortage, the Roman populace offered the office of dictator to Augustus, who turned this offer down in a particularly dramatic fashion. He is said to have knelt before the people, imploring them to desist when they were pressing him to accept this invidious power. The grain shortage, as Augustus relates in the Res Gestae, was then quickly and successfully solved by him without resorting to dictatorship, with the help of a much more modest and specific power of ‘managing the corn supply’ which he agreed to take. The incident seems highly instructive as regards the public image that Augustus sought to project, the way he and his rule were regarded by the people, and the relations between him and the populace in the early years of his rule as princeps.

Few words in the historian’s vocabulary have such a wide semantic gulf as “the people.” Add to this the vast range of different languages, cultures, and layers of time in which “the people” are invoked, and the term translates into a commonplace. The present volume reclaims some of the conceptual capacity of “the people” in history. It looks at the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome, and China through the lens of cross-cultural comparison, addressing some of the key issues that related to the notion of “the people” in the variant of each civilization. In this vein of inquiry, the book raises a set of questions: the positional question of who “the people” were, also in relation to other people; the participatory question of how groups of “the people” constituted themselves through patterns of belonging and exclusion, and how their status, or nonstatus, was charged with meaning; and the conversational question of how “the people” communicated about their group cohesion and negotiated the omnipresence of imbalances in, for instance, gender, social status, political entitlement, economic ability, or cultural expertise.

Studies in cross-cultural comparison strike a delicate balance between specificity and generalization. For one, comparative approaches to ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese history draw on the particularities of each of those civilizations, with close attention to the cultural complexities that make each one of them distinct. On the other hand, while committed to the disclosure of culture and context, comparative research seeks to extrapolate macrohistorical stereotypes and project broad, or bold, generalizations. If the investigation gravitates too much toward the specific, the comparison becomes treacherous. If it is too close to generalization, it is in danger of being meaningless.

The subject of this chapter poses a number of problems. The first is a methodological one. The sources for law in the ancient Mediterranean world, and for general social history, are far richer than those from early China, and thus there is an imbalance in the sources available for comparison of the two cultures.1 Second, the attitude toward law, especially in Rome, was far different from that in the Chinese tradition. The Romans were proud of their laws and their legal tradition, and they provided, in their various expressions and promulgations, the foundation of much Western European law, though, of course, not of common law. The Chinese Confucian tradition, on the other hand, denigrated law, if not outright despised it, associating it with the tradition of the so-called “legalists” or fajia, who they thought had assisted the First Emperor of China, Qin Shihuangdi, in unifying the East Asian subcontinent in 221 bce and founding the first Chinese empire. This emperor was long considered to be the epitome of a “bad ruler,” having authorized the “Burning of the Books” and the “Burial of the Scholars,” and his name was notorious throughout the imperial period, only being rehabilitated by Chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.