Ancient & Modern | 28 November 2009

What do we do about the wealth-producers? Especially foreign ones? Everything in our power to indicate our distaste for them, seems to be the answer. The Greek essayist and soldier Xenophon would wonder what we were playing at.

In 355 bc Athens was in desperate financial straits. It was then that Xenophon, whose military career had taken him as far as Persia and who knew a bit about rich foreigners, wrote the pamphlet Poroi (‘Revenues’). It is a programme for economic recovery quite unlike the usual Athenian public spending cuts and taxation schemes. His most bold and original proposal is to establish a state capital fund, with a decent return for investors, to, for example, invest in publicly owned slave labour to increase output at the silver mines; run state-owned trade facilities to increase business at the harbour Peiraieus; and set up a state-owned merchant shipping fleet. But he warns that, for this to succeed, Athens must be at peace. Only thus will it be able to lure ‘ship-owners and traders, people with an eye for business and money, workers, teachers, philosophers, poets, top play directors’ and so on. The concept of the ‘peace-dividend’ is not new.

But first and foremost, Xenophon wants to fill Athens with the rich from other states. This is not to fleece them — non-Athenian residents (‘metics’) already paid a small monthly resident alien tax — but because ‘they are self-supporting and help their states in a number of ways without receiving public pay for it’. The point is that, for the most part, metics could not own land or real estate. So they came to Athens only to do business, and some of them became extremely rich from it. Inevitably they could arouse resentment, but ‘imports, exports, transactions, sales, rents and excise duties would increase as they did’.