G. E. M. de Ste. Croix

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aardappeleters ("The Potato Eaters") by Vincent Van Gogh, 1885. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix used the picture as the frontispiece for his book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.

Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix, February 10, 1910-February 5, 2000 was a British historian who specialized in examining the classical era from a historical materialist perspective.

De Ste. Croix was born at Macau. He was educated at Clifton School, in Bristol, and obtained a law degree. He was a physically strong man and a talented tennis player, who once defeated Fred Perry and who competed at Wimbledon in 1929. In 1926-40, he practised as a solicitor. During World War II he joined the Royal Air Force, and was stationed for a time in Egypt, where he had the opportunity to expand his knowledge of ancient languages. After the war ended, De Ste. Croix studied ancient history at University College, London. In 1950-53 he taught at the London School of Economics and Birkbeck College, before being appointed a fellow of New College, Oxford. He lived at Oxford for the rest of his life.

Within the circles of classical scholarship, De Ste. Croix — as an exponent of a Marxian epistemological approach — was frequently involved in debate with Sir Moses Finley, an advocate of Weberian societal analysis. The two often exchanged letters and their disagreements were always civil.

The two books for which De Ste. Croix is best known are The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972) and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (1982). He was also a noted contributor on the issue of Christian persecution between the reigns of the Roman Emperors Trajan and Diocletian.

The Origins of the Peloponnesian War made several major contributions to scholarship on the subject, the major one being a reinterpretation of the Megarian Decree, passed by the Athenian Ekklesia in 432 BC. Most scholarship hitherto had considered the decree to involve economic sanctions by excluding the Megarian state and Megarian traders from access to ports throughout the Athenian Empire. De Ste. Croix instead interpreted it as a religious sanction (drawing an analogy with the Spartan demand — in response to the Megarian Decree and other Athenian policies — that Athens expel some religiously-tainted citizens. De Ste. Croix maintained that the sanction was exercised not to hurt the Megarians — which it could not do, given the nature of trade and economics in the ancient world, but on religious grounds felt to be genuine by the Athenians. This argument has not achieved general acceptance among historians.^[1]

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World stands as a hitherto unparalleled quest to establish the validity of historical materialist analysis of the ancient world. De Ste. Croix begins with the attempt to define exactly what terms such as "class", "exploitation", "surplus" and "means of production" mean, in the sense they were used by Karl Marx. The book, which spans diverse historical periods, covers questions as varied as the emergence of democracy in Ancient Athens and the social importance of the decline of the Greek city-state during the Roman Empire.