Gary North

This is from my book, Moses and Pharaoh (Institute for Christian Economics, 1985).

Periclean Athens was a massive welfare state in which the state built huge public works projects, organized public assistance, offered pensions to the disabled, subsidized bread purchases, established price controls on bread, imposed export controls, established free theater programs for the poor, and regulated corn merchants [G. Glotz, The Greek City and Its Institutions (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1929] 1969), pp. 131-32.] The "bread and circuses" political religion of Athens ended in an enforced inter-city alliance, war with Sparta, defeat, tyranny, and finally the loss to Macedon. That is the fate of all bread and circus religions.

Athens worshipped politics with all its being, on a scale barely understood by most historians. It was understood by Glotz:

Five hundred citizens were to sit in the Boule for a whole year. The heliasts, whose functions were originally confined to hearing appeals against awards made by the magistrates, were now to judge in first instance and without appeal the increasingly numerous cases in which citizens of Athens and the confederate towns were involved: they formed a body of six thousand members of which half on an average were in session every working day. There were ten thousand officials within the country or outside, five hundred wardens of arsenals, etc. Thus public affairs did not merely demand the intermittent presence of all the citizens of the Assembly; they required besides the constant exertions of more than a third of them [Glotz, p. 126].

Consider this: one-third of all the estimated 35,000 to 44,000 resident male citizens of Athens in the year 431 B.C. were in State service. [Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 172.] At least 20,000 were "eating public bread," meaning that they were either on the payroll or on the dole [Zimmern, pp. 172-73].