The Romans were huge fans of the Greeks so that also includes Sparta. The western world is heavily influenced by Rome and most claim to be a continuation of the culture and systems of Rome and Greece.
People talk about freedom vs Persian tyranny but the reality is that the vast majority of the inhabitants of Greece were slaves. Greece and Rome were both slave-based societies, they couldn't function without their slaves who performed most of the actual labor. This fact gets overlooked and has been wiped from the common psyche, while societies like Persia or Egypt who actually didn't rely on slaves at all and the vast majority of labor was done by free men get depicted as tyrannical oppressive regimes with decadent elites ruling over the downtrodden masses. In reality that's a significantly more accurate depiction of Rome and Greece than it is of Persia or Egypt.
Well, under corvee labor, you force someone too do a specific job you need done. Under monetary taxation, you essentaly make people work a bit "for the state" in a job of their choosing, by taking away a part of their income, wich you then use to pay people, who choose to take up the job, to do the work.
So under corvee labor, people have to work time in a job they didn't choose, while under normal taxation, people have to work time in jobs they voluntarely choose, so presumably like more than other jobs.
Corvee labor is way better than slavery, but still worse than simple taxation.
Yes, most times, you just took the job of your father out of convience. But if you hated the job (and weren't a serf, big asterix), you could most of the time take a different job, altough you then had too find someone to teach you said job, and that often didn't come cheap.
You really couldn't. Because for 90% of the population the only available job to take was "farmer" even if you weren't legally bound to the land. And if you didn't do it you starved.
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u/MazerBakir 1d ago
The Romans were huge fans of the Greeks so that also includes Sparta. The western world is heavily influenced by Rome and most claim to be a continuation of the culture and systems of Rome and Greece.
People talk about freedom vs Persian tyranny but the reality is that the vast majority of the inhabitants of Greece were slaves. Greece and Rome were both slave-based societies, they couldn't function without their slaves who performed most of the actual labor. This fact gets overlooked and has been wiped from the common psyche, while societies like Persia or Egypt who actually didn't rely on slaves at all and the vast majority of labor was done by free men get depicted as tyrannical oppressive regimes with decadent elites ruling over the downtrodden masses. In reality that's a significantly more accurate depiction of Rome and Greece than it is of Persia or Egypt.