The Marxist ancient historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix (1910-2000) was born in Macau, China. His father was an official in the Chinese Customs Service and his mother was a devout Protestant from a missionary family. After attending Clifton College, Bristol, he gained a legal training and became a sollicitor in 1932.[1] It was not until the 1930s that Ste Croix started taking a serious interest in politics. It is likely that Ste Croix’s disappointment with the lukewarm response of the British mainstream politicians to the rise of fascism which led him, along with many others, to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It was at this time that he visited the Soviet Union.
Ste Croix eventually broke away from the CPGB following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. During WW2 he was commissioned and sent overseas with the Royal Air Force (RAF). Disgusted by the contrasts in living conditions between the officers and lower-ranked soldiers, he saw the crude image of the British class system. Not only did his time in RAF influence his political sympathy towards socialism, but it also influenced his decision to pursue an academic career. He chose to revive his classical studies at University College, London (UCL), rather than Oxford or Cambridge because of the course’s greater emphasis on Ancient History. After graduating from UCL, Ste. Croix began teaching in London, where he was appointed Associate Lecturer at the London School of Economics (LSE), while also working at Birkbeck College and UCL. In 1953, he went to New College, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life.[2]
His first monographs were The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972) and Early Christian attitudes to property and slavery (1975). In 1981 he published his magnum opus The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, about which Paul Cartledge writes:
“One of the best things in The Class Struggle is the pioneering description in detail of how democracy, the rule of “the poor”, was inexorably stamped out by the combined efforts of the Greek propertied classes and their Macedonian and Roman suzerains.” [3]
The Class Struggle was generally well received and even won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize. The book was highly praised by those on the left of the discipline. Robert Browning, for example, commented:
“The neatness with which highly technical evidence is marshalled and assessed provides the kind of satisfaction one gets from watching a skilled craftsman at work.” [4]
This profile was written by Kevin Lee.
[1] Hall and Stead, A People’s Classics. 2020: 484.
[2] Parker, “Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix 1910-2000,” Proceedings of the British Academy. 2001: 111, 459.
[3] Cartledge, “Reviewed Work(s): The Class Struggle in The Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests by G. E. M. de Ste Croix”. The English Historical Review, 1984. vol. 99, no. 392: 569.
[4] Browning, “Review: The Class Struggle in Ancient Greece,” Past and Present. 1983: 100, 148.
