The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  The first assumption, that Greece is not exceptional because the Greek world shared various features with other premodern societies, seems to me insufficiently attentive to historically salient distinctions: It is certainly true that the Greek economy remained primarily based on arable agriculture; that Greeks practiced various sorts of morally repugnant status-based hierarchy, including slavery and other forms of coerced labor; and that polytheistic religion was an important part of the ordinary Greek’s worldview and daily practice. But the Greek economy was also, as we will see, fundamentally based on specialization and exchange; real wages (including the wages of at least some slaves) were much higher than the premodern norm. Religion was very important in Greece, as it was (and is) elsewhere. Yet classical Greece stands out among documented premodern societies, as the Oxford Greek historian Oswyn Murray has emphasized, in the prominence of formal rationality and explicitly political reasoning in the decisions and decision-making processes that set the course of its history.5

  The second claim, that Greek exceptionalism renders the Greek case analytically meaningless, seems to me to place too much interpretive weight on historical prevalence. When studying some feature of a given society, a social scientist may (under some circumstances) discard “outliers” on the ground that the relevant sample is in the middle of the distribution. But in this case, the features that made the historical outlier exceptional are of great interest because the outlier appears quite similar, in salient ways, to our normal and because of its normative significance to us. Perhaps the city-state ecology was, as the Cambridge historical sociologist W. G. Runciman claimed, “doomed to extinction” because the Greek city-states were “without exception, far too democratic.”6 But the city-state ecology lasted for a very long time before it went extinct. All ancient empires, most of which proved more ephemeral than the city-state ecology, are likewise extinct. Insofar as we value democracy, and insofar as Greek democratic exceptionalism did anticipate exceptional conditions of modernity, we have strong reasons to want to know whether Greece’s “doom” must also be our own—and if not, why not.

  The third assertion is based on the premise that, because each society is in some ways distinctive, societies are strictly incomparable. The strong version of the historicist argument rejects quantification and focuses on the contextual specificity of the societies in question and their cultural products.7 Historicists embrace the idea that comparative analysis highlights differences by showing how desperately foreign each society is when viewed from the perspective of the other. Comparison of similarities, on this argument, yields only false analogies. The historicist approach is, however, incomplete insofar as patterns of human behavior are fundamentally similar across societies widely separated in time and space. Social science (like natural science) is predicated on the possibility of determining regularities that underpin apparently diverse phenomena. The goal of much contemporary social science is to infer the causes of observed social, political, and economic phenomena, based on parsimonious “micro-foundations”—minimal and at least potentially testable assumptions about the motivations of individual and collective human action under specifiable conditions.

  This book is both history and social science. As history, it may be characterized as middle-range in the sense of being neither global nor local, neither big nor micro-level. I do not attempt to match the breadth of global history or the level of generalization of recent “big histories,” which look at change and continuity over tens of thousands or millions of years.8 I am concerned to explain change and continuity in a society of several million people, in about a thousand states, over a period of several hundred years. I will sometimes focus on the doings of individual legislators or leaders, but more often I try to explain collective action at both the level of the state and at inter- and multistate levels. My approach is, therefore, at a much higher level of generalization than local or microhistory.9

  As social science, my approach is also middle-range, straddling quantitative and qualitative methods. A good deal of the argument draws on quantified data. My discussion of Greek economic growth over time is necessarily quantitative, and I believe that it is possible to make substantial advances by using original data sets (compiled in conjunction with colleagues and students) based on recent monumental collections of evidence for the ancient Greek city-state ecology. I also make some use of simple game theoretic models, drawing on well-established social-scientific theories of political behavior and development. Although only one formal game is presented in full (appendix II), throughout the book readers are invited to think of Greek social relations in the form of games whose background rules induce individual players to make relatively cooperative choices. The aggregate of those prosocial choices was the “thumb on the scale” that tipped classical Greece toward sustained economic growth.

  When addressing complex questions of long-term social development in a society that flourished in the distant past, it is impossible to employ a perfectly clean identification strategy—that is, to strictly distinguish independent (explanatory) variables from dependent variables and to rigorously test hypotheses through natural, lab, or survey experiments. The data I use are inevitably noisy, although, as I argue, not so noisy as to preclude valid conclusions. More generally, the social systems I address are sufficiently complex and the time spans long enough to introduce what social scientists call the problem of endogeneity—that is, feedback between causes and effects. Many of my results are based in part on qualitative analysis of literary and documentary sources. The conclusions of this book assume that quantitative and qualitative methods can be conjoined in ways that are rigorous enough to pass muster as causal explanation.10

  My goal is to use the tools of the historian and the social scientist to explain two phenomena that seem to me especially relevant to the larger project of understanding political and economic exceptionalism: First is the sustained economic and cultural growth of the Greek world from 1000 to 300 BCE: “the rise of classical Greece.” The second phenomenon is “the fall of classical Greece”: the defeat of a coalition of Greek city-states by imperial Macedon in the late fourth century BCE, an event that ended the era in which fully independent city-states determined the course of Mediterranean history. I explain the economic rise by tracing the development of civic institutions and political culture in an environment of interstate and interpersonal competition and rational cooperation. I demonstrate how and why political development drove exceptionally high individual and collective investments in human capital, high levels of economic specialization and exchange, continuous technical and institutional innovation, high mobility of people and ideas, low transaction costs, and ready transfer of both goods and ideas. I distinguish the role played by these same political and economic developments in the political fall.

  The rise and fall of classical Greece can be explained without special pleading involving a mystical Hellenic spirit and without spurious assumptions about inherent differences between the peoples of the East and West.11 The answers to the questions of why and how Greece rose, fell, and persisted in the cultural memory of the world are of intrinsic interest. They bear on central issues in social science, including the problem of collective action without central authority and the role of political institutions in economic development. Those answers also bear on some of the biggest challenges and most promising opportunities that democratic citizens are now confronting in our own decentralized world.

  In the chapters that follow, after posing the question of why Greece rose and fell, I present new data for answering that question. This new evidence shows just how far Greece had come from the age of Homer to the age of Aristotle, both politically and economically. I formulate new hypotheses concerning specialization and innovation to explain both rise and fall through a causal relationship between political and economic developments. I then offer a new narrative of Greek history, from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period. The narrative expands and tests the explanatory hypot
heses. Tracing the histories of great and small Greek city-states alike, the unfolding story reveals how the ecology of city-states grew so dramatically, over such a long period of time, how it was finally conquered, and how Greek culture became a world culture.

  Chapter 1 introduces the puzzle of classical Greek exceptionalism. Chapters 2–4 explore the contours of a decentralized ecology of hundreds of small states; develop a theory of how high-level cooperation, and therefore stable political order, is achieved in the absence of central authority; and document ancient Greek economic growth. Chapter 5 suggests two primary drivers of Greek growth: First is the establishment of fair rules that encouraged investment in human capital and lowered transaction costs. Next is competition among individuals and states, driving continuous institutional and technological innovation, and motivating rational cooperation.

  Chapters 6–9 tell the story of the rise of classical Greece: the historical development of citizen-centered politics and economic growth from the age of Homer to Aristotle. We focus on a few particularly successful and influential states but also attend to the historical development of less prominent and less powerful communities. The rise of Hellas is illuminated by similarities and differences among Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse and by the differential historical trajectories of many Greek states of different sizes and levels of prominence. Comparing the internal development of great and small city-states reveals how innovative political institutions and culture stimulated specialization and fomented creative destruction. The failure of Athens to sustain its fifth century BCE empire demonstrates the robustness of the decentralized Greek social ecology, while dense populations and high per capita incomes in the postimperial era demonstrate that empire was not a precondition for continued economic growth.

  Chapter 10 narrates the political fall, showing how the products of Greek specialization, especially military and financial expertise, were taken up by leaders of states on the frontiers of the Greek world, and how Philip and Alexander of Macedon, the most talented of these entrepreneurial opportunists, terminated the era in which independent city-states determined the course of Greek history.

  Chapter 11 concludes by explaining the surprising robustness of the polis ecology and continued high economic performance in the postclassical era. Because Hellas did not collapse after the political fall of the major independent city-states, the memory of Greek political exceptionalism has been preserved as part of the world’s cultural heritage. As a result, classical Greece remains a resource for theorists of decentralized social order, and both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for those who aspire to practice citizen-centered politics.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have been thinking about and working on the subject matter of this book since I first fell in love with Greek history. That was in an introductory class at the University of Minnesota taught by Thomas Kelly, who, after overcoming his skepticism about my seriousness of purpose, sent me on to earn a Ph.D. under the direction of Chester Starr at the University of Michigan. Kelly’s high standards for writing history and Starr’s belief that Greek historians must seek to understand social, political, and cultural change (and not just continuity) have guided my studies ever since.

  I have been extraordinarily lucky in my subsequent career to have colleagues eager and able to help me as I struggled to make sense of the Greek past and with the question of why it ought to matter to anyone who was not convinced, as I always have been, that it is the most fascinating possible subject of inquiry. I learned a great deal about history beyond antiquity from colleagues in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University; about classical studies beyond history and about political theory from colleagues in the Department of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton; and, most recently, about political institutions and behavior, quantitative methods, and causal inference from my colleagues in the Departments of Political Science and Classics at Stanford.

  Along the way, I have been equally lucky in having the chance to teach and to learn from extraordinary students, undergraduate and graduate alike. A list of those who influenced the ideas and arguments in this book would, in its length, grossly violate the norms governing expressions of academic gratitude. Many who deserve mention here are unnamed but not unremembered.

  This book began as a presidential address on the topic “Wealthy Hellas,” presented to the American Philological Association (“Wealthy Hellas” © 2010 American Philological Association). An earlier version of chapter 4 first appeared in Transactions of the American Philological Association, Volume 140, No. 2, Autumn 2010, pp. 241–286, published by Johns Hopkins University Press (Ober 2010c). “Wealthy Hellas” was then the topic of a two-term classics graduate seminar at Stanford. I learned much from the students, from Rob Fleck and Alain Bresson, who, as faculty visitors to Stanford, regularly sat in, and especially from Ian Morris, with whom I codirected the seminar. I have also had the opportunity to present work related to the book to well-informed and helpfully critical audiences at conferences and by invitation—in most detail at Cornell University as the Townsend Lectures in Classics, and also at Aarhus University, Bergen University, Cambridge University, University of Brussels (Franqui Conference), University of Chicago, University of Florence (ISNIE Conference), Fudan University, University of Indiana, Lund University, McGill University, Ohio State University, Princeton University, University of Rome (Sapienza), St. Andrews University, Stanford University, and Zheijiang University.

  Special thanks are due to those who read various drafts. John Ma, Adrienne Mayor, Michelle Maskiell, Ian Morris, and an anonymous reader for Princeton University Press read drafts of the entire manuscript and made erudite, thoughtful, and detailed suggestions that have substantially improved the final result. Peter van Alfen, Ryan Balot, Sarah Ferrario, Rob Fleck, Stephen Haber, Eero Hämeenniemi, Andy Hanssen, James Kierstead, Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Emily Mackil, Walter Scheidel, Matt Simonton, Barry Strauss, David Teegarden, and Greg Woolf commented helpfully on parts of the manuscript and raised my occasionally flagging spirits with their enthusiasm. I owe special thanks to Deborah Gordon for introducing me to the world of ant science and for discussions of information exchange, evolution, and behavior; to Steve Haber and Barry Weingast for many long and deep discussions concerning institutions, economics, game theory—and much else. Eleni Tsakopoulos, Markos Kounalakis, and Yan Lin have supported my work at Stanford, both materially and through their ardent belief that Greek culture and democratic politics belong together as matters of the greatest possible import.

  My profound indebtedness to the work of the Copenhagen Polis Center (CPC), and especially to its former director, Mogens Hansen, will be evident throughout. David Teegarden, Tim Johnson, and Bailey McRae entered some of the published results of the CPC onto spreadsheets, thereby making those results available as data for quantitative analysis. Those data were made publicly accessible on an interactive Web page (http://polis.stanford.edu) created and designed by Maya Krishnan, a Stanford undergraduate whose talents range from history and philosophy to computer science. Michele Angel transmogrified crude versions of the maps and figures into their present forms. Stanford University, through its School of Humanities and Science, provided substantial material, as well as intellectual, support for this project from the beginning. I hardly need say that, while whatever merit this book possesses is due in large measure to others, its errors of omission and commission are my own.

  Rob Tempio, who is my editor at Princeton University Press, along with my literary agent Jill Marsal, played a formative role in the book’s genesis and a major part in its subsequent development. The editorial, production, and marketing staff at Princeton University Press have also been outstanding throughout. In an age in which scholarly books are sometimes regarded as exotic luxury goods, their passion for academic book publishing is an inspiration and offers hope for the future of a uniquely deep and powerful form of intellectual communication.

  This book is
dedicated to Adrienne Mayor—my life partner, intellectual companion, closest friend, my heart’s desire—who once warned me that autodidacticism has its limits and urged me to try a few university courses.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  NOTE: Ancient Greek authors, whose works are available in the Loeb Classical Library and other modern editions, are cited by book, chapter, and section, according to the ordinary practice of classical historians.

  Ath. Pol.

  Athenaion Politeia (“The Constitution of Athens”). Two literary works by this title have come down to us, one attributed to Aristotle (probably by one of his students) and the other by an anonymous author of the later fifth century BCE, alluded to as Pseudo-Xenophon and nicknamed “The Old Oligarch” by twentieth century classical scholars.

  BCE

  Before common era.

  CAH

  Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 2nd edition (vols. 3–14) or 3rd edition (vols. 1–2), 1970–2005.

  CE

  Common era.

  cm

  centimeter. 1 cm = 0.39 inches.

  dr

  drachma—basic unit of Greek silver coinage. Attic drachma = 4.3 grams of silver. Approximately one day’s wage for an unskilled laborer in late fifth century BCE Athens.

  FGrH

  Fragments of Greek Historians, English edition, edited by Ian Worthington (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill), multiple volumes.

  EIA

  Early Iron Age, in the Greek world, ca. 1100–750 BCE.