The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  Geography and climate are certainly one part of the answer. Specialization and exchange in the Greek world were encouraged by distinctive geographic and climatic features of the Mediterranean basin, a region characterized by a great variety of microclimates, diverse soil conditions, and unevenly distributed concentrations of natural resources. Moreover, the geophysical conditions that were common to the states of Hellas disfavored large-scale standardization directed from a distant imperial center. Agriculture in Hellas was primarily based on sparse but adequate rainfall in relatively small valleys and terraced hillsides, rather than large-scale irrigation in extensive plains. Unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China, for example, Hellas had no great river systems that could be cooperatively managed by a centralized bureaucracy so as to create the conditions favorable to maximizing the production of a few staple crops. The geographic and climatic conditions typical of Hellas were conjoined with a highly variegated coastline and a seascape featuring many islands, which facilitated overseas trade and lowered the costs of transport. Nearby empires (Persia) and less developed societies (Thrace, Scythia) provided ready markets for the goods and services produced by Greek specialists; those societies in turn produced goods (notably food and slaves) imported by the Greeks.26

  These exogenous factors, important as they were, ultimately fail to explain how specialization, innovation, and creative destruction drove the classical Greek efflorescence. That failure is manifest simply by comparing classical Hellas to earlier and later eras in Greek history. The Greek world remained geophysically similar over the millennia, and Hellas has always had more and less developed neighbors. And yet, as Byron believed and modern scholarship confirms, the classical-era efflorescence of the first millennium BCE was unique: Neither before nor after the first millennium BCE did Greece experience a world-class efflorescence. The geophysical and climatological conditions of the Mediterranean world obviously permitted high levels of economic growth and the distinctive forms of cultural flourishing that characterized classical Greece. But if those factors were primary drivers of Greek greatness, we would expect greatness to recur over time.

  Natural conditions favoring specialization and exchange were reinforced by favorable cultural conditions: As the Greek polis system expanded in the eighth century BCE and thereafter, a common language and other commonly shared cultural attributes (religion, diet, marriage practices) lowered the cultural barriers to efficient exchange and thereby lowered transaction costs. But the dynamic expansion of the Greek world is one of the remarkable features of the Greek efflorescence that we are seeking to explain. Although there was no doubt a degree of productive feedback in the system, an expanding common culture cannot at once be an adequate cause and a primary effect of Hellenic greatness.27

  KNOWLEDGE, INSTITUTIONS, CULTURE

  In order to understand the relationship between specialization, innovation, creative destruction, and the classical Greek efflorescence, we will need to step back from Adam Smith’s early industrial-era conception of the relationship between specialization and economic growth to consider the roles played by individual exchanges of information and by the aggregation of diverse forms of useful knowledge. Smith’s prime example of vertical specialization was a pin factory. Smith vividly illustrated the advantages to be reaped from specialization by comparing the output of an efficient factory, in which workers specialize in different parts of the production process, to the output of pins that could be expected from that same number of workers if each were making pins on his or her own, from scratch. Knowledge is certainly part of Smith’s story: Someone with the relevant knowledge of how pins are made needs to set up the factory. But diverse forms of local knowledge that might be possessed by and exchanged among the workers is irrelevant—each needs to be properly trained in his or her specialized job; the rest of what he or she happens to know is not a positive factor in the performance of the factory—and indeed it may be thought of as a liability.

  The idea that specialization implies that the information and knowledge component of production ought to be separated from its manual part was deeply embedded in industrial-era thinking: Henry Ford, who famously employed Smith’s core insight to create a sophisticated industrial production system for automobiles, is said to have bemoaned the fact that when he hired a pair of hands, they came with a head attached. The conjunction of specialization of production and centralization of the management of knowledge for rational planning was one of the hallmarks of the industrial era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This conjunction might help us to understand how highly centralized societies function, but it does not explain the powerful role of specialization, innovation, and creative destruction in the decentralized world of ancient Greece.28

  To explain the world of the Greek poleis, we need to move forward in time, beyond the industrial era into the contemporary world of self-consciously knowledge-based enterprises. It is now widely understood that exchanging and aggregating diverse and dispersed forms of knowledge is a key factor to the success of contemporary purposeful organizations—whether for-profit business firms (professional service and software firms are canonical examples) or not-for-profit organizations of various kinds (e.g., modern research universities).

  The challenge of the knowledge-based enterprise is not detaching hands from heads à la Ford but rather providing conditions in which the different forms of useful knowledge embedded in many minds will be voluntarily disclosed and effectively organized so as to address the problems that must be solved in order for the organization to further its purposes. This system typically requires creating conditions of mutual trust and a sense of shared purpose. Those conditions are in turn facilitated by the development of the relevant forms of common knowledge—that is, the situation in which person A knows something, and B knows that A knows it, and A knows that B knows that A knows it … and so on. Under conditions of common knowledge, people are better able to align their efforts. Under conditions of effective aggregation of diverse types of knowledge, the group may effectively be wiser than any of its individual members, and important innovations may be the product of group effort rather than individual genius.29

  When common knowledge and dispersed and diverse knowledge are brought together under the right conditions, and when the results are codified, the effect is to increase over time the total stock of useful knowledge. By “the right conditions,” I mean conditions of shared interests and purposes, rational trust, and fair competition (level playing field, equitable rewards), such that people voluntarily choose to share what they know with others in their organization in a timely and appropriate manner, thereby allowing for their knowledge to be applied to complex problems—that is, to problems that demand for their solution many different kinds of knowledge.

  Moreover, under the right conditions, individuals voluntarily choose to deepen their own special knowledge and sharpen their skills: In other words, they invest in the development of their own relative advantages and turn those relative advantages to cooperative, prosocial ends. This process of building human capital and social capital is manifest in the operations of modern science and engineering and is therefore at least indirectly responsible for, inter alia, the dynamic growth of modern economies. As the managers of modern organizations have found, however, getting the conditions right is not easy. In the Greek world, the right conditions were achieved and sustained by innovative political institutions and a robust civic culture.30

  The greatness of the Greek world that inspired Byron and so many other Hellenophiles before and since was driven by a set of political institutions and a civic culture that are historically rare—indeed, at the time of their emergence in Hellas, those institutions and that culture were probably unique. The political institutions found in many citizen-centered Greek states, but especially in democratic states and most especially in democratic Athens, put specialization and innovation on overdrive because those institutions and that culture encouraged individuals to take more rational risks an
d to develop more distinctive skills. They did so by protecting individuals against the theft by the powerful of the fruits of risk-taking and self-investment.

  Today we typically think of such protections as “rights.” The Greeks did not have a fully modern conception of universal human rights. But they did develop a strong tradition of civic rights—immunities against arbitrary action by powerful individuals or government agents. These immunities guaranteed for each citizen the security of his or her body against assault, the security of his or her dignity against humiliation, and the security of his or her property against confiscation. It is important to remember that many residents of a polis were not citizens and so were not full participants in the regime of immunity and security. And yet, in some of the most highly developed poleis, these immunities were extended to at least some noncitizens.

  Citizens, who themselves collectively held the authority to make new institutional rules, in turn were more likely to trust the rules under which they lived to be basically fair. Judgments, by citizens who were empowered (by vote or lottery) to settle disputes and to distribute public goods, were made on the basis of established and impartial rules, rather than on the basis of patronage or personal favoritism. With these guarantees in place, and because successful innovation was well rewarded, individuals had strong incentives to invest in their own special talents, to defer short-term payoffs, and to accept a certain level of risk in anticipation of long-term rewards. The end result of those rational choices, made by individuals in many walks of life in the common context of clear rules and a level playing field, was a historically unusual level of sustained economic growth and an equally unusual rate of sustained cultural productivity and innovation.31

  Attention to the political foundation upon which the growth of human and social capital was predicated helps to solve an apparent paradox: In classical Hellas the benefits of specialization were reaped in such abundance because specialization did not go “all the way down” in the ways that are typical of centralized authority systems. Much of the work of governance in a democratic polis was done by amateurs—by citizen-farmers and citizen-shoemakers, and citizen-soldiers who chose to dedicate themselves, part-time, to the tasks of rule-making, judgment, and administration. The costs associated with amateurs spending part of their productive energies on the business of governance (loss of productivity in the nongovernment sector, steep learning curves) were more than made up for by the benefits that arose from the assurance that the incentives of decision-making bodies were aligned with those of the citizen population.32 Further benefits accrued from exchanging and aggregating diverse local knowledge resources and from a rising stock of social and human capital, as citizens came to trust in one another and in a political system that they collectively created and collectively managed.33

  The logic of centralized authority places specialization at the heart of the system of social order: The rulers are specialists in ruling, and no one who is not a specialist in ruling has a legitimate role to play in governing the state. Rulers are supported by a military class of violence specialists, who monopolize the use of force and support the rulers in exchange for a share of the rents extracted from the rest of society. This situation of specialist-rulers was certainly conceivable to the Greeks. Indeed, “each does his own specialized job and strictly avoids interfering in the specializations of others” is the primary principle of justice in the most famous work of Greek political philosophy, Plato’s Republic. In Plato’s ideal state, that principle leads inevitably to the absolutist rule of philosopher-kings, who are described as perfectly and uniquely competent expert rulers. The philosopher-kings are supported by the auxiliary guardians, specialists in violence who enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, both internally against rule-breaking locals and for purposes of external warfare.

  In practice, however, the Greek poleis rejected this kind of hyperspecialization at the level of governance and violence. In most Greek states, it was the citizens who were the warriors: either infantrymen or rowers in warships. Violence was a specialization, but not of a small military elite. Meanwhile, the embrace of collective self-governance by amateurs and the rejection of governance by experts alone played a fundamental role in making the Greek efflorescence so extraordinary, so durable, and so memorable. This embrace of amateurism did not mean that expert knowledge was excluded from the processes of decision and judgment in the making of public policy. But it did mean that no individual or small group could legitimately monopolize authority to govern the state. As we will see, when the right institutional and cultural conditions had been achieved, the many actually did prove to be adequately wise.34

  The historically distinctive Greek approach to citizenship and political order, and its role in driving specialization and continuous innovation through the establishment of civic rights, alignment of interests of a large class of people who ruled and were ruled over in turn, and the free exchange of information, was the key differentiator that made the Greek efflorescence distinctive in premodern history. The emergence of a new approach to politics is what propelled Hellas to the heights of accomplishment celebrated by Byron. By the same token, however, the dynamic combination of political institutions, innovation, specialization, and low-cost distribution of goods and services across an expanding exchange network helps to explain how an authoritarian ruler was able to terminate the era in which major city-states set the course of Mediterranean history.

  FALL AND PERSISTENCE

  The dynamic process of creative destruction, driven by specialization and knowledge-based innovation, was central in the rise of the Greek world. It was also a key factor in the defeat of a coalition of independent poleis of mainland Greece by imperial Macedon in the later fourth century and in the subsequent conquest of the whole of the Greek world by imperial Rome in the second century BCE. The fall of most of the great Greek city-states from their dominant position in Mediterranean affairs was precipitated, at least in part, by the successful adaptation of Greek innovations by some of the Greeks’ neighbors.

  Among the most notable products of Greek specialization in the fourth century BCE were new forms of expertise, notably in warfare and in state finance. While developed within a civic context, to further the purposes of Greek city-states as civic communities, military and financial expertise proved to be readily exportable. Relevant forms of expertise migrated across the borders between poleis—but also outside the classical world of the poleis, to emerging states at the frontiers of the Greek world. In the fourth century BCE, certain of these states self-consciously adopted products of Greek culture and adapted them to the expansionist needs of centralized authority systems. By the middle decades of the fourth century BCE, the kingdom of Macedon had proved the most successful of these “opportunist” states.35

  In the Macedon of King Philip II (who reigned 359–336 BCE) and his son Alexander III (“the Great”: 336–323 BCE), Greek expertise in finance and warfare were conjoined with ethnonationalism, rich natural resource endowments, and a level of military and organizational skill that may legitimately be described as genius. The result was the emergence of state military capacity that was unequaled in the prior history of the Mediterranean or west Asian worlds: In the course of a single human generation, Macedon conquered not only the poleis of mainland Greece, but also the vast Persian Empire. Rome later proved spectacularly adept at borrowing expertise and technology from its various neighbors, including the Greeks, and putting those elements together into a highly effective military and administrative system. That system eventually allowed the Romans to govern an empire of some 75 million people that encompassed much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

  If full independence of most major Greek states was ended by the Macedonian and Roman conquests, the classical economic and cultural efflorescence continued into the postclassical era as a result of an equilibrium struck between ambitious Hellenistic monarchs and the city-states within their kingdoms. After Alexander’s death, the s
prawling Macedonian empire was carved up by Alexander’s most competent lieutenants. They quickly found in the polis system the economic and social underpinnings for their own newly created kingdoms. In the administrative systems perfected in the most advanced poleis, they found some of the tools that allowed them to manage their kingdoms.

  The early Hellenistic kings often acted as predatory warlords, but the fortified, federalized, and democratic Greek poleis proved to be hard targets. The kings were constrained to allow considerable independence to the city-states and to tax them at moderate rates. Democracy became more prevalent than ever in the Greek world; public building boomed; science and culture were codified and advanced. The perpetuation of efflorescence in the Hellenistic era, long past the moment of political fall, made possible the “immortality” of Greek culture.36 The material conditions of non-elite Greeks and the population of core Greece declined after the consolidation of the Roman imperial order and fell precipitously after the collapse of the Roman Empire. But by then Greek culture had been codified and was so widely dispersed that much of it survived—enough for Byron to admire and for us to explain what made it possible.

  2

  ANTS AROUND A POND

  AN ECOLOGY OF CITY-STATES

  In Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo (109b), Socrates describes the corner of the Earth that was in his day occupied by his fellow Greeks. He employs what initially appears to be a peculiar analogy: “The Earth is very large and we … live in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs around a pond.” Although Plato himself knew little about the lives of ants, new research on ant behavior by evolutionary biologists suggests that his seemingly far-fetched simile was in some ways startlingly apt: Greek society developed, through the historical mechanisms of cultural-institutional innovation, certain features that mimic social behavior developed through evolutionary adaptation by ants. Just as self-conscious biomimicry has, in modernity, inspired technological breakthroughs (e.g., Velcro fasteners and drag-reducing “shark skin” swim suits), so too focusing on the unconscious biomimicry by the Greeks of certain behavioral patterns typical of social insects may help us to understand the underpinnings of the classical Greek efflorescence.