by Ober, Josiah
MOTIVATING COOPERATION AMONG NONRELATIVES
All ants of a given nest are daughters of the queen, either sisters or half-sisters.29 Given their shared genetic inheritance and thus their shared reproductive interest, cooperation among ants is, in evolutionary terms, adaptive. Although ants do not use reason, we may say that ant cooperation is, in terms of expected utility maximization, rational. The flourishing of the nest ensures the survival of each ant’s genetic inheritance—there is, in Aristotle’s terms, no gap between the good of the whole and the good of each individual part. Residents of a given Greek polis were not, of course, genetically related to one another at anything approaching an ant-nest level of genetic closeness. So how could active cooperation have been motivated among the residents of a polis—who shared with the ants a lack of direction from any central authority, but who lacked the ants’ strong genetic reasons for ongoing cooperation?
Ideology may provide a partial answer. Some city-states, prominently including Athens in the imperial mid-fifth century, tried, through the medium of culture, to promote an ethnic origins narrative that claimed something like the biological kinship of the ant nest. According to one strand of Athenian mythology, all native Athenians (and indeed, by extension, all Ionian Greeks) traced their ancestry back to a single Earth-born queen (Creusa: the story is told in Euripides’ tragedy, Ion). So Athenians might suppose that by acting for the good of their fellow citizens, they were also acting for the good of close kin. But in the Greek polis, this fictive kinship story did not enjoy a monopoly among narratives of origin. The “all Athenians as kin through a common mother” myth faced rivals in competing and contradictory stories that emphasized that the population of Athens was heterogeneous, the result of immigration from many different regions of the Greek world (Thucydides 1.2.6). Many Athenians and their imperial subjects certainly recognized the myth of shared ancestry as a fiction. Ideologies of fictive kinship presumably gave some Greeks some reason to choose to cooperate with their fellows, but an ideology of kinship cannot, in and of itself, account for the phenomenon of general cooperation.30
Another possible answer lies in attending to scale. As we have seen, the political economist Mancur Olson claimed that the problem of collective action does not arise, or not, at least, with the same urgency, in a very small, face-to-face community. In a community small enough for everyone to know everyone else, each can also keep an eye on what the others are up to. Free riding cheaters are likely to be caught out, and just as likely, to be promptly punished. I suggested above that smallness of scale might help to explain cooperation in the many very small Greek city-states, but that most Greeks lived in city-states that were too large to operate as face-to-face societies in which mutual monitoring would be reliably effective.
One of the challenges faced by large poleis, and most especially, superpoleis like Athens, was managing scale by creating and encouraging face-to-face subcommunities, and doing so without loss of polis-level coherence. That challenge was met at Athens through quasi-federal institutional reforms in the aftermath of a democratic revolution (ch. 7). Federalism was widely adopted in mainland Greece in the fourth century BCE (ch. 9). Federalist and quasi-federalist institutional experiments allowed Greek states to operate as extensive “networks of social networks”—and thereby contributed to solving the problem of monitoring and punishing free riders.
Why self-interested individuals would ever choose to take the potentially costly option of punishing cheaters long remained a puzzle. But recent work by social scientists on “altruistic punishment” suggests that in a given population, there are always a certain number of individuals who have a low tolerance for unfairness, and who therefore enjoy punishing doers of injustice. Although their choice to punish cheaters is not truly altruistic, the result of their choice is the important public good of rule enforcement. Those whose pleasure in dishing out just punishment is high enough willingly assume the costs of punishing. The frequency of voluntary choices to engage in socially beneficial punishment of cheaters can be increased if the community offers rewards for those who lead efforts to punish malefactors.31
The social rewards offered to punishers can be material or in the form of honors and recognition. In the latter case, the reward is greater if the community has successfully promoted an ideology that emphasizes the virtue of cooperative participation in monitoring and punishment, and the rightness of punishing defectors. That sort of ideology was common in large and successful Greek poleis—including Athens and Sparta (chs. 6, 7). The classicist and political theorist, Danielle Allen has shown how, in classical Athens, judicial institutions and political culture developed in tandem to create a “politics of punishment” that served to reward successful prosecutors, to generate collective anger at malefactors, and thereby to include the whole community in acts of public punishment. Where there is known to be a ready supply of punishers, the society as a whole benefits because, knowing that they are likely to be caught and punished, would-be cheaters are discouraged from cheating in the first place. And thus the community can sustain the sort of imperfect but workable cooperative order that we posited, above, pertains in efficient centralized-authority societies.32
Neither ideology nor smallness of scale nor altruistic punishment fully solves the puzzle of why Greeks were motivated to cooperate at scale, but together these conditions help to explain motivation. Another part of the solution can be found by attending to the endemic nature of intercommunity conflict in the city-state world. Each of the ca. 1,100 Greek city-states was a potential rival of each other city-state and therefore a potential threat to its neighbors. Conflict among neighboring poleis was common, and conflict could have deadly results. States that lost wars with their neighbors risked losing control of valuable resources. Victors would seize, as plunder, as much movable property as they could carry away. They might also take control of economically productive borderlands. If the defeat were severe enough, the defeated polis might become a dependent ally of the victor. Or the winners might simply dissolve the state of the defeated rival, incorporating its territory and population into their own polis. In the worst case, if the victors breached the city walls or otherwise forced an unconditional surrender, they might eliminate the rival polis entirely, killing the men and enslaving the women and children. The general point is that, under the conditions of limited interstate cooperation that reigned for much of Greek history across much of the Greek world, the stakes of intra-Greek, intercommunity conflict were high. When the choices are “costly cooperation” or “loss of livelihood and possible extermination,” intracommunity cooperation becomes a rational choice.
Success in high-stakes regional conflicts is at least part of the explanation for the emergence, in the archaic period of Greek history, of the superpoleis that are one primary focus of subsequent chapters. While remaining small compared to the major states of early modern Europe, superpoleis grew at the expense of Greek communities that were, or might have become, fully featured poleis. The takeover by Athens of the town of Eleusis (home of an important mystery cult), and other major towns in the territory of Attica, was remembered in legend. The Spartan takeover of the southwestern portion of the Peloponnesus, in the hard-fought Messenian Wars of the early archaic period, was a defining event for Spartan history (ch. 6). Syracuse became the dominant Greek state of Sicily in the early fifth century through forcible relocation of the populations of Sicilian poleis (ch. 7). And, in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, Thebes twice destroyed the small polis of Plataea, in an ultimately futile attempt to force all the poleis of the region of Boeotia into a single state (ch. 9).
The continuing attempts of bigger poleis to coerce their weaker neighbors gave the residents of both aggressor-states and potential victim-states more incentive to cooperate with one another. In some cases, cooperation meant voluntary submission to the superior power. In the introduction to his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides notes that in early times, Greek coastal communities
rationally acquiesced to the rule of a hegemonic power, the (semimythical) Cretan King Minos, and, in the long run, they benefited materially as a result (1.8.3: “love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger”).
Yet classical Greek communities often failed to see it that way. Despite all the fierce fighting and periodic destruction of communities, the consolidation of the Greek world went only so far. The failure of attempts of Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, and Thebes to sustain stable empires was due in part to the unwillingness of the citizens in would-be imperial city-states to dilute their civic privileges by radical extension of quasi-citizenship (on the Roman model) to imperial subjects, in part to the strength of local polis identities and the effectiveness of local resistance (ch. 8). The emergence of the kingdom of Macedon in the mid-fourth century BCE ended the centrality of major independent poleis in Mediterranean history (ch. 10) but left most polis institutions intact. Macedonian warlords threatened the local independence of Greek cities but found the poleis hard targets when they sought submission rather than negotiation (ch. 11). The endemic risk posed to Greek communities by would-be predatory states, Greek and non-Greek alike, fostered decentralized cooperation by rewarding the high levels of mobilization that were facilitated by federalism and democracy.
We now have a theory of effective collective action with decentralized authority. The theory is based on a conception of human nature as at once social, interdependent, justice-seeking, self-interested, and strategic. That conception is consistent with contemporary social science and with ancient Greek thought. The theory explains (through a mix of ideology, federalism, “altruistic” punishment, and existential threats) individual motivation to cooperate in the absence of a unitary sovereign as third-party enforcer. It provides (through information exchange) a mechanism that enables many individuals to accomplish common goals and to produce public goods without requiring orders from a master.
The theory of cooperation developed in this chapter shows that a complex but decentralized social order is possible at the level of the individual state and across an extensive ecology of small states. The next chapter demonstrates that the classical Greek world actually did flourish economically; chapter 5 then proposes two hypotheses, grounded in our theory of collective action, to explain how citizen-centered political development contributed to the economic development of the Greek world.
4
WEALTHY HELLAS
MEASURING EFFLORESCENCE
In the later fourth century BCE, as Aristotle was writing the Politics, Hellas reached the peak of its classical efflorescence. This chapter documents the material conditions that provided the foundation for the cultural greatness celebrated by Lord Byron. Thanks to recent work by archaeologists, economists, and historians, we can specify, in considerable detail, how wealthy Hellas actually was. But first we need to establish a baseline: Just how wealthy ought we to expect classical Hellas to have been, if, counterfactually, it had reached only the median level of development of core Greece during the three-plus millennia from ca. 1300 BCE to 1900 CE? What is the premodern normal by which we can measure the divergence of the classical Greek economy from the expected path?
THE PREMODERN GREEK NORMAL
We may start our investigation of the premodern normal in the era shortly after Byron proclaimed contemporary Greece a sad relic. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greece was, when compared with the more developed states of Europe, or to any premodern state in an era of efflorescence, a very poor country. In 1830, upon finally achieving independence from Ottoman Turkey, the population of Greece—comprising the Peloponessus, the Ionian and Aegean islands, and central Greece south of Thessaly—was about 750,000 people. Life expectancy at birth was about 35.5 years in the early 1860s, by which time the population had grown to more than 1.1 million; life expectancy was undoubtedly lower in 1830 and before.
By 1890 (after territorial expansion that added the region of Thessaly), the population of the Greek state had reached about 2.3 million. By this time, Greece was experiencing severe Malthusian pressure. The population had exceeded its mostly agricultural resource base. The result was labor surplus, chronic unemployment, and widespread poverty, only partially alleviated by extensive overseas emigration, especially by adult men. In the decades before World War II, Greece was, per capita, the poorest nation in Europe. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the population of Greece was living quite close to subsistence.1
There is no reason to suppose that living conditions had been substantially better in the previous 1,500 years. The Greek core (defined as the territory controlled by the Greek state in 1890) had already declined from the classical peak by the Roman imperial era (first century BCE to second century CE). The third and fourth centuries CE saw further decline as the Roman Empire began to come apart. After a robust recovery in the early Byzantine period of the fifth and sixth centuries, Greece fell into an economic doldrums that lasted until the ninth century. The middle Byzantine period of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries saw some economic recovery. Yet in the late twelfth century, at a high point in medieval Greek history, Michael Choniates (later Metropolitan of Athens) wrote these poignant verses—anticipating Byron’s sentiments by more than half a millennium:
Though I live in Athens, I see Athens nowhere,
Only dust, sorrowful and empty, blessed.
Where is your magnificence, wretched city?
All vanished, as if become a myth …
By around 1400, the population of Greece and median consumption had fallen to new lows. The early Ottoman period once again saw improvement; in ca. 1600, the population of the Peloponnesus was up to about 250,000. This was, however, no more than a quarter of the population of the same area around 300 BCE. The same 1:4 “early Ottoman to late classical” ratio holds for sixteenth century Boeotia. In much of Greece, these demographic gains were lost in the grim later Ottoman era of the seventeenth century. By 1685, the population of the Peloponnesus had dropped by half, to 125,000, approaching the Early Iron Age nadir of ca. 1000 BCE. While there was improvement in the eighteenth century, it was not until the later nineteenth century that the population of Greece began to climb toward the late classical peak, and even then incomes remained low enough to encourage largescale emigration.2
At the other end of our historical spectrum, during the Late Bronze Age (LBA), known to historians as the Mycenaean period (1600–1200 BCE), Hellas (roughly the area of the Greek state in 1890 but including the island of Crete) was divided into approximately 15 small states; the median territorial extent of these LBA states has been estimated at ca. 1,500 km2. Each state consisted of a primary urban area, centered on a fortified palace, surrounded by a number of secondary settlements (close to 300 such centers have been located archaeologically) and a scatter of smaller rural occupation sites. The Mycenaean states of Greece appear to be quite centralized, ruled by kings who controlled considerable military might (notably horse-drawn chariots) and ruled through a fairly elaborate bureaucracy. The economy of a Mycenaean state was directed from the palace, which served as a center of production and distribution of goods. Palace records, inscribed by scribes on clay tablets, tracked the movement of raw materials and other imports into the palace and of locally manufactured goods out of the palace.
The population of Hellas in the Mycenaean period (including Thessaly and Crete) was somewhere in the range of 600,000 people, suggesting that the overall population was less dense than it would be in Greece’s “sad relic” era around 1830 CE. Judging by skeletal evidence for their health and the rich goods with which they were buried, the palace elite evidently lived well in the LBA. Wealth was concentrated in the palace and in the hands of local elites in secondary centers. Rents were extracted from industrial labor at the palace and from a rural population of agriculturalists and pastoralists. This is what we would expect from premodern autocratic states. There is little reason to suppose that, outside the palatial elite and the lo
cal elites who governed the territory in the name of the king, much of the population of Greece in the mid to later second millennium BCE lived substantially above subsistence.3
Economic conditions for some residents of the Aegean world were probably better before the Late Bronze Age. Crete and some of the Aegean islands experienced a notable efflorescence during the Middle Bronze Age of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE—the central era of the Minoan period. The palace-based Minoan culture was an early high point of Aegean civilization, marked by considerable wealth that may have extended beyond a narrow elite. The Minoan culture was weakened by natural disaster in the mid-fifteenth century, and Crete was conquered by the Mycenaeans of the mainland by ca. 1400 BCE. Although the Minoan efflorescence was not at the scale of the later classical efflorescence, it demonstrated the potential of the Aegean region for development, and, like the robust recovery of the fifth and sixth centuries CE, that an advanced level of economic development was possible under political conditions very different from the citizen-centered institutions characteristic of the classical Greek efflorescence.4
On the mainland, the LBA Mycenaean era marked the early peak of Greek population size and economic development. After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in ca. 1200–1100 BCE, Greece entered the Early Iron Age (EIA, also known as the Greek Dark Age). At the start of this period, population and living standards declined sharply. The population of Greece reached a low of perhaps 330,000, about half of the LBA figure, around 1000 BCE. The early EIA was an era of general impoverishment: Imports of goods from outside Greece, while never falling to zero, declined even more precipitously than did the population. The palaces were abandoned, the bureaucracy withered away, writing was no longer used, and Greece fell back into illiteracy. There were many fewer urban settlements, and they were smaller than the palace centers of the Mycenaean era. Houses were small and poorly furnished.5