The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  Individuals and communities alike obviously benefited from higher levels of economic specialization and higher value exchanges of goods and services. The chance to gain greater payoffs—fame and honor as well as wealth—drove incremental improvements in existing domains (heavy-infantry tactics, lyric poetry) and led innovators to pioneer new domains (light-armed infantry tactics, tragedy and comedy). Innovations spread readily across the ecology (Doric and Ionic architectural orders, epic poetry).

  Advances in communications technology (alphabetic writing) were quickly adapted to multiple domains (poetry, philosophy, law, contracts). Goods and services developed in the high human capital/low transaction cost/innovation-and-learning-driven Greek context were readily exported to regions on the periphery of the Greek world (red-figure pottery; mercenary soldiers, doctors, architects). In return, the Greeks imported grain, raw materials (timber, tin, copper)—and labor in the form of slaves.

  In order to be of real explanatory value, hypotheses must be testable and at least potentially falsifiable. The two hypotheses offered here as explanations for classical Greek efflorescence can be tested by examining changes over time in individual poleis and the Greek world as a whole, differences among communities within the Greek world, and differences between Hellas and other premodern socieites. The explanandum (i.e., the thing we are seeking to explain; in the language of social science, the dependent variable) is the rapid and sustained growth of wealth, in Hellas as a whole and in individual poleis, across the period 1000–300 BCE. The “fair rules, low transaction costs” hypothesis would be falsified as an explanation (i.e., as an independent or explanatory variable) if, as wealth increased, rule-egalitarian institutions declined across the Greek world. Likewise, it would be falsified if, when we compare poleis, there proved to be a negative correlation between wealth and egalitarian rules. If the least egalitarian poleis were also the wealthiest, the hypothesis must be wrong. The “competition, innovation, rational cooperation” hypothesis can be falsified by showing a negative correlation between innovation and wealth: If the poleis that were most institutionally conservative were also the wealthiest, then continuous innovation cannot be the right explanation for why Hellas was wealthy. The narrative of Greek history traced in the next six chapters supports neither falsification condition.

  Two final questions remain before we turn to historical narrative. First, do we really need two explanatory hypotheses? Social science values parsimony in explanation. Assuming chapter 4’s claims about the extent and growth of Hellas’ wealth are right, are both hypotheses developed in this chapter actually needed to explain the phenomena? Can we reductively dispense either with fair rules, capital investment, and low transaction costs or with competition, innovation, and rational cooperation as an explanatory variable?

  The answer, I believe, is no. Although, as noted above, the two hypotheses can be conjoined into a single statement, in order to account for the phenomenon of the growth of wealth in the context of what we know about the history of the Greek world, we must invoke both fair rules/capital investment/low transaction costs and competion/innovation/rational cooperation. But this in turn means that we ought to be able to test the interdependence of the hypotheses. One preliminary test is to ask whether especially important and widely adopted institutional innovations tend to push toward or away from fair institutions featuring equality of access to information. The development of democracy and federalism, as, respectively, particularly strong forms of rule-egalitarian intra- and interpolis cooperation, offer us particularly salient test cases. In the coming chapters, we consider how prevalent democracy and federalism actually became across the Greek city-state ecology in the classical and immediate postclassical eras.

  Finally, how was the Greek efflorescence sustained for so long? The basic answer (illustrated in figure 5.1) is that ongoing advances in exchange and specialization were driven by continued innovation and capital investment, provoked by unrelenting competition and sustained by strong institutions. However, as the example of independent medieval cities shows, under some conditions civic institutions that initially produce high levels of innovation and growth, over time, predictably lead to stagnation.

  David Stasavage, a political scientist at New York University, has recently demonstrated that an autonomous (citizen self-ruled) city in medieval Europe could expect a higher rate of population growth (Stasavage’s proxy for economic growth) than a comparable dependent city under the control of monarchical states—for about 100 years following the onset of independence. Thereafter, the growth rate of autonomous cities was slower than that of dependent cities. Stasavage suggests that this fast-then-slow growth pattern was a product of how institutions affected rates of innovation and trade. Initially stimulated by strong property rights and protection from outside interference, innovation and trade in autonomous medieval cities was, in the long run, stifled by restrictions on competition and limits on entry to institutions. Those restrictions and limits were enacted by citizen-rulers who were members of merchant and craft guilds, eager to protect their own monopolistic interests. Since kings had different interests, they imposed fewer restrictions and limits in cities under their control. We might expect independent Greek city-states, in which self-interested citizen-rulers controlled access to institutions, to have followed a similar fast-then-slow innovation, trade, and growth trajectory. Yet the evidence suggests that they did not.45

  There are many differences between the governments of medieval European and classical Greek cities and between the contexts in which they operated. Among the salient differences is the tendency of some of the most developed Greek cities to increase access to institutions over time. Access was opened both by expanding the percentage of the adult male population exercising active citizenship and by broadening civil rights for at least some noncitizens. In the next six chapters, we trace the historical factors that led citizen-rulers in Greek cities to make choices in respect to access that were quite different from those made by the rulers of independent medieval cities. Those choices had profound consequences for the level and duration of the classical efflorescence.

  6

  CITIZENS AND SPECIALIZATION BEFORE 500 BCE

  Sparta, Athens, and Syracuse were the biggest, most prominent, most powerful, and arguably the most influential states of the classical Greek world. Assessing the rise of these three poleis allows us to test the hypothesis that political exceptionalism, in the form of fair rules (resulting in capital investment and lower transaction costs) and competition (promoting innovation and rational cooperation) were primary causes of dramatic growth across the decentralized ecology of city-states. This chapter and the next trace how each of these “superpoleis” developed innovative rules that led to bold new forms of social order, in each case based on establishing an extensive body of citizens who shared equal high standing. The present chapter concentrates on Sparta and Athens in the seventh to later sixth centuries BCE. Chapter 7 focuses on Athens and Syracuse in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE.1

  Each of the three superpoleis followed its own historical trajectory. Each gained advantages, relative to once-potent regional rivals, as a result of being a successful early mover. Each adopted bold institutional designs that were later adapted to the local needs of other states. The striking similarities and the sharp divergences between the historical trajectories of the three superpoleis in an Age of Expansion—an era of demographic growth, state formation, colonization, increasing trade, and scaled-up conflict—set up the question of how historically distinctive rule-egalitarian regimes came to define the Greek world and produced a long and brilliant efflorescence.

  In both archaic Sparta and Athens, institutional innovations, historically remembered as the legislative initiatives of wise lawgivers, resulted in a highly original citizen-centered regime. In both Athens and Sparta, as in other less well documented Greek states, new forms of citizenship, as “civic membership and identity,” were invented as highly consequential
kinds of social belonging. In each case, the status of citizen was brought about by new rules that also served to reorient individuals’ incentives toward specific kinds of specialization and cooperation. In the case of the Lycurgan reforms at Sparta, hyperspecialization in heavy-infantry warfare was an integral part of the citizenship reform. The result was the most effective and most feared fighting force in the Greek world. In the case of the Solonian reforms at Athens, specialization took the form of increased economic activity outside the realm of grain-intensive subsistence agriculture. The long-term result was the emergence of Athens as a center of Mediterranean production and exchange.2

  In each case, reform was implemented against a background of social crisis. In Sparta, an ambitious expansionist project risked collapse in the face of determined local resistance. In Athens, the ruling coalition faced the prospect of fragmentation and a civil war in which elites stood to lose control of their clients and their land. In both Sparta and Athens, innovative institutions addressed an immediate threat to social order. In each case, the solution had long-term effects that the original lawmakers could not possibly have intended or imagined—but that we, with hindsight, can both describe and explain.

  BEFORE CITIZENSHIP: BRONZE AGE AND EARLY IRON AGE GREECE

  To understand the crises confronted by Sparta and Athens, and the originality and boldness of their institutional solutions, we must briefly review the history of the Greek world in the Bronze Age—an era that saw the first flowering of high civilization in the Aegean—and in the Early Iron Age that followed the collapse of that civilization.

  When it is compared to the eras that preceded it, the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1200 BCE) stands out as a glorious era in which high culture emerged in city-states and imperial states from Egypt, to Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and beyond. Some regions of the Bronze Age world remained characterized by small independent communities. Others saw the rise of the first great empires. A Bronze Age state was typically ruled by a king (or queen) whose authority lay in military leadership and his (or occasionally her) claim to a special relationship to divine forces. The king and his palace, along with temples to the gods with whom he was associated, lay at the center of the social order. Palaces and temples extracted rents from subjects, who received in turn a measure of security and welfare—along with the assurance that their obedience to royal authority was in harmony with the divine cosmos. The king’s godlike status legitimated high rents, which ensured that most of the population would remain fairly near subsistence. Surpluses extracted as rents were distributed to the ruling coalition: warriors, priests, bureaucrats, and local governors. Much, but not all wealth was concentrated in and near the palace and temple.3

  Greece lay at the margins of the Egyptian and western Asian centers of Bronze Age civilization. Through networks of exchange that had crossed the Aegean long before the Bronze Age, local Greek elites became aware of these momentous technological and institutional developments and sought to benefit by copying them. The Greek rulers of Bronze Age Greek states mimicked many of the methods and legitimacy claims of Egyptian and western Asian kings, albeit on a reduced scale. Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia but like the early city-states of western Syria, Bronze Age Greeks remained divided into small kingdoms.4 The mountainous Greek landscape that later was to support the many independent poleis of the archaic and classical eras was already proving inimical to imperial centralization. As we have seen (ch. 4), in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE, Crete and some of the Aegean islands saw the Greek world’s first efflorescence, during the Minoan era. But the Minoan kingdoms, weakened by natural disaster, had been conquered by the Mycenaean Greeks of the mainland by 1400 BCE.

  Each of the Late Bronze Age–Mycenaean kingdoms was centered on a fortified palace complex, managed by a royal bureaucracy and defended by a warrior elite, men who fought from horse-drawn chariots and in oared ships. The king owned much land outright, levied taxes on others’ land and flocks, and could perhaps confiscate land at will. The high-ranking personnel of local religious sanctuaries may have controlled some of their own resources, but there was overlap between the hierarchies of sanctuary and palace. Sanctuaries may not have been directly controlled by the king, but neither were they fully independent. The king ruled his kingdom through local delegates: He appointed provincial governors with administrative responsibilities for tax-paying towns. Economic specialization (e.g., chariot-making, arms and armor) was driven in large part by the needs of the palace, and much but not all industrial production was located in the palace. Records, kept on clay tablets in an early form of written Greek (in the syllabary known as “Linear B”), tracked raw materials and finished goods as they entered and left the palace. While the palace clearly did not direct all economic activity, the Mycenaean king seems to have stood at the center of a fairly typical Bronze Age ruling coalition of warriors, religious officials, bureaucrats, and local officials. The Mycenaean kingdoms were, in the terminology of the political scientists North, Wallis, and Weingast, “natural states.”5

  Athens and Sparta were sites of Bronze Age settlements, although far from the most important of them. The most prominent palace of Late Bronze Age Greece was Mycenae, in the Argolid region of the southeastern Peloponnese. By the classical era, Mycenae (i353: size 2, fame rank 3) was a minor polis in the orbit of the major state of Argos (i347, see map 4). But in the Late Bronze Age, Mycenae was a major center, perhaps for a time even exercising a loose hegemony over some of the other Greek kingdoms. Bronze Age Sparta and Athens participated in extensive trade networks that connected the relatively small kingdoms in Greece with one another and with the great empires to the south and east, as well as with trading outposts stretching west across the Mediterranean.

  The Bronze Age kingdoms were, compared to anything that had come before them in the Greek world, sophisticated in social organization, advanced in culture, and rich in treasure. But they fell victim to a system-level crisis that shattered most of the great eastern states and threatened to overwhelm even ordinarily stable Egypt. With multiple challenges to established political authority and social order came major dislocations and movements of peoples. In Greece, the crisis ended in a collapse of Bronze Age palace society. Greek speakers, probably originally raiding bands from the Aegean islands and mainland, migrated to the western coast of Anatolia where the Mycenaeans had earlier established a few outposts. Some of the raiders settled down, founding communities that would, several hundred years later, become prominent Greek city-states.6

  Mainland Greece was hit hard. Life in the Early Iron Age (EIA, also known as the Greek Dark Ages, ca. 1100–750 BCE), the historical era that followed the collapse, was very different from the Bronze Age. By 1000 BCE, the networks of trade that had helped to sustain the thriving palace hierarchies of the Bronze Age kings were in tatters. The palaces were burned and mostly abandoned. The palace bureaucracies were no more. With no royal accounts to record, the technology of writing was lost. Reduced to the basics, life at the nadir of the EIA must have in some ways resembled Thomas Hobbes’ grim vision of humanity in the state of nature: although not solitary, it was certainly, compared to what came before and after, poor and short. As we have seen (ch. 4), in the Early Iron Age the total population of Greece declined to about half of its Bronze Age peak. Communities were relatively tiny and isolated. Houses were mostly small; material possessions were relatively few and poor; life expectancy was low. Monumental building was not unknown but was rare and on a scale much reduced from the Bronze Age palaces.7

  With the collapse of the Bronze Age Greek kingdoms and their eastern models, the way was opened for new forms of social and political organization: The strong-king-based system of centralized authority withered away, along with the systems of patronage and hierarchy that the palace-centered system had helped to maintain. Many of the economic specializations that had been sustained by the palaces and by palace-supported trade networks simply disappeared. Although pottery and metalwork remained some
what specialized skills, the great majority of the population of any EIA community was necessarily employed in subsistence agriculture or pastoralism. When almost everyone lived near subsistence, there was little surplus to distribute. Leadership in an EIA Greek community was provided by coalitions of local chiefs. Although they may have claimed some special relationship to the gods, the chiefs lacked the capacity to capture substantial rents. While some chiefs lived in somewhat larger houses, and their houses may have been centers of cult, the circumstances of their lives were, compared to the Bronze Age kings, only marginally removed from the rest of the population.8

  In some communities, one of the chiefs might claim preeminence, but there were no godlike rulers. If they were to retain even a marginally superior social position, Iron Age elites were compelled to consult with other adult males in the community. With only a very limited surplus of goods to control and distribute, the chiefs could not hope to create a narrow coalition capable of monopolizing the means of violence: Bronze Age war chariots were now just a memory, and the military might of each small community was measured by how many men were capable of arming themselves and mobilizing against threats from neighbors. Fighting men might double as foot soldiers and, by the later EIA, as oarsmen on ships used for local trade, piracy, and war—activities that were not yet clearly demarcated.9