The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  The Lycurgan system was predicated around the conjoined principles of distinguishing Spartan citizens (and their families) sharply from all other residents, and of hyperspecialization in respect to strictly delimited social roles. Spartan citizens were full-time warriors and occasional governors; helots were full-time farmers. The system was sustained by systematic acts of terroristic violence and ritualized humiliation of the helots and by intense mutual supervision by the citizens. There was, in principle, little to no upward mobility: Helots did not become citizens, although they might occasionally be offered the chance to become perioikoi. On at least one such occasion, those helots who took up the offer were “disappeared,” and presumably killed; the spurious offer served to cull the ambitious.36

  There was, on the other hand, ample opportunity for downward mobility: An individual Spartan could be stripped of citizenship for failing in his military duties as a warrior (coming back from war “neither with his shield, nor on it”), as well as for failing in his economic duty to share with his military unit a sufficient quantity of extracted rents. As a result of the quickening pace of downward mobility, which clearly increased with intensifying inequality and concentration of wealth in the hands of a few elite families, the total numbers of Spartan citizens declined over time. By the late 370s BCE, there were insufficient Spartan citizens to sustain Sparta’s military dominance. The tipping point was, however, slow in coming. Sparta was a dominant state for two centuries, from the early- to mid-sixth century to well into the fourth.37

  The Lycurgan reforms created a strong and unusually broad-based “natural state” ruled by an extensive and stable coalition of citizens. Through their specialization in the arts of war, the citizens held an effective joint monopoly on the means of organized violence. The proportionality principle, under which rent shares are distributed in a natural state according to capacity for violent disruption of the social order, was also respected: The norms of hoplite warfare rendered thousands of citizens functional equals in their violence potential, and the public system of apportioning Messenian land and extracting the surplus from helot labor treated citizens as equals in the distribution of rents. Within the citizen body, laws were strictly enforced, and all citizens—even the kings—were, in principle, equals before the law. The citizens, as collective and, in principle, equal power holders and rent-seekers, were credibly committed to mutually sustaining the system. They shared a very high incentive to preserve the current regime and to mobilize against internal or external threats to it. The incentives were matched by sanctions for deviation, which was reliably detected and reported by the social panopticon of Spartan citizen society.38

  Sparta’s hyperspecialization on infantry tactics and training proved extremely successful in an era in which interstate contests were decided by phalanx warfare. In the wake of adopting the Lycurgan reforms, Sparta saw a string of successes in foreign affairs. With the incorporation of Messenia, Sparta was securely established as a superpolis, outstanding in size of population, size of territory, and influence. Sparta’s attempt to replicate the Successful incorporation of Messenia in mountainous Arcadia faltered when the Spartan army suffered a defeat at Tegea (i297) in the sixth century (see map 3). Rather than continuing the imperial project, Sparta turned to cooptation: The poleis of southern Greece were brought into a Sparta-dominated Peloponnesian League. The league was stable so long as Sparta credibly protected the interests of local elites by suppressing would-be tyrants and, later, democrats. Potential rivals to Spartan power, notably the major polis of Argos in the northeastern Peloponnese, were handed crushing military defeats by the formidable Spartan army.39

  By the mid-to-late sixth century BCE, with the Lycurgan system up and running, Sparta was the leading state of mainland Greece. Moreover, Sparta long maintained its first-mover advantage over potential rivals in respect to organized violence based on hyperspecialization in military affairs. Other poleis found it unpalatable (most Greek elites had little taste for austerity and a lifetime of military training) or simply too difficult (helotization of neighbors was a costly undertaking) to adopt the full Lycurgan package. It was a very long time before another Greek state found a way to replicate Sparta’s excellence in land warfare.

  ATHENS: REFORMS OF SOLON, 594 BCE

  In the mid-fifth century BCE, the city center of Athens presented a stark contrast to the unprepossessing villages of Sparta: Great temples and public buildings were prominent features of the cityscape, and the big, densely populated city was surrounded by a massive circuit wall. Thucydides (1.10) quipped that, were some later observer to judge on the basis of infrastructure, the power of Athens would be much overestimated, while that of Sparta would be badly underestimated. The Athenian home territory of Attica was extensive, at 2500 km2—about a third of the size of Laconia and Messenia Combined. The total population of the polis of Athens in the fourth century, after massive war casualties, is estimated at 250,000—thus roughly comparable to the combined population of Laconia and Messenia. Like Laconia and Messenia, Attica featured villages and more substantial towns, but Attica was much more densely settled. A number of the settlements of Attica boasted their own mythic histories and distinctive cults associated with particular gods: In addition to the major cult of Athena on the Acropolis in the city center, there were Demeter at Eleusis, Artemis at Brauron, Nemesis at Rhamnous, Dionysus at Ikaria—among many others (map 5). Athens’ dispersed pattern of cult distribution contrasts with, for example, Peloponnesian Argos with its single important “border cult” dedicated to Hera.40

  By the seventh century, the many native residents of Attica were regarded by other Greeks and by one another as Athenians and, as such, sharers in a distinctive common dialect and homeland. Unlike Laconia, none of the towns or villages of Attica sustained a separate polis identity into the classical period.41 By the seventh century, the authority of Athenian public officials—notably the treasurers of the Athena cult and the archon who gave his name to the year in the Athenian civic calendar—extended, in principle, across all Attica. Yet, in the era before the reforms of the lawgiver Solon in 594 BCE, it remained unclear whether a shared Athenian heritage and the rudiments of government had as yet created a coherent state that would be capable of competing with smaller but better organized local rivals.

  MAP 5 Attica and Boeotia.

  The Athenians, like the Spartans, and unlike residents of some smaller central Greek states—Eretria, Chalkis, Megara (i225)—were not active participants in the first great waves of Greek colonization. Nor, however, did the Athenians seek to incorporate extensive neighboring territories, on the model of Sparta’s takeover of Messenia. The Athenians focused on internal colonization and intensification of agricultural enterprise in their large and still ill-defined homeland, over external colonization or regional expansionism. The choice may have been pre-determined: In the era before Solon, it was probably impossible for Athenian elites to mobilize social resources for largescale enterprises like foreign colonization or territorial expansion. Athens before Solon was not yet a cohesive community.

  The Kerameikos cemetery, which lies just outside the classical-era city wall of Athens, offers a diachronic material record of Athenian social development. The graves clearly point to a striking demographic increase in the eighth century. As Ian Morris has shown, in that same era Athenian burial practice became more inclusive: More women and children were given formal burial (i.e., they were buried in graves that are readily identified and studied by modern archaeologists) than had been the case in the Early Iron Age. It is probable that a higher percentage of subelite males were now properly buried as well. But the eighth century expansion of access to dignified burial, and the generally greater social inclusiveness that formal burial implies, was followed by a seventh century reaction, as an Athenian elite seemingly consolidated its hold on the society and sought to limit access accordingly. Compared to social developments in other Greek poleis, restricting access was not a particularly Successful strat
egy. Athens in the seventh century punched well under its weight, suffering military setbacks at the hands of smaller neighboring poleis.42

  Herodotus’ Solon (ch. 4) described Athens in the bygone age of happy Tellus as reasonably prosperous. Yet pre-Solonian Athens was clearly a very long way from the great imperial state of the fifth century BCE or the thriving commercial center of the fourth century. In Herodotus’ tale, Tellus’ Athens struggled not against great eastern kingdoms, like Lydia or Persia, or against grand coalitions of states led by the superpolis of Sparta, but rather against incursions from Megara, the city-state that bordered Athens to the west. Megara (size 4, with an estimated peak population of 40,000) was less than one-fifth the size of Athens, and yet Megara clearly constituted a real threat to the territorial integrity of its much larger neighbor. The story of “Tellus coming to give aid” suggests that the Megarians were capable of entering Athenian territory in arms and threatening the important Athenian border town of Eleusis. The security threat faced by Athens was not from neighboring Megara alone. Sea raiders from Aigina (i358), a small (size 2) but densely populated (perhaps 40,000 in the fifth century) and well-organized island polis in the Saronic Gulf, were capable of attacking Athenian coastal communities with relative impunity. Solon gained an early reputation with poems exhorting the Athenians not to abandon the struggle with their neighbors for the control of Salamis, a strategic island lying close to the southwestern coast of Attica.43

  In the first decade of the sixth century, Athens faced a severe test of its tenuous cohesion as a polis. Athenian population growth, along with intensification of agricultural enterprise in Attica, in the context of the new opportunities of the Age of Expansion, led to a growing gap between relatively wealthy and relatively impoverished Athenians. In the absence of out-migration through colonization, demographic growth seems to have led to a local labor surplus, and thus to lowering the value of Athenian labor. A family with little land of its own, and therefore dependent upon selling its labor surplus in order to make ends meet, could, under these conditions, face catastrophe. Starvation was apparently fended off, in some cases at least, first by borrowing from more prosperous neighbors and then, when loans went unpaid, by selfenslavement. The hypothesis that Athens had a farm-labor surplus and that returns to agricultural labor in Attic were considered low is supported by the choice of some Athenian owners of self-enslaved Athenians to sell their human property abroad.44

  Depressed labor costs would, in turn, have increased the rents available to the owners of large estates. Those costs could be driven even lower by using free laborers’ indebtedness to create conditions of peonage, whereby local men were bound to the land of major owners by agreements that rendered them effectively serfs. Reducing the mobility of the remaining ostensibly free laborers would reduce whatever slight bargaining power they might have gained when legally enslaved Athenians were sold abroad—thereby allowing the maximum surplus to be creamed off by the rentier elite. Reducing mobility of free laborers meant that the wealthy could sell off some of their fellow Athenians without pushing up their labor costs.

  With bigger rents available to corral and to distribute, ambitious Athenian elites, like elites in states throughout premodern history, sought to limit access to institutions that might widen the pool of would-be rentiers or that might protect rent-payers from rent-seekers. Athenian elites saw that if they successfully monopolized access to decision-making, dispute resolution, and sharing as equals in cult, they would be well situated to maximize their rents. Monopolizing political, legal, and religious authority was thus the obvious route to gaining and securing greater wealth. Yet, on the other hand, the proportionality principle meant that the ruling coalition must distribute rents to all those with the potential to disrupt the system. And therein lay the rub: By the end of the seventh century, there was no very obvious way for a handful of the very wealthiest Athenians to monopolize the means of violence.

  As the sixth century dawned, several possible developmental paths lay open, but none looked promising. A hypothetical “Athenian Lycurgus” could have sought to unite an extensive minority of Athens’ native males into a cohesive military elite, while pushing the rest of the native population into serfdom. But, as we have seen, the Spartan model was a very difficult one to follow, and halfway measures would not solve the problem of the need for mobilization against external threats and the widely distributed internal capacity for violence. Alternatively, the elite coalition might have fragmented, enabling the rise of a tyrant capable of mobilizing enough armed men to seize control of the state. In fact, a generation earlier, in the late seventh century, an Olympic victor named Kylon had seized the Acropolis of Athens in a failed attempt at establishing a tyranny. The bloody aftermath of the botched coup eventuated in the impious slaughter of some of Kylon’s supporters at a sacred altar of Athena. This was the context for Athens’ first formal and written laws, established in about 610 BCE by a lawgiver named Drakon. The only surviving section of the law concerns the rules for reintegrating perpetrators of involuntary manslaughter back into the community. It remains unclear what (if any) other matters were addressed in the laws of Drakon, although in later Athenian legend, he was believed to have prescribed death for a wide range of offenses. Whatever their scope and intent, the Drakonian laws did not lead to a stable social order.45

  By the year 594 BCE, pressed by external rivals and internal conflict, the still-emergent polis of Athens seemed poised at the verge of losing any vestige of high-order cohesion it had achieved. Athens faced fragmentation along regional lines into several small poleis, or even a devolution to primitive economic conditions reminiscent of the Dark Age. It was evidently to forestall the collapse of the state, and in hopes of avoiding the rough expedients of Spartan or tyrannical solutions to social order, that Athens’ ruling coalition chose Solon as archon and endowed him with special lawmaking authority.

  If we are to believe the ancient tradition and the evidence of Solon’s own poetry, in the event the elite got a more extensive set of reforms than they had bargained for—Solon’s reforms amounted to nothing less than the creative destruction of Athens’ prior system of rules. Yet Solon characterized himself in his poetry, and was remembered by Greek posterity, as a moderate. according to the tradition, Solon’s reforms were attempts to find a middle way between the ambitions of greedy rent-seeking elites who sought to use the power of the state to further enrich themselves, and the hopes of a mass of relatively impoverished Athenians, who dreamed of a world of resource equality and urged revolutionary confiscation and redistribution of the agricultural land of Attica. Indeed, Solon’s reforms may best be understood as seeking to create an Athenian “middling class” of moderately prosperous, Tellus-like, independent citizens: men who would stand between the very rich and very poor and who could be mobilized against external enemies.

  Although Solon is a more historical figure than Lycurgus, there remains substantial scholarly uncertainty about the precise nature of the crisis leading to Solon’s reforms and about exactly what “Solonian” measures were passed, when, and by whom. Yet the social and political reforms that have come down to us under Solon’s name, and that were widely believed in antiquity to have been put into place in response to a social crisis during his archon-year of 594 BCE, appear to be a coherent set of rules. Those rules served to create a distinctive form of polis citizenship predicated on equalizing certain legal immunities and participation rights, while at the same time providing individuals with powerful incentives for investment in human capital and experiments with economic specialization. In the long run, the new rules convinced a significant number of Athenians to move out of the low-profit activity of subsistence agriculture and into potentially more lucrative endeavors.46

  Solon’s first move was a one-time cancellation of debts; debtors were allowed to “shake off their burdens” by declaring bankruptcy without penalties; creditors received no advance notice or reimbursement. This use of the fiat power of the st
ate to cancel private obligations had obvious dangers, in terms of increasing moral hazard (incentivizing speculative risk-taking by some by passing the costs of failure on to others) and lowering the willingness of Athenians to lend on credit. Stories circulated claiming that Solon’s opportunistic friends had used advance word of his reform plan to take out loans that were swiftly forgiven by the new law. On the other hand, Solon refused even to consider a wholesale redistribution of land. Presumably this line in the sand reassured some potential lenders. It meant, however, that the underlying conditions that led poorer Athenians to fall into crippling debt were not directly addressed, insofar as Athens’ economy remained primarily agricultural. Unlike Lycurgus, Solon did not make citizens even notional equals in material terms by distribution of land and labor resources.47

  Solon’s next major innovation was to forbid the enslavement of one Athenian by another. He did not abolish slavery. Instead, he established a fundamental civil immunity against the ultimate status degradation—a “civic right” of citizens, rather than a “human right” of people as such. The civic right came with a corresponding legal duty: As a result of the new law, Athenians lost actual and potential property rights to other Athenians’ persons. Thus, for the first, time, “being an Athenian” gained a substantial content beyond longterm residency and dialect: Solon had, in essence, invented citizenry as a distinctive civil status that was guaranteed by written law.

  Athenians who were currently slaves of other Athenians were freed (there is no evidence to suggest that the owners or the slaves were compensated); at least some Athenians who had been sold abroad and had lived away from their homeland for long enough to “lose their Attic tongue” were repatriated. Again we lack details about how this was accomplished in practice and how many people were involved. But it is difficult to see how Solon could publicly boast, as he did, of repatriating citizens in his postreform poems unless at least some Athenians were indeed brought home.48