The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  ATHENIAN INSTITUTIONS AND STATE PERFORMANCE, 506–478 BCE

  That question was answered quickly and positively. In 506 BCE, Athens’ enemies launched a three-pronged attack on Attica. Along with their Peloponnesian allies, the Spartans invaded Attica from the west, through the territory of Megara. Meanwhile, armies from Boeotia and from Euboean Chalkis threatened Athens from the north and east. Yet before the first battle could even be engaged, the Peloponnesian army dispersed, beginning with the Corinthians, who suddenly found reason to be elsewhere. The Athenian army was now free to march north and east, delivering decisive defeats to the Boeotians and Chalkideans. The unraveling of the invasion and the unexpected Athenian victories can best be explained by assuming that Athens was now, for the first time, able to mobilize a national army worthy of its size. Presumably, its rivals, expecting a much smaller force, were caught off guard. We may guess that many of the Athenian fighting men of 506 were, compared to the highly professional Spartan army, ill-equipped, poorly trained, but highly motivated.16

  Herodotus makes much of the Athenian victory in 506, noting that

  The Athenians at this point became much stronger. So it is clear how worthy an object of attention is equality of public speech (isēgoria), not just in one respect but in every sense. Since when they were ruled by tyrants, the Athenians did not stand out from their neighbors in military capability, but after deposing the tyrants, they became overwhelmingly superior.

  This, then, shows that while they were oppressed, they were, as men working for a master, cowardly, but when they were freed, each one was eager to achieve for himself.

  —Histories 5.78 trans. Stanton (1990) adapted17

  For Herodotus, the end of the tyranny was the beginning of Athens’ truly exceptional performance as a state. He specifically connects performance to motivation and attributes the high motivation of the Athenians to their new political standing. The implication is that men who must serve a master, and who must turn over some of the fruits of their labors to him, are not well motivated to take risks. Without a master, or rather, once they were the collective masters of their own collective fate, each Athenian was eager to do well for himself.

  Political liberation resulted, in Herodotus’ assessment, not in a cascade of free riding, but in the coherent collective military action that defeated the Spartan coalition. Moreover, Herodotus claims that the Athenian leap forward in state strength demonstrates the general value of “equality of public speech.” This claim is initially puzzling.18 But if we attend to the reform of the deliberative Council, and the ways in which equality of public speech could, under the right conditions, pay out in bold and innovative new policies, Herodotus’ comment becomes perfectly comprehensible. The history of Athens through the era of the Persian Wars (490–478 BCE), which followed close on Cleisthenes’ reforms, provided Herodotus with considerable evidence for the value of equality of public speech in state policy-making.

  In the generation following the reforms of Cleisthenes, the Athenians expanded and refined the institutions of their democracy. These changes are sometimes difficult to date precisely, and it is not always clear which changes were “original Cleisthenic” and which were subsequent adjustments. But the upshot was that collective self-governance was put on an increasingly solid footing, as the legislative, judicial, and executive functions of the new democratic regime were expanded and consolidated within specific institutional loci. The Athenian citizenry elected their military leaders; many other state officials were, however, chosen by lottery. All officials, elected or lotteried, were subject to ex ante public scrutiny and held publicly accountable, on an annual basis, for their performance.

  Each year, the Athenian assembly decided whether to conduct an ostracism; if the decision was positive (as it was only 15 recorded times in Athenian history), the citizenry chose, by plurality written ballot, which prominent member of the Athenian elite to expel from the community for 10 years. The Council met almost daily to consider policy and to devise the agenda for a legislative assembly open to all citizens. The assembly met regularly—in the fourth century four times each month. The Solonian people’s court was subdivided into a number of courts, so that many more cases could now be judged by panels of citizens, chosen by lottery. Public business was carried out in new civic buildings constructed in a democratic building boom in and around the agora.19

  The democratic regime was soon tested by another foreign invasion, this time at a scale unprecedented in mainland Greek history. Persia had taken umbrage at material support offered in 499 by Athens and Eretria (i370: the major polis on the big island of Euboea that was Chalkis’ rival in the War of the Lelantine Plain) to a botched revolt by the Anatolian Greek poleis against Persian rule. A Persian naval expeditionary force swept across the Aegean. The Cycladic islands fell one by one. Eretria was successfully besieged in 490 BCE; the city was sacked, its main temple burned, and at least part of its population deported to Mesopotamia. The Persian forces then moved across the narrow straits to Attica, where they made landing at the plain of Marathon in northeastern Attica. The former tyrant, Hippias, was with them. Clearly the Persians hoped that his presence would divide the Athenian elite, making the conquest that much easier.

  In response to the invasion, Athens dispatched its full levy of 10,000 hoplites, organized now by tribal regiments and led by elected generals, to meet the invaders. The defenders were joined by a small force from Boeotian Plataea, a close Athenian ally, but they remained badly outnumbered. Yet the outcome of the ensuing battle was the rout of the Persian forces and the slaughter of thousands of the invaders. In an act reminiscent of heroic Tellus’ public burial (ch. 4), Athens buried the 192 Athenians who fell at Marathon beneath a great earthwork tumulus. They sent word of their victory to the rest of the Greek world—notably to the Spartans, who had promised aid but had been delayed, as they explained, by religious duties.

  Although Marathon only deferred Athens’ Persia problem, it was a remarkable victory, and never forgotten. John Stuart Mill memorably opined that “The battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.” The battle was won by Athens’ phalanx of hoplites. Yet the decade that followed the great infantry victory of Marathon was especially remarkable for the buildup of the Athenian navy. A rich vein of silver ore running through south Attica, was now, for the first time, efficiently mined. Since mineral rights belonged to the state, this resulted in a substantial windfall. A proposal to divide the unexpected surplus evenly among the citizens was rejected by the assembly. Instead, the citizen assembly adopted the proposal of a political leader, Themistocles, who earlier had championed the fortification of Athens’ port town of Piraeus. Themistocles argued that the silver windfall should be turned to public purposes, financing the construction of a large number of warships that might be used against Aiginetan raiders. Athens thus added at least 100 (perhaps 200) modern trireme warships to its fleet and thereby became, almost overnight, the greatest naval power in the Greek world.20

  The silver windfall was no doubt a key factor in the Athenian decision to turn to sea power in such a big way in the 480s. But it was not the only factor: With its large, well-motivated citizen body and active overseas trade, Athens was in a strong position to specialize in military operations requiring a manpower-intensive navy. Classical Greek triremes were three-banked oared galleys, powered by large (ca. 180-man) crews of rowers. The manpower for the newly constructed ships was recruited from the ranks of the poorer citizens (the lowest Solonian income class), who thereby became full participants in the Athenian defense establishment. There is no hint in our sources that the proposal to enhance Athenian sea power was opposed by the middleclass infantrymen who manned the land army. That in turn suggests that the level of trust across social classes in the Athenian citizen body was high enough that the hoplites felt no need to protect a monopoly on the employment of organized violence in the state’s interest. By the 480s, and probably wel
l before, it was clear that decisions about the Athenian military, how it would be developed, and how deployed, were being made by the citizenry and not by a closed coalition of specialists in violence.

  Matters with Persia came to a head again in 481; a massive overland invasion of Greece, through Thrace and Thessaly, was imminent. Athens had to decide what to do before the Persians neared Attica. After considerable debate, the Athenians adopted a plan, advocated by Themistocles, to evacuate the population of the polis to the Peloponnese, and, in conjunction with other Greek states, to challenge the Persians at sea. The result was the dramatic Greek victory at the naval battle of Salamis, off the coast of Athens, in 480. Salamis set up a decisive land battle the next year at Boeotian Plataea, in which the infantrymen of Athens, Sparta, and the Peloponnesian League states defeated an elite Persian force of infantry and cavalry. A final naval battle, at Point Mycale on the central Anatolian coast (map 7), sealed the Greek victory. It was obvious to everyone in the Greek world that the war against Persia could never have been won without Sparta’s expert citizen-infantry and its ability to muster the Peloponnesian League. But neither could it have been won without Athens’ big citizen-navy. Athens had, over the course of a generation, joined the ranks of the Greek superpoleis.21

  EXPLAINING ATHENIAN STATE PERFORMANCE

  As Herodotus astutely noted in the passage quoted in the previous section, Athens’ quick ascent to the status of superpolis was correlated with the end of tyranny and the institution of more egalitarian democratic rules. In order to draw a causal arrow from democratic reforms to superior performance, however, we need to explain just how the relevant changes made Athens more capable and ultimately wealthier as a polis. If that arrow can be drawn, and if it can be shown that the rise of democratic Athens furthered a general classical Hellenic efflorescence, through emulation by other poleis of performance-enhancing Athenian institutions, the fair rules/capital investment/low transaction costs hypothesis would be supported—if not yet proved. Here I focus on three related, and readily adaptable, features of the new democratic system that may be causally related to superior state performance: federalism, expertise, and elite incentives.

  Federalism

  The federalist deme and tribe system, along with the proliferation of voluntary associations that flourished alongside it, was an important part of what made democracy work. After the reforms of Cleisthenes, each Athenian was a citizen at three ascending levels, of a deme, a tribe, and a polis. Federalism enabled trust among citizens, arising from local interactions at the deme level, to be leveraged at the level of the tribe and then at the level of the polis. Within the general framework of the Solonian laws, Athenian citizens now worked together in their demes toward collective local ends (confirming young men as citizens, appointing councilors, managing local finances) that had important higher level effects. Collective action in an average deme was facilitated by smallness of scale: Without resorting to a Spartan-style social panopticon, the citizens of a deme could monitor and, when necessary sanction, one another’s behavior relevant to the production of public goods. They could thereby credibly commit to common enterprises, ranging from the management of deme property to the mustering of units for the army.

  At the tribal level, trust was built by reiterated interactions. Each adult male tribe member engaged with men from diverse geographic backgrounds (the coast, inland, and urban regions of Attica) in common enterprises aimed at important public ends that could be gained only though joint action. Coordinated tribe-level activity included performance in competitive contests (against other tribes) in state-sponsored cultural events (notably 50-person men’s and boys’ singing-and-dancing choruses at the Dionysia), work on tribal teams in the Council, mustering in tribal regiments in the army, and collective oath-taking.22

  Tribe-level interactions in civic, religious, and military domains served to bring men from different parts of Attica into contact with one another in common enterprises and thus encouraged them to build more extensive and more socially diverse social networks. As men’s lives extended beyond their home deme to the level of the tribe and the polis, possibilities opened up for the formation of “weak ties” that bridged the gaps between deme-level “strongtie” networks, which were trust-based, but potentially exclusivist and parochial. By identifying “structural holes” in the burgeoning web of Athenian social interactions—that is, by making connections linking local networks that had formerly been isolated from one another—social entrepreneurs could gain material benefits for themselves (e.g., potentially lucrative marriage alliances). Weak-tie bridges between local networks thus benefited individuals who, in a sense, became specialists at networking. As a positive externality, their bridge-building helped to increase the flow of social knowledge and useful information across the citizen body as a whole.

  The deme-tribe-polis federal system helped to make the mass meetings of the Athenian assembly both less daunting and less clientalistic, as ordinary citizens developed social networks that extended at least to the tribe level. Men attending the assembly, who lacked experience in institutional procedures or the substantive matters under consideration, could now appeal “laterally” to more experienced and trusted fellow tribesmen who were also in attendance. In this way, the naïve citizen gained guidance horizontally, from civic peers, rather than having to make vertical appeals to elite patrons. Moreover, networks that began at the tribe level would increasingly have been extended to the level of the polis—as members of different tribes interacted with one another on boards of magistrates, in the Council, in the assembly, on juries, in “all Athens” cult activities, and through military service.23

  Expertise

  As citizens gained in trust and confidence of the political system and of one another, the Cleisthenic order was better able to aggregate and to organize useful knowledge in ways that enabled better policy-making. Like all purposeful organizations, democratic Athens had to make many decisions on questions concerning collective security and welfare. Even when the general policy goal was tolerably clear as a matter of common interest (securing the continued existence of the community in the face of external threat, increasing collective welfare without compromising the standing of individual citizens), the right answer to the question “what policy will best promote the goal?” was far from obvious.

  Information relevant to the decision was dispersed, and in some cases, might be privately owned and jealously guarded. Complex and difficult decisions called for the input of experts in various domains: A foreign policy choice might, for example, require the testimony of experts in the domains of diplomacy, finance, logistics, strategy, and geography—among others. With historical memories of the tyranny and revolution still vivid, the Athenians were attentive to the danger of elite capture—and therefore unwilling to turn over important decisions to a small body of elite experts. And yet, there remained a real danger that decision-making by a large Council and a mass Assembly would devolve to a lowest common denominator of collective ignorance.24

  As it turned out, Athenian citizens proved to be quite good at identifying and attending to experts and quite capable of using the knowledge of experts for the ends of policy-making without turning state management over to them. Plato, who was highly critical of democracy on many dimensions, readily conceded the point in his dialogue, Protagoras (319b–c). Plato noted that when, for example, the assembly was discussing the construction of warships, the “wise Athenians” listened only to the relevant experts; ignorant citizens who wasted the assembly’s time with ill-informed opinions were quickly hooted from the speakers’ platform.

  Plato regarded the ends of increasing wealth and security as inferior to, and a distraction from, the ethical project of advancing individual moral excellence and therefore criticized Athenian democratic leaders for cluttering the polis with “harbors and shipsheds and walls and imperial tribute-payments and suchlike trash” (Gorgias 519a). But we are concerned here, in the first instance, with explaining
economic growth. The capacity of many citizens to attend to experts in matters that were relevant to the wealth and security of the state was clearly, and plausibly, linked in Plato’s assessment with Athenian growth. But how did the Athenians actually know who was expert in each domain relevant to decisions on matters concerning state wealth and power? And how did they persuade experts to divulge what might have been regarded as proprietary information?

  The organization and procedures of the Cleisthenic Council of 500, in conjunction with the final decision authority of the citizen assembly, provide at least a partial answer to the Athenians’ collective capacity to identify relevant experts and to persuade experts to disclose proprietary information in the public interest. As the Councilmen in each tribal team of 50, and eventually in the plenary body of 500, came to know one another better, through the extension of social networks and through deliberations on public matters, they also came to recognize who among the membership was more or less expert in any given domain. Incentives, at each level of citizenship (deme, tribe, and polis), in terms of chances to gain reputation, honors, and material rewards—or, alternatively, to incur sanctions and opprobrium—encouraged those with useful information and skills to disclose what they knew, if and when it was relevant to the issue at hand. Competition among experts for public recognition encouraged disclosure, while forestalling collusion and elite capture.