The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece
Page 29
It is not surprising that specifically Athenian interests were increasingly furthered by league-financed operations. As a positive (to Athens) externality arising from the necessity of preempting Persian naval power, Athens had taken the next big step as a superpolis by leveraging the resources of many other states. Athens had, in short, embarked on the road to empire.10
These developments were viewed with alarm in Sparta. Thucydides (1.101) reports that in 463 BCE the Spartans secretly offered to aid the defection from the Delian League of the prominent north Aegean island-polis of Thasos (i526: size 4, fame 5). They were, however, prevented from doing so by a major earthquake that killed many Spartans and triggered an uprising by the helots of Messenia.
The helots threw up improvised fortifications on the steep slopes of Mount Ithome in central Messenia, enabling them to defy the Spartans, whose skill in open-field battle was not matched by their siege technique. In a quick turnabout, Sparta appealed for aid to Athens, by now the Greek state with the deepest expertise in siege operations. An Athenian army headed south, led by the highly successful general Cimon, who had long advocated closer relations between the two former allies. But there was another surprising turnabout. The Spartans, who, according to Thucydides (1.102), were now alarmed by the Athenians “daring and revolutionary nature” and feared that they might side with the helots, abruptly informed the Athenians that their services were not needed. Deeply offended, the Athenians returned home—and ostracized the pro-Spartan Cimon.
The events of 462 are sometimes described as a watershed in Athenian political history. With the eclipse of Cimon came a constitutional reform that limited the judicial authority of the Areopagus council of former archons to a few categories of criminal trial, eliminating its role in reviewing (and possibly setting aside) legislation passed by the assembly. The way was opened for a new style of leadership, prominently exemplified by Pericles—who was related by birth and marriage to the Alcmaeonids—the family of Cleisthenes. The decades after 462 saw an intensification of the democratic features of the Cleisthenic system.11
Over the course of the next generation, the system of people’s courts and the practice of paying citizens who held public office were expanded, enabling ordinary men to take an increasingly active role in polis governance. But those developments were hardly a revolutionary change of political direction. The increasingly important role of the navy in ensuring state security gave the ordinary-citizen rowers substantial bargaining power. But the growth of imperial wealth, conjoined with ever-deepening social networks made possible by the Cleisthenic tribal system, obviated for the time being any need for difficult bargains between elites and masses. Prodemocracy members of the elite, like Pericles, provided effective leadership for the state. Meanwhile, the ostracism of several prominent Athenians suspected of obstructionism undercut the ability of those elite Athenian who were opposed to deepening democracy to coordinate behind their own preferred leadership.12
The events of 462 showed that there would be no quick return to the Athens–Sparta alliance that had defeated the Persians, but there was no fundamental change in the direction in Athenian foreign policy. Like Cimon and Aristeides before him, Pericles and his political allies were ready and able to employ the Delian League to further Athenian policy goals. The decade following 462 saw ambitious operations in several theaters: against Persian bases in Cyprus and Phoenicia, in support of anti-Persian uprisings in Egypt, and against Athens’ old rivals in mainland Greece. Megara and Aegina were among the major Greek states now added to the league. An effort to incorporate the poleis of Boeotia, to Athens’ north, was, however, ultimately stymied by Spartan military opposition. Recognizing the status quo, the two superpolis rivals declared a five-year cessation of hostilities in 451; after another brief spate of hostilities, which included a Spartan incursion into Attica, a second armistice agreement was signed in 446 BCE. This time the peace was meant to last 30 years. In the event, it lasted for fewer than 15. The war that broke out in 431 BCE, recorded in great detail by Thucydides and usually known as the Peloponnesian War, would polarize the Greek world and convulse Hellas, on and off, for 27 years.13
ATHENIAN EMPIRE
Meanwhile, by the 450s, it was increasingly clear that the anti-Persia confederation was quickly morphing into an Athenian empire (map 7). In 454 BCE, following a major setback in which an Athenian expeditionary force was lost off Egypt, the Delian League’s treasury was moved from Delos to Athens. After this, we hear of no further meetings of the league assembly, an institution that had, in any event, devolved to a rubber stamp for policy decisions made in Athens. The same year saw the inauguration of the so-called Athenian Tribute Lists, a monumental set of inscriptions on a great marble stele set up on the acropolis. The inscriptions record the goddess Athena’s 1/60th share of the annual contributions of Athens’ sometime allies. In 449, some sort of peace agreement was struck between Athens and Persia. It appears that by the terms of the agreement, the Athenians agreed to cease raiding Persian territory, and the Persians agreed to keep their military forces away from the Anatolian coast and out of the Aegean. The ostensible goal of the league, containment of Persia, would now seem to have been fulfilled. But the mandatory annual contributions to the league treasury by member states quickly resumed. The question, by this time, is no longer whether the league was an Athenian empire but rather what sort of empire was it?14
The most obvious imperial model was Persia. The Athenians adapted some features of Persian imperial imagery, along with the system of assessing tribute and perhaps some Persian techniques of rule.15 But Persia’s empire was, measured in population, some 20 times the maximum size of the Athenian empire. There were, moreover, structural differences that went well beyond the difference in scale. Persia’s empire stretched across much of western and central Asia, encompassing a vast land area and a huge diversity of cultures and languages. Athens’ empire was not only smaller, it was much more homogeneous, culturally and linguistically. Virtually all the states under Athens’ control were at least Hellenized, if not fully Hellenic.16
Athens had another big advantage over Persia as an imperial power: Athens did not confront the intractable principal-agent problem faced by every extensive premodern continental empire. In light of slow overland communications and difficult logistics, the agents (local governors) must be granted considerable scope for independent decision and action by the principal (the central government or emperor). But, the greater an agent’s independence (and thus his capacity to serve his own interests), the lower is his motivation loyally to advance the interests of the principal. Most of the states controlled by Athens were on or very near the Mediterranean coast, and because Athens had a dominant navy of fast and powerful warships, communication, command, and control were much simpler for Athens than for Persia or any great continental empire. As the events of the Peloponnesian War would soon show, Athens was able to concentrate military forces in trouble spots with great speed and devastating efficiency. By contrast, it might take months, even years, for a Persian army to respond to a distant uprising. As a result, the Athenians had no need to create a Persian-like system of quasi-autonomous, and thus potentially rebellious, provincial governors.17
On the other side of the imperial control ledger, the Athenians lacked a legitimating ideology that could stand in for the Great King’s claim to have a special relationship to a great god. The closest thing the Athenians had to an imperial ideology was the claim that Athens was the mother-city of the Ionians—that is, the Greeks who spoke an Ionian dialect. It seems clear enough that the Athenians did make some efforts to assert an “ancestral” leadership over Ionians, claiming, for example, that Ion, the mythical ancestor of all Ionians, was the son of an Earth-born Athenian queen (see Euripides’ tragedy Ion). Yet there is little evidence than anyone outside Athens ever behaved as if that claim were in any meaningful sense action-guiding. In order for an imperial ideology to function in the interests of the hegemonic power, those su
bject to it must act under moral constraint: They must behave in a dutiful manner out of something exceeding the cost–benefit reasoning of economically rational agents. I know of no evidence that any of Athens’ imperial subjects ever acted out of a sense of duty to Athens arising from an ideology of “Ionicism.” Moreover, it is not the case that Athens’ empire was homogeneously Ionian—some subject states in northwestern Anatolia were Aeolic; others were Doric; yet others, notably in Caria in southwestern Anatolia, fell completely outside Greek ethnolinguistic subdivisions.18
The problems that could arise in the absence of a legitimating ideology of empire were exacerbated by the strong Greek commitment to the normative ideal of local citizenship. Although, as we have seen (table 2.3), many Greek states lacked full independence, at least in their ability to set their own foreign policy, there were limits to the degree of dependency that could be accommodated within a value system centered on citizenship. While ordinary citizens might see Athens as a supporter of local democracy, as a bulwark against domination by local oligarchs, there was some point at which at least part of the populace of a given state would push back against the devolution from “free and equal citizen of polis X” to “humbly obedient subject of imperial Athens.” The option of exchanging “citizenship in polis X” for the status of “citizen (or even quasi-citizen) of a greater Athenian state”—the approach to imperial expansion that was being adopted by the Romans in Italy—was never on the table.19
The Athenians guarded the status of Athenian citizenship jealously. Indeed, in 451 BCE a new law, passed by the assembly on a proposal sponsored by Pericles, restricted Athenian citizenship to people who could demonstrate that each of their parents had been an Athenian native. Mixed marriages (which had usually been of the form native Athenian male with nonnative wife) were no longer recognized as legitimate. The male offspring of a mixed marriage was now legally a bastard. As such, he was ineligible to inherit an equal share in the family property or to be presented by his father before the demesmen as a candidate for inclusion in the ranks of the Athenians.20
In lieu of an imperial ideology based on divinity, shared ethnicity, or shared citizenship, the Athenians could, in some cases, lean on shared regime preferences. In the course of the fifth century BCE, more Greek states, and especially those within the Athenian empire, adopted some version of democratic government. We seldom know many of the details. As we have seen in the example of Syracuse’s adoption of democracy in 465, the constitutional form taken by popular government might vary considerably from the Athenian model. But all democracies shared the common feature of being “not oligarchy.”
As the Greek historian Matthew Simonton has demonstrated in recent work, in the Greek world the political form “oligarchy” is not best thought of as the generic background political condition of all nondemocratic Greek states. Rather, oligarchy, as it was understood by classical Greeks, was a specific reaction by “the few who were wealthy” to the emergence of democracy as a strong form of extensive citizenship and collective self-government. Thus, with the development of democracy came the possibility that democracy might be subverted—not only by a tyrant, but also by an organized effort on the part of local elites to establish a government in their own interest. Elite interests might overlap with, but were far from identical to, the interests of the masses of non-elite natives. The ordinary citizens of a democratic Greek polis could, therefore, expect to do substantially worse if and when their polis was transformed by elites into an oligarchy—and vice versa.21
While Athens never consistently required subject states to adopt democratic constitutions, the Athenians were obviously sympathetic to democracy as a form of government in ways that the Spartans and Persians, for example, were not. Among the advantages, then, that might be enjoyed by the ordinary citizens of a Greek polis in the Athenian empire was the expectation of a certain level of solidarity with the demos of Athens. In several high-profile cases, notably after a revolt by the great island state of Samos (i864: size 5) in the 440s, the Athenians did actively promote the establishment of a democratic regime. Democratic states within the empire could expect some measure of Athenian support were local elites to seek to overthrow a democratic regime in favor of oligarchy. And thus, democracy may have encouraged some Greeks to accept their position as subjects.22
The most widespread benefit that the Athenian empire offered to its subjects was, however, economic. Most obviously, by guaranteeing protection against Persian privateers and against the ordinary pirates that have historically infested the Mediterranean in the absence of a strong naval power determined to suppress them, the Athenians created the baseline conditions for peaceful trade. Smaller states no longer needed to fear predation by larger states, or raids on their ships or coastal settlements by pirates—which was an endemic problem when there was no power strong enough to keep piracy down to a minimum.23
Reliable security, along with reliable punishment of would-be free riders, encouraged rational submission to imperial rule: Unlike raid-and-grab pirates, the Athenians had a vested interest in keeping order and in protecting the economic interests of tribute-paying imperial subjects. In the face of the alternative, residents of weak states were relatively better off, all things considered, when they paid a reasonable and predictable level of protection money to a stable hegemon with relatively long time horizons. The long Athenian horizon was graphically expressed, for example, by the Athenian Tribute Lists: The great stone stele set up prominently on the Acropolis in 454, on which the lists were inscribed, had room for 15 or more years of records: Clearly by setting up that massive stele, the Athenians signaled that they planned to be in the empire business for many years to come.24
The logic of rational acquiescence to rule was not lost on Greeks of the fifth century. An inscription found in Athens dated around 445–430 details the relations between “the community (koinon) of the Eteokarpathians” (on the island of Karpathos, between Crete and Rhodes) and the Athenians. The Eteokarpathians (i488: size unknown but surely small) seem to have taken some initiative in getting themselves assessed for tribute, and they donated building materials (in the form of a cypress log from a sacred precinct) to a construction project on the Athenian acropolis. In turn, they had received Athenian military intervention in a local dispute, and thus their community’s continued existence was guaranteed. The inscribed record of mutually beneficial interaction points to the self-consciousness on the part of a small community of the benefits it might receive by being under the control of a great state. Like most of the Greek states overall (figure 2.2), most states of the Athenian empire were small (size 3 or below).25
In the first book of his text, in an abbreviated analytic narrative of earliest Greek history, Thucydides theorized the relationship of rational acquiescence in a quasi-historical account of the rise of Greek civilization. He notes that in the distant past, before the Trojan War, there were no substantial coastal towns due to piracy.
But after Minos [mythical king of Crete] had organized a navy, sea communications improved…. [he] drove out the notorious pirates, with the result that those who lived on the coasts were now in a position to acquire wealth and live a more settled life. Some of them, on the strength of their new riches, built walls for their cities. The weaker, because of the general desire to make profits, were content to put up with being governed by the stronger, and those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller poleis under their control.
—Thucydides 1.8, trans. Warner (Penguin), adapted
Despite its setting in a mythic past, this passage is clearly meant to alert the reader to a central logic of empire—and especially of the kind of maritime empire that had been created by the Athenians during Thucydides’ own lifetime.
ECONOMICS OF EMPIRE
In fact, the Athenians seem to have run their empire with a close eye to the balance sheet of interests reckoned as costs and benefits—in the first instance, their own interests but, because the imp
erial system was based on increasingly high levels of economic integration and interdependency, the interests of other states as well. Both the strength and, as we will see, one of the weaknesses of the Athenian empire was the historically unusual degree to which it was predicated on assumptions about rationality of behavior, understood as the pursuit of interests capable of being reckoned upon a cost–benefit basis. Lacking any very promising ideological justification for their rule, the Athenians went on the assumption that, so long as the subject poleis were net gainers from the existence of the empire, local rulers (whether democrats or oligarchs) would, under most conditions, act like the Eteokarpathians. They would realize that their collective interests were better served by cooperation with the hegemonic power than by defection.26
The Athenian empire did indeed provide very substantial economic benefits for the states and their residents within its ambit in exchange for the costs they were asked to bear in the form of imperial tribute and loss of foreign policy independence. The total tax burden of the empire was probably in the range of 3% to 6% of imperial GDP. If, counterfactually, this comparatively light burden had been shared across the entire population of the Empire on a regressive per capita basis (in fact local elites bore most of the tax burden), an average family would have had to devote no more than one or two days of labor per month to paying the imperial taxes.27 In return, in addition to security against rapacious states and pirates, Athens provided substantial economic services: First there was, at Piraeus and in the Athenian agora, a central market for exchange. The costs of entering that market were not exorbitant—a standard (as it appears insofar as we have comparative Greek evidence) 2% tax on imports and exports. Although many goods were exchanged through cabotage—i.e., local coasting voyages by small-scale merchants—and so did not need to go through a central market, there were obvious advantages to some traders to having a single major market to which bulk and luxury goods could be brought for exchange. Fifth century writers were explicit about the advantages that central exchange brought, both to Athenians and to those who traded in Athens.28