by Ober, Josiah
The advantage was multiplied when the central market was well regulated; was liquid (well-supplied with specie); employed standard weights, measures, and units of exchange; provided first-rate facilities (docks, storage areas, transport system); and when there was a great deal of local wealth. Athens made major improvements in infrastructure and imposed regulations meant to reduce cheating by unscrupulous traders. The Athenians at first encouraged, and ultimately required, throughout their empire, the use of standardized weights and measures, and a standard coinage, in the form of Athenian owls. Finally, because of the massive production of owls by the Athenian mint after 449 BCE, the Athenians effectively guaranteed market liquidity: With perhaps 12–24 million silver drachmae produced each year by the Athenian mint, there was no lack of specie available with which to transact exchanges.29
The upshot of these several measures was to lower the costs of transactions and thereby to increase the value of voluntary and mutually beneficial exchanges. Under the relatively high-security, low-transaction-cost conditions promoted by the Athenian empire, increasing investment in specialization to maximize relative advantage and increasing the percentage of production aimed at exchange relative to that aimed at subsistence were rational behaviors. And thus, as we would expect, the part of Hellas controlled by Athens became wealthier. Moreover, Athens had a very limited capacity to impose a mercantilist policy that might have limited imperial subjects to trading within the empire—even if the Athenians had formed a preference for such a policy.30 Because imperial subjects traded outside as well as inside the empire, the growth of the imperial economy benefited all of Hellas—and thus it promoted the efflorescence that we are seeking to explain.
The Athenians themselves, of course, benefited most of all. Athenians benefited directly, as rentiers. Elite Athenians reaped rewards from military leadership positions, especially when, as was often the case, military operations resulted in booty. Non-elite Athenians had the chance to raise their socioeconomic status by sharing rents from distribution of goods, notably when agricultural land was confiscated from a subject state that had failed fully to grasp the rationality of acquiescence. Confiscated lands were divided among Athenian “cleruchs” (klerouchoi: “shareholders”—the Greek root kleros is the term that was used for the “allotment” of land and helots controlled by each Spartan in the Lycurgan system). Cleruchs, often drawn from the ranks of formerly poorer Athenians, might take up residence abroad to look after their new landholdings in person. Alternatively, they might lease the land on a sharecropping basis back to its original owner. Other Athenians benefited from the imperial revenues that were plowed back into the Athenian economy: Athenian rowers, marines, and infantrymen were relatively well compensated for military service on the annual naval patrols in the Aegean and for garrison duty among potentially restive subjects.31
Yet other Athenians, of all classes, benefited from pay for government and legal service and from a surge in public building. That surge began in earnest in the mid-440s: A series of extraordinary new temples and related sacred buildings were constructed on the Acropolis and in major towns of Attica. The Parthenon, the most technically advanced temple that had ever been constructed in Greece, was the masterpiece. But it was only one sacred building among many that went up in the city of Athens and at the demes of Rhamnous, Eleusis, and Sounion. The city and Piraeus fortification circuits were now connected with monumental long walls, which created a fortified corridor from the coast to the city, five miles inland. Piraeus was fitted out with monumental dockyards and shipsheds to protect the precious warships when they were not on active duty. The theater of Dionysus was for the first time built in stone. A new concert hall (the Odeon) was the largest roofed performance space ever contemplated in the Greek world. And a host of other public buildings, many of them constructed at an unprecedented level of grandeur and attention to artistic detail, went up in the agora and in other parts of the city and countryside. Based on the limited evidence preserved in inscriptions, the wages, even for unskilled or semiskilled construction work were good—well above the subsistence level that was the premodern norm (ch. 4).32
Athenian industry was growing apace: Silver production from the mines of south Attica reached all-time highs, as did the marble and limestone production of Athenian quarries and vase production in pottery workshops. It is a reasonable guess that other industries (weaving, leatherworks, bronze and iron foundries, etc.) flourished as well. Prominent Athenian politicians were reputed to have made their fortunes in industry—in, for example, tanning and the production of musical instruments.33
Meanwhile, the population of Athens was also growing. Athens was a highly desirable destination for economic migrants, both temporary and permanent. Despite casualties of war and a more restrictive citizenship policy, conditions of improved welfare also promoted increased natural population growth. By the mid-430s, Athenian (adult male) citizen population had reached its ancient peak of perhaps 50,000 or more. A good number of citizens lived abroad, as cleruchs or garrison soldiers, and Athens led a new wave of Greek colonization, collaborating in the founding of new poleis in Thrace (notably Amphipolis [i553: size 5]) and Italy (Thurii [i74: size 3]). Nonetheless, the total resident population of the polis certainly exceeded 250,000; if we add nonresident Athenians (cleruchs, garrison troops, etc.), the total probably exceeded 300,000.34
The growth of Athens was both spurred by and was a result of more intensive and more diversified specialization, both in Athens and across the Greek world. The imperial-era comedies of Aristophanes preserve a startlingly high number of names for work specializations in industry and service.35 Intensified specialization, in a context of competition and cultural conditions enabling ready emulation, drove innovation. The results are, today, vividly evident in the high-cultural products of what has often been described as the Athenian Golden Age: These include the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the comedies of Aristophanes; the architecture of Ictinus; the sculpture of Pheidias; the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides; the moral philosophy of Socrates; the astronomy of Anaxagoras; the anthropology of Democritus; the medicine of Hippocrates—the list could be very readily extended.36 It would be even more impressive if so much had not been lost since antiquity. Fifth century Athens was, for example, the center of major innovations in large-format figurative painting and in musical composition and performance. These remarkable cultural results were, as we have seen, the basis of Byron’s (and many others’) belief in Greek greatness. They were produced both by native Athenians and by artists and intellectuals drawn to Athens by its role as a cultural capital. As Ian Morris and Reviel Netz have shown with simple statistics, Athens was unquestionably the intellectual and cultural hub of the Greek world through much of the fifth century BCE.37
Less visible to us than the products of high culture, but of great consequence for Athens and Hellas, were innovations in other domains. Athenian warships were not only numerous, they were also capable of speed and maneuvers that were well in advance of those built and maintained by other Greek states—the incremental results of ever-deepening expertise gained by thousands of hours of experience by naval architects, captains, steersmen, and rowers. The management of the empire led to deepening expertise in the organization of state finances—the leadership of Pericles and other prominent Athenians of this era was in part based on their skill in the traditional roles of generalship and public speech but in part on the new domain of organizing the finances of an imperial state.38
GREEK THEORIES OF WEALTH, POWER, AND POLITICS
These dramatic changes did not go unnoticed—or untheorized—by contemporaries. The so-called sophists, a highly diverse group of Greek intellectuals, wrote texts and offered to teach students (typically the offspring of elite Athenians capable of paying their fees), in fields of expertise relevant to political leadership: broadly speaking, they taught “political science” (politike techne)—which conjoined theories of human nature and the nature of p
ower with the theory and practice of rhetoric, music, mathematics, and ethics. Behind their theorizing about politics lay a general theory of specialization and education: The sophists claimed to have mastered the essence of what it took to be a specialist and that they knew how to achieve genuine expertise.39
Some Athenians scoffed at the sophists’ claims. Among their most prominent critics was Socrates, whose dialectical method was meant to show that (among other things) the sophists’ pretensions to be masters of political science were spurious. But many others, like Socrates’ young friend Hippocrates (ch. 5), took the sophists seriously and learned from them—or hoped to. Herodotus was clearly well aware of arguments developed by the sophists about the techniques that produced efficient centralized authority and about the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of government. But among surviving fifth century writers, it was Thucydides who most obviously and effectively adopted the techniques and arguments of the sophists (as well as those of other imperial-era intellectuals—notably including the Hippocratic medical writers), in his exposition of the origins and conduct of the Peloponnesian War.
While his text (as far as we know he produced just the one) is often read simply as a brilliant historical narrative of a terrible war, Thucydides goes beyond the discipline of history, as we now tend to think of it, in his analytic framework and aims. His expressed goal was not only to offer an accurate account of the course of events but also to enable readers to be effective political actors in the future. Thucydides’ explanation for why the Peloponnesian War broke out, and why both powerful and weak states acted as they did in the course of the war, was based on a view of human political nature as, to a significant degree, rationally self-interested.40
Humans are, for Thucydides, driven by, on one side, fear of loss, and on the other by desire for wealth, power, and glory. States, as aggregates of human fears and desires, are likewise driven by their perceived self-interest. All states seek to survive; powerful states also seek rents and resources that enable them to dominate other states. All states, and all powerful states, therefore, shared some features in common with one another. But they also had salient features that made them differ from one another. For Thucydides, the three superpoleis of Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse—which were the most important (but certainly not the only) collective historical agents in his history—were at once relevantly alike and relevantly different. Both their similarities and their differences helped to determine the choices that in turn determined the course of the war—or helped to affect it, given that chance was also a major factor in Thucydides’ narrative.41
Thucydides was intensely interested in precisely the puzzle that concerns us, that is, explaining the changing situation of Hellas in terms of both wealth and organized political power. Thucydides pointedly contrasts the impoverished and weak Greek communities of ancient times with the rich and powerful states of his own era. As we have already seen, he regarded it as rational for a small and weak state to choose to accept subjection to a powerful hegemon capable of providing security and welfare. This allowed him to explain the emergence and persistence of the coalitions of states that enabled Athens, Syracuse, and Sparta to leverage human and natural resources. Thucydides was especially interested in the phenomenon of the dramatic growth in Athenian wealth and power in the 50-year era between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War. For Thucydides, Athens in the age of Pericles represented a new and fascinating condition of human possibility.42
The necessary conditions for Athens’ dramatic rise were, in Thucydides’ view, the massive and extensive fortifications that ensured security against hostile powers, a great navy that provided the capacity to enforce the will of a powerful hegemon with unmatched quickness and efficiency, and huge capital resources that funded both the walls and the navy. These three conditions were created and sustained by a large, highly experienced, highly motivated, and relatively cohesive citizen population. But these were still only necessary, not sufficient, conditions. The essential ingredient that propelled Athens into a new condition of human possibility was self-conscious human reason and leadership. Thucydides wrote his account of the great Peloponnesian War in part to demonstrate to readers the role of human knowledge and knowledge-based choices in the rise, and ultimately also in the fall, of Athens as a great imperial power.
Thucydides singled out Pericles as a leader who had come to understand the underlying factors that could and did, under his direction, make Athens into a new kind of superpolis—a Greek state that had moved to a higher level of achievement and that had the potential to bring much of the rest of the Greek world along for the ride. Three explanatory speeches are put into Pericles’ mouth in Thucydides’ history: The second and most famous is an inspiring funeral oration over Athenian soldiers who fell in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. In the funeral oration (2.35–46), Pericles celebrates the extraordinary achievements of Athens’ post-Persian War generation, links Athens’ present greatness to its democratic form of government and to the depth and diversity of individual Athenian skills, and suggests that Athens can and should be a model for all of Hellas. The first Periclean speech in the text (1.140–144) is delivered to Athens’ citizen assembly. Here Pericles sets out the necessity of fighting Sparta and enumerates the unique resources that Athens would bring to the struggle and that, as he confidently predicted, would enable Athens to be victorious. The third and final speech is again delivered to the citizen assembly (2.60–64), but this time in the aftermath of a plague that had devastated Athens during the war’s second year. In this speech, Pericles explains why the Athenians cannot afford to abandon the imperial project and emphasizes how each Athenian’s private interests were inextricably conjoined to the collective fate of the Athenian state.43
Pericles is credited by Thucydides with extraordinary insight and talent as a leader, but he did not work in the shadows nor did he ever have anything like autocratic political authority: Each of his speeches in Thucydides’ text was delivered to a mass audience, and in reality his policy recommendations, which were offered in the face of rival policies urged by other leaders, were deliberated and voted upon by Athenian citizen bodies. Pericles was a highly skilled player within a game with rules that were widely understood. although Thucydides’ analysis of Athenian power and wealth is unique in its depth and detail, other Athenian writers also grasped the essentials of the imperial age.44
A short text by Pseudo-Xenophon, an anonymous author, nicknamed “The Old Oligarch” by modern classicists, describes Athens as a democratic imperial state that was at once “bad” (because not dominated by the excellent few) and extremely effective at gaining and keeping wealth and power. The Old Oligarch’s text is (or affects to be) by a politically disaffected Athenian (he speaks of Athenians as “we”) writing for an audience (“you”) that is antidemocratic in political sympathy and relatively ignorant of Athenian norms. The Old Oligarch assumes that his reader wants to understand how and why “bad” Athens rose to such a remarkable level of prominence in the Greek world. Athens’ effectiveness is succinctly explained as a result of non-elite Athenians’ capacity to recognize and to pursue their own best interests and of their development of expertise in naval operations. That expertise enabled them to exploit a favorable location and to leverage the talents of a large and diverse population at home and abroad. Moreover, noted the Old Oligarch, the Athenians were (unfortunately, in his view) not at risk of an oligarchic coup because both masses and elites benefited materially from the imperial order that their conjoined efforts maintained. Finally, our author recognized that the Athenians benefited by legally protecting not only their own interests but also those of slaves and noncitizens.45
While we can now see why the growth of the Athenian imperial economy would have had positive knock-on effects for the economies of other parts of the Greek world and thus we can begin to explain some part of the general phenomenon of efflorescence, the rise of Athens was a serious and growing problem for its rivals. T
he control Athens exercised over its imperial subjects meant that, even without implementing a general mercantilist strategy, Athens could punish trading states with which it was displeased. One of the triggers of the Peloponnesian War was the Athenian decision to exclude Megarian merchants from the harbors of the empire after Megara left the Athenian empire to rejoin the Peloponnesian League (Thucydides 1.139.1–2). Moreover, the fast and continued growth of Athenian wealth and power threatened the established position of Sparta. Because Sparta’s economy was more or less a closed system, based primarily on extracting the surplus of the agricultural production of Laconia and Messenia, Sparta stood to one side of the system of economic integration and interdependency of the Athenian empire. After the falling out of 462, and in spite of the uneasy truce of 446, Athens’ gain looked, at least potentially, to be Sparta’s loss.
The demonstrated Athenian ability to take member states away from the Peloponnesian League degraded Sparta’s alliance system and thereby its military capacity. Corinth was one of the most important poleis of Sparta’s league due to its size, wealth, large navy, and strategic location on the isthmus, potentially controlling movement between southern and northern Greece. Corinth’s threat to leave the Spartan alliance in favor of Athens (Thucydides 1.71.4), was, in Thucydides’ account of the outbreak of the war, a matter of grave concern to Sparta. But the ultimate reason for the war was, according to Thucydides, deeper: The Spartans were terrified by the growth of Athenian power (Thucydides 1.23.6, 1.88.1).