The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  The employment of experts did not invariably promote growth across the Greek world. The history of the Greek poleis of Sicily from the late-fifth through the mid-fourth century demonstrates how an overdose of military experts could help push a once-productive region into economic decline.

  FALL AND RISE OF SYRACUSE AND GREEK SICILY

  In the aftermath of their victory over the Athenian invaders in 413 BCE, the Syracusans had much to celebrate. Thucydides (7.87.5) described the destruction of the Athenian fleet and ground forces in Sicily as the greatest event of the greatest war in Hellenic history. But soon thereafter, it appeared that the imminence of the Athenian threat had been a linchpin of Syracuse’s political stability. In 412, constitutional changes were introduced, evidently in favor of a stronger form of democracy. For the first time, some magistrates at Syracuse were chosen by lot. Hermocrates, who had been a principal military leader, was exiled while in command of a small squadron of Syracusan warships sent to the Aegean to aid in the war against Athens; he quickly defected to Persia.

  Meanwhile, ongoing disputes between Sicilian cities created an opening for Carthage to expand its sphere of influence on the island. A long series of ultimately inconclusive but horrifically bloody and debilitating wars followed, pitting Carthage and its various Sicilian allies against an unstable coalition of Sicilian Greek poleis. Early in the course of those wars, all Carthaginian traders were summarily expelled from Syracuse and the other Greek poleis. Eventually, many of the major cities of Sicily—Greek, native, and Carth aginian alike—along with some Greek cities of south Italy, were sacked; many of their residents were killed, enslaved, or transported. Some cities were refounded or founded anew with forcibly relocated populations. Others were stripped of fortifications and left vulnerable. The miseries of war were compounded by intensified social conflicts. As in the early fifth century, these conflicts were stoked by ethnic antagonism and social inequality.

  Greek and south Italian mercenaries did much of the fighting. Freelance military experts—especially Spartans—provided military leadership. Some mercenary forces fought under the direction of polis governments that aimed at self-preservation or aggrandizement. But elsewhere, mercenary bands evolved into nonterritorial, nonstate organizations, specializing in the use of violence to extract resources from settled populations. Unlike the mainland, there was no critical mass of reasonably stable republican states ready and able to field citizen armies large enough to counterbalance the negative externalities of a burgeoning market in organized violence provision.49

  Sicily’s republican governments were replaced by tyrannies. Syracuse’s reformed democratic government proved fragile in the face of the pressure of the ongoing war with Carthage and Carthage’s Sicilian allies. The tyrant Dionysius I had assumed power at Syracuse by 405 BCE, on the strength of his military skills and by his skillful manipulation of social conflict. While unable to defeat the Carthaginians decisively, he was a skilled general, capable of defending Syracuse from attack, building up its fortifications and often taking the war to the Carthaginians. Among the accomplishments with which Dionysius is credited is the invention of the nontorsion (cross-bow type) catapult. According to Diodorus (14.42.1), by offering a mix of high wages and prizes, Dionysius attracted a number of skilled mechanics to Syracuse. They were provided with work spaces and encouraged to develop new engines of war. The story of the invention of the catapult in Syracuse is lent plausibility by the account of the use of catapults, as well as extremely tall siege towers, in Dionysius’ successful siege of the Carthaginian stronghold of Motya in 397 (Diodorus 14.50.4–51.7).50

  As in the mainland, the allure of empire proved strong. When he was not fighting Carthage, Dionysius sought to rebuild and extend the Syracusan mini-empire in eastern Sicily, making war on both native Sicilian and Greek towns. By the mid-380s, he had achieved considerable success in eastern Sicily, sacking Hipponium (i53: size 3) and Rhegium (i68: size 6) on the toe of Italy and gaining control of a number of south Italian cities. He launched raids further north in Italy, against the Etruscans, and established outposts and diplomatic ties in Epirus (region 5: modern Albania). It appeared, for a time, that he might be an empire builder on a substantial scale, exceeding even the early fifth century accomplishments of Gelon and Hieron (ch. 7). Unlike imperial Athens, however, Syracuse under Dionysius I neither created a peaceful zone of imperial control nor encouraged rational acquiescence by signaling long time horizons and extracting a sustainable level of rents. Syracuse’s fourth century mini-empire remained at the level of smash and grab—with dire consequences for the Sicilian economy. Wars between Syracuse and Carthage, and involving Sicilian cities and the poleis of south Italy, continued intermittently until Dionysius I’s death in 368.

  He was succeeded by his son, Dionysius II. In one of the more bizarre experiments in fourth century politics, Plato now returned to Syracuse. He had previously visited there in the 380s, during the reign of Dionysius I—his interview with the old tyrant had not gone well. As before, the invitation had come from Plato’s philosophical adherent, Dion, who was intimately connected to the tyrant’s household. Plato’s idea seems to have been that he would convert the young tyrant into a sort of philosopher-ruler.

  That plan predictably failed, Plato got out of Sicily by the skin of his teeth, and Dion engineered a coup against Dionysius II. Disputes among the ‘“liberators” over offices, spoils, and regime type led to a messy and protracted civil war in Syracuse. Dionysius II survived it; Dion did not. Through the 350s and into the 340s, Syracuse was ruled by a series of predatory warlords, culminating in the return in 346 of an increasingly bloody-minded Dionysius II. The external wars continued.51

  According to our literary sources, 60 years of killing and plunder wreaked havoc on Sicily’s economy. Plutarch offers a vivid description of Syracuse and Sicily in the mid 340s:

  … some [residents of Syracuse] had perished in their external and civil wars, while others had fled into exile from tyrannical governments. Indeed, for lack of population the market place of Syracuse had produced such a quantity of dense grass that horses were pastured in it, … and the other [Sicilian] poleis, with almost no exceptions, were full of deer and wild swine, while in their suburbs and around their walls those who had leisure for it went hunting, and not one of those who were barricaded in fortresses and strongholds would attend to any summons, or come down into the urban center, but fear and hatred kept all away from market place and civic life …

  —Timoleon 22.4–6, trans. Perrin (Loeb) adapted

  Diodorus (16.83.1) tells a similar story of how Sicily’s population responded to endemic instability by fleeing, hiding, and digging in. Although the archaeological record is less clear and the literary accounts obviously highly colored, the numismatic evidence, and some archaeological evidence, is consistent with a period of economic decline. While rhetorically embellished, Plutarch’s and Diodorus’ detailed accounts of infrastructure destruction and decay are plausible enough and unlikely to be simple fictions.52

  Sicily had undergone previous periods of war without economic decline, and as we have seen, the eastern Greek world experienced conflict along with continued efflorescence. But the fourth century Sicilian situation was different in various ways: Carthage was, from the late fifth century onward, willing to pour its resources, gained from its imperial and trading enterprises, into a protracted attempt to gain control of Sicilian cities. Ethnic differences between Greeks and native Sicilians were exacerbated and exploited by Carthaginians and Greeks alike. Mature citizen-centered governments—relatively stable oligarchies and democracies—were less common in the Sicilian cities than in the Greek east.

  The Sicilian Greek poleis had long been marked by social conflict driven by high levels of wealth and income inequality. Military expertise imported from abroad had, in the person of Gylippos of Sparta, enabled Syracuse to resist imperial Athens. In the fourth century, however, foreign military experts became warlords. Finally, and unde
rlying other factors, the Sicilian Greek cities had specialized in grain production for export. That had produced high-value surpluses but lacked regional (island-level) economic integration. Compared with the mainland, there were few economic incentives for the rulers of Sicilian cities to avoid debilitating warfare and there were large rents to be reaped by victors—or so it seemed.

  By the mid-fourth century BCE, Sicily had more rent-seekers than rent-producers. The collapse of the lucrative wine trade with Carthage, after the expulsion of Carthaginian traders from the Greek cities early in the century, left grain-growing as the primary rent-producing activity. Arable agriculture was robust to the ordinary conditions of Greek warfare, but it did require cultivators with a reasonable expectation of reaping what they had sown. And it required a substantial agricultural labor force. After two generations of warfare, there were neither expectations of decent harvests nor enough laborers. The warlords of fourth century Sicily, with their short time horizons, employed violent methods of expropriation that both discouraged cultivation and encouraged laborers to exit.53

  Many residents of Sicily were killed or enslaved and sold abroad. Many others availed themselves of the opportunities that Hellas offered to migrants. As the Berkeley historian Emily Mackil has shown, the world of the poleis often proved willing and able to absorb surviving populations from failed poleis. Because Hellas remained a net importer of labor in the fourth century (ch. 4), Sicilians who fled the island could expect to make a living elsewhere, in Greek Italy or the mainland. Greek labor mobility may have pushed forward the tipping point for the Sicilian economy.54

  If we are to believe our literary sources, the tipping point had been reached by mid-century. If we were to take Plutarch’s description at face value, Sicily might have seemed ready for a descent into conditions resembling the Early Iron Age nadir. But, unlike the system-level collapse at the end of the Bronze Age, Sicily’s economic difficulties were regional and stemmed from political problems that could potentially be rectified. Indeed, by the last third of the fourth century BCE, Sicily’s economic fortunes were on the mend. The downturn was reversed and Sicily rejoined the world of wealthy Hellas.

  In 344 BCE, answering an appeal from surviving residents of Syracuse to the ancestral mother city, Corinth dispatched one of its citizens, Timoleon, with a small army to Sicily. Although we hear little of his earlier career (other than his killing of his brother, who had sought tyranny at Corinth), Timoleon proved adept as a general, politician, and diplomat. As in the case of the arrival of Gylippos at Syracuse in 414 BCE, an outsider with particular skills and disengaged from local factional politics proved capable of intervening successfully at a moment of acute crisis. Like Gylippos, and Solon before him (and for reasons unexplained in our sources), throughout his Sicilian career Timoleon remained uninterested in seeking personal power, at least through the familiar route of using autocratic military authority as a springboard to tyranny. By playing on very real fears of a Carthaginian takeover of the island, and by rallying a populace desperately tired of tyrants, Timoleon eventually came out ahead in a struggle between the tyrant of Leontini, the Carthaginians, and Dionysius II for the control of Syracuse. No doubt to the surprise of many, Syracuse was then given a new republican constitution. At least parts of the new constitution were designed by Timoleon’s associate, a Corinthian named Cephalus. The Corinthians, like the Athenians, seem to have recognized the value of distinguishing between expertise in military affairs and constitutional reform.

  With Syracuse secured, Timoleon successfully campaigned against tyrants in other Sicilian cities and against the Carthaginians. Again, contrary to what many Sicilians must initially have expected, this did not prove to be a prelude to renewed Syracusan empire building. Timoleon resembled the warlords in that he employed mercenaries and resorted to booty raiding to pay them. But each tyrant he overthrew was replaced by a republican regime; each polis he took was treated as an independent ally, rather than as a subject state. Meanwhile, Timoleon gained a series of military victories against Carthage, resulting in a negotiated settlement that limited Carthage’s sphere in Sicily to the northwestern third of the island. Seven years after arriving in Sicily, having gone blind, Timoleon retired from active politics.55

  The upside to an economic decline that had been compounded, if not caused, by labor mobility is that when the underlying conditions that led to large-scale emigration changed, such that agricultural cultivation for export was again a rational strategy, there would be good reason for Greeks to return to the fertile fields of Sicily. The incentive would be especially strong insofar as labor shortage, as a result of depopulation, put upward pressure on wages.56 By 337 BCE, the warlords and tyrants were gone, Syracusan and Carthaginian imperialistic ambitions were on hold, and Timoleon had resigned his military command. Greek immigrants flooded into Sicily—some 60,000, according to Diodorus and Plutarch.

  Some archaeological evidence supports the literary accounts of the rapid revival of Sicily’s economy, both in the cities and the countryside, in the wake of Timoleon’s campaigns. Grain exports seem to have recovered; large numbers of coins from Corinth and Corinthian colonies in Sicilian hoards from this era are most readily explained as payments for grain. Minting of coins by Sicilian poleis, which (other than at Syracuse) had been at a near standstill for most of the fourth century, now revived, with close to half (20/47) of the poleis in Sicily for the first time issuing bronze coins for purposes of local exchange.57

  The economic fall and rise of Sicily in the fourth century shows both the potential fragility of regional economies—especially those that depended on the export of grain—but also the resilience of the larger economy of Hellas. The dispersed-authority ecology proved capable of responding to changes in local political conditions in ways that we can see, ex post, were at once unfavorable to polis-centered empires and favorable to long-term economic growth. The ecology-level response—including the short-term depopulation and the repopulation of Greek Sicily—was an emergent phenomenon. It arose from the behavior of a great many individuals who made their choices based on simple assumptions—e.g., the likelihood of being able to move freely about Hellas and find work outside Sicily, and then the likelihood that republican regimes would be nonexploitative relative to tyrannies. Although the choices made by, for example, Dionysius I, the Carthaginian government, Corinth, and Timoleon had significant consequences, there was no central power setting policy or determining outcomes.

  THE ANATOLIAN GREEKS UNDER PERSIA

  Among the headlines of the history of mainland Greece and Sicily in the fourth century BCE is the failure of imperial states to subordinate free Greek city-states. In western Anatolia, however, the story was quite different. As both Athens and Sparta stumbled in their expansionist projects by the mid390s, Persia stepped into the breach. Picking up where his royal predecessors had left off after the war of 480–478, Artaxerxes II reasserted an ancestral sovereignty over the coastal cities of Anatolia. The history of the fourth century Anatolian Greek cities is not well documented in our surviving literary sources, but the gap is at least partially filled by documentary and archaeological evidence.

  For our purposes, the important point was made by the eminent American historian, Chester Starr 40 years ago: Contrary to what classical historians had long supposed—based in part on highly colored accounts by the rhetorician Isocrates, who hoped to persuade Philip II of Macedon to invade the Persian Empire—there is good reason to believe that the Anatolian Greeks were at least as prosperous in the fourth century under the Persians as they had been in the mid-fifth century under the Athenians. Almost certainly they were better off than they would have been if, counterfactually, Sparta’s imperial project had been prolonged for two generations. Starr emphasized the archaeological evidence for public building and the expansion of minting activity by a number of the Anatolian poleis. He also noted that the Anatolian Greek cities seem not to have joined revolts against the king by western Anatolian governors.
A generation of scholarship has tended to confirm Starr’s main points, while substantially deepening and broadening our understanding of the history of western Anatolia in the fourth century BCE.58

  A major study of the Anatolian Greek world from the late fifth through late fourth centuries BCE by the French historian, Pierre Debord, concludes that at least some Anatolian poleis fared better in this period than did some parts of mainland Greece. Like Starr, Debord points to the evidence of a spate of architectural construction: temples, civic buildings, and Fortifications. In Ionia (region 38), for example, Priene (i861) was refounded, probably around mid-century, on the slopes of Mt. Mycale, with a full complement of civic buildings and a monumental city wall. Much of the city plan of Neandreia (i785) in the Troas (region 35) was reorganized, as was the entirety of Priene, on a grid plan. And, as at Priene, Neandreia’s new building included massive city walls. Debord also details increased minting activity. Ephesus (i844), Miletus, Cos, and Rhodes issued substantial quantities of silver coins; other poleis under Persian control minted in gold and electrum.

  On the whole, the Anatolian Greek poleis seem to have accepted the rationality of acquiescence to an imperial power that had demonstrated its commitment to long time horizons and reasonable taxes. While most of the Anatolian Greek cities were ruled by pro-Persian oligarchies, there were notable exceptions; Erythrai (i845) had democratic institutions by ca. 400 BCE, and Kyme (i817) was democratic by 350 BCE. As in the mainland, institutional innovations were linked to the growth of civic populations. The king and his governors generally respected local autonomy. Cities that paid their taxes were left in peace.