The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  PHILIP AND ALEXANDER BETWEEN ARISTOTLE AND HOBBES

  In sum, one reason that Macedon under Philip succeeded in conquering the mainland Greek city-states, whereas Persia under Darius and Xerxes had failed, was because Macedon took on some, but only some, of the characteristics of a Greek superpolis. Macedon was like Athens and Syracuse in making effective use of experts and seizing a first-mover advantage from institutional and technical innovations. Even at the level of political institutions and culture, Philip’s Macedon was in certain ways more like a polis than was the Persia of Xerxes or Darius. Of course Macedon remained very unlike any great polis in that it was a monarchy, ruled by a king who could keep his own counsel, make his own policy, and did not need to worry about challenges to his legitimacy—at least so long as he was militarily successful.

  As subjects of the king, Macedonians were never citizens of Macedon in the strong political sense that Athenians or Spartans were citizens of their respective states. Yet, like the citizens of a leading Greek polis, many Macedonians must actively have supported the regime at least in part because they saw that doing so was in their own interest, as rational people, capable of cost–benefit reasoning, and concerned (although not uniquely) with maximizing their own utility. While power played a part, Macedonians (unlike, say, the helots of Sparta) were not merely coerced into obedience. Nor did they obey only because they accepted a state ideology claiming for the king a godlike status. The Macedonians in Philip’s and Alexander’s armies expected to do better for themselves and their families than their ancestors in Upper Macedonia could ever have hoped to do. Alexander was not exaggerating wildly when he (reportedly) dressed down restive Macedonian troops by reminding them where they had come from and what they had gained:

  Philip took you over when you were helpless vagabonds, mostly clothed in skins, feeding a few animals on the mountains and engaged in their defense in unsuccessful fighting with Illyrians, Triballians, and the neighboring Thracians. He gave you cloaks to wear instead of skins; he brought you down from the mountains to the plains; he made you a match in battle for the barbarians on your borders…. He made you city dwellers and established the order that comes from good laws and customs. It was due to him that you became masters and not slaves and subjects…. He annexed the greater part of Thrace to Macedonia and, by capturing the best placed positions by the sea, he opened up the country to trade.

  —Arrian, Anabasis 7.9.2–3, trans. Brunt (Loeb) adapted41

  Macedonians fought, not only for king and country, but also for themselves.

  Like Cleisthenes of Athens, Philip was a sociopolitical innovator in that he created a vastly expanded coalition that included tens of thousands of ordinary (non-elite) men. In a move that is in some ways analogous to the radical expansion of the Athenian navy in the era of the Persian wars, Philip’s military reforms incentivized a great many more individuals to undertake service in the armed forces and enabled them to see themselves as primary stakeholders in the outcomes of state-directed military operations.

  A rational commitment to advancing a community’s common interest in welfare and security, well aligned with the self-interest of many members of that community, had undergirded the reforms of Lycurgus of Sparta and of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Themistocles of Athens. That alignment of collective and individual interests was made explicit in the speeches put into Pericles’ mouth by Thucydides. It was the key to the rise of Thebes in the age of Epaminondas, to the rebuilding of Athens after the Peloponnesian War, and to the rise of the Greek federal leagues. The failure to align collective and individual interests at a scale beyond that of the city-state ultimately doomed the various imperial projects of Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, and Thebes. A similar failure led the poleis of Sicily into a cycle of tyranny and economic downturn in the mid-fourth century. Timoleon revived the Sicilian economy by aligning the interests of many Greeks around a common project of resisting Carthaginian expansionism and ending an era of warlord exploitation.

  Any reasonably attentive student of Greek social and political history might well have come to the conclusion that, in the absence of a state monopoly of coercive force conjoined with a compelling ideology of godlike kingship (the package that Greeks supposed, rightly or wrongly, the Great King of Persia offered his subjects), alignment of collective and individual interests was the only plausible route to high state performance. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Diodorus were attentive students of history, and their texts make the point clearly enough.

  Aristotle was an astute student of history and a world-class theorist of politics. The alignment of the collective interest of the whole community (the state) with the interest in the flourishing of each of its essential constituent parts (individual citizens) lay at the center of Aristotle’s discussion in the Politics of both justice and the practical measures that could be employed to preserve regimes.

  For Aristotle, the key features of an uncorrupted regime were, first, the alignment of the interests of the ruler (individual or collective) with the common good of the community as a whole, and next the reliable deference of rulers to law—that is, to established rules guaranteeing the alignment of interests. None of this is surprising if we think of Aristotle in the tradition of Greek historical and political thought. But it is puzzling if we think of Philip as an absolute and lawless sovereign, on the model of Hobbes’ Leviathan—a model that Hobbes used to refute Aristotle (ch. 3). Why on Earth, we may ask, would Leviathan hire Aristotle to tutor his prospective heir?

  It is possible, but surely unlikely, that Philip was entirely ignorant of Aristotle’s political (including social and ethical) commitments when he appointed him as Alexander’s tutor. Yet assuming Philip did do a background check, and therefore did have an inkling of Aristotle’s political thought, we may assume that Philip found Aristotle’s thought worthwhile. Surely he would not have hired a tutor whose ideas about social order he found repugnant. So what was he thinking of?

  Philip certainly did not hire Aristotle to tell him how to run his kingdom. Aristotle may have been working on the Politics (among other works) in the late 340s, when he was in residence in Macedon. But there can be no causal story leading from Aristotle’s political philosophy to Philip’s success. Aside from the absurdity of imagining Philip as playing Dion of Syracuse to his own Dionysius II, Philip had embarked on the reforms that led to his victory at Chaeronea long before Aristotle arrived. Yet, much in the philosopher’s political theory would, I think, have resonated with the Macedonian king for the reasons suggested above: Philip’s approach to ruling a kingdom relied on intuitions about aligning the interests of the state with those of rational men concerned with their own welfare. Whatever the source of those intuitions, Philip shared them with Greek institutional designers since the sixth century, with Greek political theorists since the fifth century, and with Aristotle himself.

  It seems likely, then, that Philip’s selective borrowing from Greek culture and expertise included not only techniques of state finance and military organization but also a general conception of social order that was based on the rational alignment of the interests of a great many individuals, rather than just a few elites, with the interests of the state. In Philip’s Macedon, the state was personified by the king, and Philip might therefore be imagined as a Hobbesian sovereign. But in order to achieve his ambitious goals, Philip had to be able to commit credibly to social conditions that were regarded as advantageous by the tens of thousands of ordinary Macedonians who made up the bulk of the army. The question of whether that commitment meant that the king was bound by rules (per Aristotle) or that he ruled as a lawless third-party enforcer of agreements among his subjects (per Hobbes) was probably not fully articulated in the time of Philip. And that ambiguity later contributed to sometimes-violent confrontations between Alexander and certain members of his supercoalition during the conquest of Asia.

  Wherever we situate Philip and Alexander between Aristotle and Hobbes, the social equilibrium that was s
truck between the kings of Macedon and their Macedonian subjects is central to any explanation for the rise of Macedon and thus for the political fall of the independent Greek city-states. As we see in the next chapter, a secondary equilibrium, between kings and poleis, is a key to explaining the persistence of the high-performing Greek economy in the generations after the fall.

  11

  CREATIVE DESTRUCTION AND IMMORTALITY

  Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!

  —BYRON 1812

  In the poetic lines with which we began, Byron described Greece as immortal, fallen, and great. We have followed the rise of classical Greece to greatness, understood as efflorescence. We have traced the fall, understood as the loss of full independence by the major city-states. This concluding chapter reviews the causes of greatness and fall and turns to the question of immortality.

  FALLEN, GREAT …

  Both greatness and fall had similar causes: high levels of specialization, innovation, and mobility of people, goods, and ideas as the result of distinctive political conditions. I characterized those political conditions as fair rules and competitive emulation. Those conditions were emerging in the eight century BCE, had crystallized by the sixth century, and continued to develop through the fourth century in self-governing citizen-centered polities within a decentralized marketlike ecology of many small states sharing a common language and background culture.

  In the most developed Greek city-states, relatively impartial rules, backed by the willingness of citizens to act in their defense, protected citizens (and some noncitizens) from historically common forms of domination and expropriation. That gave individuals and communities reason to invest in themselves. Investments included acquiring education, perfecting skills, and deferring short-term payoffs in favor of anticipated long-term rewards. The Greek world was characterized by intense competition between individuals and between communities but also by institutions and cultural norms that enabled extensive interpersonal and interstate cooperation and that lowered the costs of transactions. Competition, along with growing human capital and lower transaction costs, drove continuous innovation, both institutional and technological. Successful institutions and technologies, along with goods and ideas, were readily transferred within and among states. Because transaction costs were low, the value gained from the exchange of specialized goods and services was high. These political conditions promoted economic growth that was driven by a large middle class of consumers: non-elite families living well above subsistence. Economic growth in turn underpinned spectacular levels of cultural achievement. The same conditions paved the way, however, for an entrepreneurial and opportunistic authoritarian leader to borrow selectively from Greek institutions and technological innovations and thereby to conquer the mainland Greek states, ending the era of full great-polis independence.

  Fair rules and competitive emulation in an ecology of small states do not explain every historical example of efflorescence. The historical sociologist Jack Goldstone’s survey, discussed in chapter 1, shows that premodern societies with different political trajectories have experienced efflorescence.1 But in Greece, the distinctive political situation that arose beginning around 800 BCE and persisted for at least the next half-millennium was the differentiator that enabled the world of the city-states to perform economically and culturally at a level much higher than the premodern normal, defined by conditions in the Late Bronze, Early Iron, and early modern periods of Greek history—and indeed, at a level that in some respects matched the exceptionally high-performing early modern societies of Holland and Britain.

  Those conclusions are important to us in modernity, not because Greece was the unique origin of the Western tradition or the spark that ignited a putative “great divergence” between East and West but because classical Greece is the earliest documented case of “democratic exceptionalism plus efflorescence”—a historically rare combination of economic, cultural, and political conditions pertaining among developed countries in the contemporary world.

  Insofar as we value democracy and prefer wealth to poverty, then we have good reason to care about explaining the rise of the society in which the wealth and democracy package is first documented. We have equally good reasons for wanting to explain why the major states within that society failed to maintain their full independence in the face of entrepreneurial authoritarians willing and able to appropriate institutions and technology. In the long run, the loss of city-state independence was coincident with a long economic decline. By the seventh century CE, core Greece had reverted to the relatively impoverished condition of the “premodern normal.” The world of Greek antiquity was obviously very different from our own, and some of the factors that led to both the rise and fall of classical Greece are unlikely to be repeated. Yet for those who do recognize certain features of our modernity in the history of classical Greece, that history may serve as a cautionary tale.

  … BUT WHY IMMORTAL?

  We have one more puzzle to solve: Whence Greek immortality? How is it that Byron (and we) could know so much about the history and cultural accomplishment of classical Greece? If the political fall had coincided with the end of Greek greatness—if Greece had quickly reverted to the depressed economic situation of the premodern normal after Philip’s victory at Chaeronea, Byron could not have learned enough about ancient Greece to regard it as immortal. Much of the literature, science, art, and architecture that are associated with “immortal Greek greatness” were indeed produced during the classical era. Even more was, however, produced in the subsequent Hellenistic period, drawing on that classical heritage. Self-consciously classicizing Greek literature continued vibrant during the high Roman Empire with the literary renaissance called the “Second Sophistic.” In late antiquity, Greek philosophers and historians were still producing important work, actively drawing on classical models. Moreover, the cultural achievement that was a primary basis for Byron’s belief in Greek greatness was preserved and canonized, as well as built upon, in the postclassical era: We would be severely limited in our knowledge of the history of the Greek world in the era 800–300 BCE if it were not for the sustained efforts of librarians and copyists during the centuries that followed the fall.2

  Neither Byron’s famous lines nor this book would have been written if the political fall of classical Greece had meant an abrupt end of efflorescence. But if the fall did not terminate economic growth and cultural achievement, we must ask why it did not. I have argued that distinctive classical-era political conditions that supported fair rules and competitive emulation—conditions not pertaining during the Bronze or Early Iron Ages nor in the medieval through early modern periods of Greek history—produced the sustained specialization and innovation that drove efflorescence. Then why did the loss of full independence not precipitate a quick and steep decline?

  The answer is that the initial loss of Greek independence turned out to be only partial: Although the power of the Macedonian dynasts was real, many postclassical Greek poleis enjoyed considerable independence in the Hellenistic period. Some smaller Greek states were more independent than they had been in the classical era of hegemonic city-states. We now know that, contrary to what most scholars of Greek antiquity long believed, important aspects of Greece’s political exceptionalism survived the classical fall.3

  The political conditions of the postclassical Hellenistic world included the persistence of a multistate ecology: Until the Roman takeover of Greece in the second century BCE, there were always multiple rulers rather than a unitary empire. Meanwhile, ongoing institutional innovations promoted new forms of interstate cooperation. The political institutions and values of classical Greek democratic exceptionalism—federalism, rule of law, citizen self-government, and civic values of freedom, equality, and dignity persisted long after the fall, albeit sometimes in modified forms. As a spate of new scholarship has proved, many polis governments were democratic well into the second century BCE, and robustly so.4

  Under th
ese conditions, enough of the Greek poleis were able to preserve sufficient levels of rule egalitarianism and competitive emulation to sustain efflorescence for some two centuries after the “fall”: Economic growth, while harder to measure after 323, appears to have continued long after Chaeronea. Cultural production certainly remained high. Important new advances were made in the fields of Greek historiography, drama, philosophy, science, technology, medicine, art, and architecture. While Athens remained an important cultural center, Hellenistic cultural production was widely dispersed across a large number of major cities. Cultural centers now included royal capitals—including Egyptian Alexandria, Anatolian Pergamum, and Syrian Antioch, each functioning as a polis with its own laws, citizens, and local government—along with poleis that had already been major centers in the classical period: Rhodes, Cos, Corinth, Sicyon, Kyrene—as well as Syracuse, Athens, and others. The political fall of classical Greece proved, in short, to be yet another example of creative destruction, rather than a ruinous destruction leading to quick economic and cultural collapse.

  By the time imperial Rome took over a still-flourishing Greek world, Romans had become eager consumers of Greek culture. By the second century BCE, Roman elites were deeply enough Hellenized to ensure the subsequent preservation and dissemination of Greek thought and culture throughout the huge and still-growing Roman Empire and across the next several hundred years. Having jumped scale to become a dominant imperial culture in one of the two biggest empires of the premodern world (the other was Han China), the immortality of Greece was, if not ensured, at least made possible.