by Ober, Josiah
After the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth to seventh centuries CE, classical Greek culture was sustained by the successor Eastern (Byzantine) empire and by scholars and scientists in the medieval Arabic-speaking world. When, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, in the face of Ottoman Turkish imperial expansion, Greek literature was reexported to the West during the Italian Renaissance, and when Greek learning was popularized in northern Europe by Erasmus and other luminaries in the sixteenth century, its immortality was ensured.5
None of that was inevitable in the late fourth century BCE: Not every Empire has encouraged, or even allowed, the preservation of the intellectual heritage of conquered small-state ecologies.6 The immortality of Greek culture hinged on its uptake by the Hellenistic kingdoms after the political fall. That uptake was in turn predicated, at least in part, on the capacity of a number of the Greek poleis, in the two centuries after the fall, to negotiate terms of local independence and reasonable tax rates with powerful and rapacious Hellenistic dynasts. The dynasts were forced to concede more independence and to charge lower rents than they would have preferred because Greek cities were hard targets: While a given dynast often had the power to capture a given city, the cost of doing so was likely to be high (appendix II). Greek cities were hardened through Greek institutional and technical innovations—especially democracy, federalism, and military architecture—devised in the classical era and robustly sustained and further developed in the Hellenistic period.
ALEXANDER’S CAMPAIGN AND ANOTHER FALL
Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Persian Empire had immediate and profound effects on the Greek world. The Greek cities of western Anatolia were liberated from Persian imperial control—whether or not they wished to be—following Alexander’s battle with Persian satraps at the Granicus River (map 9). The battle, fought just east of Abydos in northwestern Anatolia in May 334, was a great victory for the young Macedonian king. Things might, however, have gone otherwise. There would have been no battle to win had the Great King Darius III accepted the strategic advice of his Greek general, Memnon of Rhodes. Memnon advocated a scorched earth policy aimed at starving the invaders while avoiding direct battle. Moreover, in the course of the battle, Alexander was nearly killed. Leading a cavalry charge, he was cut off from most of his men, and his helmet was cleaved by a Persian axe. Alexander thus came close to suffering the fate of the brilliant would-be usurper of the Persian throne, Cyrus II, who died leading a cavalry charge at the battle of Cunaxa in 401 (ch. 9). The near-doublet need not have been happenstance: Persian tactics in both instances seemed well designed to isolate an impetuous commander. Only a fortuitous spear thrust by Alexander’s companion, Cleitus “the Black,” saved the young Macedonian king from suffering Cyrus’ fate. The history of a counterfactual world in which Cleitus had been just a bit slower would have diverged radically from what in fact followed.7
After his victory at Granicus, Alexander moved inland and replaced the Persian governors of Lydia and Phrygia with men of his own choosing. He left intact the existing Persian satrapal system of local governance, however, perpetuating the principal-agent problem that had long bedeviled the governance of the Persian Empire. Once the Macedonian army returned to the coast, most of the Anatolian Greek poleis accepted their liberation, but Miletus in central Ionia resisted, as did Halicarnassus in Caria. Miletus fell fairly quickly to Alexander’s siege machines. Halicarnassus, though, whose defense was led by the redoubtable Memnon, held out for much longer by making effective use of catapults mounted on the city walls. Each of the Anatolian Greek cities, now subject to Alexander, paid taxes to him in the form of suntaxis—the Greek term was borrowed from the “contribution” system of the Athenian naval league of the fourth century—and avoided the coercive associations of the “tribute” (phoros) system of the fifth century Athenian empire.8
Alexander actively promoted democracy in the Anatolian poleis, in place of Persia-supported oligarchies. He thus broke with Philip’s Corinthian League regime policy, guaranteeing that subject states kept their existing constitutions. He also broke with Philip’s preference for oligarchy, a preference that had been expressed in the new government imposed on Thebes after Chaeronea. Presumably Alexander felt that he had good reason to distrust the Greek elites who had gained most from Persian rule. New democracies would be more likely to support the new king—especially if the alternative was the return of the oligarchs with bloody reprisals to follow. The incumbent satrap of Caria, Ada (sister of Mausolus and wife of the previous satrap), was left in control of her province. The Greek cities of Ionia and Aiolis (regions 37 and 38: map 1 and appendix I) seem, however, to have arranged the terms of their allegiance directly with the Macedonian king, thus anticipating the situation of many Anatolian Greek poleis in the Hellenistic period.9
Meanwhile, after leaving Halicarnassus, Memnon, Darius’ Greek commander, moved west into the Aegean, where he quickly gained control of Cos, Chios, and four of the poleis of Lesbos. He besieged the fifth and most important Lesbian city: Mytilene, the site of the Athenian campaign in 427 BCE (ch. 8). Alexander now faced the prospect of losing the Aegean. He hastily regrouped naval forces that had been prematurely dismissed after his victory at Miletus. Memnon, however, fell ill and died before the walls of Mytilene. Persian commanders carried on with Memnon’s Aegean strategy, eventually taking Mytilene and the island of Tenedos (i793). But Alexander’s lieutenants contained the Persian advance and later retook the north Aegean islands. Once again, Alexander had dodged a bullet and thus was free to continue his fast-paced advance south to Syria and Egypt and then east across Asia.10
The rest of Alexander’s extraordinary campaign—from the victory at Issus to the great sieges of Tyre and Sidon, to the conquest of Egypt, and to his greatest victory at Gaugemela; the burning of Persepolis, the pursuit of Darius and then of Darius’ murderers, the difficult Afghan and Indian campaigns, the voyage down the Indus River, and the horrific march back through the Gedrosian Desert to Babylon—falls outside the ambit of this book. What matters for our purposes is that, during his lifetime, the diplomatic arrangements that followed the Macedonian victories over the Greeks in 338 and 334 remained for the most part intact. There was one dangerous challenge to Macedonian authority while Alexander was still campaigning deep inside Asia: By spring of 331 BCE, King Agis III of Sparta had built an anti-Macedonian Peloponnesian alliance that included most of the poleis of Arcadia, Elis, and Achaea. Megalopolis (i282) stood by Macedon and was besieged by Agis. Athens hesitated but eventually stood aloof, as did Corinth and other major poleis. The uprising was crushed by the Macedonian general, Antipater, after a big battle before the walls of Megalopolis (reportedly some 65,000 combatants: equivalent to the number who fought at Chaeronea). Sparta, defeated, was forced to join the League of Corinth.11
Upon Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, there was another uprising, this time led by Athens. Relations between the king and the city had soured when, in 324, Alexander had ordered the return of political exiles to the Greek cities—thereby threatening Athens’ cleruchy on Samos. Alexander had also demanded that he be offered divine honors as a godlike king in each of the Greek cities. When, soon thereafter, news came of the king’s death at Babylon, the Athenians had already raised funds and gathered a large mercenary army. There were several hundred warships (triremes, and the new quadriremes and quinqueremes) ready for action in the shipsheds. Athens declared war, joined by Rhodes, the Aetolians, Phocians, Locrians, and some states of the Peloponnese. Leosthenes of Athens was elected commander by the council of the allies. The Boeotians, most of the poleis of Euboea, and many other Greek states remained loyal to Macedon.
Leosthenes gained quick victories over Antipater, besieging him in the southern Thessalian city of Lamia (i431)—the town that would give its name to the war. But the siege was broken by Macedonian reinforcements. The Athenians meanwhile launched a fleet of 170 ships—an armada comparable in size to the great imperial navies Athe
ns had put to sea during crises of the Peloponnesian War. But in July 322, the Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Macedonian navy in battles fought off Abydos at the Hellespont and the island of Amorgos in the central Cyclades. The Macedonian victories at sea were sealed a month later by a big land battle (again with about 65,000 combatants) at Crannon (i400) in central Thessaly (map 9).
After the Macedonian victory at Crannon, there was another negotiated settlement, but this time, with its fleet lost and vulnerable to being starved (as in 404 at the end of the Peloponnesian War), Athens was forced to accept a new government: The robust democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries was abolished. Athens was to be ruled as a moderate oligarchy in which citizenship was determined by a property qualification of 2,000 drachmas. The cleruchy on Samos was disbanded. In September 322, a Macedonian garrison took up residence in Piraeus. Athens’ political fall appeared complete. Yet a few years later, the democracy was briefly restored. For the next century, the Athenians would repeatedly struggle, sometimes successfully, to regain democracy and a measure of independence.12
AFTER THE FALL: HELLENISTIC WORLD
The possibility that the era in which great and independent Greek city-states dominated the eastern Medieterranean might be rebooted after 338 was shut down by the Macedonian victories against Agis in 330 and in the Lamian War of 322. In 304, however, a failed siege of the island-polis of Rhodes by Demetrius “the Besieger” proved that even the most redoubtable of the Hellenistic warlords risked failure when they sought to capture the greatest of the fortified Greek cities. Then, in 301, at Ipsus in central Anatolia, an epic battle was contested by more than 130,000 infantry, 25,000 cavalry, and 500 war elephants. It pitted several of Alexander’s ambitious former commanders against one another. The victory of Seleucus “the Victorious” and his allies at Ipsus determined that Alexander’s mega-empire would not survive to be governed by a single emperor but rather would be subdivided into several rival kingdoms, each ruled by a Macedonian warlord.13
By the beginning of the third century, the framework of the postclassical Hellenistic world had been set. Which colorfully nicknamed dynast would control what territory remained in doubt. But by 300 BCE, in the wake of Ipsus, it was certain that at any given moment several kings, most of them Alexander’s former generals or their descendants, would share in ruling the eastern Greek world.
Sicily quickly followed the lead of the Greek east. After the collapse of the constitutional order established by Timoleon (ch. 9) and a brief oligarchic interlude, the military adventurer and mercenary general, Agathocles, had become tyrant of Syracuse. He eventually became master of eastern Sicily along with (occasionally) parts of south Italy. In 304, Agathocles declared himself king. Breaking with the practice of earlier Sicilian tyrants and emulating the practice of the Macedonian kings, Agathocles issued coins featuring his own image in his own name and with the royal title that the Greeks had ordinarily reserved for legendary heroes and eastern monarchs: basileus. By the third century, the main Hellenistic kingdoms were centered in Syria and Mesopotamia, ruled by descendants of Seleucus “the Victorious”; in Egypt, ruled by descendants of Ptolemy “the Savior”; and in Macedonia, ruled by descendants of Antigonus “the One-Eyed.” Substantial second-tier kingdoms were centered in Pergamon, Pontus, and Syracuse.14
These were extremely important developments for the city-state ecology. Rather than a single empire, able to bring matchless resources to bear on dissidents, the greatest power holders of the Hellenistic world were both limited and counterbalanced by rivalry with one another. With authority divided and the now much-expanded Greek world remaining in many ways decentralized, there were ample openings for city-states and federal leagues to play the Macedonian dynasts against one another. While there was no question of most Greek city-states remaining fully independent of the will of kings, the citizens of the poleis were not reduced to the status of docile royal subjects. Meanwhile, as the noted historian of the ancient Greek world, John Ma, has emphasized, the end of city-state hegemonies left many smaller poleis (for example, the poleis of Boeotia) with more freedom of action than they had experienced in the classical era.15
While the citizen-centered world of city-states that Aristotle had described in the Politics was certainly changed in many ways, the new world that emerged from the dramatic late fourth century era of creative destruction did not bring forth a Leviathan of the sort that would have satisfied Thomas Hobbes (ch. 3). Just as the destruction of the Athenian empire had brought into being new and creative political and economic possibilities (ch. 9), so too the end of the hope and the fear that Alexander’s empire could be consolidated as a single state spurred the creation of new polis and interpolis institutions.
There had been, in the course of the later fourth century, reason to fear that the end of the political conditions that had sustained the classical efflorescence would precipitate a quick and severe economic decline. As we have seen, Philip’s Macedon was far from an open-access order. Whatever grand plans Alexander might have had for the cities of his empire were lost in the struggles that culminated at Ipsus. Alexander’s successors were, as the British historian of the Hellenistic era, M. M. Austin, has emphasized, warlords: pirates writ large. By the third century BCE, several of the dynasties founded by Alexander’s generals were able to maintain control over core regions. But in the generation immediately following Alexander’s death, the Macedonian kings treated much of the extended Greek world as up for grabs and a source of booty. An early Hellenistic warlord’s two primary policy goals were closely related: gain control of an army of well-trained, well-armed Greeks and Macedonians, and find the means to pay them.16
Under these conditions, we would expect ferocious rent-seeking. Cities would be plundered to pay mercenaries. Extortionate taxes on surviving cities, arbitrarily collected, would drive up transaction costs, reducing individual and collective incentives to invest in human capital. Increased costs of trade and declining economic specialization would result in a long-term drop in the value of exchange and thus economic contraction. Places where central authority was strong, notably Egypt under the Ptolemies, settled quickly into an equilibrium that was productive in the long run for the ruling elites. But in Asia and the mainland, with authority contested, armies large, and the stakes high, we might expect an economic decline similar to that suffered by the poleis of Sicily in the mid-fourth century (ch. 9). Yet this grim scenario was not played out—or at least not consistently enough to put an end to Greek efflorescence.
Because the data on Greek poleis in the Inventory do not extend beyond 323 BCE, the conventional end point of the classical era, it becomes more difficult to measure the performance of the Greek economy in the late fourth and third centuries. There was considerable migration of Greeks, east and south out of mainland Greece, as Macedonian kings established new cities in Egypt and other former provinces of the Persian Empire. This movement presumably reduced population density in core Greece. But it seems highly unlikely that late fourth or third century saw a general or sustained economic decline across Hellas. Indeed, in at least some parts of the Greek world, notably in western Anatolia, the Greek poleis probably reached new economic peaks.17
EMULATION, CONVERGENCE, AND COOPERATION AFTER CHAERONEA
Athens in the era after Chaeronea provides a particularly well-documented and exhaustively studied example of the postclassical economic and cultural potential of a leading Greek state. As we have seen, after Chaeronea Philip II negotiated a diplomatic settlement with Athens rather than seeking to force submission by besieging the city. Athens joined the League of Corinth and thereby lost its independence in foreign policy. But there was no change in government, no garrison, no extortionate taxes. In the years between 338 and 322, Athens was robustly and actively democratic. Politicians debated policy in the Council and citizen assembly and prosecuted one another in the people’s courts over alleged breaches of public trust. The democratic government passed numerous laws and decrees and
ordered them published on marble stelae. Many public documents from this era have been unearthed by archaeologists, including the law passed on the motion of Eukrates in 336, which reiterated the legality of tyrant killing and specified punishment for magistrates who collaborated with a nondemocratic government.18
Athens also flourished economically. Under the expert financial management of the statesman Lycurgus and his associates, annual state income rose to the point that it roughly equaled that of the high imperial era before the Peloponnesian War. Public funds were expended on important building projects, civic and military alike: The city and Piraeus fortification walls were modernized, and more warships were built, along with shipsheds and dockyards to house them. A monumental new arsenal for the storage of naval equipment was constructed in Piraeus. Among major civic projects was a new stadium for the Panathenaia festival. The Theater of Dionysus was given a massive overhaul, as was the civic assembly place of the Pnyx. This was also the period in which Athenian wages—at least for laborers (including slaves) on public projects—reached levels similar to those of Golden Age Holland (table 4.7). Similarly high wages were offered for especially important forms of public service. The civic education and military training of 18- and 19-year old Athenian citizens was formalized and intensified through the institution known as the ephebeia.19
Athens in the 17 years after Chaeronea serves as a model for the semi-independent postclassical Greek city-state. The Greek historian John Ma has documented what he calls the “great convergence” of the Hellenistic poleis around institutions that were especially associated with, and in some cases directly borrowed from, classical Athens. Greek states in the Hellenistic period took on signature democratic institutions, including elimination of property qualifications, people’s courts, pay for public service, and formal accountability procedures for magistrates.20 The Athenian “epigraphic habit” of publishing democratically enacted laws and decrees on stone spread widely across the Hellenistic world. Hellenistic Greek cities have provided modern epigraphers with extensive dossiers of public decisions on a variety of matters—including detailed records of negotiations with the kings to whom taxes were paid. Young citizens were trained in military skills and civic values in institutions modeled on the Athenian ephebeia. Wealthy citizens were expected to contribute generously to public goods. They were honored publicly, with inscriptions and sometimes with statues, when they did so with sufficient enthusiasm. New public buildings were erected. Many states now constructed theaters, stadiums, and stoas—as well as new temples and religious sanctuaries. Special attention was lavished on military architecture. Some states, most notably Rhodes, built navies of modern warships.21