The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  11. Goldstone 2013 critically reviews recent literature on the supposed “great divergence” of East and West. This book addresses Goldstone’s call (p. 59) for the study of “smaller divergences that arose in different times and places.”

  CHAPTER 1 The Efflorescence of Classical Greece

  1. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, stanza 73.

  2. Byron 1812. Byron in Greece: Minta 1998; Beaton 2013. Greece in the Roman Empire: Alcock 1993. Poorest European country before World War II: Allbaugh 1953: 15. The recent Greek economic crisis: Lynn 2010. Greece did experience other, if less remarkable, efflorescences in the middle Bronze Age and in the early Byzantine era of the later fifth and sixth centuries CE. See note 3 in this chapter.

  3. Goldstone 2002: 333–334: An efflorescence is “a relatively sharp, often unexpected upturn in demographic and economic indices, usually accompanied by political expansion and … cultural synthesis and consolidation.” Efflorescence is, however, “distinct from Kuznetzian ‘modern’ economic growth founded on the continual and conscious application of scientific and technological progress to economic activity.” Cf. de Vries and van der Woude 1997, who call Golden Age Holland of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “the First Modern Economy.” Relative brevity (to date) and possible fragility of the nineteenth to twenty-first century efflorescence: Deaton 2013: 78.

  4. Figure 4.3 breaks out population and consumption estimates. Dates at which modern Greek development achieved classical peak levels: figure 4.1. Figures 1.1, 4.1, and 4.3 are restricted to core Greece because an exceptionally full body of documentary and archaeological evidence, discussed in chapter 4, allows rough estimates of population and consumption rates for this territory over the long run (1300 BCE–1900 CE). For a comparison of the population of core Greece and the wider Greek world, see figure 2.1, with further discussion in chapter 4.

  5. Cultural features are detailed in chapter 2. Because of “Hellenization”—the tendency of non-Greek communities to adopt Greek cultural features, especially in the fourth century BCE (see chs. 9–10)—some Greeks had non-Greek ancestors; others could claim a Greek ancestry back to the Bronze Age. It is meaningless to speak of a “Greek race.”

  6. By “middle class” I mean a demographic category of people who fall below elite levels of consumption but who are able to consume at levels comfortably above subsistence; see ch. 4. I do not mean to imply anything substantive about self-identification, class consciousness, or place in the mode of production.

  7. Precocious modernity of Athens: Carugati, Ober, and Weingast forthcoming.

  8. Hansen and Nielsen 2004.

  9. Bintliff 2012.

  10. The Inventory (Hansen and Nielsen 2004) is the source of many of the numbers concerning size, prominence, persistence, and regimes of Greek states that are cited in this book. The Inventory was the culmination of the work of the Copenhagen Polis Center, which produced many important studies of individual Greek states and addressed a wide range of historical issues. For some of the limitations of the Inventory’s framework, see the critical review of Fröhlich 2010. de Callataÿ 2012, 2014a surveys recent quantitative work on ancient Greek and Roman economies and its effect on the study of ancient economic history. Morley 2014 critically assesses the uses of quantification in ancient history, pointing both to its potential and its limits.

  11. Unitary, essentially unchanging ancient economy: Finley 1999, with foreword by Ian Morris. New institutional economics: North 1981, 1990. North and Weingast 1989 (on why England was able to raise more money to fight wars than was France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and Acemoglu, Johnnson, and Robinson 2002 (on the “reversal of fortune” of rich and poor colonized regions of the New World from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries) are classics of the institutional economics field. Bresson 2007 is an impressive example of recent ancient-historical work in institutional economics. See further Christensen 2003; Eich 2006; Scheidel, Morris, and Saller 2007; Osborne 2009a; Ober 2010c; Halkos and Kyriazis 2010; de Callataÿ 2014a, and the works cited in ch. 4. On the other side: Hobson 2014 urges a poststructuralist, postcolonialist approach to archaeology and ancient history. He argues that quantification and institutional economics should be “exorcize[d]” (p. 13), along with deductive reasoning and hypothesis testing, on the grounds that they are neo-liberal, imperialist, ideological “relics” (p. 12) that import “concerns from outside the discipline” (p. 14) of ancient history. De Ste. Croix 1983 and Rose 2012 offer Marxist accounts of economic development in the Greek world, predicated on structural conditions of exploitation and class struggle; each presents a detailed argument for the applicability of Marx’s economic theory to the Greek world.

  12. Forsdyke 2012.

  13. Encyclopedic surveys of ancient Greek culture: Brunschwig and Lloyd 2000; Grafton, Most, and Settis 2010. The genetic impact of ancient Greeks on populations in Sicily, Italy, Corsica, and southern France: King et al. 2011, with literature cited.

  14. Number of poleis and population of Hellas: Hansen 2006b, 2008; with discussion in this book, chs. 2 and 4. As we will see (table 2.4), about four-fifths of the states listed in the Inventory as “Greek poleis” were unambiguously Greek communities; some scholars would not count all or even many of the remaining one-fifth as Greek. But reducing the total Greek population by 20% would not change the overall picture in any substantial way. Today’s population of the nation of Greece is about 11.3 million.

  15. Peer polity interaction: Renfrew and Cherry 1986; Ma 2003. On the Greek world as a decentralized network of states, see further Malkin 2011.

  16. Definition and primary features of the polis: Hansen 2006a. While most Greek poleis lacked some features found in the most highly developed modern nation-states, the attempt to define the polis as an “acephalous society” rather than as a state (Berent 1996, 2000) is misguided (Rhodes 1995, Hansen 2002b). Disappearance of poleis: Inventory pp. 120–123, Index 20.

  17. Small-state systems: Spruyt 1994. Comparative studies of city-state cultures: Molho and Raaflaub 1991; Hansen 2000, 2002a; Parker 2005. Long duration of the polis ecology: Ma (in progress b). Ancient Phoenicia: ch. 5. Tilly 1975: 15 notes that Europe in 1500 had some 500 more or less independent political units, but by 1900 only 25. For Tilly, the challenge was explaining consolidation. For a historian of ancient Greece, the challenge is explaining persistent decentralization. Comparison of Rome and China as cases of Successful imperial states: Scheidel 2009b.

  18. Problem of violence as central to social order: North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009.

  19. Hobbes 1996 [1651], with discussion here in ch. 3. Contemporary Hobbesianism: Anderson 2009; Morris 2014. Contrast van der Vliet 2011.

  20. Logic of centralized authority systems and godlike rulers, and role of war: Morris 2014. Empire as the standard ancient form of large-scale state organization: Morris and Scheidel 2009.

  21. Scheidel 2006, with discussion here, ch. 3 note 15.

  22. Cooptation or destruction of deliberative associations at all levels by centralizing royal authority, during in the seventeenth century: Tilly 1975: 21–22.

  23. Natural state: North, Wallis, Weingast 2009; proportionality of violence potential and privilege: Cox, North, and Weingast 2012. Development and emergence of large, centralized states, and their association with development: Tilly 1975, 1990; Morris 2010, 2014; Fukuyama 2011. The question then becomes, Whence modern democracy (and its associated values and rights)? Acemoglu and Robinson 2006 develop an influential theory, based on rational bargaining and elite choice, for how democracy arises from autocracy. We consider the Greek case of democratic emergence in detail in chapters 6–7.

  24. Importance of exchange: Bresson 2000. Harris 2002 discusses the prevalence of horizontal specialization in the Greek world but underestimates vertical specialization in some important Greek industries, e.g., pottery, architecture, shipbuilding, and mining. Greek understanding of core principles: Ober 2009.

  25. Schumpeter
1942. On innovation, as opposed to rent-seeking, as the engine of growth, see Baumol 1993, 2004. Baumol and Strom 2010 underline the essential role of historical examples (and counterexamples) in studying the history of entrepreneurship.

  26. Role of Mediterranean microclimates and geographic diversity in building networks of exchange: Horden and Purcell 2000. Role of rainfall in political development: Haber 2012; Haber and Elis 2014. Beneficial location relative to nearby societies: Ian Morris personal communication. See, further, ch. 5.

  27. Tilly 1975: 18 points to Europe’s “vital and prosperous cultural homogeneity” in ca. 1500, noting the “ease it gave to the diffusion of organizational models, to the expansion of states into new territories, to the transfer of populations from one state to another, and to the movement of administrative personnel from one government to another.” For Tilly, cultural homogeneity is a background condition that fostered consolidation of large states; insofar as that is right, cultural homogeneity does not provide us with an adequate explanation for the persistence and efflorescence of a small-state ecology.

  28. Smith 1776. Ford, Taylorism, and industrial production: Rothschild 1973.

  29. Contemporary knowledge-based organizations and the polis as a knowledge-based organization: Manville and Ober 2003. Common knowledge: Chwe 2001. Wisdom of the crowd: Landemore 2012; Landemore and Elster 2012.

  30. Aggregation, alignment, codification as collective knowledge processes, and their association with political institutions: Ober 2008. Stock of knowledge, modern science, and modern development: Mokyr 2002.

  31. Civic rights, immunities, and risk-taking: Ober 2012.

  32. Incentive compatibility and choice of amateurism in Athenian courts: Fleck and Hanssen 2012.

  33. This epistemic approach to the question of why democratic institutions are positively correlated with economic growth weighs in on the long-standing debate, inaugurated by Lipset 1959, over whether democracy causes growth (and if so, how) or vice versa; cf. metastudy by Doucouliagos and Ulubaşoğlu 2008. For a recent argument that democracy does cause growth, see Acemoglu et al. 2014; for the other side: Boix 2011.

  34. Plato, Republic, especially book 6, with discussion of Reeve 1988. Expertise in democratic systems of aggregated knowledge: Ober 2013a. See further, ch. 9.

  35. “Opportunist” states and their adoption of Greek expertise: Davies 1993 (ch. 12), 2004; Pyzyk forthcoming. See further ch. 10.

  36. The long history of the postclassical Greek polis: Ma in progress b.

  CHAPTER 2 Ants around a Pond

  1. On the demography of the Greek world, see Hansen 2006b, 2008, with discussion here, ch. 4. Roman population; world population: Scheidel 2007. The population of the United States is currently about 4.25% of the world’s population.

  2. Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson 2011: Table 1.

  3. West of Sicily: 4 poleis in region 1 (total population under 20,000); south of Crete: 6 poleis in region 45 (total population under 100,000); Black Sea (including Marmara): 92 poleis (total population just under one million).

  4. The only noteworthy exception is region 30: Inland Thrace—where a half-dozen towns were sufficiently Hellenic by the later fourth century BCE to qualify as poleis. See discussion here, ch. 10.

  5. Overall correlation of elevation/size = Pearson–0.19; elevation/prominence: Pearson–0.13. In Sicily, the correlations of both elevation to size and prominence = Pearson–0.48. Pearson correlations are common statistical measures of the linear relationship between data sets, ranging from–1 (complete negative correlation) to 1 (complete positive correlation); correlations greater than 0.5 (or less than–0.5) are considered quite strong. Note that polis location, where precision is possible, is measured at the center of the central city; large poleis, like Athens, included in their regions considerable high-elevation territory, and some villages lay at elevations considerably higher than the main city.

  6. Designated “Csa” (temperate/dry summer/hot summer) in the standard Köppen-Geiger climate classification system: Peel, Finlayson and McMahon 2007. Per below, “dry summer” includes rainfall averages up to about 5 cm per month. Total average precipitation across most of the Greek world ranges from ca. 20 to 50 cm (Attica, Cycladic islands, parts of Sicily and Cyprus), to 50–75 cm (Argolis, Laconia, Corinthia, Boeotia, Thessaly, Thrace, Sporades and Dodecanese islands, Macedonia, Eastern Crete), and up to 75–125 cm (Western Peloponnese, Epirus, Acharnania, Adriatic islands, Rhodes, Western Crete, Caria). Source: http://www.bestcountryreports.com. Precipitation maps for Greece, Italy, Turkey. Accessed November 7, 2013.

  7. Source: http://www.pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/DrySummerClimates=PacificBulbSociety. Map of Mediterranean summer rainfall: http://www.pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/files/00_others/Europe_climate.gif (accessed Sept. 23, 2013). On this map, the range of Mediterranean climates is subdivided from A (“extreme desert”: 5–15 cm total annual rainfall) to G (“wetter”: rainfall of more than 2.3 cm/month in 2 summer months but less than 5.1 cm in the driest month), and from 1 (“frigid”: winter lows average below–1°C) to 4 (“temperate”: lows average 7–15°C). Greeks outside the Black Sea region inhabit almost uniquely zones C3, C4, D3, D4, E2, E3, E4, F2, F3, F4. Notable exceptions to the “very dry summer” rule are Neapolis and Massalia, both in zone G2. Bresson 2014 argues that the Mediterranean climate of ca. 500–1 BCE was on the whole cooler and wetter than in the twentieth century CE. On long-term climate change, see, further, ch. 5.

  8. The relationship between specific climatic and/or agricultural regimes and the potential for the historical emergence of specific political and economic outcomes is the subject of important ongoing research; see Haber 2012; Haber and Elis 2014. The Greek world scores high in three measures (storability of crops, absence of aggregate shocks, and easy transport) that seem to open the way (while not determining it) to democracy, law, and growth.

  9. The question of when Greek-speakers first arrived in mainland Greece (i.e., when mainland Greece became “the Greek homeland”) need not concern us here: the arrival was in any event before the Late Bronze Age.

  10. Steppe nomads: Morris 2014; Mayor 2014. The ancient geographer Strabo (11.3–5) notes that in the Caucasus region fertile land went uncultivated because of systematic raiding by nomads.

  11. Of a total of 1,035, 84 poleis are known to have employed a street grid (Inventory Index 22), but since the street plan of many urban centers remains archaeologically undetermined, this number certainly underestimates the total number of grid-planned Greek cities. See further Cahill 2000, 2002. Greek houses: Nevett 1999, 2005.

  12. Food ways: Foxhall and Forbes 1982; Dalby 1997; Davidson 1997; Garnsey 1999.

  13. Greek religion: Parker 1996; Cole 2004.

  14. Greek warfare: Strauss 1996; van Wees 2000a, 2000b, 2004, 2013a; Pritchard 2010; Kagan and Viggiano 2013.

  15. Aside from Vatican City, the smallest independent modern nation-states, Nauru and Tuvalu, have populations around 10,000; some 10 other countries have populations under 100,000. China’s population is in excess of 1.3 billion. Alesina and Spolaore 2003 discuss (with reference to modern states) the trade-off between the economic and security advantages of large size and the costs associated with diverse preferences among large populations.

  16. Hansen 2006b and 2008.

  17. Regional variation in size: Inventory 70–73 with Index 9. Hansen 2008 adds 32 poleis to the “plausibly estimated size” group; four others were added by Emily Mackil (personal communication). Distribution of population into small, medium, and large poleis: table 2.1.

  18. Herodotus 8.25.1–2 tells a similar story, in which Belbina (i326: size 1, fame score 2) plays the role of the obscure polis.

  19. Although a diverse array of scholars wrote the individual Inventory entries, editorial oversight ensured a good level of consistency in treatment. Comparison of the space allotted to a sample of poleis in the Inventory and two other recent and distinguished encyclopedic works on Greek antiqui
ty shows high correlation: Ober 2008: Appendix.

  20. Coin data: see note 24. The evidence of coins as a category of archaeological evidence: de Callataÿ 2011b; van Alfen 2012. Victories: Inventory Index 16.

  21. Scheidel 2006 offers a helpful discussion of the terms hegemony and empire in the context of ancient Mediterranean city-states. He suggests that hegemony is (at a minimum) a state’s control over the foreign policy of other, autonomous, polities. An empire, by contrast, is (at a minimum) a very large state, generally created by conquest, divided between a dominating central core and subordinate peripheries.

  22. On the challenges of finding a balance between the most prominent poleis and the rest, see Gehrke 1986; Brock and Hodkinson 2000.

  23. Mackil 2013: 1.

  24. Discussion of certainty of polis attribution and “hellenicity” and definitions for each category: Inventory 7.

  25. Silver coinage: 340 poleis (of 1,035) are known to have minted silver coins, 94 of these by the end of the sixth century; 285 poleis also issued bronze coins. Coinage figures: Inventory, Index 26, with corrections of Peter van Alfen (American Numismatic Society, personal communication). Coinage and autonomous state identity: Martin 1986.

  26. Most local Greek historiography has failed to survive intact; the very substantial fragments are collected in Jacoby et al. 1957 (and following), now available with English translation, in e-form as Brill’s New Jacoby.

  27. Greek colonization: Graham 1964; Malkin 1987, 1994, 2011. Osborne 2009c: 106–123, 220–230, while rejecting the term “colonization” in favor of “settlement abroad,” offers a concise survey; his figure 32 and table 5 helpfully tabulate and map major Greek settlments outside core Greece. Data: Inventory Index 27.

  28. Frederiksen 2011: 1.

  29. Frederiksen (2011: 111) counts 121 poleis with evidence of having had fortifications by 480 BCE. Per table 2.5, by 323 BCE the count (based on Hansen and Nielsen 2004) was 537. On Greek fortifications and their historical development, see Maier 1959; Winter 1971; Lawrence 1979; Ober 1985, 1991; McNicoll 1997; Camp 2000.