The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  CHAPTER 3 Political Animals

  1. On the science of emergence, see for example Jensen 1998; M. Mitchell 2009; S. Mitchell 2009.

  2. Couzin et al. 2005.

  3. Olson 1965:2 (original emphasis).

  4. See, for example, Bowles and Gintis 2011; Boehm 2012a.

  5. Ober 2013b seeks to demonstrate that these “useless” arguments do not render Aristotle’s naturalistic political theory as a whole useless for contemporary political theory. I do not seek to “save Aristotle” by claiming he did not make bad arguments (he certainly did), but I show that the bad arguments are not fundamental for a recognizably Aristotelian (as opposed to “Aristotle’s own”) political theory. Ryan 2013 offers an assessment of Aristotle’s political thought along similar lines.

  6. Aristotle’s work in the Politics makes better sense when read in light of certain of his works on biology; see Depew 1995.

  7. Aristotle’s king bee (History of Animals 5.21) was actually the queen: i.e., the common mother of all bees in the hive; but queen bees no more direct the activity of a hive than do queen ants in a nest. And the cooperating individuals are females, not, as Aristotle apparently thought, males. On the surprisingly complex forms of cooperation achieved by honey bees, notably in the vital project of finding a new nest site, see Seeley 2010.

  8. Aristotelian fair distribution is predicated not only on need but also on the differential levels of virtue possessed by different individuals, and by different categories of people. His theory is not egalitarian in an “equal shares to each” sense. It notoriously allows for very unequal distributions of certain goods to slaves and women, based on Aristotle’s peculiar beliefs about moral psychology. See further Ober 2013b.

  9. On these questions, see Murray 1993b and Ober 2005a.

  10. In the real world, of course, all other things are not held constant—so that it is not the case that every citizen-centered community has outperformed, or even provided a better environment for individual or collective flourishing, than rival autocratic or hierarchical communities.

  11. The Aristotelian approach sketched here is admittedly incomplete, in that it focuses primarily on the choices and behavior of adult male citizens. If we are fully to grasp the workings of the Greek polis, more work is needed on the roles played by women (wives of citizens), foreigners (long- and short-term), and slaves in the production of public goods (e.g., security, welfare) through shared knowledge, and in the consumption of those public goods.

  12. Agonistic competition as definitive of Greek society: Burckhardt 1998 [1898]; Lendon 2005, 2010; Skultety 2009. Duplouy 2006 places agonism at the center of Greek social life. He focuses on the various strategies used to acquire prestige by those aspiring to elite status. He argues that the agon was generalized insofar as there was no ossified Greek aristocracy, meaning that elite status could potentially be attained by non-elite competitors.

  13. Yoffee 2004 criticizes “neo-evolutionary” approaches to the study of early states (notably in Mesopotamia). He rejects the idea that rulers of early states are adequately characterized as godly despots and urges a greater focus on social relationships outside the realm of the state, while accepting (ch. 2) that early states were indeed typically organized around centralized authority of a ruler with special relationship to the gods, and (p. 3) “new ideologies … that insisted that such leadership was not only possible but the only possibility.”

  14. Egyptian royal authority: Frankfort 1948; O’Connor and Silverman 1994. In practice, of course, things were not so seamless: The Egyptian king faced principal-agent problems (misalignment among the incentives of those taking and giving orders), struggled to keep a big bureaucracy in line, and faced pushback from powerful priesthoods. See further Manning 2003, 2010; Kemp 2006.

  15. Phoenician cities and Carthage: Aubet 1993; Krings 1998; Niemeyer 2000: 101–109; Ameling 2013. Stockwell 2011, 2012 seeks democratic elements in Phoenician political organization. Etruscan aristocracy and oligarchy: Torelli 2000: 196–205. Scheidel 2006: 6, drawing on the evidence collected in Hansen 2000: 619 nn. 81 and 82, notes the historical prevalence of republican (oligarchic and democratic) government in city-state ecologies and the fact that monarchical city-states sometimes feature deliberative assemblies and voting. Scheidel 2006 also notes the relative rarity of city-state empires. Etruscan imports of Greek vases: Osborne 2001.

  16. We must always keep in mind that even in democratic poleis—where citizenship was held by almost all resident adult native males—citizens were a minority of the total resident population (see for example, population model for fourth century BCE Athens: table 4.4). In oligarchic poleis, empowered decision-makers were a minority of the resident native adult males. And yet, even Greek oligarchies appear strikingly “citizen-centered” when compared to most premodern societies; see Simonton 2012.

  17. In practice, of course, it is more complicated: see n. 14, on the practical problems faced by Egyptian kings. What follows describes an ideal type of monarchical authority; in chapters 7–10 we consider some of the problems that ancient kings (notably the king of Persia) actually faced in asserting their unitary will across time and space.

  18. In social choice theory, rationality is defined as a preference ordering among three choices, A, B, and C, taking the form A > B > C but not C > A. The impossibility of eliminating C > A in voting systems under plausible rules (Arrow 1963) is the basis of a large literature arguing that democracy is unworkable; see Riker 1982.

  19. Morris 2014 is a notable example of an explicitly Hobbesian argument by a prominent historian (who happens to be my friend, colleague, and collaborator) who seeks to explain economic growth in the very long term. On Hobbes and the “personality” of the polis, see Anderson 2009.

  20. The effort by Tuck 2008 to show that free riding is a uniquely modern idea seems to me to be wrong on the face of it; see Ober 2009. Likewise, Tuck’s (2007) attempt to show that Hobbes embraced an Aristotelian conception of democracy is chimerical: Hoekstra 2007; Skinner 2007.

  21. Performance of Greek states: Ober 2008. Tyranny and state performance in the Greek world: Fleck and Hanssen 2013, showing how tyrants inadvertently promoted conditions favorable to democracy.

  22. Gordon 1999, 2010, 2014. My thanks to Deborah Gordon for many helpful and enjoyable discussions of ant behavior and how it might help us to think about features of ancient Greek history.

  23. Forel 1930 offers an entrancing and detailed (if now outdated in its science) description of the varied “social worlds” of many different ant species.

  24. Bernard Werber’s engaging sci-fi fantasy, Empire of the Ants (1996), in which ants from many nests and across species do indeed form an empire under the leadership of a charismatic queen, points to the strength of the Hobbesian idea.

  25. Gordon’s breakthrough, demonstrated through careful observation of individuals and now generally accepted by ant scientists, was that the same ant did different tasks—individuals are not genetically programmed to do just one task—tasks are assigned by “collective intelligence” rather than by genetic distinctions among conspecifics. This is, of course, what makes harvester ants a good analogy for real Greek poleis and a poor analogy for Plato’s ideal state.

  26. From different perspectives, see Horden and Purcell 2000; Bresson 2000.

  27. See, in detail, Ober 2008.

  28. As Hoekstra (forthcoming) demonstrates, despite Hobbes’ memorable rhetoric about human life being “solitary” in the state of nature, local cooperation is possible in the Hobbesian state of nature (in the form of gangs: which is why even the most powerful individual must live in fear), but large-scale cooperation, necessary to advance beyond the state of nature, requires Leviathan—that is, a third-party enforcer.

  29. Before a new nest is established, the future queen mates with several males in a swarm, reserving the sperm of these short-lived founder-males for the remainder of the life of the queen and nest.

  30. On Greek ethnic identity and fic
tive kinship in the classical period, see Hall 1997, 2002.

  31. Altruistic punishment: Gintis et al. 2004, with literature cited.

  32. Allen 2000.

  CHAPTER 4 Wealthy Hellas

  1. Demographics of modern Greece: Valaoras 1960. Impoverished conditions 1880–1912: ibid. 136. Poorest nation in Europe: Allbaugh 1953: 15. The question of efflorescence in the Hellenistic period of the third and second centuries BCE is more complex: See, for example, Reger 1994, 2007: 481–482. We return to this question in chapter 10. This chapter and the next are adapted and expanded from Ober 2010c.

  2. The economy of core Greece in the Roman period of the first century BCE to fourth century CE: Alcock 1993 and 2007. Medieval Greece: Cheetham 1981; relative poverty of medieval Greece, compared to antiquity: Morris 2013b: 66–73; fifteenth to eighteenth century (Ottoman era) Greek economic conditions, with special reference to rent-seeking by the Turkish overlords and subsistence agriculture: Asdrachas 2005. Greek development from the Roman era to the nineteenth century, with special reference to archaeological evidence: Bintliff 2012: chs. 13–22. Populations of Peloponnese and Boeotia in ca. 1600: ibid. 438–439, 441. The drop in population of the Peloponnese by 1685 but the Aegean islands doing relatively better in this period: ibid. 447–448. Choniates quote: cited by Minta 1998: 119.

  3. Survey of LBA economy: Bennet 2007; cf. Bintliff 2012, ch. 7. Numbers and sizes of LBA states; population estimates and levels of imports in LBA and Early Iron Age (EIA) Greece: Murray 2013: 134–145. See, further, ch. 6.

  4. Minoan material culture: Shelmerdine 2008, chs. 5B, 6, 8, 9; Minoan palace administration: ibid. ch. 7. For the later history of Crete (twelfth to fifth centuries BCE), which diverged markedly, both politically and economically, from the norms of the wider Greek world, see Wallace 2010.

  5. Murray 2013 effectively refutes earlier arguments for a larger LBA population of around 1 million people and also demolishes arguments that the EIA decline, following the LBA collapse, was less than severe, demographically and economically. See, further, Bintliff 2012, ch. 8 and in this book, ch. 6.

  6. Non-elite populations in premodern economies typically hover near subsistence: Scheidel 2010, with discussion below, this chapter, section on “equitable distribution.”

  7. Zimmern 1931: 219. Zimmern’s line about the “doom of Athens” is borrowed from a comment about poverty and impossibility attributed by Herodotus to the self-description of residents of the Aegean island-polis of Andros/i475 (Histories 8.111.3). Ironically, the Andrians were explicitly contrasting their own impoverished situation with that of “great and prosperous” Athens. Modern citations of Herodotus 7.102.1 and collection of the “standard ancient premise” in Greek writers: Desmond 2006. Not all historians of Greek antiquity bought into the standard modern premise: Chester Starr (1977) believed that economic growth was a key factor in Greek social history, but the no-growth argument, canonized in Finley 1999 [1973], largely carried the day. The “standard modern premise” is a staple of contemporary political theory: Ryan 2012: vol. 1, p. xii.

  8. Athenian exemplarity or exceptionalism: Ober 2008: 276–80. Athenian performance compared to other leading poleis: Ober 2008: ch. 2.

  9. Long recognized: e.g., Morris 2004: 22.

  10. Economies in modern developed countries compared to ancient economies: Saller 2005, Morris 2010.

  11. Wages: Scheidel 2010, discussed below, this chapter. The prosperous sixth century Babylonian period was terminated by 500 BCE, presumably at least in part by the focused rent-seeking of the ruling Persian imperial ethnoelite; see Ma 2013c and in progress a.

  12. Ancient Middle Eastern economies: Bedford 2007; Babylonia in the late seventh to early fifth centuries BCE: Jursa 2010. Babylonia in the fourth–first centuries: van der Spek and van Leeuwen 2014. Roman economy: de Callataÿ 2005, 2014b; Bang 2007; Hopkins 2009; Bowman and Wilson 2009, 2011, 2013; and parts V–VIII of Scheidel, Morris, and Saller 2007. It is important to keep the diversity of the Roman Empire in mind; certain regions of the Roman Empire, including Italy, North Africa, and western Anatolia, were highly urbanized (Wilson 2011) and prosperous; these regions might have outperformed the Greek economy on the measures noted above.

  13. Allen 2001 is a detailed study of wages, prices, and welfare levels in a number of early modern European cities. His conclusions (2001: 427–430, 433–435; cf. Allen 2009: 338, adding Delhi and Beijing) are clear: between 1500 and 1800, only Holland and England managed to avoid the Malthusian trap in which a rising population led to falling wages and lower welfare for most people.

  14. Morris 2004, 2005, 2007; cf. Reden 2007; Kron 2014. It is important to keep in mind that no estimate of ancient economic change (aggregate or per capita) is fine grained. What can be estimated is change over relatively long periods of time. These long periods would certainly have included short-term eras of negative growth as well as eras of positive growth. For the mix of positive-growth and negative-growth years in modern societies, see North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009: 5–6 with Table 1.2. Thus, although the general trend of Greek economic growth was positive over the 500-year period 800–300 BCE, a given generation might have experienced substantial overall negative growth.

  15. Beloch 1886, 1993 [1889]. Quote, Morris 2004: 727; high rate of growth: Morris 2004: 728; cf. Scheidel 2003.

  16. Hansen’s (2006b, 2008) estimation method is based, like that of many other ancient demographers, on calculating intramural (urban) areas and extramural (rural) areas and estimating settlement densities for each category. Price 2011 argues for substantially lower settlement densities for ancient Greek sites than those used by Hansen and other archaeologists, in part by employing Cretan and Ottoman-era comparanda. But, per above, there is good reason to believe that Ottoman-era Greek populations were much lower than the classical peak, and Cretan economic development was quite different from that of most of the rest of the ancient Greek world.

  17. As noted in chapter 1, Hansen’s figures are reduced by about 20% if we exclude partially Hellenized communities (table 2.4). This leaves a total “culturally Greek” population of ca. 6.6 million, and thus a 20-fold nadir-to-peak increase.

  18. Change in house size: Morris 2004: 721; quote, 723–724. Morris has recently (2013b: 66–73) estimated Greek growth by energy capture; see ibid. 72–73 with literature cited, 279 n. 48, for the stark contrast in quality of housing and artifacts between classical and medieval/early modern Greece.

  19. Saller 2005.

  20. Morris 2004: 728.

  21. My thanks to Elaine Matthews of the Lexicon for Greek Personal Names, who provided access to beta versions of the on-line database; see http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/. Breakdown of numbers by century BCE (men/women): seventh: 75/9, sixth: 1,062/124, fifth: 5,234/436, and fourth: 14,714/2,424.

  22. Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards: Thompson, Mørkholm, and Kraay 1973. These data were collected and analyzed, beginning in 2005, by David Teegarden and me; cf. discussion in Ober 2008: 285–286. Much more accurate data on Greek coins in hoards are currently being compiled at the American Numismatic Society. See http://admin.numismatics.org/igch/.

  23. Turchin and Scheidel 2009.

  24. Urbanization and total population as proxies for economic growth: Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2002; Wilson 2011: 161; Stasavage 2014: 344–345.

  25. Hansen 2006b, 2008.

  26. By my lower bound estimates (based on a variation of Hansen’s shotgun method, but somewhat lower than Hansen’s, for the relevant regions: appendix I in this book for figures), the regions apparently included in the Morris 2004 estimate of 4 million would have had a population of more than 5 million. Hansen 2008 offers new empirical evidence that suggests that his original “shotgun method” estimates, offered in Hansen 2006b, were too low, both in the number of poleis and in the total population of the Greek world.

  27. As noted above, Hansen’s “catchment area” for mainland Greece is different from that of Morris (2004: Aegean, south Italy, and Sicily).
My own lower bound estimate for the late fourth-century BCE population of the1889 census region is 2.75 million people, but that figure would increase to within Hansen’s on the assumption of a total Greek population of about 9 million (the median of Hansen’s “probable total” population figures). Hansen’s estimate of the population of mainland Greece in the classical era is not radically different from that of earlier demographers: Scheidel 2008b. Densities: ch. 2 with note 2.

  28. Valaoras 1960, with discussion above.

  29. My lower bound estimate of 2.75 million would leave a surplus of 450,000.

  30. Other Greek states, including Corinth, Megara, Aegina, and Samos, as major grain importers: Bissa 2009: ch. 9. Definition of rents: Krueger 1973.

  31. Hansen 2006b: 24, 28. For size ranges and distributions, see table 2.1 in chapter 2. For the Malthusian trap, see Clark 2007; Goldstone 2002 notes examples of ancient societies that escaped the “trap” for extended periods of time.

  32. Hansen 2006b: 26–29.

  33. Roman urbanization: Wilson 2009, 2011. Of course, because the Roman world was much larger, the total number of Romans living in towns (ca. 7–8.5 million) was much greater than the number of urban Greeks (ca. 2.5–3 million); as noted above, some regions of the Roman Empire may have been more urbanized than Hellas overall. Moreover, the largest Roman cities, Rome and Alexandria, were much larger than any classical Greek city. Premodern comparisons: Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson 2011: Table 1, and below, table 4.3.

  34. The alternative demographic standard for measuring urbanization is the percentage of total population living in cities of more than 10,000 people. Assuming (based on table 2.1) that about a third of size 4 poleis, most size 5 poleis, and all size 6 and 7 poleis had total populations over 20,000, if Hansen’s intramural estimate is correct, then some 20–24% of Hellas’ late fourth century population lived in 100–113 cities of 10,000 or more. Based on de Vries 1984, Table 3.7 (p. 39), figures for European urbanization in 1600 (at the 10,000+ standard), Hellas was comparable to Holland (24.3%: 19 cities: de Vries 1984, Table 3.1), which was the most urbanized part of Europe in 1600. Hellas was substantially more urbanized at the 10,000+ standard than any other European region in 1600: Northern Italy = 16.6% (30 cities); Mediterranean = 13.7% (101 cities); Europe overall = 7.6% (220 cities).