The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece Read online

  THE RISE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL GREECE

  The PRINCETON HISTORY of the ANCIENT WORLD

  FRONTISPIECE Temple of Apollo at Bassae, in the mountains above the polis of Phigalia in the region of Arcadia (northern Peloponnese).

  Engraving is plate 1 of Thomas Leverton Donaldson, Description of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, Near Phigalia.

  London: Priestly and Weale, 1830 (Vol. 5 of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens: London, 1762 and following).

  THE RISE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL GREECE

  JOSIAH OBER

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Princeton & Oxford

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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  JACKET IMAGE: Engraving of northeast view of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae near Phigalia, by Thomas Leverton Donaldson, from The Antiquities of Athens (London, 1830). Image courtesy of Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ober, Josiah.

  The rise and fall of classical Greece / Josiah Ober.

  pages cm. — (The Princeton history of the ancient world)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-14091-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C. 2. Social change—Greece—History—To 1500. 3. Greece—Politics and government—To 146 B.C. 4. City-states—Greece—History. 5. Greece—Economic conditions—To 146 B.C. I. Title.

  DF77.O24 2015

  938—dc23

  2014037623

  BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro and Penumbra Flare Std

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  for ADRIENNE

  CONTENTS

  List of Images and Tables

  IX

  Preface

  XIII

  Acknowledgments

  XXI

  Abbreviations

  XXV

  1

  The Efflorescence of Classical Greece

  1

  2

  Ants around a Pond: An Ecology of City-States

  21

  3

  Political Animals: A Theory of Decentralized Cooperation

  45

  4

  Wealthy Hellas: Measuring Efflorescence

  71

  5

  Explaining Hellas’ Wealth: Fair Rules and Competition

  101

  6

  Citizens and Specialization before 550 BCE

  123

  7

  From Tyranny to Democracy, 550–465 BCE

  157

  8

  Golden Age of Empire, 478–404 BCE

  191

  9

  Disorder and Growth, 403–340 BCE

  223

  10

  Political Fall, 359–334 BCE

  261

  11

  Creative Destruction and Immortality

  293

  Appendix I: Regions of the Greek World: Population, Size, Fame

  317

  Appendix II: King, City, and Elite Game

  JOSIAH OBER AND BARRY WEINGAST

  321

  Notes

  329

  Bibliography

  367

  Index

  401

  IMAGES AND TABLES

  MAPS

  MAP 1

  The 45 regions of the Greek world

  XXVI

  MAP 2

  The Greek world in context

  XXVIII

  MAP 3

  Expansion of the Greek world, 800–300 BCE

  134

  MAP 4

  Peloponnesus

  138

  MAP 5

  Attica and Boeotia

  145

  MAP 6

  Sicily

  177

  MAP 7

  Athenian empire (maximum extent)

  195

  MAP 8

  Aegean Greek world, early to mid-fourth century BCE

  225

  MAP 9

  Northern Aegean Greek world, mid-fourth to third century BCE

  265

  FIGURES

  Frontispiece

  Temple of Apollo at Bassae

  II

  FIGURE 1.1

  Development index, core Greece, 1300 BCE–1900 CE

  3

  FIGURE 2.1

  Estimated populations, core Greece and the Greek world, 1000–300 BCE

  22

  FIGURE 2.2

  Elevations of 902 poleis, by region

  25

  FIGURE 2.3

  Polis territory sizes, 1,100 poleis

  34

  FIGURE 2.4

  Fame scores, 1,035 poleis

  36

  FIGURE 2.5

  Walled poleis, 900–323 BCE

  42

  FIGURE 3.1

  Aristotle’s behavioral taxonomy of solitary and social animals

  48

  FIGURE 4.1

  Comparative Greek demographics, ancient and modern

  75

  FIGURE 4.2

  Athenian inequality, late fourth century BCE (Lorenz curves)

  93

  FIGURE 4.3

  Population and consumption estimates, core Greece, 1300 BCE–1900 CE

  99

  FIGURE 5.1

  Origins of efflorescence in a marketlike ecology of citizen-centered states

  105

  FIGURE 7.1

  Athenian tribe system, after 508 BCE

  165

  FIGURE II.1

  King, City, and Elite game

  323

  TABLES

  TABLE 2.1

  Territorial Sizes and Population Estimates for 1,100 Greek City-States

  32

  TABLE 2.2

  Fame Scores for 1,035 Poleis

  35

  TABLE 2.3

  Limits to Polis Independence: Some Examples

  38

  TABLE 2.4

  Certainty of Attribution of Settlement as a Polis and Degree of Hellenization for 1,035 Poleis

  39

  TABLE 2.5

  Greek City Fortifications by 323 BCE

  43

  TABLE 4.1

  Summary of Proxy Indicators of Economic Growth

  84

  TABLE 4.2

  Estimated Distribution of Greek Population by Polis Size

  87

  TABLE 4.3

  Comparative Urbanization Levels and Populations

  88

  TABLE 4.4

  Athens, Late Fourth Century BCE Income Distribution Models

  92

  TABLE 4.5

  Per Diem Income (Real Wages Expressed as Wheat Wages)

  94

  TABLE 4.6

  Income Distribution, Roman Empire

  95

  TABLE 4.7

  Athens and Holland, Wheat Wages

  96

  TABLE 4.8

  Income Distribution, Late Fourth Century BCE Athens

  97

  TABLE 7.1

  Twenty Largest Athenian Demes

  163

  TABLE 8.1

  Thucy
dides’ “Corinthian Assessment”

  211

  TABLE 9.1

  Estimated Athenian State Spending and Income

  245

  TABLE I.1

  45 Regions of the Greek World: Population, Average Polis Size, and Fame

  318

  TABLE II.1

  King, City, and Elite Game: Payoffs to Each Player

  322

  PREFACE

  I live in exceptional times. I can take for granted a global order defined by many independent states, some of them wealthy democratic federations governed ultimately by their citizens. Freedom, equality, and dignity are widely shared values. In states where citizens keep rulers in check, public authority protects individual rights and the rule of law pertains most of the time. These political conditions promote economic growth. The conjunction of democratic politics and a strong economy is, in practice, available only to affluent citizens of highly developed countries. But many people who do not yet enjoy those conditions aspire to them. Democracy and growth define the normal, although not yet the usual, conditions of modernity: Autocracy, while still prevalent, is regarded as aberrant, so that most autocrats pretend to be democrats. Economic stagnation is seen as a problem that demands a solution.

  These conditions were not normal, or even imaginable, for most people through most of human history. But, for several centuries in the first millennium BCE, democracy and growth were normal for citizens in ancient Greece.

  How that happened, and why it matters, is what this book is about.

  New scholarship—much of it written by my colleagues at Stanford—has helped to show why the political and economic conditions of modernity are, historically, so exceptionally rare. For the past several thousand years of human history, and until the eighteenth century, most people lived under the rule of autocrats who claimed a special relationship to divinity. The most successful of these rulers were masters of extensive empires, but most of their subjects lived perilously close to bare subsistence. Rulers stayed in power by extracting surplus from their subjects and distributing the loot to a ruling coalition. Under these conditions, access to institutions is limited, rights remain vestigial, and economic growth is usually low.1

  This premodern normal can be summed up as “domination”—so long as we remember that some subjects had input into government, through consultative assemblies or petition rights, that autocracy was sometimes limited by tradition or religious institutions, and that subjects often accept the legitimacy of royal authority. Domination pertained across most of the world until the eighteenth century. Then things began to change, first in a few Atlantic countries and later across much of the world. The result is our modern political normal, a condition that may be summed up as “democracy”—so long as we keep in mind that many people in democratic societies are in fact dominated in various ways.2

  The modern world is exceptional for its economic development and for its political development: not only for being (overall) wealthy, but also for the prevalence of democratic politics and the values that democracy sustains. I assume that few readers of this book would choose to live in premodern normal conditions of domination, even if their economic circumstances could be guaranteed. I assume that equally few would choose to live at the median economic level of a normal premodern society, even were it democratic. The citizens of modern developed countries need not make the choice between wealth and democracy. As we now know, democratic states are quite capable of achieving high levels of economic growth.

  My colleague, Ian Morris, has shown that relatively high levels of development have historically been achieved under various political systems.3 The question of what institutional conditions are necessary or sufficient to sustain growth remains hotly debated. But what is not in question is that many people—including those not lucky enough to be affluent citizens of developed countries—have a strong preference, not only for affluence over poverty but also for democracy over domination. This is a normative preference, predicated on deeply held assumptions about the value of democracy relative to that of domination. I believe that there are good reasons for that normative preference. I assume that many readers of this book share my preference for democracy, even though your reasons may be different from my own.4

  If we prefer our modern political and economic conditions to the premodern normal, we have good reason to inquire how we got here and to ask how likely it is that democracy plus wealth will become usual as well as normal. How is it that historically exceptional economic and political conditions came to be regarded as normal? Ought we to expect these conditions to persist where they currently pertain and to spread to the rest of the world? The prehistory of political and economic exceptionalism offers one relatively unexplored avenue by which we may address those questions.

  The exceptional political conditions that I have summed up under the rubric of democracy—a social ecology of many independent states, federalism, citizen self-governance with its associated values—were indeed rare before the eighteenth century. But they were not unknown. Societies with these features include the Dutch republics of the sixteenth century, the Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and classical Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In each case, the era of economic exceptionalism was limited, and in no case did premodern political rights or economic growth reach levels comparable to those enjoyed by many citizens of the most highly developed states in the past 150 years. But these early societies each experienced an extended period of economic growth and cultural achievement in the context of a historically remarkable extension of citizenship.

  A comparative analysis of these (and other) historical cases of political and economic exceptionalism would go a long way toward answering important questions about the origins and sustainability of our modern condition. Before that ambitious comparative project can be undertaken, however, we need to know more about each of the relevant cases. We need to explain how each historically exceptional society arose when and where it did and how and why its political and economic exceptionality was terminated. By offering a new political and economic history of ancient Greece, this book contributes to that project.

  This is not a book about a putative “great divergence” between East and West, nor does it claim that democracy is either necessary or sufficient to sustain economic growth. It traces the rise of a society in which the normatively valued political conditions of democracy for an extensive body of citizens (although decidedly not for all residents) were conjoined with economic growth whose benefits were widely shared and with cultural achievements that had a lasting impact on the world. It measures growth, traces the causal relationship between Greek political and economic development, narrates the conquest of citizen-centered states by an autocratic empire, and explains why so much is still known about ancient Greek society.

  It would be absurd to claim that ancient Greeks, who owned slaves, denied rights to women, and glorified war, offer an off-the-shelf model for us. The Greek transition from domination to democracy was incomplete, and it left a great many people behind. It would be equally absurd to claim that our modernity has all, or even most, of its roots in what happened in Greece some 2,500 years ago. But if we are interested in the conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism, we must start somewhere, and classical Greece was the society in which the wealth-and-democracy package first emerged in a form that can be studied in depth.

  Classical Greece was not a state or a nation; it was an extensive social ecology of many independent city-states with citizen-centered governments. While the Greeks never fully formulated the concept of human rights, they did develop the basic democratic values of liberty, political equality, and civic dignity. The Greeks experimented successfully with federalism. Some Greek states practiced the rule of law, and some went a long way toward opening access to institutions. Political reforms were self-consciously enacted by Greek legislators, who sometimes left records of what they intended. Political developm
ent was critically analyzed in incisive and groundbreaking works of Greek political theory.

  Because of the rich literary and documentary record surviving from classical antiquity, subsequent theorists and practitioners, eager to break with the norm of domination, were able to draw on Greek experience. For their own part, while they learned a great deal from other societies, the Greeks themselves had few precedents to build upon when devising democratic institutions and values. If we can explain the rise of classical Greece, we may gain a better sense of what it took to bootstrap the wealth and democracy package in the first place. If we can explain the fall of the Greek political order—that is, why major city-states did not maintain full independence for longer than they did—we may better understand democratic fragility.

  My approach to explaining the rise and fall of classical Greece is that of a historian and political scientist. These are not the only ways to elucidate the Greek past. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and literary studies have advanced our understanding of Greek culture in ways that are compatible with the results offered here. But there are ways to think about the ancient Greek world, associated with these three disciplines, that in their strongest forms, would render my project incoherent: First is an assumption that the Greek world was not actually exceptional. Next is a claim that Greece’s exceptionalism makes it analytically irrelevant. Third is an assertion that the exceptionalism of the Greek world has nothing to do with modern politics or economics.