by Ober, Josiah
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
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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.
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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.
