The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  GDI

  Gross domestic income.

  GDP

  Gross domestic product.

  Inventory

  Hansen, Mogens Herman, and Thomas Heine Nielsen. 2004. An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. i# (e.g., i361) refers to the inventory number of a polis listed in the Inventory (i361 = Athens).

  km

  kilometer. 1 km = 0.62 miles. 1 km2 = 0.39 square miles, or 247 acres.

  L

  liter. 1 L = 0.25 U.S. gallons, 0.22 imperial gallons.

  LBA

  Late Bronze Age, in Greek world, ca. 1600–1200 BCE.

  m

  meter. 1 m = 3.28 feet. 1 m2 = 10.7 square feet, or 1.2 square yards.

  T

  Talent: Basic unit for measuring large amounts of money in the Greek world. 6,000 drachmas. 1 Attic talent = ca. 25.725 kilograms of silver. Very approximately, a lifetime’s income for an Athenian laborer in the fifth century BCE.

  MAP 1 The 45 regions of the Greek world.

  Regions (indicated by numbers on the map) are per order in the Inventory, based on 907 of 1,035 total city-states with known (or plausibly inferred) locations. Polis numbers are per the Inventory. See further appendix I. Known or plausibly hypothesized locations of individual poleis: http://polis.stanford.edu/. Most but not all of the poleis listed in the Inventory were in existence in the later fourth century BCE; some had, however, gone out of existence before that time. 128 of 1,035 poleis in the Inventory have not been located with enough confidence for mapping. Note that region 1 is off the map to the left—for locations of region 1 poleis, see map 3.

  Map KEY

  region number (poleis in the region: Inventory numbers), region name

  1

  (1–4)

  Spain & France

  2

  (5–51)

  Sicily

  3

  (52–74)

  Italy & Campania

  4

  (75–85)

  Adriatic

  5

  (86–111)

  Epirus

  6

  (112–141)

  Acarnania & Ajacent

  7

  (142–156)

  Aetolia

  8

  (157–168)

  West Locris

  9

  (169–197)

  Phocis

  10

  (198–223)

  Boeotia

  11

  (224–228)

  Megaris, Corinthia, Sikyonia

  12

  (229–244)

  Achaea

  13

  (245–265)

  Elis

  14

  (266–303)

  Arcadia

  15

  (304–311)

  Triphylia

  16

  (312–322)

  Messenia

  17

  (323–346)

  Lakedaimon (Laconia)

  18

  (347–357)

  Argolis

  19

  (358–360)

  Saronic Gulf

  20

  (361–364)

  Attica

  21

  (365–377)

  Euboea

  22

  (378–388)

  East Locris

  23

  (389–392)

  Doris

  24

  (393–470)

  Thessaly & Adjacent

  25

  (471–527)

  Aegean

  26

  (528–544)

  Macedonia

  27

  (545–626)

  Thrace: Axios—Strymon

  28

  (627–639)

  Thrace: Strymon—Nestos

  29

  (640–651)

  Thrace: Nestos—Hebros

  30

  (652–657)

  Thrace: Inland

  31

  (658–672)

  Thracian Chersonesos

  32

  (673–681)

  Propontic Thrace

  33

  (682–734)

  Black Sea

  34

  (735–764)

  Propontic Asia Minor

  35

  (765–793)

  Troas

  36

  (794–799)

  Lesbos

  37

  (800–835)

  Aiolis & SW Mysia

  38

  (836–869)

  Ionia

  39

  (870–941)

  Caria

  40

  (942–943)

  Lycia

  41

  (944–992)

  Crete

  42

  (993–1000)

  Rhodes

  43

  (1001–1011)

  Pamphylia & Cilicia

  44

  (1012–1021)

  Cyprus

  45

  (1022–1035)

  Syria to Pillars of Herakles

  MAP 2 The Greek world in context.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL GREECE

  1

  THE EFFLORESCENCE OF CLASSICAL GREECE

  FAIR GREECE, SAD RELIC

  In 1812, Lord Byron published a poem that made him the hero of a world poised at the brink of modernity and ready for romance. It included these poignant lines:

  Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

  Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!1

  With just fourteen words, Byron illuminated the stark contrast between Greek antiquity and the Greece he had observed during his travels in 1809 and 1810. Byron knew a lot about Greece. As an educated English nobleman, he had read classical literature. As an intrepid traveler, he had personal experience of early nineteenth century Greece. By Byron’s day, the Greeks had suffered as subjects of the Ottoman Empire for more than 300 years, and, more recently, from the rapacity of European collectors. But Greece was already a “relic of departed worth” when Pausanias, a travel writer of the Roman imperial age, described Greek antiquities in the second century. Neither Byron nor Pausanias could have guessed that at the dawn of the twentieth century, Greece would be the poorest country in Europe or that in the early twenty-first century, two centuries after Byron wrote his memorable lines, Greece would be sadder yet—wracked by a political and economic crisis that immiserated millions of Greek citizens and threatened the financial stability of Europe.2

  Byron’s vision of greatness was inspired by ancient Greek cultural and intellectual achievement: art and architecture, literature, visual and performance art, scientific and moral thought. A generation later, the British banker-scholar George Grote published his monumental History of Greece (12 volumes: 1846–1856), a work that came to define, for the English-speaking world, the greatness of classical Greece in terms of a unique set of values and institutions: democracy, freedom, equality, dignity—conjoined with a dedication to reason, critical inquiry, and innovation.

  Despite its brevity and limited frame, Byron’s romantic couplet, with its sharp contrast between the fortunes of ancient and modern Greece and its explosion of exclamation points, captures the mystery that this book explains: Why and how did the ancient Greeks create a culture that became central to the modern world? If Hellas had once been great, why was it no longer? Why, once fallen, was Greece so long and well remembered?

  Those questions remain vitally important in the twenty-first century, and they can be answered. Hellas—the ancient Greek world that, even before the conquests of Alexander the Great, extended east into western Asia, north to the Black Sea, south to North Africa, and west to Italy, France, and Spain—was great indeed. Hellas was great because of a cultural accomplishment that was supported by sustained economic growth. That growth was made possible by a distinctive approach to politics.

  CLASSICAL GREEK EFFLORESCENCE


  In a spirited diatribe against the habit of dividing world history into dichotomous eras of premodern economic stagnation and modern growth, the historical sociologist Jack Goldstone has shown that a number of premodern societies experienced more or less extended periods of efflorescence—increased economic growth accompanied by a sharp uptick in cultural achievement. Efflorescence is characterized by more people (demographic growth) living at higher levels of welfare (per capita growth) and by cultural production at a higher level. It is not signaled merely by treasure heaped up in palace storerooms or by monumental architecture. Concentrations of state capital and grand building projects may or may not be accompanied by a dramatic rise in population, welfare, and culture.

  Efflorescence is impermanent by definition, but some efflorescences are more dramatic and longer lasting than others. Modernity—the experience of the developed world since the early nineteenth century—is the most dramatic, but not (yet) the longest lasting efflorescence in human history. It remains an open question whether the historically exceptional rate of sustained economic growth that some parts of the world have experienced in the past two centuries is merely the most recent and biggest (by many orders of magnitude) of a long series of efflorescences—or whether “this time it’s different,” so that modernity represents a fundamental and permanent change of the direction of human history. Goldstone focuses on examples of efflorescence after 1400 CE, but he notes in passing that classical Greece was among a handful of societies that experienced efflorescence long before that date.3

  FIGURE 1.1 Development index, core Greece, 1300 BCE–1900 CE.

  NOTES: The development index multiplies a population estimate (in millions) × median per capita consumption estimate (in multiples of bare subsistence). Population and consumption estimates are discussed in chapters 2 and 4, and broken out in figure 4.3. Core Greece = The territory controlled by the Greek state in 1881–1912 (Inventory regions 6–25: see map 1). LBA = Late Bronze Age. EIA = Early Iron Age. EH = Early Hellenistic. LH = Late Hellenistic. ER = Early Roman. LR = Late Roman. EB = Early Byzantine. MB = Middle Byzantine. EO = Early Ottoman. LO = Late Ottoman. Ind = Independent Greek state.

  The Greek efflorescence that peaked by around 300 BCE lasted several hundred years, from the Archaic, through the Classical, and into the Hellenistic eras of Greek history. Figure 1.1, based on evidence presented in chapter 4, illustrates efflorescence in terms of economic development (measured by population and consumption) in “core Greece” from the Late Bronze Age to the dawn of the twentieth century. Because, by my definition, core Greece is limited to the territory controlled by the Greek state in the late nineteenth century CE, the graph understates the total population of the wider Greek world at the peak of the classical efflorescence by a factor of about three—so the chart captures only part of the rise. But the main implication is clear enough: it was not until the twentieth century that the number of people living in the Greek core, and their material welfare, returned to levels comparable to those achieved some 2,300 years before.4

  The ancient Greek efflorescence was exceptional in premodern world history. While ancient Greek economic growth fell far short of the growth rates experienced by the globe’s most highly developed countries since the nineteenth century, the ancient Greek efflorescence was distinctive for its duration, its intensity, and its long-term impact on world culture. The Greek efflorescence took place in a social ecology of hundreds of city-states. “Greeks,” for our purposes, are the residents of communities that were, in antiquity, substantially (not homogeneously) Greek in terms of language and a distinctive suite of cultural features.5 While wealth and incomes remained unequal in those communities, a substantial part of the Greek population experienced relative prosperity. The growth of the Greek economy was driven, at least in part, by the ability of an extensive middle class to consume goods and services at a level well above mere existence.6

  Ancient Greek society was unlike our modernity in important ways: Among other things, slavery was taken for granted and women never held political participation rights. Yet the most developed states of classical Hellas in some respects tracked conditions typical of developed modern states as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Residents of the most developed ancient Greek states experienced aspects of a precocious “modernity before the fact.” As Byron’s lines remind us, the classical efflorescence was not sustained indefinitely. Yet, by the same token, it was never forgotten.7

  We can answer questions about Greece that remained mysterious for Byron because we have better data. We now know much more about ancient Hellas than he could have known. Happily for the contemporary investigator seeking to explain the changing fortunes of Hellas, a great deal of primary evidence for Greek history has come down to us from antiquity—it survived the fall for reasons we will explore in chapter 11. Moreover, from the age of Byron onward, classical Greece was such a hot field of inquiry that many of the Western world’s most brilliant intellects devoted their lives to investigating its every facet. After generations of exploration and reconstruction by historians and archaeologists, there is now an unrivaled historical record for the Greek world in the first millennium BCE.

  Equally important, that massive and detailed record has been organized by encyclopedic projects and thereby made available for systematic analysis. The most important of these, for our purposes, is the monumental Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis (hereafter “the Inventory”), compiled by an international team under the direction of the preeminent Danish historian of the Greek world, Mogens H. Hansen.8 The Inventory collects detailed information for 1,035 Greek states known to have existed in the extended Greek world, across 45 regions, during the 500-year period from the eighth through the later fourth century BCE. Each state has a separate entry and a corresponding inventory (i) number. These numbers (e.g., Athens = i361) help us to be clear about which Greek states are being discussed in the pages that follow (some Greek names are shared by more than one state, others are Anglicized in various ways). The 45 Inventory regions are illustrated in map 1.

  Meanwhile, the archaeological and some relevant documentary evidence for the long history of the Greek world, from the Bronze Age to modernity, has been recently summarized and reassessed in a magisterial volume by John Bintliff of the University of Leiden. Bintliff’s detailed survey, which includes analyses of demographic change over time, enables us to assess the data for archaic and classical Greece against a much broader chronological context.9

  The mass of quantifiable evidence assembled in the Inventory, and in other recent collections of data on Greek history, archaeology, and geography, has made it possible to employ the sharp analytical tools of contemporary social science when we seek to explain Greek history. By quantifying evidence, we can estimate the total population of the classical Greek world and of each of its regions. We can study comparative state and regional development across the Greek world, and we can compare the Greek world to other premodern societies. All of this comparison allows us to test competing explanations for the rise to greatness of Hellas, for its fall, and for its enduring influence. The data on which my statistics are based are publicly available at http://polis.stanford.edu.10

  The twenty-first century has seen a renaissance in the study of ancient Greek and Roman economic history. Following a generation of scholarship grounded on the premise that a unitary “ancient economy,” lasting for millennia, was defined by a deep social structure inherently resistant to change, economic historians are now attempting to measure and to explain economic growth and decline in specific times and places within the premodern world. Much recent scholarship on Greek and Roman economies is predicated on the “new institutional economics” pioneered by the Nobel Prize–winning economist and political scientist, Douglass North and exemplified by recent work by the MIT and Harvard social scientists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Their insistence that institutions (the “rules of the game”) and organizations (including, but not only, states), along with
markets and networks, are fundamental determinants of economic change, grounds the arguments of this book. Scholars working in the institutional economics field seek, first, to develop a plausible theory of how specific institutions in a given society affected social choices, and then to test the theory against competitor theories by reference to a substantial body of evidence. At its best, institutional economics offers bold, new, and defensible explanations for important developments in historical and contemporary societies.11

  Along with a theory of social choice under conditions of decentralized authority, and data for testing the theory, this book presents a new narrative history of Greek political and economic development. It does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of every major event of ancient Greek history. I focus more on formal institutions and civic order than on the politically salient informal cultural performances that have been wonderfully elucidated by Sara Forsdyke, a classical Greek historian at the University of Michigan.12 I will have little to say about the Greek family, religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, childhood, aging, sport, or other important areas of social history. Other books, by scholars more knowledgeable than I, cover each of these areas well. Nor do I describe in detail the cultural accomplishments that so impressed Byron. While cultural accomplishment is an important part of the efflorescence I seek to explain, this terrain has been brilliantly elucidated by others. I assume that it is uncontroversial to say that in the areas of visual art, architecture, drama, historiography, philosophy (ethics, politics, epistemology, metaphysics, logic), and natural science (geometry, geography, astronomy, medicine), classical Greece provided enduringly important resources for world culture. Finally, although promising recent collaborations between historians and geneticists have demonstrated that, as a result of colonization and mobility, ancient Greeks had a profound and enduring impact on the genetic makeup of populations in the western, as well as eastern Mediterranean, I will not seek to address the genetic legacy of Hellas.13