by Ober, Josiah
My goal is to measure the classical Greek efflorescence and to explain how political institutions and culture enabled the Greek world to rise to greatness from humble beginnings, how the great states of Greece fell to a predatory empire, and how Greek culture was subsequently preserved for posterity.
SMALL STATES, DISPERSED AUTHORITY
After two centuries of intensive scholarly research and with the aid of the Inventory, we can now grasp, much more clearly than Byron or his contemporaries could have, the extent and development of ancient Hellas. First and foremost, it was a world defined by a startlingly large number of surprisingly small states—there were about 1,100 Greek states by the end of the third quarter of the fourth century BCE—when Aristotle was writing his masterpiece on Politics and his student, Alexander the Great, was completing the conquest of western Asia. The extended Greek world of city-states stretched from outposts in Spain and France, through southern Italy and Sicily, to the Greek peninsula; east and north to Thrace (modern Bulgaria), to the shores of the Black Sea and western Anatolia; then south to eastern and southern outposts in Syria and North Africa (map 1). By Alexander’s day, the total population of Hellas—that is, the residents of small states that were substantially Greek in language and culture—was in excess of 8 million people.14
Individual Greek states varied tremendously in their size and influence. Athens, Sparta (i345), and Syracuse (i47), which provide focal points for developing the ideas in this book, were among the largest and most influential states in Hellas. Athens boasted a territory of some 2,500 km2—about the size of Luxembourg or Orange County in southern California—and a population of perhaps a quarter-million people. A more typical Greek polis, Athens’ northwestern neighbor, Plataea (i216), had a territory of ca. 170 km2, with a population below 10,000. And a great many Greek states were considerably smaller than that. At the lower end of the range, Koresia (i493), the smallest of four poleis on the modest-sized (129 km2) island of Kea, possessed a territory of roughly 15 km2—about one-fifth the area of the island of Manhattan or one-seventh the area of Paris. Yet in important ways, the Greek states were peer polities, interacting with one another diplomatically, militarily, and economically as equals in their standing as states, if not in power, wealth, or influence.15
These small Greek states were city-states—in ancient Greek, poleis (singular polis). By Aristotle’s day, a polis was characterized by a well-defined urban center, typically walled, in which lived perhaps half of the polis’ population. The urban center was surrounded by a rural hinterland. The hinterland of larger poleis featured small towns, as well as villages, and farmsteads. Near the borders were pastureland and tracts of near wilderness. Boundaries between the many states of Hellas were quite clearly defined, although not always respected by neighboring states: Disputing borders was a major source of conflict between poleis, and wars among the Greek states were frequent. As a result of warfare, and of diplomatic negotiations carried out in the shadow of war, some poleis went out of existence altogether. Close to 100 Greek states, about one in ten of the known poleis, are known to have disappeared, through extermination or assimilation, by the time of the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Many other poleis were less than fully independent in terms of their authority to determine their own foreign policy. But, by definition, each polis had considerable local authority to set and to enforce the rules by which its residents lived.16
There have been dozens of small-state, “dispersed-authority” cultures in world history—prominently including ancient Renaissance northern Italy and the Hanseatic League of late medieval/early modern northwestern Europe. Other city-state cultures are documented in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World. When juxtaposed to “centralized authority” cultures—most obviously in the form of empires (imperial Rome, Han China), and nation-states (Europe after 1500)—that have tended to dominate the political history of the premodern world, these small-state cultures are sometimes disproportionately influential in terms of their long-term impact on world history. Examples of small-state cultures that “punched over their weight” include, in addition to the two examples above, the city-states of early Mesopotamia, which pioneered many of the basic elements of urban civilization, the commercial city-states of Phoenicia, and the Etruscans of northwestern Italy (see map 2).
Small-state, dispersed-authority systems can be compared to a natural ecology, characterized by a rich variety of plant and animal species, none of which is dominant. Large, highly centralized states more closely resemble the ecology of a modern large-scale factory farm, which efficiently produces great quantities of a single crop by eliminating diversity. Hellas was a strikingly extensive and long-lived small-state, dispersed authority culture—and it was by far the largest and the longest lived city-state culture in documented world history.
Among the central questions raised by ancient Greek history is how and why such an extensive small-state system persisted, in such a flourishing condition, for such a long time. In an inversion of, for example, European history from 1500 to 1900 or Chinese history from ca. 700 to 200 BCE, there were many more independent states in the Greek ecology by the height of the classical efflorescence than there had been several hundred years previously. Despite repeated attempts, no classical-era Greek city-state succeeded in creating a centralized empire (chapter 8). Why, during the era of efflorescence, did the many states of Hellas not consolidate into a unitary empire, on the model of Persia, Carthage, or Rome? Or, failing that, into several large competitor states, on the model of ancient Phoenicia, or Warring States China, or Europe ca. 1500–1900?17
All workable social systems are predicated on creating reliable forms of cooperation among an extensive population and then distributing the fruits of that cooperation across the population in ways that prevent the outbreak of catastrophic levels of violence. Centralized authority systems work according to the simple and powerful logic of command-and-control: Cooperation is achieved through obedience to a central coercive authority. With a unified authority structure capable of enforcing cooperation, and a distribution plan designed to ensure that those who are capable of destabilizing society through violence have no incentive to do so, conflict is effectively reduced.18
The basic logic of centralized authority has long been appreciated; Thomas Hobbes, in his great mid-seventeenth century work of political theory, Leviathan (1996), remains among the most astute and influential of its expositors. Hobbes famously argued that the choice faced by all societies is between a centralized authority system and the anarchy of “war of all against all”—a condition in which human life is inevitably, “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” Although modern social scientists usually do not see the history of human development in such stark terms, the tendency to associate economic and cultural development with the emergence and persistence of highly centralized bureaucratic states remains pervasive, not least in discussions of premodern state formation.19
In a centralized system, people know just where they stand (or kneel) in a hierarchical social order, and that order determines who does what in the production of goods, and who gets what in the distribution of goods, services, and privilege. The system is centered on a ruler (or a small group of rulers), typically, in the premodern world, a monarch to whom divine or quasi-divine powers are attributed. Authority devolves from the godlike ruler through a pyramidal chain of authority. The residents of the state are the subjects of the ruler. Wealth and power are concentrated at and distributed from the center. Social privileges and access to important institutions (e.g., law, property rights) are determined by social proximity to the ruler. The pyramidal organizational structure allows commands to be passed down from the apex of the hierarchical system to its base, and thus, ideally at least, everyone knows exactly what is expected of him or her and what he or she can expect to get in return. As long as those expectations are met, and no one who could disturb the order of society has reason to do so, the system is stable.
Th
e great majority of the ruler’s subjects are situated at the base of the pyramid; they provide the productive labor that sustains the system. They take orders and pass most of the surplus to those above them, in the form of rents or taxes. With most of his or her surplus appropriated, the median individual thus lives quite close to the level of bare subsistence. Because wealth is concentrated at the center and at the top, and because conflict is suppressed, a well-organized centralized state can sustain both a bureaucracy and military forces—thereby allowing the ruler to manage the state, pay off his or her coalition, and make war against rivals. An especially large and successful centrally organized state eventually subordinates its local rivals and thereby becomes an empire.20
How premodern small-state systems function is less well understood. How can a system in which authority is dispersed create adequate opportunities for cooperation at scale, redistribute the fruits of cooperation in ways that promote stability, and thereby accumulate resources sufficient to preserve itself over time? Why do small-state systems not quickly collapse into Hobbes’ “war of all against all”? The puzzle of how dispersed-authority systems are sustained is exacerbated when the stakes are high: How could a small-state system like Greece survive, much less flourish, when it was endemically threatened by a large, well-managed, and predatory empire like Achaemenid Persia?
In small-state systems authority is decentralized. There is no overarching hierarchy, no central point at which wealth and influence can readily be concentrated. As a result, as Hobbes confidently predicted, conflict remains endemic within the system. The many wars between the small states of ancient Greece are typical of other dispersed-authority ecologies, for example in early Mesopotamia, Warring States era China, or Renaissance Italy. Nor is the answer to the question of how small-state systems manage to flourish necessarily to be found in local centralization. Individual states within a small-state system may be ruled by kings and their elite coalitions. But a number of small-state systems included states with republican, citizen-centered, forms of government.21
In the most influential states of Hellas, authority was widely distributed, not only at the level of the multistate ecology but also at the level of the individual state. In the typical Greek polis, the adult male native residents were citizens, rather than subjects. In a Greek democracy, a form of government that became increasingly prevalent in Hellas after the late sixth century BCE, free and politically equal citizens collectively governed themselves. While political authority was concentrated in state institutions, power was dispersed among institutions; many citizens held offices and participated actively in both legislation and adjudication. Once again, in an inversion of the experience of state-building in early modern Europe, where, by the seventeenth century, centralized royal authority had succeeded in weakening the power of deliberative institutions, individual Greek states and the ecology of states became more democratic during the era of classical efflorescence.22
Some of the most influential and most democratic of the individual Greek states diverged markedly from the model of social order that political scientists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast call the “natural state”—and which they argue has been the basic form of centralized state-level social order throughout most of recorded human history. The natural state is ultimately based on domination and governed by a leader and the members of his or her elite coalition. Leader and elites cooperate to create and sustain, in their own interest, a system of production, distribution, and conflict suppression.
Natural states are not democratic; they seek to restrict access to institutions; they tend not to extend rights to secure possession of property or other privileges beyond the small and tightly patrolled ambit of the ruling coalition. But, so long as it distributes the fruits of cooperation to the right people (i.e., those with potential for violence) in the right proportion (the greater the potential for violence, the bigger the share), the natural state can be very stable. The unitary empire is one historically important kind of natural state, but the natural state, as a basic form of social order, can be scaled up or down.
While economically inefficient, when compared to modern open-access orders, the emergence of ever-larger limited-access states with ever more highly centralized authority, has, historically, been associated with political and economic development. In the light of the stubborn refusal of the Greek small-state ecology to coalesce into either an empire or a few large states ruled by strong leaders and narrow elite coalitions, the greatness of ancient Hellas becomes more mysterious. It also becomes more interesting to those who prefer democracy, freedom, and dignity—even in the incomplete form in which they were manifest in ancient Greece—to the kinds of domination typical of most premodern states.
Ancient Greek history points to a possible alternative to the dominant narrative of political and economic development, based primarily on the history of early modern Europe, as “first (and necessarily) the big, centralized, and autocratic state, and only then (sometimes) democracy and wealth.”23
SPECIALIZATION, INNOVATION, CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
One of the keys to unlocking the puzzling success of the polis ecology is economic specialization and exchange. In the Greek world, as in other times and places through history, specialization was based on developing and exploiting a local advantage, relative to other producers, in the production of some valued good or service. Assuming that costs of transactions are low enough to make exchanges mutually beneficial, specialized goods (e.g., olive oil, fine pottery) and services (of, e.g., mercenary soldiers, poets) are distributed through networks of exchange so that the products of specialized endeavor become available across a large ecology of diverse local specialists.
The powerful role that specialization and cooperative (mutually beneficial) market exchange can play in promoting economic growth was recognized and described in the later eighteenth century by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1981 [1776]). Greek specialization was often more horizontal (workshops and individual craftspeople specializing in the production of specific goods) than vertical (factories employing specialist labor at each phase of a production process). And ancient Greek writers never produced a work of economic analysis to rival Smith’s hugely influential book. Yet it is now very clear that specialization and exchange flourished at different levels in Hellas and, moreover, that the core principles of relative advantage and rational cooperation were understood by the ancient Greeks.24
Individual Greek states developed specialties based on natural resource endowments relative to other poleis—for example, the fine white marble at the Aegean island-state of Paros (i509), or favorable wheat-growing conditions in the cities of southern Italy and Sicily (chapter 6). Other poleis developed advantages by perfecting industrial processes—e.g., manufacture of painted vases and warships in Athens (chapters 7 and 8). Competition and conflict among poleis served to sharpen the recognition of the necessity of exploiting relative advantages, whereas a recognition of the value of lowering transaction costs pushed in the direction of opening access and interstate cooperation. Meanwhile, within poleis, individuals specialized in a wide range of endeavors. Within a given specialization, individuals competed with one another (“potter vies against potter,” as the poet Hesiod remarked in his Works and Days, line 25), once again sharpening the recognition of the value of relative advantage and leading to the deepening and multiplication of subspecializations.
The upshot of the cycle of competition, specialization, and cooperation in creating conditions for mutually beneficial exchange was a high premium on innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation—the process whereby novel solutions were developed to meet new requirements or existing needs—in turn drove a dynamic that the Austrian-American economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction”: Advances in artistic and productive technique drove out earlier techniques; new institutions marginalized traditional forms of social organization; poleis that exploited relative ad
vantages absorbed their less innovative rivals, while new poleis were continuously being created on the ever-expanding frontiers of Hellas.25
The products of local specialization were readily distributed, within poleis, across the extensive small-state ecology, and then beyond the Greek world, through increasingly dense networks of exchange and interaction. Local markets grew into regional markets, and some poleis succeeded in creating major interstate emporia where goods from across the Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds could be bought and sold. Experts in various arts and crafts migrated to new homes and established new centers of specialized production. Meanwhile, the costs of transactions were driven down by continuous institutional innovations, notably by the development and rapid spread of silver coinage as a reliable exchange medium, the dissemination of common standards for weights and measures, market regulations and officials to enforce them, and increasingly sophisticated systems of law and legal mechanisms for dispute resolution. Competition and conflict between poleis and between the Greeks and their non-Greek neighbors temporarily disrupted local networks of exchange. But those disruptions only served to motivate poleis and individuals to seek out new markets for their goods and services, to deepen and broaden their exchange networks, and to develop cooperative solutions whereby conflict could be reduced or at least rendered less disruptive.
Specialization in production of goods and exchange of the goods and services produced by specialists are common features of complex societies. If we are to explain the efflorescence of Hellas, we need to answer the question of why and how, in the Greek world, specialization and exchange achieved such high levels, and how they become so strongly intertwined with continuous innovation and creative destruction—thereby driving a sustained level of economic growth that proved high enough to overcome the costs of conflict among many small states.
