The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  The substantial differences in polis size and prominence, along with the important roles that manpower, training, and wealth played in military operations, were factors in the emergence of various voluntary and hegemonic forms of interstate cooperation among the Greek states. In the fifth century BCE, most of the poleis of the Peloponnese (continental Greece south of the Isthmus of Corinth: map 4), along with a number of poleis in central Greece, were members of the Peloponnesian League, a defensive–offensive military alliance dominated by Sparta. In the mid-fifth century, Athens had transformed a defensive league of poleis into an eastern Mediterranean empire that, at its greatest extent, extracted tribute from between a quarter and a third of the states of Hellas (map 7). In the age of Plato, most of the 200+ Greek states on the west coast of Anatolia were under at least the nominal control of Persia. Meanwhile, by Aristotle’s day, about half of the poleis of mainland Greece were members of one of several federal leagues (koina).23 These leagues were increasingly influential voluntary associations of states. Federation enabled smaller poleis to compete more effectively in an environment potentially dominated by aggressive and successful big states. We look at each of these systems in more detail in later chapters. Table 2.3 estimates the total numbers of poleis and estimated Greek populations that were involved in each of these state-autonomy-limiting systems of interpolis dependency.

  TABLE 2.3 Limits to Polis Independence: Some Examples

  NOTES: Data for Peloponnesian League: Inventory regions 9–11, 13–17, 22, plus Ambrakia, Anaktorion, Leukas, Pallene (see Thucydides 2.9.2); for Athenian empire: Inventory Index 18; for Persian empire in late 6th century BCE: Inventory regions 35–38, total population reduced by 170,00 to account for later growth; for Persian empire in mid-4th: Inventory regions 34–40; for federal leagues, Inventory individual entries, with corrections by E. Mackil (personal communication). Population estimates for Peloponnesian League, Persian Empire, and Federal league derived from estimated regional populations (see Appendix I). Athenian empire population = Delian League poleis (Inventory Index 18), excluding Attica; total population reduced by 400,000 to account for 4th century growth. Athenian empire and Federal league populations estimated by methods described in Appendix I.

  Dependency relations, voluntary and coerced, create some blurriness at the margins when we ask the question: Is a given Greek settlement actually a city-state?—in the sense of being an urban center connected organically to a specific rural hinterland, and in the sense of being an political unit that is sufficiently autonomous, as a system of territorially defined authority, to qualify as a state. The editors of the Inventory recognized and addressed the issue. While standing behind the claim that each of the 1,035 settlements listed in the Inventory as poleis does in fact deserve to be called a city-state in a territorial and political sense, the editors also assign each polis a score from A to C meant to measure the strength of the claim that a community was actually a polis—with A indicating those communities (about half the total) unambiguously attested to in ancient sources as poleis. Category C is reserved for 217 settlements for which the evidence for polis status is weakest and the status of the settlement as a polis can only be regarded as likely or possible. The upshot is that for about two in ten of the communities considered to be poleis in the Inventory there is reason for hesitation in considering the settlement to be a city-state in the most robust sense of the term. Table 2.4 sums up the distribution of Inventory-listed sites according to this “polis-certainty” measure.24

  TABLE 2.4 Certainty of Attribution of Settlement as a Polis and Degree of Hellenization for 1,035 Poleis

  NOTES: Source data = Inventory, individual polis entries. A = community is called polis in an ancient source. [A] = community is subsumed under the heading poleis alongside other communities. B = community is believed to be a polis based on its known activities that are characteristic of a polis. C = known activity characteristic of a polis but identification as a polis is less certain or only a possibility. α = Hellenic polis with few or no elements of non-Greek civilization. β = mixed community in which Greeks and non-Greeks live side by side. γ = predominantly barbarian community with some elements of Hellenic civilization. N.B. Many type β and γ poleis became fully Hellenized after the classical period (Inventory, p. 7).

  Despite any limitations upon its full autonomy, each Greek city-state sought political distinction, or at least local independence, and to be an entity unto itself. Each had its own code of law (written or unwritten), its own ritual calendar, its own peculiar social customs. Although weights and measures were becoming increasingly standardized across the Greek world, by the time of Plato most of the larger and more prominent poleis minted their own silver and (later) bronze coins. These coins typically proclaimed the name of the state (often abbreviated) along with some suitable image: Athena’s owl for Athens, a sea turtle for maritime-trading Aigina, an ear of wheat for grain-rich Metapontum, and so on. Almost 100 Greek states were already minting their own distinctive silver coinage by the end of the sixth century BCE and, by 323 BCE, a third of all known poleis were minting silver coins.25

  Just as each city-state cherished its own laws and customs, so too each remembered and recounted its own local history. Among the distinctive shared features of Greek culture was a concern with historical narrative. By the time Aristotle began collecting polis constitutional histories, local polis identity was manifest in a flourishing literary genre of local and regional historiography.26 The many diverse but at least partially overlapping local Greek narratives, oral and written, were the raw materials that enabled Herodotus, Thucydides, and other classical Greek historians to write histories, not just of individual poleis, but of Hellas. These master narratives concerned interaction among individuals within Greek states and conflict and cooperation among the Greek states—but they also took in the relations, by turns friendly and hostile, of the Greeks with their non-Greek neighbors.

  Among the issues prominently addressed by historians, local and “panhellenic” alike, was the emergence, endurance, and change of political regimes. Although most Greek political regimes are startlingly citizen-centered by comparison with other premodern states, the diversity of regimes among the poleis was a constant theme of Greek historical and philosophical literature. No doubt every state’s government had its own peculiarities, but by the early fifth century BCE, the Greeks had settled on a canonical list of three regime types: The rule of one man was tyranny (or in a benign form, monarchy); the rule of a restricted part of the adult native male population in a state was oligarchy (or, when spoken of approvingly, aristocracy). The rule of all, or almost all, the free adult native males was democracy.

  Herodotus and Thucydides, along with many other Greek writers, regarded the question of the emergence and collapse of regimes in specific poleis to be among the most important events in a state’s history, and they considered the regime to be a primary determinant of state behavior. The question of how specific social conditions and institutions preserved or undermined regimes was a major concern of Greek theoretical writing on politics: both Plato (Republic and Statesman) and Aristotle (Politics and Pseudo-Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians—probably written by one of his students) treated the question of regime persistence and change as a primary issue for political philosophy.

  At any given point in the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, a political map of the Greek world would have resembled a mosaic of regime types, but the mosaic would have looked substantially different depending on the moment chosen. Overall, tyranny would have appeared less prevalent in the fifth or fourth century, compared to its two citizen-centered rivals, oligarchy and democracy. Moreover, by the later fourth century BCE, democracy had gained a good deal of ground over oligarchy. Yet regional differences persisted. For example, tyranny remained a major factor in Sicily long after it had become less common in the central and southern mainland of Greece. Both the general Greek drift away from tyranny and toward democracy, and the persi
stence of regional specificity of regime distribution played a role in the classical efflorescence, and we return to these topics in later chapters.

  The history of a given polis was often traced (whether historically or mythologically) back to a founder-hero. Some founders were thought to have magically sprung from the Earth (as in the case of Athens); other founders were more plausibly remembered as having been natives of another city-state who led expeditions from their homeland in the hope of creating a new and independent state in some other land. It was through the process of colonization that the Greek world grew outward from the Greek peninsula, first to Anatolia, then Sicily, Italy, southern France, northern Africa, and the shores of the Black Sea (map 3 and ch. 6).

  Some 81 Greek states (8% of all known poleis) are known to have served as “mother-cities” in that they colonized, or participated in the colonization, of one or more of hundreds of other “colonial” poleis—some of which themselves became major colonizers. Several especially prominent states (Athens, Miletus i854, Syracuse, Corinth i227, Samos i864, and Thasos i526) were involved in 10 or more colonizing expeditions; 25 other poleis were involved in establishing 3 or more colonies. Greek colonial settlements typically developed into independent poleis; a few (like Syracuse, a colony of Corinth) became preeminent poleis. Yet relations between colony and mother-city sometimes remained strong, and some mother-cities took a proprietary interest in the doings of their former colonies. The question of how much deference a colony ought to show to its mother city helped spark the conflicts leading to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE (ch. 8), whereas aid sent by a mother-city to a former colony sparked the economic resurgence of Sicily after its decline in the mid-fourth century (ch. 9).27

  Colonization was one important route by which Greeks came to live among non-Greek peoples, in ways that make obvious the error of imagining that the “Greek world” was ever purely Greek in ethnicity, culture, language, or history. Some 10–20% of known “Greek” poleis—mostly located in Sicily, Thrace, and Anatolia—are best understood as hybrids, manifesting strong non-Greek cultural features. Of these poleis, 44 (4% of all known poleis) were primarily non-Greek in their culture and only became substantially Hellenized after the end of the classical era. The degree of Hellenization of the 1,035 known poleis is summed up in table 2.4.

  Moreover, and obviously, the Greeks of the city-states shared their extended Mediterranean/Black Sea world with non-Greek peoples (map 2). Some of these peoples (for example Lydians, Phrygians, Persians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians) lived in highly developed, state-based societies. Others (for example, some Thracians and most Scythians) were seminomadic tribe- or clan-based societies, and at least part-time pastoralists. Yet others (native Sicilians, Anatolians, North Africans) lived in towns and villages interspersed among Greek poleis. Greeks learned many things from their neighbors—borrowing their alphabet, for example, from the Phoenicians and the idea of coined money from the Lydians. Non-Greeks, for their part, borrowed some of the cultural features of the poleis. The Greeks engaged intensively in cooperative trade relations with non-Greek peoples. Yet competition for resources periodically led to conflicts between Greek states and their non-Greek neighbors as well as between Greek states.

  FIGURE 2.5 Walled poleis, 900–323 BCE.

  NOTES: Numbers are of poleis believed to be walled on the basis of literary or archaeological evidence. Source data = Frederiksen 2011, except for –323 (323 BCE) = Inventory, Index 23.

  Failure in war could, and sometimes did, mean destruction of urban infrastructure or even state death (extermination, enslavement, or forced migration of the population). In the Early Iron Age of the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE, Greek settlements were unwalled. But in subsequent centuries, along with developing forms of social organization that promoted effective mobilization of soldiers, Greek poleis increasingly invested in substantial fortifications: urban circuits, and later in long walls connecting cities to harbors, and forts and towers to protect rural populations and assets. The preference for strong walls was not universal: Sparta remained unwalled throughout the classical period, believing that “our men are our walls.” Some Greek political theorists, notably Plato in the Republic, argued against walling the city on the grounds that brave men ought willingly to fight their enemies in the open field. But by the end of the classical period, this was a minority position; Aristotle thought it badly outdated (ch. 11). Fortification policy was one way in which Greek poleis became more similar to one another over time.

  Fortification walls were costly. The Danish classicist, Rune Frederiksen, is surely right to say that, “city walls belong to the category of public architecture and must have constituted the most expensive and laborious undertaking for the communities that built them.”28 Yet the no-wall option clearly became less attractive over time, as Greek poleis grew wealthier. Fortifications figured in early stages of Greek state formation and, from the early fifth century BCE to the later fourth century, more Greek cities were increasingly heavily fortified. Late classical city walls were on the whole more substantial (built of stone, rather than mud-brick), more highly developed (towers, crenellations, indented trace), and in many cases augmented with outworks and elaborate systems of rural defense (forts, watchtowers, pass-control walls).29 Figure 2.5 shows the growth in the number of known (to modern scholarship) fortified poleis in the Greek world, from 900 to 323 BCE. Table 2.5 shows that by 323 BCE almost all large and prominent Greek cities were fortified.

  Finally, circling back to the physical conditions of the Greek world, different poleis, and even different subregions within the territories of large city-states, had quite different resource endowments. In addition to the uneven distribution of valuable minerals (iron, silver, gold), regional differences in elevation (figure 2.2) and in rainfall (above, note 7) produced areas better suited to one or the other of the triad of basic crops (grain, olives, grapes), or to specific grains (wheat or barley), or to some specialty crop (e.g., silphium, at Kyrene, a now-extinct plant used both as a seasoning and as a medicine). While much of the Greek world had abundant building stone, fine marbles, suited for sculpture, were located only in particular regions (most famously on the island of Paros). Moreover, the core Greek world lacked certain essential metals, most notably copper and tin, the components of bronze. These valuable raw materials had to be imported into the Greek core from Cyprus, Anatolia, and western Asia. Resource diversity and scarcity provided a further impetus to specialization and cooperative exchange, to competition, and to conflict—both within Hellas and with neighboring cultures. Those conditions in turn helped to drive the classical efflorescence.

  TABLE 2.5 Greek City Fortifications, by 323 BCE

  NOTES: Source data = Inventory, Index 23. Evidence of city walls may derive from literary, epigraphic, or archaeological investigation. Size 3 = 100–200 km2/population range 3,500–25,000. Size 5 = 500–1,000 km2/population range 17,500–75,000. Fame 3 = 1–2.87 Inventory columns. Fame 4 = 3–5.87 Inventory columns. On size and fame, see further, tables 2.1 and 2.2.

  3

  POLITICAL ANIMALS

  A THEORY OF DECENTRALIZED COOPERATION

  At the heart of the mystery of classical efflorescence lies the question of how the Greeks, in an ecology of many small states, solved problems of decentralized cooperation and thereby ruled one another, as citizens—rather than being ruled as dominated subjects of centralized royal authority in a large state.

  Decentralized cooperation is among the most important and pervasive features of life. It plays a major role in the activity of, for example, bacteria, ants, birds, and humans—and it defines a research area for the social and biological sciences alike. Yet many aspects of cooperation have long resisted explanation. Why do organisms cooperate? And how does local cooperation among individuals produce higher order, system-level effects? In biology, explaining emergent phenomena associated with decentralized cooperation, exemplified by the complex and rapidly changing formations of large f
locks of birds in flight or schools of swimming fish, remains a research frontier.1

  The behavior of flocks and schools is minutely coordinated; the shapes produced by that coordination are things of startling beauty and great complexity. No bird in the flock, nor fish in the school, issues commands to others, yet huge flocks and schools move as one—resembling at times a single, gigantic, shape-shifting superorganism. Biologists have recently shown that relatively simple algorithms can go a long way toward explaining how large groups of birds and fish coordinate their movements.2 Explaining decentralized cooperation in ants is harder because their collective activities are more complex. Explaining decentralized cooperation in humans is hardest of all, yet it is imperative if we are to understand the efflorescence of classical Hellas.

  For social scientists, the research agenda for the problem of “human cooperation at scale” was set a half century ago by the political economist, Mancur Olson, who posited that cooperation without coercion (i.e., a centralized system of authority, backed by a credible threat of force) was only possible in small groups of not more than a few hundred people. This is because, in small groups, individuals can readily monitor one another’s behavior and can act quickly to sanction aberrant behavior by those who stray from the path of cooperation. As Olson famously argued, once a human group exceeds a certain size, it becomes impossible for group members effectively to monitor free riding—i.e., strategically defecting from the cooperative regime by refusing to pay the costs of cooperation, yet continuing to share in the collective benefits accruing through others’ cooperation. As a result of the failure of monitoring, and because of the costs associated with punishing defectors, sanctioning of defection will be foregone. Given that everyone has the same incentive to defect by free riding, we can expect that a cascade of rational defection will doom the cooperative regime: In Olson’s words, “unless the number of individuals is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.”3