by Ober, Josiah
The political systems characteristic of the emergent poleis in the early Age of Expansion can best be described, using the social-scientific typology of North, Wallis, and Weingast, as weak natural states. As in the EIA, elites provided a modicum of political authority, subject to constraints arising from egalitarian norms. With the growth of trade, there was more surplus available to be extracted as rents. Where those rents were concentrated in the hands of the elite and used to buy off those with a potential for disruptive violence, egalitarian constraints were weakened. Yet most archaic Greek elite coalitions remained fragile. In an age of rapid population growth, just as in the EIA, the defense of a community’s territory against incursions by rivals depended on mobilizing as many local adult men as possible. Greek elites in the Age of Expansion needed the support of armed men to ensure state security, but they lacked technological–tactical conditions favoring the monopolization of violence potential by small bodies of warriors (e.g., chariots, cavalry). Moreover, they lacked the ideological justification that might have legitimated their own superior position, for example, a privileged relationship to the divine order.
Whatever special relationship to the gods the EIA chiefs had been able to claim seems to have blown away as the ceiling came off at the dawn of the Age of Expansion. From the eighth century through the classical era of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Greek society was distinctive for its lack of leaders who were able to claim divinely ordained public authority. By the seventh century, Greek temples and sanctuaries had become important sites of social ritual and elite display, featuring rich dedications and monumental architecture. Yet, in stark contrast to other premodern societies, the priests of Greek cults failed to translate their religious authority into a position of outstanding social privilege or political power. Cults belonged not to a closed caste of priests but to the wider community of worshippers—whether they were the people of a polis, a region encompassing several poleis or, in the case of the great sanctuaries at Delphi and Olympia, the whole of the Greek world.22
Greek elites likewise failed to secure unique access to military technology and tactics (e.g., Bronze Age style chariots or medieval-style armor and warhorses) that would allow a few men securely to dominate many potential opponents. By the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the technology and tactics of Greek warfare had converged on contests between organized bodies (phalanxes) of infantrymen (hoplites), fighting in close order, using a standard panoply of thrusting spear and large round shield (hoplon). A fine bronze helmet and sculpted body armor were at once the most expensive and the least essential pieces of the hoplite’s panoply. Wooden shields and iron-tipped spears, the irreducible minima of hoplite arms and armor, were, as we have seen, relatively cheap. All other things being equal, a bigger phalanx could threaten to outflank, and therefore likely defeat, a smaller phalanx. There was, therefore, a strong incentive for states with aggressive neighbors, or expansionist ambitions, to mobilize fighting men at the social margin, even if their headgear and armor were rudimentary. This in turn gave subelite men who were able to provide themselves with shield and spear a stronger bargaining position.23
Local men who felt that they were not being treated fairly by the local ruling coalition had little incentive to support that coalition when the going got tough. This is the situation envisioned by the early Greek poet, Hesiod, who was affronted by the unwillingness of “gift-gobbling rulers” to judge disputes fairly. Hesiod advised his reader to avoid public spaces—which is, of course, where military mobilization would take place. It is perhaps not surprising that Hesiod’s Askra never became a state in its own right; in the classical period, Askra was a village in the territory of the polis of Thespiai (i222: map 5). The opposite situation is imagined (ch. 4) by Herodotus’ Solon in his tale about happy Tellus of Athens. Given the context of Solon’s story in Herodotus’ narrative, Tellus is not a plausible candidate for a privileged rent-seeking member of an elite coalition. Yet clearly his willingness to “come to help” when there was an incursion across the Athenian border was essential to Athens’ security. If Tellus and his fellow moderately prosperous Athenians were to take Hesiod’s quietist message to heart, the Athenian ruling coalition would quickly find itself in trouble.24
The stakes in interstate warfare were increasingly high. Meanwhile, the resources that might allow a defecting member of the elite to change the game were increasingly abundant. The opening up of trans-Mediterranean trade made it possible for a lucky family to make a substantial fortune in a short span of time. That fortune could be transformed into disruptive violence potential through a growing market in military expertise: The Greeks had discovered that, relative to neighboring cultures, hoplite warfare provided them with a relative advantage as violence specialists. By the seventh century BCE, a good number of Greeks were serving as mercenaries outside of the Greek world; Greek mercenaries in seventh century Egypt, for example, tagged ancient monuments with inscribed graffiti. But mercenaries might also be employed within the Greek world. As the development of Greek warfare yielded increased dividends in terms of innovations in arms, armor, and tactics—and as skilled Greek fighters became a “commodity” available to anyone with the wealth to pay them—the possibility of hiring a small army capable of displacing a fragile ruling coalition made it possible for an ambitious man to imagine establishing his family as sole rulers. And so a path to tyranny was blazed.25
Caught between the threat of elite defection (in the form of attempts at tyranny) and non-elite defection (in the form of refusing to mobilize against external threats), Greek ruling elites walked a tightrope. Unsurprisingly, many fell: Short-lived tyrannies replaced established aristocratic coalitions in a number of Greek poleis. Elsewhere, large Greek states proved incapable of securing their borders against smaller, more cohesive, local rivals. This was the context in which the nascent elitist social orders of both early Sparta and early Athens were creatively destroyed by the enactment of new citizen-centered rules.
SPARTA: LYCURGAN REFORMS, SEVENTH TO SIXTH CENTURY BCE
In the classical era of the mid-fifth century BCE, Sparta was an unprepossessing cluster of villages occupying a stunning mountain-girded setting in the fertile valley of the Eurotas River in the south-central Peloponnese (map 4). Like other Peloponnesians, Spartans spoke Greek with a distinctive Dorian dialect and traced their ancestry, in myth, to the ancestral claim on the Peloponnesus by the sons of the Greek superhero, Herakles. In addition to their core homeland in Laconia (also known as Lakonike, Lakedaimon), the Spartans had seized the territory of Messenia to the southwest—a region, now centered on the town of Kalamata, that remains among the most agriculturally productive areas of the Greek mainland. The estimated combined population of Laconia and Messenia was, in the later fourth century, in excess of 250,000 (appendix I: regions 16 and 17); the population may well have been similar in size in the late sixth and fifth centuries. By the fifth century BCE, Sparta dominated most of the other states of the Peloponnese and could mobilize large armies through its leadership of a coalition of southern and central Greek states with a combined population of more than a million (table 2.3).26
MAP 4 Peloponnesus.
The key to Sparta’s classical era power was its highly professionalized land army. At its peak, Sparta mobilized perhaps 9,000 citizen soldiers. Sparta’s army was centered, as were the armies of other archaic and classical Greek states, on a phalanx of heavy-armed hoplite infantrymen. But the Spartans were exceptional in their level of training, discipline, and in their capacity to execute complex battlefield maneuvers. Spartan citizens were, to a man, specialists in violence: trained from childhood in the skills and the mind-set thought by the Greeks to be especially appropriate to hoplite warriors. That army was long believed to be invincible in a standard phalanx versus phalanx battle on open terrain. The certainty that fighting Sparta meant crushing defeat on the field of battle became a consequential factor in the calculations of other Greek states.
Spartan citi
zen-soldiers could hyperspecialize in military affairs because Sparta effectively outsourced the agricultural activities that would otherwise have been demanded of them. Sparta’s economy was based on the labor of tens of thousands of state-owned serfs, known as helots. They were, in effect, specialists in subsistence agriculture. Helots farmed much of the land of Laconia and all of Messenia, turning over the surplus, as rents, to their Spartan overlords. Organized violence ensured that the “reservation price” for helot labor remained very near bare subsistence, thus maximizing rents. Sparta annually declared war on the helot population, rendering the helots not only the economic foundation of, but also official and highly vulnerable enemies of the Spartan state. Helots who stood out in any way were subjected to attack by a state-sponsored terror organization, known as “the Hidden” (krypteia), as well as to occasional state-organized mass killings. The net effect of state-sponsored violence was to limit helot mobility and to eliminate laborers’ chance of bargaining with individual landowners for better wages. Violence, internal and external, was, therefore, an intrinsic part of Sparta’s social order and essential to its perpetuation.27
The non-Spartan, nonhelot population of Laconia, known as perioikoi (“marginals”), lived in some two dozen small and dependent poleis. They did the Spartans’ bidding in peace and augmented the ranks of the Spartan army in times of war. With the exception of a colony at Tarentum (i71) in south Italy (settled, in Greek legend, by the bastard offspring of Spartan women whose husbands were fighting in Messenia), Spartans did not participate in the colonization movement of the Age of Expansion. The Malthusian trap faced by other leading Greek states seems to have been addressed by successful expansionism—the incorporation of Laconia and conquest of Messenia—conjoined with the distinctive approach to military hyperspecialization that resulted from a set of social and political reforms traditionally associated with the lawgiver Lycurgus.
The historicity of Lycurgus, the chronology of the reforms, and some of the details of the Spartan social order are matters of scholarly debate; I refer in this book to “Lycurgus” and “Lycurgan reforms” simply for convenience. What is most important for our purposes is that by the mid-sixth century BCE, if not before, the social order of Laconia and Messenia had taken on the highly distinctive form that enabled classical Sparta to achieve and long sustain superpolis status.
Sparta’s social order was designed for waging war. That order emerged against the background of military conflicts, beginning in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, over the control of the territory and population of Messenia. We cannot precisely date the Lycurgan reforms; even in antiquity Lycurgus was regarded as a semimythical figure. We do not know how, or how quickly, the new order was instituted. The origin story told by the Roman-era biographer Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus—that new social order was consolidated in the wake of a revolt by the Messenians, and that there was violent, although ultimately futile resistance to the new order on the part of Sparta’s established ruling elite—is plausible if not demonstrable. Some details of the Lycurgan social order remain debatable, not least because the Spartans were notoriously secretive about themselves and hostile to overly inquisitive visitors. Yet the outlines of the mature Spartan system are tolerably clear.28
The Lycurgan order was a set of rules governing social and economic relations among Spartan citizens, the education of young Spartans and their induction into citizenship, and the governance of the state. The system was premised upon equality among citizens. Although much property was privately possessed by individual Spartan families and landholdings became increasingly unequal over time (ch. 9), each citizen was in principle the equal of every other citizen in his ability to provide for a minimum regular and mandatory contribution of food to his regimental mess: A Spartan’s baseline income came, again in principle, via a tract of land that may have once been given to his family as part of a distribution of conquered lands and the agricultural enterprise of a number of privately managed but collectively controlled helots. Each Spartan citizen’s civic and social standing was predicated on his sustained capacity to provide enough income from the rents of his land to provide a specified share of the food consumed by his military unit. Those who failed to provide their share were summarily dropped from the ranks of citizens and demoted to the humiliating social status of “Inferior.”29
Based on the estimated populations of Laconia and Messenia (appendix I), there may have been something like 40,000 adult male helots, which would mean (at the high point of Sparta’s citizen body and counterfactually assuming equitable distribution) about four or five helot families for each Spartan citizen.30 Certainly by the later classical era, the distribution of land and helots was not equal, and probably never had been. So, even accounting for the decline in the number of Spartans, we must suppose that some Spartans controlled fewer than a “full share” of four to five helot families. The total rents that could be extracted from, say, one or two farming families engaged in subsistence agriculture might have been enough to maintain a Spartan family but cannot have been enough to provide for much luxury.31
The Lycurgan system was predicated on extracting rents from helots, distributing those rents among the citizens, and sustaining an appearance of lifestyle equality among many men with an equal capacity for violence. Thus, although individual Spartans reaped substantial revenues from private properties, so that they had enough private wealth to dedicate rich offerings to the local deities and to compete in high-status chariot races at Olympia, the unequal wealth accruing from private property could not be publicly displayed in everyday life. The upper bound of the quotidian lifestyle of every Spartan was set by the rent available to the least wealthy citizens. The limited rent available to the poorer Spartan citizens was, therefore, the basis of the famous “virtuous austerity” of Spartan society. That mandatory austerity became, in light of Sparta’s fame, an important part of the “impoverished Hellas” mirage, in antiquity and modernity alike.32
The limited rent available to poorer Spartans was a potential weakness of the Lycurgan system: If mischance or malice (e.g., targeted terror killing of an enemy’s helots by one of the Hidden) were to deprive a Spartan of the helot labor force necessary to cultivate his land, he would be expelled from the ranks of the citizens. This dynamic both threatened the demographic integrity of the citizen army and provided a strong individual incentive to seek private wealth as a backstop. That, in turn, might be an incentive to free ride on the system by reaping the benefits of low-cost helot labor without contributing to perpetuating the system of violence that kept labor costs low. The incentive to private wealth-seeking undercut the Lycurgan system’s ostensible goals of equality among citizens and of producing citizen-specialists who focused entirely on military affairs. The system remained reasonably stable, in spite of this structural problem, as a result of the famously intense mutual monitoring among all Spartan citizens; the Spartan social panopticon was facilitated by the orientation of citizen life around public spaces and military units. Any observed deviation from the norms of citizen behavior was, in principle, immediately publicized and punished.33
In addition to their time-consuming military training, every Spartan was expected to devote substantial efforts to the perpetuation of the social order by contributing to the education of the young. The goal of Spartan education was the maintenance, generation by generation, of a distinctive pattern of behavior (including courage in battle and violence toward helots) and a distinctive set of attitudes (including despising cowards and helots as inherently unworthy of respect). Spartan boys were raised from childhood to be warriors and were subjected to a strict regimen aimed at making them tough, self-reliant, and loyal to their units. Upon completing his training, a Spartan youth was inducted into a combination dining club and military unit, which became, in principle, the focus of his life.34
As we have seen, Spartans were expected to maintain at least a public façade of austerity and simplicity in their style of life. They live
d in relatively humble houses, dressed alike in simple clothing, and ate simple food. They were expected to defer, socially and politically, to elders and to their leaders: two hereditary kings (descendants of two families who traced their ancestry to Herakles; leaders in war and ritual, they were treated in ways that were decidedly heroic but far from godlike), a council of 28 elected elders selected from prominent families, and five ephors, who served as general enforcers of the austerity regime. Policy decisions were in practice made by the leaders and were affirmed by the citizens via public acclamation in occasional assemblies.
The Lycurgan system did not encourage economic specialization beyond the divide into citizen-soldiers and helot-farmers. Although Laconian artisans among the perioikoi continued to produce and to export some fine metalwork and pottery, Spartan citizens were, in principle, not permitted openly to engage in trade or industry. Moreover, the Spartan state, uniquely among the major poleis of Greece across the whole of the classical era, declined to coin silver and discouraged (and at one point at least forbade) the circulation of other states’ coinage within their territory.35 As silver coins increasingly became the standard of exchange across and beyond the Greek world, this restriction dampened internal and external trade. Laconia and Messenia never became a fully closed economic system, but, once the Lycurgan system was in place, Spartans were at least partly insulated from the imperatives of economic specialization, innovation, and creative destruction that was typical of much of the rest of the Greek world. One result was the conservatism for which the Spartans became famous in the classical era (ch. 8). Yet because that insulation was never perfect, there was always the danger that individual Spartans would find ways to defect from the Lycurgan system, a tendency that eventually contributed to the collapse of the system in the mid fourth century BCE (ch. 9).
