The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  In a puzzling, but celebrated, passage of his poetry, Solon speaks of disestablishing the horoi (singular horos) that had formerly encumbered the Earth, so that the land of Attica, once enslaved, now was made free. The horoi are often taken to be records of indebtedness: “disestablishing the horoi” would, on this interpretation, simply mean “canceling debts.” But the Greek word “horos” ordinarily meant “access-governing boundary marker” (i.e., “do not cross this line unless you are among those entitled to do so”). “Horos” was not used as a term for “record of indebtedness” until much later in Greek history. It seems more natural, therefore, to read Solon’s “abolition of the horoi” reform as referring to boundary markers that limited territorial access. This suggests that the horoi had constrained movement by some Athenians to and from certain parts of Athenian territory—perhaps including the central city and its institutions—thereby enforcing the conditions of peonage and the elite monopoly on both political and ritual power. Disestablishing the horoi was thus a way of equalizing physical access, eliminating the insidious use of debt to enforce vicious forms of inequality, and creating de facto freedom of movement and association for Athenians within their home territory.49

  On this interpretation, abolishing the horoi established an equal right of free citizens to move about at will within a country now understood as a collective possession of the Athenian people. With the constraining boundary markers removed, Athenians might move to and live wherever they believed they could do best for themselves. They were free to travel to the central city and to make use of state legal, political, and religious institutions, on something approaching equal footing. Of course, this newfound freedom (like the abolition of debts and the rule forbidding enslavement of fellow Athenians) was gained at the expense of the rent-seeking elite, who might attempt to reestablish conditions of monopoly control under new auspices. This possibility provides a plausible context for another Solonian law, forbidding acts of hubris—behavior aimed at humiliation and intimidation—against any resident of Attica. Among the hubris law’s targets would have been rent-seeking elites who might have sought to mimic the Spartans by using threats and intimidation to reimpose limits on the free movement of poor citizens.50

  In order to give the citizenship reforms teeth, Solon created a new procedure whereby the citizens of Athens, gathered in formal assembly, could sit as a collective court of law to pass judgment on certain categories of malefactors. State officials who abused their power by acting outside the proper purview of their office could now be indicted before the people and subsequently punished. Powerful officials thus became the equals of ordinary citizens before the law, a development with profound implications for public order. Moreover, Solon extended the right of legal standing in various criminal actions (including hubris cases) to every citizen on behalf of every other. Thus, if a powerful individual mistreated a weak individual, he might be hauled before the people’s court by another powerful citizen, acting on the weak person’s behalf. In a society in which “helping friends and hurting enemies” was a conventional definition of justice, and in which there were high levels of intraelite rivalry and competition, this was not an empty gesture.51

  Taken together, these three legal reforms—written law defining brightline violations, institutionalization of the citizenry as a legal body with authority and capacity to act jointly in response to violations, and incentives for individuals to initiate legal process against violators—created the foundations for a political order in which citizen immunities could potentially gain purchase on public behavior, and thus the equal standing of citizens might really matter. Athens had taken the first steps on the road to being a state governed not only by rules, but by fair rules.

  Other of Solon’s reforms augmented the “negative” value of citizenship as legal immunity from status degradation with specified “positive” participation rights. All citizens were formally granted the opportunity to vote in public assemblies. The right to stand for office (whether by election or lottery) was, however, determined by an individual’s annual income: Depending on his income (denominated as “wet and dry” products of agriculture), each Athenian was assigned to one of four standardized income classes. certain offices, notably magistrates who handled substantial public funds, were reserved to the highest income class; other offices were distributed to the two middle classes. The poorest Athenians were left with votes on policy as Assemblymen and votes as jurors when the assembly met as a court. This fourclasses reform seems to point to the effort by Solon, the self-described “man of the middle,” to build a middling class of citizens, juridically distinguished both from the richest and poorest, unwilling to join the elite in oppressing the poor but ready and willing to be mobilized against Athens’ external enemies—or against revolutionary attempts to redistribute private property.52

  For all its boldness, the Solonian system might seem, on the face of it, to lack the essential egalitarian feature that made the Lycurgan system so Successful: Athenian citizens had gained a substantial measure of legal and political equality, but inequality persisted in the economic realm—and indeed material inequality was formally recognized in the distribution of public offices. By failing to provide poor Athenians with material capital, in the form of redistributed land, while stripping them of the collateral represented by bodies that could be sold, Solon’s legal reforms might have ended in strengthening bonds of patronage and increasing dependency and clientalism. This might in turn have ended in a stronger state but one with a narrower ruling coalition. Given the generally low productivity of such regimes, Athens would not be a likely contributor to the dramatic classical efflorescence.53

  The ancient tradition concerning Solon’s reforms suggests, however, that the issue of the long-term economic welfare of citizens was addressed by laws that reoriented Athenian society away from low-productivity forms of Subsistence agriculture and toward potentially more productive forms of specialized agriculture and industry. A law attributed to Solon banned the export of agricultural produce other than oil from Attica (Plutarch, Solon 24.1). As one of the driest areas of mainland Greece, Attica was on the whole better suited for growing relatively low-value (and drought-resistant) barley than relatively high-value (and drought-sensitive) wheat. Athens had no hope of developing a comparative advantage in high-value grain production relative to other regions of the Greek world: Exports of grain from Attica might further immiserate the poor by producing local shortages but would not much improve Athenian GDP (gross domestic product). On the other hand, Attica is well suited for olive production, and the same Solonian law explicitly permitted the export of high-value olive oil. The law both encouraged entrepreneurs to invest in “exportable” high-value crops and guarded local food supplies when drought lowered yields elsewhere. Yet another law encouraged families to invest in human capital by stripping fathers who failed to teach their sons a useful skill of their traditional right to expect support from their sons in old age. Still other Solonian laws paved the way for immigration by foreigners with specialized skills and clarified certain property rights.54

  Taken as a package, Solon’s reforms represent a major rebooting of Athenian society, one that set Athens on a path that, as we now know, eventuated in democracy and prosperity. But at the end of Solon’s year as archon, that outcome lay far in the unforeseeable future. In the immediate aftermath of Solon’s reforms, both elite and ordinary Athenians were disgruntled; everyone, it seems, felt either that his reforms had gone too far in equalizing access to institutions and legal protection, or not far enough in equalizing property. The fragmentary poems by Solon that have come down to us were, for the most part, written after the enactment of his program, in what must have seemed at the time a vain attempt to justify it to the Athenians.55

  The three generations following Solon’s reforms (593–510 BCE) were an unsettled era in Athens’ political history, marked by short-lived experiments in reorganizing state offices and by three tyrannical coups d’ét
at. With the support of mercenaries, the third of these coups was successful. The family of Peisistratus dominated Athens from 546 to 510 BCE, while, for most of this period, carefully preserving at least the forms of the Solonian legal order.

  During the same three-generation period, Athens became a notable producer and exporter of fine painted pottery, as well as of olive oil and wine. Peisistratus and his sons introduced certain innovations that had the effect of furthering some aspects of the Solonian reforms: The state extended development loans to farmers and established traveling “circuit judges” who offered alternatives to clientalistic dispute resolution by local elites. The tyrants also sought to buttress Athenian identity by the sponsorship of religious festivals. Notable among these was the great Panathenaia—an “All Athens” festival that included Olympics-like contests in which athletes and musicians from around the Greek world competed for prizes. Those prizes prominently included large, finely painted Athenian vases, in the form of transport amphorae employed in overseas trade and filled with fine Athenian olive oil. The symbolism was clear enough: Athens was being promoted as an exporter of specialized agricultural products, fine pottery, and high culture.56

  CITIZEN STATES

  By the middle of the sixth century BCE, much of the Greek world had moved toward citizenship. The world of the poleis had become remarkable on two dimensions of decentralization. First, there was the proliferation of a great number of peer polities within a single extensive culture zone. Next, many poleis were defined by an extensive body of citizens who treated one another as equals within specified domains, rather than by a tiny ruling elite dedicated to monopolizing access to institutions and rents through coercion and ideology. While increasing access to institutions within the body of citizens, citizenship potentially enabled tighter restrictions on noncitizens. It remained to be seen whether, where, and when access would be opened beyond the confines of the citizen body.

  Although it is not possible fully to disentangle the webs of influence, the relative success of prominent poleis in weathering social crises and consolidating large territories, by expanded citizenship and promoting egalitarian rules for citizens, helped to spread citizen-centered institutions across the Greek world. The relevant context of the rise of the citizen state included a military environment that rewarded those states capable of mobilizing many highly motivated and skilled soldiers, and also the relative ease of institutional and technological transfers between states. Across the ecology of city-states, bodies of citizens were more or less extensive and citizens enjoyed more or less extensive systems of political equality. But Greek native men were, in most cases, more equal and more actively engaged in state governance than was the norm in the premodern world. Even Greek tyrants were constrained to respect salient aspects of equal citizenship. No Greek tyrant ever established himself as a godlike king. Indeed, as the historical economists Rob Fleck and Andrew Hanssen have shown, through the institution of policies favorable to economic growth, Greek tyrants appear inadvertently to have fostered conditions that also favored democratization.57

  By 550 BCE, the Greek world had diverged in significant ways from standard premodern paths of state development. Even when compared to other ancient city-state ecologies (e.g., Etruscan and Phoenician), the Greek world was unusual in the strength and pervasiveness of citizen-centered public authority, as well as in the great number of states, on three continents, that shared a common core culture. While we know much more about Athens and Sparta than we do about other poleis, it is certain that other Greek states had also embarked on a path of bold institutional reform. A tantalizing sixth century inscribed document from the island polis of Chios (i840), for example, mentions a “popular council” as an important body of government. In order to mobilize volunteers willing to “bring aid” (like Tellus) in times of emergency, local elites were increasingly compelled to open access to some institutions to local men capable of arming themselves. Poleis that narrowly limited access to state institutions risked losing wars to neighboring states with more extensive citizen bodies.

  There remained considerable social tension within Greek states: Elites in many poleis still commanded considerable property-power; some dreamed of narrowing access and thereby increasing rent shares. Meanwhile, the logic of citizenship led non-elites to seek to expand their access to institutions and to increase their collective influence on public policy. Many Greek poleis experienced violent ongoing struggles between elites who sought to shrink the functional role of citizenship in the distribution of political and social power and poorer male natives who sought to grow it. Rivalries among elites, and the constant quest for innovative paths to gaining social prestige, led ambitious aristocrats to seek support among non-elites. In the most successful Greek states, the trend was toward an equilibrium in which male citizens, elite and non-elite alike, found compelling reasons to cooperate in a political regime that was strikingly inclusive by any premodern standard.58

  Lycurgan Sparta and Solonian Athens offered contrasting approaches to creative destruction of earlier forms of social order and the formation of the “Greek citizen state.” In each state, major constitutional reforms created a large body of citizens who were distinguished from other residents by clearly defined legal and participation rights. In each, the invention of new forms of citizenship allowed for the potential (Athens) or actual (Sparta) mobilization of large bodies of armed men.

  The Athenian model made strong distinctions between citizens and others and allowed for substantial social inequality among citizens. On the other hand, Athens now extended certain legal immunities to all native males and even, in the case of the hubris law, to all residents. It allowed citizens much greater freedom of choice in the conduct of their private lives, and allowed for upward, as well as downward, social and status mobility.

  The Spartan model emphasized strictly enforced social, political, and (notional) material equality among citizens whose monopoly position was secured by the rents extracted, through violence and threat of violence, from other natives in their home territory and maintained by a hyperspecialization in warfare. While perioikoi presumably had some legal rights, the helots, against whom war was declared each year, were denied the protection of even minimal norms of civilized propriety. The Spartan citizenry was homogeneous in principle, and its potential for growth was strictly limited by the ease of downward mobility out of the ranks of the citizens and the impossibility of upward mobility.

  By the later sixth century BCE, Sparta’s revolutionary social order had achieved an equilibrium that enabled Sparta to extend its influence across a substantial part of the Greek world through its Peloponnesian League. It remained unclear how far Sparta’s League might extend beyond the Peloponnese. In Athens’ case, it was unclear whether the combination of a citizen-centered social order, established by Solon, with the autocratic leadership of the tyrants would find a stable equilibrium. The answer to both questions was revealed in the last decade of the sixth century, in the aftermath of a political murder arising from a love triangle within the ranks of the Athenian tyrant’s ruling coalition.

  7

  FROM TYRANNY TO DEMOCRACY, 550–465 BCE

  TYRANT SLAYERS

  The liberators’ knives struck home; the tyrant fell; Athens, freed from despotism, went on to democracy and greatness. Or so the Athenians sometimes liked to imagine. The real story of tyranny, its demise, the origins of democracy, and Athens’ rise to prominence in the Greek world was more complicated and, from the viewpoint of explaining efflorescence, much more interesting. It becomes even more interesting when compared to the experience with tyranny and democracy of Sicilian Syracuse, a polis that seemed in some ways to be Athens’ twin.1

  What the Greeks called tyranny was, outside the Greek world, a historically prevalent form of political order in which the head of a given family rules as an autocrat with the collusion of an elite coalition of specialists in government, ritual, and violence.2 What is surprising about the political hist
ory of the Greek poleis is not that tyrants arose as complex states crystallized but that tyranny failed to become the Greek norm. While many prominent Greek poleis experienced tyrannical interludes, a given tyrannical regime seldom outlived two human generations. When Greek tyrants were overthrown, they were typically replaced, not by another ruling family with its own coalition, but by citizen-centered government. This is surprising in light of the challenge of achieving and sustaining decentralized social cooperation at scale (ch. 3).

  By the mid-fifth century BCE, both Athens and Syracuse had solved the challenge of scaling up without tyranny through the development of democracy as an especially strong form of citizen-centered self-government. Athens and Syracuse were, in the later fifth century, in some ways strikingly similar superpoleis (ch. 8). But the trajectories and institutional forms of tyranny and democracy in Athens and Syracuse were very different. Autocrats and democrats alike must answer the fundamental question of distribution: “Who gets what—and why?” Greek tyrants failed to answer that question in a way that gained them a stable position of exclusive authority. The inability of Greek tyrants to create a powerful ideology of rulership is testimony to the enduring strength of egalitarian values in Greek society. But democracy did not automatically provide a stable alternative. Achieving a workable set of democratic institutions was a matter of constant experimentation—and some experiments failed. The experience with tyranny and democracy at Athens and Syracuse offers a further test of the explanatory power of the two hypotheses (fair rules/capital investment/low transaction costs and competition/innovation/rational cooperation) developed in chapter 5.