by Ober, Josiah
Of course, properly identified expertise in various domains of knowledge was only useful to public decisions insofar as particular domains were relevant to specific policy issues and insofar as the right weight was given by the decision-makers to each domain in addressing the matter at hand. Over time, the collective experience of the Council, passed down through annual year-classes of Councilors via increasingly dense social networks, helped to define the domains of expertise relevant to various areas of state policy and the relative significance of each relevant domain to certain kinds of issues.
Insofar as (1) decision-makers properly identified experts in each domain relevant to the issue, (2) experts sincerely disclosed their knowledge, (3) decision-makers appropriately deferred to experts within their domain, and (4) they properly weighted the significance of each domain to the overall decision, the outcome was likely to be a better decision—that is, one that better promoted the common interest in security and welfare. The process of seeking and using information and expertise remained subject to error and to manipulation. But over time, the intersection of growing trust and aggregate social knowledge among citizens, increasing specialization in various domains of endeavor, and institutional learning pushed in the direction of collective wisdom.
Athenian collective wisdom seems manifest, at least after the fact, in the decision to expand the navy of warships and then in the decision to fight the Persians at sea. Herodotus’ (7.140–144) detailed account of the assembly meeting at which the decision was made to fight at sea makes it clear that a different (and presumably worse) decision would have been made had the Athenians counterfactually followed the advice of traditional sources of authority: supposed experts in oracle interpretation or community elders—both of whom urgently warned against the sea fight. In the new institutional order, however, the democratic value of “equality in respect to public speech” ensured that the opinions of neither oracle interpreters nor elders would be dispositive. Because the advice of experts in relevant domains was given proper weight, both by the Council and by the assembly, the choice of “fight at sea” was selected over the other options. The outcome was the victory that preserved Athenian, and in general Greek, freedom. That victory set up the both the cultural “golden age” of the mid-fifth century BCE and Athens’ bold if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to create its own Mediterranean empire (ch. 8).25
Elite Incentives
Along with increasing trust and using diverse forms of expert knowledge, the new democracy avoided both disruptive civil conflict and elite capture. Ostracism is a particularly dramatic example of an accountability procedure that helped to push back against each of these threats to democratic government. The annual decision whether or not to hold an ostracism—and thus to put the most prominent men in the state at risk of expulsion from the community for 10 years—was in and of itself a very public reminder to the elite, collectively, of the authority exercised by the citizenry over civic standing. Ostracism allowed the demos to step in, decisively, when elite rivalry threatened to burgeon into violent civil strife. Ostracism, in effect, allowed the Athenians to answer, through a peaceful institution, the demand of Solon’s supposed law requiring citizens to take sides in a civil war.26
Ostracism also served a highly salient role as a kind of knowledge-aggregating “preemptive prediction market” that allowed Athens to identify and eliminate possible internal threats to civic order. The new democratic regime confronted the problem of how to address behavior that put the internal stability of the polis at risk without creating an intrusive and unwieldy police apparatus and without unduly crushing entrepreneurial initiative on the part of talented elites. The annual decision about whether to hold an ostracism aggregated the collective judgment of the citizens regarding the level of danger facing the state from rival elites. This first vote answered a question about how a present state of affairs might play out in the future: “Is there in the polis an individual whose continued presence would put the state enough at risk to justify his expulsion without evidence of criminal wrongdoing and without trial?” If Athenians were, collectively, oversensitive to the danger posed by ambitious elites, resulting in many “false positives,” the institution would be overused, and presumably elites would become overcautious. In the event, the Athenians voted to hold an ostracism only 15 times in the 180-year history of the classical-era democracy, and there was never a shortage of skilled and ambitious men vying for positions of influence in the state.
On the rare occasions on which more than half the citizens did believe that the danger level was high enough and enough of them voted accordingly, the ostracism itself was held: On the appointed day, each citizen went to the agora with a sherd (ostrakon) inscribed with the name of one man. These votes were cast without formal deliberation, counted, and the name of the man with the most votes was announced. This second vote aggregated many independent judgments about prominent individuals to answer a second question: “Whose continued presence would be most likely to put Athens at risk?” The vote by ostraka both identified and preempted what the plurality of voters saw as the least preferable, because most dangerous, alternative future for the polis—the future in which a given person X remained in the polis.
Unlike a genuine prediction market (held in advance of an election, for example), Athenian voters could not know, ex post, whether the collective ex ante choice had been right—i.e., that it had accurately identified a dangerous alternative future: Would things actually have gone badly if X had remained in Athens? Nor could they know that the most dangerous alternative had been eliminated: Perhaps the presence of Y, unostracized, actually presented a greater danger. Nor could they even be sure that the ostracism had not increased the danger: With X out of the way, Y might be more able to cause trouble. What they did know is that the process represented the aggregated judgment of the community on this highly consequential matter and, as time went on, that the democracy seemed to be proving robust to the endemic problem of internal strife arising from intraelite rivalry.
Cleisthenes himself could not have predicted the full effects of his reforms, any more than could Solon before him. But building on the laws of Solon, the Cleisthenic package changed the rules of the Athenian state in ways that seem to have oriented individual behavior of elite and ordinary citizens alike in an overall growth-positive direction. If the arguments developed here are on the right track, the federalist features of the system had the effect of increasing trust and widening social networks. The organization of the Council provided new avenues for the identification and gainful employment of expertise. Ostracism dampened the most dangerous aspects of elite rivalry, without reducing socially valuable forms of elite competition. And so we can begin to fill in Herodotus’ somewhat telegraphic statement about why, in the era after the end of the tyranny, Athens rose to greater prominence in the Greek world.
SICILY IN THE LATE SIXTH AND EARLY FIFTH CENTURIES BCE
By the later sixth century, some of the Greek colonial poleis of southern Italy and Sicily were growing rich—or at least their ruling elites were. Along its coasts, Sicily boasted a dozen major Greek poleis (size 4 or larger) and another dozen smaller poleis. Inland, in the central, western, and northwestern highlands, there were perhaps two dozen substantial settlements of native Sikels, Sikans, and Elymians (map 6). Some of these inland settlements, notably Segesta in the northwest, had already taken on cultural features characteristic of Greek poleis. Thanks to robust natural population growth and very substantial ongoing flows of new immigrants from the Greek homeland—including new colonists, homesteaders, pirates, mercenaries, and other adventurers—the Greek population of Sicily was rising impressively from its modest beginnings. The total population of the island may have reached a peak of ca. 650,000 (appendix I: region 2) by the mid-fifth century.27
The prosperity and population growth of Sicily were driven in the first instance by the agricultural productivity of the island.28 Greek Sicily produced major surpluses of grain, which
was shipped west to the Greek mainland, and of wine, which was sent south to Carthage. Because of these ready markets, the Sicilian coastal cities were able to specialize in production of food staples for export and to import goods from the Greek homeland—as well as from Carthaginians, Etruscans, and others. Indirect taxes on imports and exports provided substantial state revenues that could be used for various purposes—among them the construction of magnificent temples, some of which, by the fifth century, rivaled the most ambitious architectural projects of the mainland Greek states.
Perhaps because their locations directly on the coast (Leontini: i33, about 10 km inland from Sicily’s east coast, was the exception) gave them ready access to one another via convenient sea lanes, the major Sicilian Greek poleis seem to have formed an especially tight regional network. Institutional innovations in one polis tended to spread quickly across Greek Sicily. Tyranny is a notable case in point. Within 20 years after 505 BCE, when a tyrant named Cleander seized control of Gela (i17: size 5), every major Greek polis in Sicily was dominated by a tyrant. The tyrants, variously collaborating and competing with one another, effectively divided Greek Sicily into three mini-empires (often called epicracies by historians), centered on Akragas (i9: size 5) in the west, Zancle–Messana (i51: size 4) in the northeast, and Syracuse in the southeast. The expansionist tyrants put pressure on native settlements and thus extended the zone of Greek-dominated territory inland, while at the same time driving native state formation. Meanwhile, on the northwestern coast, the Carthaginians had close relations with the Punic towns of Motya, Panormus, and Soloeis. These places remained outside the tyrants’ imperial ambitions.29
The tyrants of Sicily came to power in the context of incipient or actual civil strife. Although some Sicilian poleis may, at their foundation, have sought to establish a degree of material equality among colonists, by the later sixth century BCE, elites held most of the best agricultural territory and controlled polis governments. Recent immigrants and less-successful long-term residents were pushed into conditions approaching peonage and were increasingly restive. As we saw in chapter 6, an elite coalition at Athens, when faced with a similarly fraught situation, granted Solon legislative authority to change the constitution. Elites in Sicilian poleis, by contrast, failed to coordinate on a plan that might have forestalled tyranny.
MAP 6 Sicily.
The Sicilian tyrants of the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE acted as superelites. Already members of the very wealthiest families in their respective cities, they used control of public revenues to place themselves in a new and exalted tier of wealth and power within communities with growing economies. They were not social reformers, in that they did little to address problems arising from inequality. They did not need to appeal to the masses for continued support—instead, they used their control of public moneys to buy the services of bodyguards and then large, well-trained mercenary armies. With a near monopoly on the efficient use of violence, the tyrants turned to social engineering to create new coalitions of men dependent on tyrannical rule.
For a long generation, the grandiose plans and relatively immense power wielded by the tyrants remade Sicily’s human geography. Like the great kings of Mesopotamia, the tyrants of Sicily moved populations about at will; they emptied cities of their residents, filled established cities with new residents, and founded new poleis while destroying others or leaving them to languish. The driving motivation behind these grand schemes was the desire of the tyrants to increase and to display their power rather than to grow local economies through long-term economic planning. The tyrants were able to do much as they pleased so long as they controlled the very substantial revenues of the Sicilian cities and so long as they maintained power through the support of well-compensated specialists in violence. Mercenaries had a stake in the continuation of the tyrant’s rule that exceeded their daily pay, in that they were treated by the tyrants as citizens of the cities they garrisoned. As we have seen, citizenship really mattered to the Greeks.
SYRACUSE UNDER THE TYRANTS
The first tyrant of Gela was succeeded in 498 by his brother, Hippocrates, who immediately embarked on a campaign of imperial expansion. Within a few years, he controlled much of eastern Sicily. In 492 BCE, Hippocrates set his sights on Syracuse. The polis of Syracuse was already the biggest city-state in Sicily, with a territory of perhaps 5,000 km2—twice the size of Athens’ home territory of Attica. But, like Athens in the early sixth century, Syracuse in the early fifth century punched below its weight, in large part because of endemic social strife. The dominant elite coalition, the Gamoroi (“They Who Divide the Land”), were probably descendants of original colonists. They ruled over a much larger population that included Killyrians—native Sikels reduced to the status of slaves or sharecroppers—and an increasingly discontented non-elite Greek population, probably mostly composed of relatively recent immigrants. Hippocrates defeated the Syracusan army in battle, but rather than risk a siege, he accepted a mediated settlement that gave him control of much of Syracuse’s territory, including the important (size 4) dependent town of Camarina (i28).
A year later, Hippocrates was succeeded as tyrant of Gela by a core member of his coalition, the cavalry commander Gelon. Like the other Sicilian tyrants, Gelon belonged to a wealthy and prominent family; he soon contracted an alliance, through marriages of kinfolk, with the tyrant of Akragas. This left him free to complete the conquest of Syracuse. As it turns out, it was not a difficult job.
The loss of Camarina had exacerbated non-elite Syracusan dissatisfaction with the ruling Gamoroi. An uprising by a revolutionary coalition of free Greeks and Killyrians drove the Gamoroi from the city. This first Syracusan popular uprising did not result in a viable new regime. The Gamoroi took refuge in Kasmenai (i29), a dependent town whose territory abutted that of Camarina—now controlled by Gelon. In a move reminiscent of Isagoras’ appeal for Spartan aid after Cleisthenes brought the demos into his coalition, the elite Gamoroi appealed to Gelon for help against their fellow Syracusans. Gelon happily complied. The Killyrian and free Syracusan forces proved incapable of withstanding the well-organized army of the tyrant. The Gamoroi were momentarily restored to power, but Gelon had bigger plans for Syracuse.
Leaving control of Gela to his brother, Hieron, Gelon took up residence in Syracuse and proceeded to remake the city as a tyrannical capital worthy of his very considerable ambitions. Most saliently, he radically increased the city’s size by enforced immigration at the expense of other Sicilian poleis. First, the entire population of Camarina was transported to Syracuse, where they were added to the citizen body. Next came Megara Hyblaea (i36: size 4), defeated by Gelon in a siege. Megara’s elites were transported to Syracuse as new citizens; the non-elite population was enslaved and sold abroad. A similar fate befell Sicilian Euboea (i15). Finally, half the population of Gela was deported to Syracuse. Gelon may have borrowed the idea of transportation of populations from the Persians, who (following a well-established west Asian imperial tradition) had punished not only Eretria in 490 but also Miletus (i854) in 494 for its leadership in the Ionian revolt by razing the town, killing many of the men, and transporting the survivors to a settlement on the Persian Gulf. But Gelon’s motivation was clearly constructive rather than merely punitive: He meant to create a superpolis as the center of his east-Sicilian mini-empire.
The structural problem faced by any would-be superpolis was how to be at once big as a city-state and coherent as a citizen-state. Both Sparta and Athens had devised distinctive solutions to the problem: Sparta created an extensive and homogeneous citizenry, dedicated to specializations in violence and government that would enable them to dominate a much larger subject population. Athens created a system of laws and then a networked federal system that allowed an extensive citizen body to remain socially and economically diverse while pursuing common ends through aggregated knowledge. Gelon brought about the first of the imperatives of the superpolis, being big, by tyrannical fiat—by transporting G
reeks, and especially elite Greeks, to be citizens in his new imperial capital. Whether he would be able to achieve the second condition, of coherence, was yet to be seen.
The relative standing of the new and old citizens of Syracuse under the tyrants remains murky. What we can say is that the Gamoroi as such disappeared from history: Their monopoly on high standing was evidently overthrown by the new immigrants, many of whom were elites in their own right. Because Gelon seems systematically to have preferred elite immigrants (explicity so in the case of Megara), he seems to have had in mind the creation of a new, supersized imperial elite that would owe its very existence to the tyrant himself. Although we can say nothing for certain, it seems likely that the new citizens of Syracuse were allowed to keep their movable possessions and were given land grants from confiscated territories within the tyrant’s extensive domains. Meanwhile, the Killyrians were left in serfdom.
It is certain that Syracuse was now among the most populous city-states of the Greek world. As the tyrant’s capital, it also became one of the wealthiest. While Gelon was a bold social engineer in some domains, he seems to have done nothing to interfere with the highly profitable agricultural base of Sicilian prosperity: The tyrant skimmed enough rents to become immensely wealthy, but he kept the wealth-oriented elites in his extensive coalition content by sharing enough of the rents and suppressing the dangerous ambitions of the poorer Greeks and natives. This policy paid off handsomely: Gelon was remembered by the Greek historical tradition as a benevolent despot whose reign had brought social order and prosperity to the cities under his control (Diodorus 11.38).
