by Ober, Josiah
The reason for the repeal of petalism, according to Diodorus (11.87.4), was that “since the most influential men were being sent into exile,” there was a general withdrawal from public affairs by elites capable of taking leadership roles in the community. The frequency of petalism during its brief tenure must, if we are to believe Diodorus, have been high enough to have had the undesirable result of dissuading at least some talented individuals from entering public service. It therefore seems likely that, unlike Athens—where only one ostracism could be held each year, and where the practice was, as we have seen, used sparingly—petalism could be used to expel a citizen whenever the Syracusan assembly so chose. The inauguration of petalism can best be explained as the result of an attempt by a broad-based coalition to preserve social order by imposing restraint on ambitious individuals—whether elected officials or demagogues. But the weapon proved impossible to control, as the citizen masses, led on by ambitious elites, turned it on anyone they distrusted. The reform coalition then was rebuilt for long enough to repeal the law—but not for long enough to bring long-term stability to Syracuse’s government: Diodorus (11.87.5) reports that after the repeal, political strife remained endemic.
The divergent histories of Athenian ostracism and Syracusan petalism show that institutional transfer is not a simple affair: Because both the sociocultural context and the details of mechanism design matter, superficially similar institutions may enhance the performance of one state’s government while degrading that of another. Either the very different Syracusan political environment or the frequency of its use might have doomed petalism to failure. Together, they predictably led to a negative effect on elite choices regarding participation in public affairs. That negative effect was, however, not fatal to Syracuse’s wealth. Despite all the political unrest, Syracuse in the mid-fifth century, like other Sicilian poleis in the same period, was economically prosperous. Syracuse had a large and increasingly urbanized population and substantial surpluses available for investment in major building projects. Those projects, as we see in the next chapter, included massive fortifications and improved military forces.
EXPLAINING SICILIAN WEALTH
The political and economic history of Syracuse in the early to mid-fifth century provides a counterpoint to that of Athens and Sparta in the sixth and early fifth century BCE. As such, it sets up a test whereby the explanatory hypotheses for the classical Greek efflorescence, offered in chapter 5, might be falsified. The Greek poleis of Sicily do seem to have participated in the wider Greek efflorescence from the pre-tyrannical mid-sixth century, through the tyrannical early fifth century, and into the posttyrannical mid-fifth century. At least one apparent case of institutional transfer, ostracism/petalism, was a signal failure. We might conclude, therefore, that political arrangements and institutional emulation had no discernible positive effects on Sicilian prosperity, and therefore that we ought to seek an explanation outside the organization of political order for the general phenomenon of classical efflorescence.
Before drawing any conclusions, however, we have to take into account the role of interdependence. Sicily’s archaic and classical-era wealth was derived, in part, from surplus grain exported to the eastern Greek poleis. without the growth of the eastern Greek population, and without the specialization of the eastern Greeks in economic activities that enabled them to pay for imported grain, Sicilian poleis would have had fewer markets for exported grain.39 Syracusan wealth was to some degree bound up in eastern Greek development, just as eastern Greek development was furthered by the ready availability of Sicilian grain.
Any conclusions about whether the fair rules/low transaction costs and competition/innovation hypotheses introduced in chapter 5 are helped or hurt by the Sicilian case need to wait until the full historical quasi-experiment has been run. In the next three chapters, we complete the experiment by taking the narrative of wealthy Hellas down to the late fourth century—to the end of the era in which great independent Greek states made their own policy choices without being subject to the will of an imperial overlord. An important part of that story, told in the next chapter, is the rise and fall of the most promising native Greek attempt to sustain a Hellenic empire.
8
GOLDEN AGE OF EMPIRE, 478–404 BCE
PREEMPTIVE WAR
In 478 BCE, as they surveyed the wreckage of their once-beautiful city, the Athenians reckoned the cost of victory in the Persian wars. There was much to celebrate: The bulk of the population had survived, evacuated in advance of the Persian attack to safe havens in the Peloponnesus. The bold choice of the young democratic regime to fight at sea had been vindicated. The tenuous alliance with Sparta had remained intact for the duration of the war. Athens’ reputation had grown. Along with the Spartans, the Athenians were honored at Delphi by their fellow Greeks as having contributed decisively to the victories on land and sea. A great bronze tripod monument in the form of intertwined snakes had been inscribed with the names of the states that had defied the Persians. Punishment had been and would be meted out to Greeks who had too eagerly embraced the Persian side.1
On the other side of the ledger, Athens’ losses, collective and individual, were profound. Many good men, hoplite infantrymen and rowers in the fleet, had died in battle; the elders who had made a desperate stand on the acropolis had been massacred. The urban center had been twice occupied by the invaders and twice looted and sacked, its temples and sanctuaries burned. The dozens of marble statues and other dedications that had graced the peak of the Acropolis had been defiled; they were tossed into a heap and buried. Sacred buildings were deliberately left in ruins as a reminder of Persian sacrilege. Towns in the countryside had been plundered. Agriculture, trade, and industry were disrupted. It would be a full generation before the Athenian mint would be ready to return to full production of silver coins.2
Worse yet, in 478, there was little reason for anyone in the Greek world to believe that the Persian threat had been eliminated by the victories at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. With the exception of the Aegean islands and the Greek cities on the south coast of Thrace and along the western coasts of Anatolia, Persia’s empire was intact. Persia still controlled vast capital resources and a huge population. The Persian Great King had made two serious attempts to conquer mainland Greece and was known not to tolerate failure. There was every reason for the Greeks to suppose that he would try again.
The Spartans had lost soldiers at the land battles of Thermopylae and Plataea, but their territory was untouched by the war. They had gained in prestige from their military leadership in the successful operations, and they regarded themselves as the natural leaders of Hellas. In what must have seemed to many Athenians a blatantly self-seeking ploy to extend their authority and to weaken rival states in central Greece, the Spartans now proposed that no Greek city north of the Isthmus of Corinth should be fortified—ostensibly to deny the Persians a base of operations when they next invaded. Returning to a plan that they had urged after the pass at Thermopylae had been turned in 480, Sparta proposed constructing a defensive wall across the isthmus—a plan that would explicitly sacrifice all Greek poleis north of the Peloponnese, including, of course, Athens (Thucydides 1.90).
Herodotus (7.139.3) had mocked Sparta’s earlier isthmus wall plan as strategically absurd (the Persians could readily use transport ships to land expeditionary forces south of the wall). Moreover, it did not take strategic genius to recognize that the plan played directly to Sparta’s relative advantage in military operations. Without urban fortifications, the states north of the isthmus would be endemically vulnerable to the Peloponnesian League armies, led by Sparta’s crack army of hoplite warriors. The Spartans, backed by the allies, were formidable in open-field battle but had no deep experience in siege operations. Without fortifications, Sparta’s rivals were much more vulnerable to coercion.3
Rejecting the Spartan plan, the Athenians quickly threw a circuit wall around their city, employing as some of their construction mater
ials rubble from public buildings wrecked by the invaders. For the Athenians, the strategic question was not how to fight the Persians once they returned but how to preempt their return. Sea power was the key. The operations of the recent wars had demonstrated with stark clarity the essential role played by sea power in Persia’s capacity to invade Greece in force. The first attack on the mainland, in 490, had come by sea, across the Aegean. The second attack, in 480, had come over land via Thrace and Thessaly, but the size and complexity of Persia’s land forces required massive and continuous resupply by sea. The army was much too large for the invaders to count on “living off the land” by commandeering local food supplies along their route. So long as the Greeks had a credible navy, Persian supply ships (in the form of unarmed sailing vessels), upon which the invading army depended, had to be protected by Persian warships (oared galleys).4
The Greek naval victory at Salamis in 480 had turned the tide of the war by putting the Persian overseas logistical operation at risk. Without naval supremacy, the Great King had been constrained to evacuate the bulk of his army (along with himself). The Persian army that fought at Plataea in 479 was only a fragment of the original invasion force—albeit it was composed of elite troops and well led by top Persian commanders. The naval victory at Mycale had temporarily knocked out the bulk of the Persian navy. But with its store of treasure and a huge population that included many with experience in naval operations, the Persians could soon be ready to put a new naval force into the Aegean from bases in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt. Unless, that is, someone stopped them.
The Athenians had a plan for how to do that. Their own navy of triremes was largely intact. Moreover, the victory at Mycale had liberated the Greek poleis of the Aegean islands, southern Thrace, and western Anatolia. Whether they welcomed the liberation or not, the residents of these Aegean, Thracian, and Anatolian poleis knew that if the Persians returned, the king would be likely to take vengeance upon them as traitors to the Empire. As the hapless residents of Eretria and Miletus had learned, “Great King of Persia as taker of vengeance, in the name of god, against despicable traitors” was a central part of Persian royal ideology. No doubt there was a range of opinion among Persia’s former subjects about the costs and benefits of having been part of the Persian Empire. While some former subjects certainly longed to be free of Persia (Herodotus 8.132), being subjects of the empire had certainly offered advantages for others. But with the Great King absent and assumed infuriated, and with the Athenians and Spartans in no mood to brook any expression of pro-Persian sentiment, the citizens of the liberated Greek states now had strong reasons to cooperate in a plan that would prevent a Persian reconquest.5
With these factors in mind, the Athenians proposed their plan: A new anti-Persian alliance, extended in membership and in duration, would be formed under the same joint Spartan–Athenian leadership that had brought victory in the recent war. Its goal would be to keep naval pressure on the Persians, through privateering and preemptive attacks on any organized force of Persian warships that dared show itself in Mediterranean waters, thereby preventing the reemergence of a Persian military presence substantial enough to threaten any part of the extended Greek world. But the Spartans demurred, as they had before in the face of Gelon of Syracuse’s offer to support the eastern Greek cause against Persia at the price of his own participation in leadership—or at least they dragged their feet for so long that the Athenians proceeded without them.
Sparta’s hesitancy to join in the naval confederation plan was determined at least in part by a path dependency—the constraint of current choices by past decisions—arising from their prior commitment to specialization in land warfare. Despite the success of Spartan naval commanders in the later phases of the war against Persia, seaborne operations were not Sparta’s strong suit: Warships required big capital outlays and large crews of reliable men who were not needed for hoplite service. Sparta had neither: Those who were reliable were needed as hoplites; those who were not needed as hoplites were unreliable.6
Moreover, the Spartans needed to keep most of their military forces relatively nearby if they were to maintain escalation dominance—the capacity to win wars at increasing scale (“if the conflict escalates, we still win”)—over both the numerous helots and potentially restive Peloponnesians.7 Finally, to ice the cake of their disapproval, a Spartan king who had been posted in the north Aegean as part of the anti-Persian operations late in the war had gone seriously off the rails: Reportedly, he had conspired with the Great King of Persia. Whatever the truth of that accusation, he had certainly acted in a very un-Spartan fashion, dressing and feasting in the Persian manner and surrounding himself with a foreign bodyguard. This was clear enough evidence for the Spartans, had any been needed, that the social panopticon of the Lycurgan system was essential for maintaining Spartan society in its current equilibrium.
So Athens was left to implement the anti-Persian confederation on its own. Most of the Aegean and coastal Anatolian Greek states were quickly signed up, and other states joined, voluntarily or otherwise, in the years to come. The result was the Delian League (map 7), named after the tiny Aegean island (later a Roman-era trade center and notorious slave market) dedicated to Apollo. Here, at a site especially sacred to the Ionian Greeks who were, ethnolinguistically, the majority of the League’s membership, a common treasury was to be established and league meetings would be held to discuss policy. The league’s stated purpose was to build and man enough warships to maintain active naval patrols in the Aegean throughout the sailing season—winter operations were for the most part out of the question, due to weather.8
But who would build and who would man the warships? Many of the member states of the league were very small. Most had neither the local expertise nor the facilities to build, row, or store (in the off-season) the state-of-the-art trireme warships that would be the ships of the line in all major anti-Persian operations. Athens had both growing expertise and experience in ship-building and a large population with a proven willingness to take to the sea in force. But the post-Persian War Athenians were obviously in no condition to pay for all necessary work themselves—Athens had taken a big hit in the war and already had heavy calls on whatever funds they could raise from their own pockets.
MAP 7 Athenian empire (maximum extent).
Expost, the solution was obvious: Athenians, with their recognized specialization in naval architecture and naval warfare and a manpower base to match, would build and operate most of the ships. Several other major poleis would contribute their own ships and men. But most of the members of the league would contribute money instead. An Athenian named Aristeides came up with the schedule of payments—in ships or silver—for each polis in the league, famously earning himself the nickname, at least among Athenians (Plutarch Life of Aristeides 7.6), of “the Just” for the equitability of his arrangement.
The agreement that brought the new confederation into existence was sealed with solemn oaths that would be kept, it was promised, until iron ingots, ceremonially thrown into the sea, floated. The new league began operations immediately, reducing several important Persian strongholds in the north Aegean and forcing the south-Euboean polis of Karystos (i373), which had been pro-Persian during the war, into the league. The league’s first decade was capped by a major victory in 469 BCE at the Eurymedon River on the southwest coast of Anatolia. The strategic plan was working: Persia had not come back. And meanwhile, a newly invigorated Aegean exchange economy was emerging. It was dispersed across many markets but more focused than before on Athens and its port at Piraeus.9
TROUBLE WITH SPARTA
There was, however, trouble almost from the beginning. Insofar as Persia was a real threat, the security provided by the Delian League against any potential resurgence by Persia was a nonexcludable public good, in the sense that every Greek state potentially vulnerable to Persian predation benefited from the league’s activity in preventing Persian operations. Those states that contributed nothing to
the effort to muzzle Persia reaped just as much of the benefit as did those that contributed much. Moreover, in an easily conceivable counterfactual, if Persia were someday to defeat the forces of the league and thus retake the eastern Aegean, those states that had refused to participate in anti-Persian military actions might be spared the full force of the Great King’s righteous vengeance. Thus, there was a strong incentive for each of the league states to free ride on the security conditions produced by the collective action of the others, by failing to contribute to the league. If one state were successful in this self-interested strategy, it could precipitate an emulation cascade of defection, dooming the league and leaving Athens, and all Hellas, vulnerable to Persia.
The wealthy Aegean polis of Naxos (i507: size 4, fame 4) was the first Greek state to attempt to defect from the league. The response was swift: Naxos was besieged by an Athenian-led naval group and forced back into compliance. The pattern of attempted defection (through nonpayment of dues) followed by efficient reprisal was to be repeated on a fairly regular basis over the next two generations, generally with the same result. As Thucydides (1.98–99) notes, the Athenians, who built and manned the ships, also did most of the actual fighting. They were therefore constantly gaining in military experience—in, for example, naval operations, siegecraft, and logistics—relative to those league states that contributed only money.
