by Ober, Josiah
At the other end of the Greek world, the poleis of western Anatolia, formerly subject to Athens, became for a decade subjects of Sparta. With the quick collapse of Sparta’s Aegean imperial project after 394 BCE, they reverted to their early fifth century status as imperial possessions of the Great King of Persia. The Anatolian poleis’ economic standing was not, however, seriously degraded when they were reintegrated into the Persian Empire. Meanwhile, a substantial number of cities near the Anatolian coast became sufficiently culturally Hellenized to be ranked as Greek poleis in the Inventory. The island poleis of the central and northern Aegean were ruled early in the century by Sparta and later taxed by Athens, but in the half century after 355, they experienced an era of especially vigorous efflorescence.2
In mainland Greece, the first half of the fourth century was characterized by the surprisingly quick recovery of Athens and by failed attempts by Sparta and Thebes to build their own coercion-intensive empires. The ultimate failure of any fourth century city-state to create a viable system of domination resembling Athens’ fifth century empire ensured the continuation of the dispersed-authority polis ecology. Athens was a leader in economically salient postimperial institutional innovations: law-based constitutionalism, opening access, and lowering transaction costs. These innovations helped to sustain economic growth insofar as successful Athenian institutional experiments were emulated by other states.
In the Euboean polis of Eretria in around 400 BCE, a set of reforms reorganized the territory on a deme-tribe basis; the new system was clearly modeled on Athens’ Cleisthenic system but was adapted to local Eretrian needs.3 Meanwhile, in Achaea and Aetolia, as in other regions of Hellas, informal cooperative intraregional relations deepened to become the institutional foundations of federal states. In one sense, federalist projects may be seen as recreating Athens’ late sixth/early fifth century success in “getting and staying big” by implementing the system of demes and artificial tribes (ch. 7). But the fourth century Greek federal leagues had distinctive institutional features that were quite different from anything Athens had previously undertaken. The most successful of the Greek leagues developed new forms of two-tier (local and regional) citizenship and managed the fine balance between assertive central authority and independent constituent states. As the American Founders realized in the late eighteenth century, and as contemporary political scientists have demonstrated, finding that balance is the key to creating a federal system capable of robust growth.4
MAP 8 Aegean Greek world, early to mid-fourth century BCE.
Across Hellas, the fourth century saw deepening recognition on the part of people and states of the essential role played by specialization and expertise in gaining individual and collective ends, as well as an increasing self-consciousness about the value of relative advantage. Due to greater demand, experts were more mobile than ever. In at least some regions, increased exchange, promoted by trade-friendly institutional changes, drove transaction costs lower. Elsewhere, as in Sicily before 340, transaction costs soared as a result of endemic political disorder and the collapse of rule-egalitarian constitutional regimes.
Heightened levels of individual expertise and technological innovation were especially apparent in military affairs. Strategic planning became more sophisticated as generals became more adept at integrating light infantry, cavalry, archers, and slingers into field armies. The availability of mercenaries made year-round campaigning easier and promoted the development of strategies aimed at undermining the enemy’s economic infrastructure. The art of siegecraft advanced in technique and technology. Artillery was invented: First came nontorsion, crossbow-type catapults and then, by midcentury, more powerful torsion, spring-type catapults. In response to these advances in siegecraft, poleis adopted new forms of military architecture: City walls were rebuilt to accommodate higher towers, shuttered windows for artillery fire, and more elaborate outworks. In the countryside, fortresses and watchtowers were constructed in an attempt to protect rural populations and vital resources. Meanwhile, foreign policy decision-making became more sophisticated, and new institutions promoted interstate cooperation.5
The fourth century saw bold new experiments in the arts and letters, the flowering of moral thought, and the emergence of new perpetual nonstate civil organizations. The philosophical schools founded at Athens by Plato and Aristotle exemplified several of these trends. But Athens was not the only great center of learning and art: The postimperial era saw the multiplication of centers of enterprise that pioneered advances in architecture and the visual arts; in historiography and poetry; in philosophy and rhetoric; and in natural science and engineering.6
While the polis proved robust as a social, political, and cultural form, Greek elites, and some who expressly rejected elite values (e.g., Diogenes the Cynic), found more freedom to express their individuality. Individuals, rather than collectivities, were now more likely to be regarded by the Greeks as primary agents of historical change. Although tyranny and oligarchy remained viable alternatives, democracy became a more prevalent form of political organization. Meanwhile, democracy itself was evolving. As exemplified by Athens, democracies were more willing to offer extraordinary public honors to individuals whose actions benefited the community. At the same time, the state also placed greater emphasis on the outstanding individual’s legal responsibility for the public effects of his public speech and actions. It was an enhanced conception of the individual’s personal responsibility for the effects of his speech—not religious intolerance or fear of dissident intellectuals—that accounts for the conviction of Socrates by an Athenian court in 399 BCE.7
In this chapter, we look first at the historical development of mainland and Aegean Greece through mid-century. The apparent confusion and disorder arising from interstate conflict is counterpoised to the expansion of the Greek culture zone, more interstate emulation of successful institutional practices, deeper integration of regional confederations of poleis, and the opening of access that is especially evident at Athens. We then turn, more briefly, to the fall and rise of the poleis of Sicily and to the fate of the Anatolian poleis under Persian rule. In the next chapter (ch. 10), we consider the question of Greece’s “political fall”: Why and how, in the era of kings Philip II and Alexander III (359–323 BCE), did the Macedonian state come to dominate the poleis of the Greek mainland, and then, in the course of the conquest of the Persian Empire, the entirety of the eastern Greek world? In the final chapter (ch. 11), we answer the question of why the loss of independence in foreign policy by Athens and the other major classical poleis did not mark an abrupt end to the era of Greek efflorescence.
SPARTA’S FAILED EMPIRE
In the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta had improved its position dramatically: The victory over Athens had eliminated, so it appeared, the grave threat of the continued growth of a dynamic, democratic rival. The victory had been won at the cost of a distasteful deal with the minions of the Great King of Persia. The king had funded the buildup of a Sparta-controlled navy capable of taking on the naval forces of Athens—but his price was Persian control of the Greek poleis of western Anatolia. Immediately following Sparta’s defeat of Athens, the King of Persia was, however, in no position to assert his claim. The old king had died in 405; his successor, Artaxerxes II, was immediately faced with an uprising in Egypt. The revolt broke out in 404 and would last for the whole of Artaxerxes’ long reign; Egypt was not regained until 343 BCE.8
King Artaxerxes soon had an even more pressing problem: His ambitious younger brother, Cyrus II, sought the throne for himself. Cyrus had been chief of Persian operations for western Anatolia during the final stages of the Peloponnesian War, and he knew the Greek world very well. Most saliently, he had a keen appreciation for the capacities of Greek hoplite infantrymen. After the end of the Peloponnesian War, there was a buyer’s market in experienced mercenaries. Cyrus bought himself a big army, including more than 10,000 Greeks. They were led by a Spartan general work
ing ostensibly as a freelance but with the tacit approval of Sparta’s government.
Cyrus’s Greek troops were victorious in what could have been a decisive battle, fought in 401 BCE at Cunaxa in central Mesopotamia. Cyrus himself was, however, killed when, leading a cavalry charge, he was cut off from his army. The Greek commanders were subsequently assassinated in the course of negotiations with the king’s agents. Bereft of leaders and a cause, the surviving Greeks fought their way north through Mesopotamia to Anatolia and the south coast of the Black Sea. The expedition was made famous by Xenophon’s autobiographical narrative (Anabasis). The Greeks’ victory at Cunaxa and their long march through the heart of the Persian Empire proved to anyone paying attention that military expertise was widely distributed among Greek mercenaries, available in bulk, and extremely effective in practice. That lesson was taken to heart by the Great King, his restless agent-governors, the rebels in Egypt, and the Carthaginians—among others.9
With Athens weakened and Persia distracted, Sparta seized control of Athens’ former subject states, establishing garrisons and setting up tightly controlled pro-Spartan governments and garrisons. The Spartans thus cheerfully ignored both their agreement with the Persian king and their wartime rhetoric in which they had claimed to be fighting to liberate the Greeks from imperial despotism. When, beginning in 400 BCE, Artaxerxes reasserted his territorial claims on the basis of the deal with Sparta, a series of Spartan generals, leading mostly mercenary forces, successfully held off the royal proxy armies. Those armies were led by the Persian governors of the western Anatolian provinces, and the governors displayed a notable lack of consistent zeal. The Persian king’s principal-agent problem (ch. 8) remained unsolved. And so it appeared for a time that Sparta might simply replace Athens as the master of the Aegean world.
This was not good news for the Greeks of western Anatolia. Sparta had all the bad features of an imperial overlord, with none of the redeeming features that had, for much of the fifth century, made acquiescence to hegemony a rational strategy for Athens’ subjects. Unlike Athens, Sparta did not play the game of empire with a long time horizon. The newly established pro-Spartan governments were brutally exploitative—the Thirty at Athens (next section) were typical in their predatory policies. Nor did Sparta offer its subjects the compensation of low transaction costs: Sparta did not have its own coinage that might take the place of Athens’ owls as a common currency. Nor was Sparta capable of providing the Aegean with a central market to replace Piraeus. Finally, although we have no evidence one way or another, there is little reason to believe that Sparta used its sea power to provide reliable security against piracy. In brief, if counterfactually Sparta had enjoyed a two-generation run as a master of the eastern Aegean, it seems unlikely that this would have sustained, much less promoted, the classical efflorescence. But, in actuality, Sparta’s Aegean empire lasted no more than a decade.10
King Artaxerxes eventually responded to the Spartan threat by resorting to a tried-and-true approach to securing Persia’s interests on its western frontier. He identified Greeks whose goals aligned with his own and incentivized them, with Persian funds, to act in ways that would achieve his ends. To carry out anti-Spartan naval operations, the king used the Athenian general Conon, who had been living in Cyprus, at the court of a semi-independent dynast, Evagoras, who held the important Cyprian city of Salamis in the king’s name.11 Conon was a skilled admiral and was happy to take command of a Persian-funded fleet that could be used to hurt the interests of the Spartans and to further those of his Athenian compatriots. The upshot was a naval battle fought off the coast of Knidos (i903: just southeast of the island of Cos: map 8) in 394, which broke Spartan sea power in the north Aegean at a stroke and ended Sparta’s overseas imperial project. The Aegean island states went their own way; the Persian king retook the poleis of western Anatolia.
Conon was next dispatched to mainland Greece, where he dispensed Persian funds to those poleis that were by now finding Sparta’s imperial ambitions and high-handed tactics intolerable: These included Sparta’s old enemies Athens and Argos but also some of Sparta’s former allies, including the major states of Thebes and Corinth. The resulting Corinthian War ensured that the Spartan king, Agesilaus, who had campaigned until 394 with some effect in western Anatolia against such of the Persian governors as remained loyal to Artaxerxes, would be tied up in Greece indefinitely. The Corinthian War continued indecisively until 387, when the Great King discovered another Greek state whose interests were now well aligned with his own … Sparta.12
The Spartans and the king of Persia were once again united by their opposition to the Athenians, who had made a quick recovery after the low point of 404. Athens’ walls were rebuilt, and a new, albeit smaller, fleet was commissioned. Athenian generals began campaigning in the northern Aegean—where Athens was interested in regaining key strategic positions. These positions included the islands of Lemnos (i502–503), Imbros (i483), and Skyros (i521), which, together, enabled Athens to patrol the essential grain route from the Bosphorus to Piraeus, and, at least in aspiration, Amphipolis (i553), Sestos (i627), and other strategic towns on the south shore of Thrace and in the northern Aegean (map 8). Athens also reimposed a 10% tax on shipping coming through the Bosphorus and an additional 5% tax on at least Thasos (i526) and Klazomenai (i847). The revival of Athens’ Aegean ambitions was not welcomed by Spartans or Persians, nor was the potential rise of a Boeotian superpolis in central Greece. Thebes, the biggest single polis in the region, had long sought to consolidate the poleis of Boeotia under Theban hegemony—and the Corinthian War was providing an impetus to that end.13
In 387, the king of Persia and the Spartans declared a “common (all eastern Hellas) truce.” It became known as the “King’s Peace” because its terms were to be enforced by the Great King, in conjunction with Sparta and any of the Greeks who saw fit to join him (willing, that is, to use his money to hire mercenaries). The terms of the peace called for the cessation of current hostilities and for perpetual self-rule for all east Greek poleis outside of Anatolia (Anatolian poleis remained subject to the king). The island poleis of the Aegean were to remain independent. An exception to the autonomy clause was allowed for Sparta’s possession of the towns of Laconia and of Messenia (ch. 6). Another exception, granted to buy Athenian acquiescence, allowed Athens to keep Lembros, Imbros, and Skyros. But the Boeotian confederacy was to be broken up into its constituent poleis. Also disallowed was an innovative union of the two big poleis of Corinth and Argos. They had made substantial steps toward conjoining into what would have been a second Peloponnesian superpolis. Sparta was now back in the driver’s seat in the Greek mainland: likely to cause trouble for its rivals but quite unlikely to bother the king, who was now securely in possession of the Anatolian poleis.14
The Spartans quickly moved to take advantage of the situation, attacking mainland states within and outside the Peloponnese, forcing regime changes when they suited Sparta’s interest and seizing and garrisoning Thebes. Among Sparta’s most aggressive moves was the breakup of the major Arcadian city of Mantinea (i281: size 4), employing a strong reading of the autonomy clause of the King’s Peace to force the Mantineans to disperse to villages in the countryside. Sparta was beginning to demonstrate some of the taste for social engineering that had characterized the Sicilian tyrants of the early fifth century.
In response, the Athenians built a new anti-Spartan alliance. In 377, after an abortive invasion of Attica by a rogue Spartan commander went unpunished by Spartan authorities, Athens inaugurated a second naval league. This was a sort of anti-Delian League in that its target was Sparta, not Persia, and its charter was carefully designed to prevent the reemergence of Athenian imperialism. The league states, eventually numbering about 70, were to provide funds, as well as ships and men. The league prevented Sparta from rebuilding a credible naval force, but it never became an effective instrument of Athenian policy in the way that the Delian League had been, and it was never run at a profit
to Athens.15
Meanwhile, in 378 BCE anti-Spartan Thebans, with Athenian help, expelled the Spartan garrison from Thebes. Under the dynamic leadership of the ambitious generals Pelopidas and Epaminondas, the Thebans set out to rebuild their Boeotian League and to challenge Spartan supremacy on land. Their timing was good. Sparta was by now an empty shell. The Lycurgan social system (ch. 6), devised in a very different era and aimed at securing somewhat more modest ends, proved a bad fit for the challenges of the fourth century. Sparta’s soldiers were still, man for man, equal to their ancestors as warriors and in battlefield know-how—as proved by the frequency with which Spartan commanders were hired as mercenary commanders across and beyond the Greek world. But, having recently and repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to break interstate agreements as soon as it suited their interests, the Spartans were in a poor position to make the new and credible commitments that would have been necessary to sustain an extensive hegemony.
Like imperial Athens, the Spartans lacked a compelling ideology to support their transparently self-serving policies. The old claim to be the liberators of the Greeks had been shown up, time and again, for the lie it always had been. Spartans could not lean on the rationality of acquiescence. There was little reason for other states to find Sparta’s commitments credible. Even their willingness to support ruling coalitions that they had themselves put into power was unreliable—as the Thirty at Athens discovered in 403 (next section). Worst of all, there were not many Spartan Equals left to do the fighting when it came down to physical coercion.
The numbers of Spartans had fallen catastrophically as a result of high war casualties, low birth rates, and downward status mobility—demotion from the status of Spartan to Inferior due to individual failures of duty on the battlefield or in provisioning the regimental dining clubs. Downward mobility was driven by growing economic inequality. Writing in the late fourth century, Aristotle noted that, “some Spartans have come to have far too many possessions, while others very few indeed; as a result, the land has fallen into the hands of a small number … although the land was sufficient to support 1500 cavalry and 30,000 hoplites, the number [of Spartans] fell to below 1000.”16 By the 370s, forty years before Aristotle wrote those lines, the ranks of the Spartan Equals had dropped from a high of some 9,000 in the sixth century, to perhaps 1,300. Increasingly, the burden of fighting Sparta’s wars fell on non-Spartans: “marginals,” liberated helots, or hired mercenaries. And thus, Sparta was quickly losing its one all-important relative advantage: the certainty that in an open-field infantry battle, the Spartan army would always win.
