by Ober, Josiah
Meanwhile, although in certain respects subject to the constraints imposed by membership in the League of Corinth, Athens, like other Greek poleis, remained actively engaged in cooperative interstate relations that remained unregulated by royal authority and yet essential for sustained prosperity. In the late 330s, Greece was hit by a severe grain shortage, probably as the result of an especially bad harvest in Egypt—a big and reliable exporter of grain in normal years. A unique document from Kyrene (i1028), the leading Greek polis in North Africa west of Egypt, records shipments of grain to 43 beneficiaries, 41 of them Greek city-states. In each case, the beneficiary state would have sent commissioners to Kyrene, requesting a specific amount of grain; the government of Kyrene in turn bought grain (wheat or barley) locally and granted export licenses to various poleis. Under the circumstances, the authorities in Kyrene could set the price of grain wherever they wished. As the University of Chicago’s Alain Bresson argues in his definitive analysis of the document, the actual price charged by the Kyrenean state authorities was probably well below what they could have demanded in light of the grain shortage.22
Athens received the biggest shipment (100,000 medimnoi: 12.4% of the total grain recorded in the inscription). If distributed across the entire Athenian population, this would be about 21 L (at ordinary prices, about 1.5 days’ wages for an adult male) per capita.23 Other major poleis (Argos, Larissa, Corinth, Rhodes, Sicyon, Megara) received 30,000–50,000 medimnoi; relatively tiny poleis, including Karthaia and Koresia on Keos, also received several thousand medimnoi. In every case, this must represent substantially more grain per capita than was exported to Athens.
As Alain Bresson cogently argues, the Kyreneans erected the inscription because they were proud of having saved the other Greeks from a potential famine. They did not exploit the grain shortage by charging extortionate prices, but they did not lose from the deal either. Both the local farmers of Kyrene and the state itself stood to gain, financially as well as in prestige, from the evidently well-managed relief effort. The point is that the Greek world remained decentralized and productively interdependent after the political fall. Interstate exchange of information and goods buffered what could have been severe local conditions of famine. There was no intervention, or need of intervention, by an imperial Leviathan. The effective response was predicated on good information (identifying local deficits and surpluses across the ecology) and on a form of rational cooperation that used market mechanisms while rejecting profit maximization as the only relevant value.24
Several years later, in 325, the Athenians erected an inscription detailing the dispatch of a number of warships to a naval base that Athens had established somewhere in the Adriatic. The inscription states that the purpose of the expedition was “so that the demos may for all future time have its own commerce and transport in grain and that the establishment of their own naval station may result in a guard against the Etruscan pirates … and that those Greeks and barbarians sailing the sea, and themselves sailing into the Athenians’ naval station, will have their ships and all else secure….” Athens was obviously continuing its policy of using its naval power to suppress pirates and thereby push down the costs of exchange, especially for the essential trade in grain. The primary beneficiaries are the Athenian citizens themselves (the demos). But the decree is explicit in recognizing that the interests of the Athenians were conjoined to those of their trading partners, both Greek and non-Greek (“barbarian”) and that those interests involved security in respect to property: “[they] will have their ships and all else secure.” The inscription points to the continuation of actions by a Greek state, acting independently to secure overseas trading routes as a public good. That public good was among the underlying cooperative conditions that had sustained the classical efflorescence.25
After the Lamian War of 322 had effectively eliminated Athenian naval power, Athens could no longer defend interstate commerce against pirates. But Athens was not the only Greek polis concerned with trade: In the later fourth and third centuries, Rhodes, which had a huge trade in wine, grain, and other commodities, took on the responsibility of patrolling the Aegean and thus keeping the costs of exchange reasonably low.26
Meanwhile, the relatively independent Greek cities of the postclassical era continued to compete vigorously with one another. But competition was carried out in the context of an increasingly rich array of cooperative interstate institutions. Some disputes were still settled by interpolis warfare, but other interstate conflicts were resolved by resort to formal and binding third-party arbitration. Sometimes the arbitrator was a king, but often it was a peer polity—another city-state or federal league. The results of arbitration clarified which states had a recognized claim to what borderland territories. Such clarification reduced the border disputes that had been a perennial source of violent interstate conflict in the classical period. Piracy and privateering were at least to some extent controlled by formal interstate agreements banning the compensatory seizure of assets from residents of one state by the residents of another community. Once again, the upshot was to keep transaction costs relatively low. And once again, all this was accomplished without the intervention of a central authority.27
Interstate cooperation included the refoundation of important cities. When Thebes was rebuilt in 316, some 20 years after its destruction by Alexander, and with the collusion of the League of Corinth, a number of Greek poleis contributed to the cost—including Thebes’ one-time rival and sometime ally, Athens. The Athenian contribution was focused on the reconstruction of the Theban city walls. A half century before, after the battle of Leuctra, Messene had been refounded as a polis under the auspices of the Thebans, as a counterweight to a potentially resurgent Sparta. A big part of the refoundation of Messene had been the construction of a massive, state-of-the-art, stone city circuit wall, complete with towers designed to house catapult artillery. So too, 22 years after the fall of 338, the refounding of Thebes began with the construction of a fortification wall capable of protecting citizens against coercive threats.28
DEMOCRACY, FEDERALISM, FORTIFICATIONS
Insofar as decentralized forms of interstate cooperation, along with fair rules and competitive emulation, remained the norm for the poleis of Hellas—after as well as before the political fall—the continued vitality of Greek economy and culture after the loss of full independence by most of the great poleis does not falsify the causal explanation that I have offered for the classical efflorescence. Many Hellenistic Greek states remained, by comparative historical standards, surprisingly independent and surprisingly democratic. Their ability to remain so owed little to charity on the part of the Macedonian kings. Rather it was because rent-seeking kings were unable to impose a settlement more heavily weighted in their own favor.29
The creative potential of a postclassical Greek world was realized, and the classical efflorescence gave way to a Hellenistic efflorescence, rather than collapsing into economic and cultural decline, both because interstate cooperation continued in the absence of a unitary empire and because the Greek cities were able to defend themselves against the warlords—well enough, at least, to secure a high level of independence and low rents. The poleis were able to make coercive rent extraction difficult for the Hellenistic kings in part by playing the dynasts off against one another. But the cities would not have been in a position to play that diplomatic game had they been unable to defend themselves when necessary. The Hellenistic poleis’ capacity to look after their own security was, in large measure, the result of three related developments: the consolidation of democracy as the local government for many of the Greek poleis; the expansion and consolidation of federal leagues; and continued innovations in military architecture and technology. together, those three developments tipped the offense–defense balance back in favor of the defenders of cities and against would-be attackers.
As we have seen, Greek democracy did not perish in the fall; many Greek poleis of the Hellenistic period adopted sign
ature institutions and cultural norms familiar from classical Athens. Indeed, by the end of the fourth century BCE, it is likely that more Greek poleis were democracies than ever before. Based on the evidence collected in the Inventory, David Teegarden, a historian at the University of Buffalo, counted the number of Greek states recorded as experiencing different regime types in each half century from the early seventh to the late fourth century BCE. The number and percent of poleis known to have experienced oligarchy increased every half century from the early seventh to the late fifth century (from 40% to 59%) and decreased (to 37%) thereafter. By contrast, the number and percentages of states known to have experienced democracy increased markedly from the early sixth to the late fourth century (from 4% to 46%).30 Extrapolating from these trends, we may guess that as many as half the poleis of the Greek world were democracies by 300 BCE.
While Hellenistic democracies were in some ways different from classical Greek democracies, they were democratic in the meaningful sense of being states that were collectively self-governing, ruled by an extensive and socially diverse body of citizens. The trend toward democracy seems not to have been reversed in the course of the third and early second centuries.31 There are various ways to explain this postclassical floruit of citizen self-governance, including Alexander’s strategic choice to depose Persian-supported oligarchs in the poleis of western Anatolia. The question remains why the trend was not reversed over time: Why did the new democracies prove so robust against oligarchic and tyrannical coups d’etat?
David Teegarden has provided an answer: By emulating legal institutions that had helped to stabilize classical democracies, notably legislation legitimating the killing of tyrants, democrats in postclassical Greek poleis in effect set up an “oligarchs and democrats game” that favored the perpetuation of democracy. The rules of the game were established by legislation that was partially modeled on classical Athenian antityranny laws. The new rules reduced the level of pluralistic ignorance among citizens regarding one another’s regime preferences, provided strong incentives for first movers to initiate attacks on antidemocratic revolutionaries, and thereby enabled a cascade of cooperative action in defense of the regime by prodemocracy citizens. Would-be oligarchs, looking back down the “oligarchs and democrats” game tree to that unhappy (for them) outcome, were rationally dissuaded from revolutionary activity and chose instead to cooperate with the democrats. The resulting social equilibrium stabilized the democratic regime.32 This equilibrium was clearly an important part of the story of postclassical democracy. In this section I suggest a similar and complementary argument for why self-interested elites in cities threatened by warlords might choose to support democracy despite relatively high internal tax rates.
A Hellenistic version of the classical Athenian democratic solution to the “mass and elite game” (ch. 9) helped to bring the interests of elite and ordinary citizens into closer convergence. The elaboration of a public language of reciprocity, reinforced by institutionalized practices of civic honoring, at once encouraged high levels of generosity on the part of elites and imposed restraint on the democratic majority’s impulse to tax the wealthy minority at extortionate rates. Stable regimes promoted polis security because attackers were less able to take advantage of internal divisions by holding out a credible option of regime change. Democratic poleis also enjoyed advantages in respect to mobilization and morale, as well as in disclosure and aggregation of useful knowledge dispersed across the citizenship. Those democratic advantages, as we have seen, helped to make Athens a preeminent polis in the classical period.33
The late fourth through early second centuries BCE saw the fulfillment of the potential of Greek federal leagues (koina). As we have seen (ch. 9), the Greek koinon was a new and innovative form of strong interstate cooperation, predicated on shared identities, religious practices, and economic interests among the member states. As the Berkeley historian Emily Mackil has shown, koina of the late classical and Hellenistic eras were not throwbacks to primitive forms of prestate, tribal association. The Boeotian League of the mid-fourth century was aberrant in being the hegemonic instrument of a single imperial state. For most of their history, Greek koina were innovative and adaptive voluntary associations of peer polities. Each koinon managed regional affairs among states that treated one another as political equals and promoted strong forms of citizenship, both locally and regionally.34
The federal leagues fostered economic welfare at a regional level by lowering transaction costs among member states. They also promoted the welfare of member states through military organization. The league charter enabled each member state to commit credibly to defending the interests of the other member states—thus solving the commitment problem that had doomed so many Greek classical-era alliances and peace treaties. Koina were thus, on the whole, able to provide a measure of security for small states against external threats by much larger predatory states. The Achaean and Aetolian leagues, the most powerful of the Greek koina in the Hellenstic era, never managed to displace the kingdom of Macedon as the single most powerful player on the Greek mainland. But they did serve to limit the Macedonian king’s power to dominate the states of central and southern Greece and to extract rents from them.
By the end of the classical era, almost all relatively large and prominent Greek poleis were heavily fortified (table 2.5). For many large and mid-sized poleis, fortifications served a function similar and complementary to that of democracy and federalism: providing a measure of security against the predatory tendencies of Hellenistic warlords, based on an improved negotiating position. Relatively low rents and royal acquiescence to relatively high levels of local polis independence were, in part, the products of a balance struck between the offensive potential of the warlords’ armies to take fortified cities by force and the ability of the cities to defend themselves against sieges.
The political role of military mobilization and investment in fortification has been a recurring theme in this book: Although siege technology and technique advanced in the classical era, so long as there were enough well-motivated men to defend them, well-built fortifications markedly increased an attacker’s costs. In the Hellenistic period, the costs of offensive siege operations remained high enough to induce the kings to negotiate a reasonable level of taxation with the cities within their zones of control. Kings could not afford to use too much coercion, too often, against heavily fortified and well-defended Greek cities—especially when the kings remained in fierce competition with one another. A king might offer aid to a city besieged by a rival—as the Great King had done when Philip II besieged Perinthus and Byzantion in 340 (ch. 10), and as Ptolemy I had done (thus gaining his nickname of “Savior”) when Demetrius besieged Rhodes in 304.
The equilibrium that emerged from the game played by the democratic, federalized, and fortified Greek cities and the kings of the Hellenistic age left many of the Greek poleis as self-governing and free to continue to compete with one another—militarily as well as in other ways. The resulting “king–polis” equilibrium was superior in terms of economic performance to a counterfactual equilibrium predicated on unlimited royal coercive power (i.e., closer to the “Pareto optimal” condition in which at least one player gains and none loses). This robust Hellenistic equilibrium extended the efflorescence of “wealthy Hellas” well past the end of the classical era.
In seeking to explain the persistence of efflorescence after the classical fall, the factors of federation, heavy local investment in city fortifications, and the prevalence and stability of democracy are not entirely separate. Substantial manpower was required to take on a royal army in the field or to defend an extensive system of fortifications against a concerted attack by a large army with a big siege train. Defenders must be reliable, which meant that mercenaries were less than desirable. Democracy was a proven way for a beleaguered Greek city to mobilize a large part of its potential manpower. As we have seen (ch. 7), Syracuse proved to be a more formidable opponent than imperial Athe
ns had expected during the long siege of 415–413—in part because Syracuse was at the time a democracy. On the other hand, while there were a number of reasons for residents of Greek states to favor democracy and federation, poleis chose to invest heavily in bigger and better fortifications specifically in response to an evolving military threat: the presence of predatory warlords with big armies, who were capable of making full use of late classical and early Hellenistic advances in artillery and siegecraft.35
KINGS, DEMOCRATIC CITIES, ELITES: THE HELLENISTIC EQUILIBRIUM
There is no space, in a book devoted to explaining classical Greece, to offer a detailed account of the centuries between the political fall and the final Roman takeover of the Greek world. Instead, I offer a simple model to illustrate certain Hellenistic-era relations relevant to political and economic exceptionalism. By constructing a game played by a Hellenistic king, a democratic Greek city, and an elite citizen of that city, it is possible to model choices of kings about whether to attack a fortified city, the choices of citizens about whether to invest in fortifications and military training, and the choices of elite citizens in respect to supporting or subverting a democratic regime. Although some of the particulars would be different, a similar game could be constructed to model the choices of a king, a federation of cities, and elite citizens of the federation. Indeed, as my Stanford colleague, the political scientist Barry Weingast, and I show in collaborative work in progress, analogous games can readily be constructed to illustrate other equilibria discussed in this book: between elites and ordinary citizens in Solon’s Athens, between hoplites and poorer citizens in Themistocles’ Athens, and between elite orators and ordinary citizens in Demosthenes’ Athens.36 Our King, City, and Elite Game, is presented more formally in appendix II.
