The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  5. Arabic engagement with Greek texts: Pines 1986; Gutas 2000. European uptake of Greek literary culture: Goldhill 2002; Grafton, Most, and Settis 2010.

  6. For example, the alleged systematic destruction of the texts and teachings of the non-Legalist “One Hundred Schools of Thought” by the First Emperor in Qin China after the consolidation of the empire in ca. 221 BCE.

  7. The counterfactual world: Ober 1999: “Alexander dies young.” Ironically, years later Cleitus was himself speared to death by Alexander in the course of a drunken symposium. Alexander’s career and campaigns: Wilcken 1967; Bosworth 1988, 1996; Bosworth and Baynham 2000; Green 1991; Cartledge 2004; Roisman 2003.

  8. Alexander’s adoption of the satrapal system; sieges of Miletus and Halicarnassus: Bosworth 1988.

  9. Alexander’s arrangements in western Anatolia: Wilcken 1967: 81–95.

  10. Ruzicka 1988 offers a detailed account of the sources and a plausible reconstruction of Persian strategy in 333 to 331 BCE.

  11. Agis’ uprising: Wilcken 1967: 131, 138, 145; Habicht 1997: 20–21. Of the combatants, some 40,000 were on the Macedonian side. Agis’ Peloponnesian alliance would have had a population base of about 600,000, assuming that he had most of the poleis of regions 12–14, 17.

  12. Lamian War and Athenian history after 322 BCE: Habicht 1997: 36–66. The population base for the Lamian War alliance was perhaps about 600,000 (assuming regions 7, 8, 20, 22, 42, and some of the states of the Peloponnesus)—thus roughly comparable in size to the estimated population base of the revolt led by Agis III in 331; see previous note. Neither alliance was equal in population base to the anti-Macedonian alliance of 338, but if (counterfactually) combined, the alliances of 331 and 322 would have had a population base substantially larger than that of the 338 alliance.

  13. Hellenistic Rhodes and the siege: Gabrielsen 1997, 1999; battle of Ipsus: Billows 1990.

  14. Hellenistic history and culture: Walbank 1993; Shipley 2000; Erskine 2003; Bugh 2006. Political history of the Hellenistic world: Will 1979.

  15. Ma 2000, 2003, 2014a.

  16. Austin 1986 concluded (pp. 465–466) that Augustine’s (City of God 4.4) description of kingdoms without justice as nothing more than “large robber bands” is “strikingly appropriate to the Hellenistic monarchies.”

  17. Hellenistic economy: Reger 2007; Archibald 2001; Archibald, Davies, and Gabrielsen 2011.

  18. Law of Eukrates: Teegarden 2014a, with literature cited. List of speeches preserved from this period by Aeschines, Demosthenes, Dinarchus, Hyperides, and Lycurgus: Ober 1989: 349. Public laws and decrees: Schwenk 1985.

  19. History of the period: Habicht 1997: 22–35.

  20. Ma forthcoming. By contrast, Tilly 1975: 24 notes that in 1500 CE governments in Europe bore considerably greater resemblance to one another than they did 200–300 years later. Tilly attributes the divergence to power struggles between kings seeking to centralize authority on one side and existing deliberative assemblies and other forms of dispersed governance on the other. The struggle was, for the most part, won by the kings, who largely succeeded in destroying or coopting deliberative institutions: ibid. 22.

  21. Epigraphic dossiers: Ma 1999; public honors to generous elites: Ma 2013a; advances in military architecture: Ober 1992; McNicoll 1997.

  22. Bresson 2011. What follows is based on Bresson’s interpretation of the inscription. The other two beneficiaries of grain were royal kinswomen of Alexander III: his mother Olympias, and his sister Cleopatra, who was at the time ruling Epirus.

  23. This assumes that the standard was the Attic medimnos of ca. 52.4 L (as argued by Bresson 2011: 86–87); if instead it was the larger Aeginetan medimnos, then each individual’s share was about 30 L. The monetary value would be lower if the grain was barley rather than wheat. Labor value in wheat wages: table 4.6. We do not actually know how the grain was distributed in Athens or elsewhere. The 100,000 medimnoi is about 1/8 of the grain production of Attica plus Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros in 329–328 BCE—which may also have been a bad year: ibid 87.

  24. Amartya Sen (1981) famously demonstrated that modern democracies respond to famine threats more reliably and effectively than autocracies, citing the open exchange of relevant information as the operative mechanism. Although we cannot be certain that the Kyrenean response prevented famine conditions, it seems certain that it at least lessened the severity of those conditions.

  25. The naval base: Rhodes and Osborne 2003: no. 100, with discussion in Ober 2008: 124–133.

  26. Rhodes, trade, and Aegean security: Gabrielsen 1997, 1999.

  27. Hellenistic interpolis warfare: Ma 2000; interstate arbitrations: Ager 1996. Nonseizure (asylia) agreements: Rigsby 1996.

  28. Refoundation of Thebes: Habicht 1997: 61–62; catapult-ready towers in the new city circuit of Messene: Ober 1987, 1992.

  29. Blockmans 1989 analyzes the contest between rent-seeking “voracious states” and independence-seeking “obstructing cities” in medieval and early modern Europe, detailing the conditions (notably the level of urbanization) under which more and less favorable bargains were struck between kings and cities in different regions. Bargains in which cities retained some independence and paid relatively low taxes appear to have stimulated economic growth; arrangements that led to the complete subordination of cities appear to have depressed growth.

  30. Teegarden 2014a: 221–238, illustrated on p. 223, figure A1. The other two regimes measured are kingship (peaking at 27% in the early sixth century) and tyranny (peaking at 53% in the late sixth century). Note that a given polis might experience more than one regime type in a given half century and the quantity and quality of information for regime type generally increases over time (many more observations in the fifth and fourth centuries than in the seventh and sixth centuries). But there is no reason to believe that the later data are biased in favor of democracy or that democratic interludes were especially short. The same historical trends held when Teegarden looked at the percentage of regions with at least one recorded instance of the relevant regime: ibid. Figure A2. The editors of the Inventory (Hansen and Nielsen 2004: 84) point to the continued prevalence of oligarchy and tyranny in the earlier fourth century, concluding that “it is first in the age of Alexander that democracy becomes the predominant type of constitution.”

  31. See literature cited in note 4.

  32. Teegarden 2014a.

  33. Public languages of reciprocal generosity: Ober 1989; Ma 2013a; Athenian classical preeminence: Ober 2008.

  34. Mackil 2013.

  35. Marsden 1969; Winter 1971: 157; Campbell 2011; Frederiksen 2011: 94.

  36. For an example, see Ober 2012.

  37. Aristotle’s polis a kind of democracy: Ober 2005.

  38. Ober 1998: 347–351.

  39. On common knowledge, see Chwe 2001, with discussion here in ch. 1. Simonton 2012 demonstrates the importance of common knowledge for explaining ancient Greek regime change and persistence.

  40. On the Roman policy of defortification of Greek towns, see Frederiksen 2011: 1 n. 6, 45–46.

  APPENDIX II King, City, and Elite Game

  1. Some idea of the “submission level” is suggested by the demands of the Roman senator Marcus Brutus when raising money for a war against the Caesareans in the mid-first century Bce: Brutus demanded that the cities of western Anatolia pay immediately the equivalent of 10 years of taxes. Cities that resisted were attacked. Rhodes was compelled to surrender all gold and silver in the city, public, private, or sacred. Xanthos was stormed and almost completely destroyed: Appian Civil Wars 4.63, Dio Cassius 47.33.1.

  2. The negotiations between the splendidly walled Anatolian city of Herakleia under Latmos with Zeuxis, the envoy of King Antiochus III, provide an example: Ma 1999: 169–170, 185–186, 198–199.

  3. It is not necessary that the actual probability be known, of course; what matters is that assumptions about the probability are shared.

  4. Ma 1999.

  5. On the role of
information asymmetry in the origin of war in the modern world, see Fearon 1995.

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