Pericles of Athens
Page 12
At an economic level, there was yet another consequence to this imperial dynamic: in the course of the fifth century, in step with its increase of military power, Athens became the commercial hub in the eastern Mediterranean. Under Pericles, Piraeus became the spot on to which the riches of the “whole world” converged. As the stratēgos himself emphatically stated, according to Thucydides, in the funeral oration of 431 B.C., “Our city is so great that all the products of all the earth flow in upon us, and ours is the happy lot to gather in the good fruits of other lands with as much home-felt security of enjoyment as we do those of our own soil.”29 This position at a crossroads was a great financial advantage to the city. All the imports and exports that passed through Piraeus were subject to 2 percent taxation: the pentekostē, the tax of one-fiftieth, brought in large sums of money that filled the coffers of Athens, making it possible to pursue an ambitious policy of redistribution (see later).
Finally, the city benefited from one more trump card that was linked to its hegemonic position. To cover certain military expenses, the city raised tribute (phoros) the total sum of which is known to us from 454 onward, thanks to great lists engraved in stone. These monumental inscriptions, situated on the Acropolis, consigned one-sixtieth of the sums paid by each member of the league to the goddess Athena, as “first fruits” (aparkhē).30 These sums paid by the allies were partly diverted by the Athenians, who used them for purposes other than their original one, which had been to prevent the Persians from returning to the Aegean. It has to be said that the extent of that diversion of funds is, still today, a matter of controversy.
The Treasury of the Delian League Placed at the Service of Athens?
According to Plutarch, Pericles’ enemies accused him of having drawn on the treasury of the allies to finance the great works on the Acropolis that were undertaken from 449 B.C. (Pericles, 12.2). This is the famous passage that led to those great works, in particular the construction of the Parthenon, being regarded as the petrified symbol of Athenian imperialism.31 Several other sources also testify to the size of the sums mobilized for this vast building project: according to Diodorus Siculus, who probably draws his information from the fourth-century historian Ephorus, the Athenians spent 4,000 talents (out of a total of 10,000) on building simply the Propylaea and on funding the siege of Potidaea (432–429 B.C.). In Thucydides’ work, Pericles himself suggests a comparable sum.32 However, some historians question not the use of the league’s treasury to finance the great building works, but the degree to which the allies were made to contribute. Did the phoros cover the entire costs of the monumental building policy initiated by Pericles, or did it contribute only a part of it?
The core of the problem lies in the exact status of the league treasury at the point when it was transferred to the Acropolis, no later than 454: was it at this point amalgamated with the treasury of the goddess—that is to say, the city treasury—or did it remain distinct, stored in a separate coffer? The Athenian Tribute Lists, which recorded the sum of one-sixtieth of the contributions of all the members of the league, seem to favor the latter alternative: after all, why keep a scrupulous record of the total aparkhē offered to the goddess (one-sixtieth) if the whole of the treasury fell to her in any case?33
There is one further element that favors this hypothesis. Athens was sufficiently prosperous to finance the essential part of the works with its own funds and to do so despite the scale of the expenses simultaneously incurred not only in the town (for new constructions in the Agora and the erection of Pericles’ Odeon), but also in the khōra, for the building of the Telesterion of Eleusis, the sanctuaries of Nemesis in Rhamnous and of Demeter and Kore at Thorikos, and even the construction of the temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunium.34 The city had abundant financial resources at its disposal, thanks to the income accumulated from the exploitation of the Laurium mines, commercial taxes such as the pentekostē, and the tenth part levied on booty that systematically swelled the city treasury. In his play The Wasps (656–660), Aristophanes underlines the composite nature of Athens’s financial resources, which accrued both from the exploitation of the empire and from its own economic dynamism: “And not with pebbles precisely ranged, but roughly thus on your fingers count / The tribute paid by the subject States, and just consider its whole amount; / And then, in addition to this, compute the many taxes and one-per-cents, / The fees and the fines, and the silver mines, the markets and harbours, and sales and rents. / If you take the total result of the lot, it will reach two thousand talents or near.”
For those two reasons, on the one hand the probable maintenance of two distinct coffers and, on the other, Athens’s own economic dynamism, some historians believe that only the aparkhē was used to finance the constructions on the Acropolis—that is to say, about seven talents per year.35
Adalberto Giovannini even maintains that this allocation was decided by Athens and its allies together in 454, at the point when the treasury was transferred to the Acropolis on account of the military threat hanging over Delos. That, he thinks, was the precise moment that Athena Polias replaced Delian Apollo as the tutelary deity of the League. The reconstruction of the goddess’s temple would in these circumstances logically enough involve the allies’ participation. Clearly, this argument rests upon an irenic and idealized view of the international relations that prevailed; it nevertheless has the huge advantage of not reducing the Athenian system purely to a simple matter of an economy based on imperial revenues.
Far from living off the empire like a parasite, the city possessed an economic dynamism of its own, quite independent of its exploitation of the allies. When Athens embarked on an expensive policy of redistribution of wealth, it did so drawing partly on its own funds. In the period when Pericles was repeatedly elected as stratēgos, the Athenians were indeed setting up a full-scale system of redistributions not only by means of its great constructional undertakings but also through the general introduction of civic pay. It was probably here that the true originality of the Periclean economy lay.
PERICLES AND THE MISTHOI: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A POLICY OF REDISTRIBUTION
The Social Impact of the Great Works: The Establishment of a State Socialism?
If we are to believe the famous passage from Plutarch, those great works provided misthoi, wages, for a great many skilled professions:
It was true that his military expeditions supplied those who were in the full vigour of manhood with abundant resources from the common funds, and in his desire that the unwarlike throng of common labourers should neither have no share at all in the public receipts, nor yet get fees for laziness and idleness, he boldly suggested to the people projects for great constructions, and designs for works which would call many arts into play and involve long periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes, no whit less than the sailors and sentinels, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial share of the public wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress-wood; the arts which elaborate and work up these materials were those of carpenter, moulder, bronze-smith, stone-cutter, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers of the material, such as factors, sailors and pilots by sea, and, by land, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, and drivers. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners. And since each particular art, like a general with the army under his separate command, kept its own throng of unskilled and untrained labourers in compact array, to be as instrument unto player and as body unto soul in subordinate service, it came to pass that for every age, almost, and every capacity, the city’s great abundance was distributed and scattered abroad by such demands.36
Despite a tenacious tradition that denies the historical reality, Pericles clearly took measures that were advantageous to craftsmen, as Max Weber was one of the first to recognize.37 The great construction works benefited all those who, to varying degrees, were involved on the building sites, and the
y did so regardless of the status of the workers.38 There were many noncitizens present on those public building sites, as can be deduced, with very little risk of error, by extrapolating from the construction accounts relating to another Athenian temple, the Erechtheum. The accounts preserved are those for the years 409/8 and 408/7 B.C., but the actual building had commenced as early as 421. In 408, the building site employed 107 individuals, mostly stonemasons and carpenters. Their legal statuses varied considerably, since epigraphists have worked out that there were definitely 23 citizens, 42 metics, and 20 slaves among them. All the various components of the Athenian population were thus represented on the building site. However, those statutory differences were not reflected at the level of wages, for every worker received one drachma per day, although the slaves no doubt handed their wages over to their master, who in most cases would himself be working on the same building site.39
Let us now try to evaluate the aims and the scope of those great building works. Some historians have interpreted them in terms of modern economic behavior. Was it a matter of relaunching economic activity? Was it an attempt to establish a veritable “State socialism,” as Gustave Glotz claimed in his day?40 It seems to me that that would be to adopt a misleading point of view and to slip into anachronism, for the Greek cities in truth had no economic policies, as such. If a city intervened in economic life, it was above all so as to increase its prosodoi, its revenues, even if it did then redistribute them among members of the community; it was not ever a matter of investing and increasing economic activity; in the Greek world, growth and the fight against unemployment were not, as such, political objectives.
The monumental policy initiated by Pericles in truth had a twofold purpose: In the first place, it was intended to adorn the city with imposing monuments and, once and for all, wipe out the outrages of the Persian Wars. So the primary ambition of the “great works” was at once political and symbolic. Second, the intention was to proceed to share the common benefits between all the members of the community. In this respect, these building sites were part of a policy to redistribute wealth to the people on a scale never before seen in history.
Although the redistributions that stemmed from the great works benefited both the citizens and the metics who worked side by side on the building sites, Pericles also promoted measures destined to benefit solely the Athenians, for it was they who were the principal supporters of his policies and, as malicious gossip did not fail to point out, he needed to make sure that they would vote for him.
The Creation of Civic Pay
In the first place, the stratēgos is said to have increased the number of banquets and religious spectacles laid on for his fellow-citizens and he did so at a by no means negligible cost.41 It was a way to win the favor of the poorest citizens who, on the occasion of a sacrifice, would receive a portion of the sacrificed animals. The stratēgos was said, for the same reason, to have created a public fund, the theorikōn, grants from which were designed to cover the costs of citizens who attended the festivals of Dionysus. According to one late text, “Given that many wished to go to the theatre so competition for places was fierce among both citizens and foreigners, Pericles wished to please the people and the poor and decreed that city revenues should be devoted to the festivals.”42 The assertion should nevertheless be considered with a degree of caution, for the theorikōn is not attested until the mid-fourth century, so some historians doubt that its creation should be attributed to Pericles.43
What is certain, on the other hand, is that the stratēgos submitted to the Assembly the proposal that a number of grants, receiving of misthoi, should be created as remuneration for citizens for the time that they devoted to serving the city. These misthoi were so closely associated with the actions of Pericles that, in the Gorgias, Socrates confides to Callicles: “What I for my part hear is that Pericles has made the Athenians idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious, by starting the system of public payments [misthophoria].”44
Clearly, the stratēgos did play a pivotal role in this development that enabled the poorest citizens to take part in the functioning of democracy without fear of forfeiting their means of livelihood.
But again, we should consider what this innovation really amounted to. In the first place, contrary to Plato’s assertion, the stratēgos did not introduce such payment for all public services. Only the dicasts, the judges of the people’s lawsuits, benefited from them, and possibly the council members;45 attendance at the ekklēsia was not remunerated until the beginning of the fourth century.
Furthermore, initially, the sum paid as misthos was not enough to compensate for the loss of even the most modest of wages. Not only were the 6,000 dicasts only paid when they were actually sitting, and this did not happen every day,46 but the two obols initially paid as compensation and even the three later paid under Cleon, by no means equaled the pay of a skilled manual worker, which was at least three times greater (about one drachma per day).
Despite those limitations, the establishment of this kind of pay marked a further stage of the city’s democratization, at a date that is hard to specify; the measure was probably introduced after the reforms of Ephialtes, in 462, which certainly gave more power to the lawcourts, and probably before the death of Cimon in 451, if it is true that the compensation system was introduced, as Plutarch claims, in a context of rivalry between Cimon and Pericles.47
Whatever the exact number of these payments introduced by Pericles, as a result of them citizenship became a privilege that found expression in the pecuniary gain of those who received them. From then on, the Athenians became keen to restrict the number of those who potentially possessed such rights. Access to the first misthoi coincided with restrictions on citizenship.
Redistributions and Redefinition of the Civic Body
In 451, the Athenian political community was redefined more strictly. Not only were women and domiciled foreigners excluded, as was customary elsewhere in Greece, but now the city also rejected bastards (nothoi) with only one Athenian parent or who were born from an extramarital liaison between Athenians.48 In the wake of Aristotle and echoing his words, Plutarch explicitly attributed this initiative to the stratēgos:
Many years before this, when Pericles was at the height of his political career and had sons born in wedlock, … he proposed a law that only those should be reckoned Athenians whose parents on both sides were Athenians. And so, when the king of Egypt sent a present to the people of forty thousand measures of grain, and this had to be divided up among the citizens, there was a great crop of prosecutions against citizens of illegal birth by the law of Pericles, who had up to that time escaped notice and been overlooked.49
This restrictive measure, earlier mentioned by the author of the Constitution of the Athenians, Pseudo-Aristotle, should be understood bearing several parameters in mind. The first was of a political and ideological order: the new law chimed with one of the founding Athenian myths—namely, that of autochthony. From the mid-fifth century onward, Athenians took to calling themselves “autochthonous,” born from the very soil of Attica, unlike most of the rest of the Greeks, who were considered to be the descendants of invaders, such as the Spartans, who were said to be descended from the Dorians.50 In rejecting those of “mixed blood,” the Athenian citizens were emphasizing their own prestigious origin, their eugeneia, thereby collectively laying claim to a distinctive attribute, birth, which had, in principle, been the preserve solely of the aristocracy.51 This illustrious birth of theirs moreover constituted one of the bases upon which the Athenians relied to claim their hegemony over the rest of the Greeks. In the eyes of the Athenians, their noble ancestry justified their domination within the framework of the Delian League.
Within the city, that law may have reflected a certain hardening in the Athenians’ attitude to the growing influence of its metics.52 It is difficult to put a precise figure to the domiciled foreigners in Athens, but in the second half of the fifth century, they represented between one-fifth
and one-half of the city’s citizen population—between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals.53 Socially, they were well integrated and some of them were probably married to Athenians—and to Athenian women—producing children who, by law, had citizen status. The law of 451 was intended to exclude “those with mixed blood” from the civic community.54 However, there is no indication that this should be regarded as the result of an identity-crisis on the part of alarmed or xenophobic Athenians, for there is no mention of any such fear in the ancient sources; again, that would be to transfer certain contemporary anxieties onto the societies of the past.
The purpose of the measure introduced by Pericles seems to have been above all of a socioeconomic nature: it was voted in so as to limit the number of potential beneficiaries of the civic redistributions of wealth “because of the excessive number of citizens,” as the Constitution of the Athenians explains (26.3–4). Was it prompted by any particular event? Plutarch’s assertion should be viewed with caution: it is by no means certain that the vote on this measure was linked to the gift of wheat from the Egyptian Psammetichus, for the consignment from the pharaoh was sent in 445/4 B.C., six years after the introduction of the law on citizenship. All the same, even if he is mistaken about the details, Plutarch the moralist hits on the basic truth: the reason why the Athenians decided to redefine their civic body certainly was because it was necessary to regulate the sharing of the city’s wealth, in particular, the distribution of the many instances of compensatory pay that had just been approved—for the members of the heliaea and of the boulē—and all the types of advantages that stemmed from the increasing imperialism of the city. A restrictive redefining of the circle of potential beneficiaries now became a matter of the first importance.