The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

WEALTHY HELLAS

MEASURING EFFLORESCENCE

In the later fourth century BCE, as Aristotle was writing the Politics, Hellas reached the peak of its classical efflorescence. This chapter documents the material conditions that provided the foundation for the cultural greatness celebrated by Lord Byron. Thanks to recent work by archaeologists, economists, and historians, we can specify, in considerable detail, how wealthy Hellas actually was. But first we need to establish a baseline: Just how wealthy ought we to expect classical Hellas to have been, if, counterfactually, it had reached only the median level of development of core Greece during the three-plus millennia from ca. 1300 BCE to 1900 CE? What is the premodern normal by which we can measure the divergence of the classical Greek economy from the expected path?

THE PREMODERN GREEK NORMAL

We may start our investigation of the premodern normal in the era shortly after Byron proclaimed contemporary Greece a sad relic. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greece was, when compared with the more developed states of Europe, or to any premodern state in an era of efflorescence, a very poor country. In 1830, upon finally achieving independence from Ottoman Turkey, the population of Greece—comprising the Peloponessus, the Ionian and Aegean islands, and central Greece south of Thessaly—was about 750,000 people. Life expectancy at birth was about 35.5 years in the early 1860s, by which time the population had grown to more than 1.1 million; life expectancy was undoubtedly lower in 1830 and before.

By 1890 (after territorial expansion that added the region of Thessaly), the population of the Greek state had reached about 2.3 million. By this time, Greece was experiencing severe Malthusian pressure. The population had exceeded its mostly agricultural resource base. The result was labor surplus, chronic unemployment, and widespread poverty, only partially alleviated by extensive overseas emigration, especially by adult men. In the decades before World War II, Greece was, per capita, the poorest nation in Europe. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the population of Greece was living quite close to subsistence.1

There is no reason to suppose that living conditions had been substantially better in the previous 1,500 years. The Greek core (defined as the territory controlled by the Greek state in 1890) had already declined from the classical peak by the Roman imperial era (first century BCE to second century CE). The third and fourth centuries CE saw further decline as the Roman Empire began to come apart. After a robust recovery in the early Byzantine period of the fifth and sixth centuries, Greece fell into an economic doldrums that lasted until the ninth century. The middle Byzantine period of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries saw some economic recovery. Yet in the late twelfth century, at a high point in medieval Greek history, Michael Choniates (later Metropolitan of Athens) wrote these poignant verses—anticipating Byron’s sentiments by more than half a millennium:

Though I live in Athens, I see Athens nowhere,

Only dust, sorrowful and empty, blessed.

Where is your magnificence, wretched city?

All vanished, as if become a myth …

By around 1400, the population of Greece and median consumption had fallen to new lows. The early Ottoman period once again saw improvement; in ca. 1600, the population of the Peloponnesus was up to about 250,000. This was, however, no more than a quarter of the population of the same area around 300 BCE. The same 1:4 “early Ottoman to late classical” ratio holds for sixteenth century Boeotia. In much of Greece, these demographic gains were lost in the grim later Ottoman era of the seventeenth century. By 1685, the population of the Peloponnesus had dropped by half, to 125,000, approaching the Early Iron Age nadir of ca. 1000 BCE. While there was improvement in the eighteenth century, it was not until the later nineteenth century that the population of Greece began to climb toward the late classical peak, and even then incomes remained low enough to encourage largescale emigration.²

At the other end of our historical spectrum, during the Late Bronze Age (LBA), known to historians as the Mycenaean period (1600–1200 BCE), Hellas (roughly the area of the Greek state in 1890 but including the island of Crete) was divided into approximately 15 small states; the median territorial extent of these LBA states has been estimated at ca. 1,500 km². Each state consisted of a primary urban area, centered on a fortified palace, surrounded by a number of secondary settlements (close to 300 such centers have been located archaeologically) and a scatter of smaller rural occupation sites. The Mycenaean states of Greece appear to be quite centralized, ruled by kings who controlled considerable military might (notably horse-drawn chariots) and ruled through a fairly elaborate bureaucracy. The economy of a Mycenaean state was directed from the palace, which served as a center of production and distribution of goods. Palace records, inscribed by scribes on clay tablets, tracked the movement of raw materials and other imports into the palace and of locally manufactured goods out of the palace.

The population of Hellas in the Mycenaean period (including Thessaly and Crete) was somewhere in the range of 600,000 people, suggesting that the overall population was less dense than it would be in Greece’s “sad relic” era around 1830 CE. Judging by skeletal evidence for their health and the rich goods with which they were buried, the palace elite evidently lived well in the LBA. Wealth was concentrated in the palace and in the hands of local elites in secondary centers. Rents were extracted from industrial labor at the palace and from a rural population of agriculturalists and pastoralists. This is what we would expect from premodern autocratic states. There is little reason to suppose that, outside the palatial elite and the local elites who governed the territory in the name of the king, much of the population of Greece in the mid to later second millennium BCE lived substantially above subsistence.3

Economic conditions for some residents of the Aegean world were probably better before the Late Bronze Age. Crete and some of the Aegean islands experienced a notable efflorescence during the Middle Bronze Age of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE—the central era of the Minoan period. The palace-based Minoan culture was an early high point of Aegean civilization, marked by considerable wealth that may have extended beyond a narrow elite. The Minoan culture was weakened by natural disaster in the mid-fifteenth century, and Crete was conquered by the Mycenaeans of the mainland by ca. 1400 BCE. Although the Minoan efflorescence was not at the scale of the later classical efflorescence, it demonstrated the potential of the Aegean region for development, and, like the robust recovery of the fifth and sixth centuries CE, that an advanced level of economic development was possible under political conditions very different from the citizen-centered institutions characteristic of the classical Greek efflorescence.⁴

On the mainland, the LBA Mycenaean era marked the early peak of Greek population size and economic development. After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in ca. 1200–1100 BCE, Greece entered the Early Iron Age (EIA, also known as the Greek Dark Age). At the start of this period, population and living standards declined sharply. The population of Greece reached a low of perhaps 330,000, about half of the LBA figure, around 1000 BCE. The early EIA was an era of general impoverishment: Imports of goods from outside Greece, while never falling to zero, declined even more precipitously than did the population. The palaces were abandoned, the bureaucracy withered away, writing was no longer used, and Greece fell back into illiteracy. There were many fewer urban settlements, and they were smaller than the palace centers of the Mycenaean era. Houses were small and poorly furnished.5

By most indications, the Early Iron Age nadir around 1000 BCE was an exceptionally poor era. That has considerable implications for thinking about the classical efflorescence. On one side, the low EIA bottom left a great deal of room for improvement: Simple reversion to the mean of premodern normal population and consumption, as represented by, say, the Late Bronze Age and Greece in 1830, would represent major progress. On the other hand, the economy of classical Hellas did not have much of a springboard from which to jump off.

The premodern Greek normal represented by the LBA and the early nineteenth century CE was considerably above the EIA nadir—but very far below the classical efflorescence. Demographically, the premodern normal was a population of fewer than a million people for the Greek core of the mainland south of Macedonia and Epirus, along with the Aegean and Ionian Sea islands—the territory defined by the late nineteenth century Greek state. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the population of core Greece had reached 2.3 million. Yet median non-elite per capita consumption hovered uncomfortably near subsistence—which is, as we will see, the ordinary fate of premodern non-elite populations elsewhere in the world. Greeks responded to Malthusian pressure by emigration.

During the classical efflorescence, Greece was much more densely populated than the premodern norm. In the later fourth century BCE, the population of the part of Hellas occupied by the Greek state in 1890 (ignoring the extended Greek polis world to the west, north, east, and south) was in the range of 2.75 million (my lower bound estimate) to 3.5 million people (Mogens H. Hansen’s upper bound, with discussion below). The population density of modern Greece did not equal that of the extended Greek world in the later fourth century until the 1920s (figure 4.1).

Even the low estimate of classical era population is several times the premodern normal. Moreover, during the same period, there is every reason to believe that, at least in the most highly developed ancient Greek states, many, perhaps most non-elite people were consuming well above the level of subsistence. By the later fourth century BCE, per capita consumption was well above the premodern normal and about twice what it had been 500 years earlier. In sharp contrast to the situation in Greece of the late nineteenth century CE, in the late fourth century BCE there was no evidence of a Malthusian trap: Development was not being constrained by limited resources, and there was no need to export surplus labor through emigration. Indeed, in the era of Plato and Aristotle, Hellas was a net importer of labor (slaves), food, and raw materials—and a net exporter of manufactured goods, cultural products, and expert services. In a word, Hellas, in the era of the classical efflorescence, was wealthy when compared to any point in Greek history before the twentieth century.6

FIGURE 4.1 Comparative Greek demographics, ancient and modern.

NOTES: Modern data adapted from Country National Time Series (CNTS) Greece data (Banks and Wilson 2013). Normalized 0–1 scale. 1 = twice the classical peak.

URBANIZATION: Classical peak for Greek world = 32% of total population in towns of >5,000. CNTS data for percentage of population living in cities of more than 10,000 is available for 1919 to 1978; cities of more than 20,000 from 1850. “Over 5,000” figures estimated for 1919–1978 by adding the difference between the 10,000 and 20,000 figures (median 4.7%) to the 10,000 figure; estimate for 1850 doubles the median difference (9.4%) and adds that to the over-20,000 figure. Density: Classical peak for Greek world = 44 per km². Modern density = CNTS population divided by area. Population: Classical peak for core Greece = 2.75 million (Ober baseline estimate; Hansen 2006b, 2008 is higher). CNTS population is truncated at 1912 due to discontinuity in 1913. CNTS does not include data from 1914 to 1918.

OTHER STANDARDS OF COMPARISON

The notion that classical Hellas was wealthy comes as a surprise. Among the assumptions about the classical Greek world with which I grew up as a student of ancient history in the 1970s, was that the world of the Greek city-states was poor. This assumption was based in the first instance on what we can call the standard ancient premise. That premise is stated succinctly by the “Father of History”—the fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus: “Hellas has always had poverty as its companion.” (7.102.1). In Herodotus’ history, this statement is put into the mouth of Demaratus, a deposed king of Sparta, in the context of a conversation with Xerxes, the Great King of Persia. It has been cited frequently by later historians of the Greek world. Herodotus’ quotable line, along with other passages in Greek authors to a similar effect, contributed to the formation of a standard modern premise. In the pungent early twentieth century prose of the British classical historian and political scientist Alfred Zimmern, “the pioneers who created our European civilization were stricken with poverty all of their days … it was the doom of Athens that Poverty and Impossibility dwelt in her midst from first to last.”7

Along with the familiar claim that it was the Greeks who pioneered European civilization, Zimmern’s comment is notable for its assumption of Athenian exemplarity: For Zimmern, “Athens” stands for “Greece.” How exemplary or exceptional Athens really was, and how much we can extrapolate from Athenian economic performance to the wider Greek economy, remain important questions to which we will return in this and in subsequent Chapters. In the imperial fifth century, but also in the postimperial fourth century, Athens was certainly among the most prosperous of the Greek poleis. For our present purposes, it suffices to say that if classical Athens really was impoverished, as Zimmern claimed, then it is highly likely that the rest of the Greek world fared poorly. If Athens was relatively wealthy, it is reasonable to suppose that residents of the most developed states of the Greek world were quite well off.⁸

It has long been recognized that the poverty claim in the standard ancient premise must be understood in comparative rather than absolute terms. In Herodotus’ key passage, Demaratus compares the quotidian life of ordinary citizens in Greece (and especially Sparta) with the court of Xerxes, the Great King of Persia. When the lifestyle of the King of Persia is the standard, everyone in classical Greece was certainly comparatively poor. But, equally obviously, when we are attempting to compare the overall performance of ancient economies, “ordinary Greeks vs. court of Xerxes” is the wrong standard of comparison.9

I have suggested above that the right standard of comparison is the premodern Greek normal. But an alternative standard of comparison for the ancient Greek economy might be sought among the most advanced economies of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries of our era. If Xerxes is self-evidently the wrong comparison for, say, ordinary-citizen Tellus of Athens (later in this chapter), then how about middle-class American John Doe? When we compare median income (in standardized dollars) or consumption (measured, e.g., in per capita energy use) in ancient Greece with the United States or with the most developed countries of western Europe in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, the Greek world, once again, looks impoverished.¹⁰

As in the case of Demaratus of Sparta’s pointed contrast of ordinary Greeks to ultra-elite Persians, comparing ancient Greek and modern developed-country levels of income or consumption tells us something—but nothing that we do not already know. It is hardly news that median levels of consumption in contemporary developed economies are much higher than median consumption levels in any premodern economy: Tellus of Athens did not shop at Walmart. It is certainly worth investigating just how much higher modern consumption levels actually are. But using contemporary developed-country economies as a standard of comparison is not particularly informative if we are seeking to learn something new about the relative economic performance of premodern societies. Neither the Tellus/Xerxes nor the Tellus/John Doe comparison gives a satisfactory answer to the question, “Are the standard ancient and modern premises right?”

Rather than seeking to determine how much poorer Tellus was than Xerxes or John Doe, when we ask, “Are the standard ancient and modern premises concerning Greek poverty right?” what we want to know is how much better or worse off the ordinary Greek in the classical period was, when compared to the ordinary individual in the Greek premodern normal situation discussed above, or in other relatively well documented premodern societies. While we cannot answer the comparative welfare question directly, we can provide answers to questions that will in turn give us an indirect way to approach the question of comparative economic performance:

Was the rate of classical Greek economic growth high or low, relative to other premodern economies?

Was the classical Greek world more or less densely populated, and more or less urbanized, than other premodern societies?

Was the distribution of wealth and income across the classical Greek population relatively more or less equitable than that of other premodern populations? What part of the classical Greek population lived at a level high enough above subsistence to qualify as at least minimally decent?

Using these questions as proxies for investigating comparative general welfare, the answer to the question, “Was classical Greece impoverished?” is “obviously not”—Greeks in the age of Plato and Aristotle were not poor when compared to the Greek premodern norm or to people in other ancient or medieval societies. The Greek economy grew briskly in the period 800–300 BCE. By the later classical period, the Greek world was densely populated and highly urbanized. A high percentage of Greeks (or at least of Athenians) lived comfortably above the near-subsistence level of consumption that has been the economic fate of most people for most of human history. By the standards of other premodern economies, Hellas was wealthy. Moreover, Despite the Demaratus–Xerxes exchange and similar passages in the Histories, there is reason to think that Herodotus (and by extrapolation, his original classical Greek readers) knew it.

The “Eastern monarch discusses comparative welfare with a wise Greek” motif of the Demaratus–Xerxes interchange is anticipated in a scene near the beginning of Herodotus’ Histories in which King Croesus of Lydia (in western Anatolia) interviews Solon of Athens. The imagined date of this (perhaps imaginary) interview would have been some time in the sixth century BCE. The subject of their conversation is human happiness, and the context is relative wealth. Croesus expects Solon to acknowledge that Croesus is outstandingly happy on the basis of his superabundant wealth. But to Croesus’ surprise, Solon instead names as the happiest person ever to have lived Tellus of Athens, “who came from a prosperous city … and the circumstances of his life were likewise prosperous, by our standards” (Herodotus, Histories 1.30.4–5).

Tellus is not portrayed by Herodotus’ Solon as a member of a privileged elite pulling down big rents as a result of his violence potential in a natural state. Quite to the contrary, he is depicted as a reasonably but not exceptionally well-to-do, Greek citizen of a reasonably well-to-do Greek polis. Tellus was, in Solon’s pithy account, an ordinary Greek man who had been especially fortunate in his progeny (healthy and excellent children and grandchildren) and in his demise (timely, heroic death in victorious battle in defense of his homeland). Reasonably prosperous material conditions constituted a necessary precondition for Tellus’ exceptional happiness, but the clear implication of the story is that many of Tellus’ fellow-citizens enjoyed a similar prosperity. It was Tellus’ relative advantages in respect to his descendants and death, not his wealth, that made Tellus’ life an especially happy one. It is, however, the background material conditions of that life that concern us here: Tellus and his large and healthy family evidently lived comfortably above the level of bare subsistence, in a community in which living at that level was not regarded as remarkable.

For our purposes, the important point is this: If, as Herodotus’ story implies, the material conditions enjoyed by Tellus and his family were fairly typical, then a decent level of income (i.e., enough to live well above subsistence) must have been fairly common in Athens, and by extrapolation, in other developed Greek states. A society featuring a substantial body of ordinary people, living in decent conditions, consuming well above the level of bare subsistence, would be, by ancient standards, an exceptionally wealthy society. Of course Croesus was vastly richer than Tellus. But, if we think about Lydia as an autocratic state, and the sociopolitical conditions sustaining the great wealth of Croesus and his court, we will have reason to doubt that many non-elite Lydians lived at Tellus’ moderately prosperous level. The figure of “ordinary, relatively prosperous Tellus” was not merely a Herodotean fiction. As we will see, some 40–60% of classical-era Athenian residents (and perhaps of Greeks generally) fit a profile of Tellus-like moderate prosperity. Although a few premodern societies, notably Mesopotamian cities in sixth century BCE Babylonia, paid wages high enough to allow the presumption of quite extensive non-elite prosperity, there are very few documented cases of high-wage societies before the early modern period.11

We still lack the detailed studies of the economies of ancient Middle Eastern societies that would allow meaningful comparisons to the economy of Hellas. But it seems very unlikely, on the face of it, that the Lydian empire, or the Persian Empire, or indeed any other ancient empire substantially outperformed the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries CE in terms of per capita consumption or urbanization. We now have reasonable estimates of Roman imperial economic performance. Based on those estimates, Rome appears, by ancient standards, to have been an exceptionally prosperous and urbanized empire. The Roman economy was much bigger, and much more diverse, than the Greek economy. Comparisons can be misleading, but, by certain measures (aggregate and per capita economic growth, urbanization, and income distribution), the overall Greek economy of ca. 500–300 BCE appears to have outperformed the overall Roman economy of ca. 100 BCE–200 CE.12

If it is true that Rome economically outperformed other ancient empires and that Hellas performed well relative to Rome, then it is fair to say that the society of Hellas was, in fact, relatively wealthy by ancient standards. Moreover, certain features of the Greek economy (or at least the Athenian economy) of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE compare favorably with the most advanced premodern European economies—Holland and England in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries CE.¹³

The explanation I advance in chapter 5 for the comparative wealth of Hellas in the classical era is, in the first instance, political and institutional. The point of the comparisons is to falsify the standard ancient and modern premises about Hellenic poverty, to highlight the role of politics in Greek social and economic development, and thus to begin to solve the puzzle of the remarkable efflorescence of classical Hellas.

Here are three premises that, if correct, give us good reasons to believe that classical Hellas was indeed comparatively wealthy:

Premise 1	The Greek economy grew steeply and steadily from 1000 to 300 BCE, both in its aggregate size and in per capita consumption.
Premise 2	By the fourth century BCE, Greece was densely populated and remarkably urbanized, yet living standards remained high.
Premise 3	Wealth was distributed relatively equitably across Greek populations; there was a substantial middle class of people who lived well above bare subsistence yet below the level of elite consumption.

The three premises, in the form of descriptive statements about the Greek economy, are based on economic models that are in turn based on extensive collections of empirical evidence for ancient Mediterranean and early modern European economies.

The rest of this chapter offers evidence that tests, and ultimately supports, the validity of each of the three premises. In the next chapter (ch. 5), drawing on the theory of decentralized cooperation developed in chapter 3, I offer two hypotheses to explain how and why the Greek economy performed comparatively well. The historical narrative that follows (chs. 6–11) tests those hypotheses.

HIGH AGGREGATE AND PER CAPITA GROWTH

My Stanford colleague, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris, has assembled an impressive array of data for measuring Greek economic growth in the period 800–300 BCE.14 The first factor to consider in measuring Greek economic growth is demographic change. It is uncontroversial to state that the population of Hellas grew substantially in the half-millennium 800–300 BCE. On the basis of J. K. Beloch’s late nineteenth century surveys of literary evidence, supplemented by recent work in survey and excavation archaeology, Morris posits that the population of “the Aegean and the colonies in southern Italy and Sicily” rose from under 500,000 people in the ninth century to perhaps 4 million people in the fourth century. If this is correct, the Greek population of this part of the world increased about tenfold and the per annum demographic growth rate was over 0.4%. As Morris points out, this is a comparatively high rate of sustained demographic growth in a premodern society.¹⁵

Morris’ figures are only estimates, but in order for Morris’ posited demographic growth rate to be much too low, we would have to assume that the population of the Aegean/Italian–Sicilian Greek world in 800 BCE was much larger than 500,000, or that in 300 BCE the relevant parts of the Greek world had a population much less than 4 million. Neither counterfactual is plausible: For the early period, archaeologists have expended a great deal of time and effort searching for and analyzing sites from the Greek Early Iron Age (also known as the Dark Age), and they have done their best to show that the Dark Age was not so dark as all that (ch. 6). Despite their best efforts, known Early Iron Age Greek occupation sites remain comparatively sparse and small; as noted above, the nadir of Greek population, around 1000 BCE, was probably about 330,000.

At the other end of the time period, Morris’ estimate of the population of the Greek world in ca. 300 BCE is in line with other demographic estimates since the nineteenth century. Moreover, it is substantially lower than the more recent, detailed, and highly plausible estimates of the Danish historian, Mogens Hansen, who uses different estimation methods, addresses a substantially larger geographic area, and includes communities that were incompletely Greek in culture. My own model of Greek demographic growth, based on Hansen’s estimates, is illustrated in figure 2.1. Morris’ claim of a tenfold increase should be regarded as a minimum.¹⁶

If we accept Hansen’s mid-range figure of more than 8 million for the total population of the world of the poleis in the fourth century, meaning that (as well as accepting the modeling technique) we define “Greek” as a person living in a community that was substantially Greek in culture (rather than “Greek by ancestry”), it appears that the Greek population increased by a factor of 25 in the 700-year period between the Early Iron Age nadir and the peak of the classical efflorescence.17 The geographic expansion of the Greek world accounts for more than half the rise in total population; see figure 2.1. The figures for “core Greece,” discussed below, suggest a nadir-to-peak local population density increase in the range of eight- to tenfold, but this discounts all colonization and emigration.

The second key factor in estimating aggregate economic growth is per capita consumption. Morris sought to estimate changes in per capita consumption over the same 500-year period, 800–300 BCE. While there is no way to measure consumption directly, the proxies employed by Morris are telling. Morris assembled a substantial data set (n = 405) of Greek house plans. The median Greek house in the ninth century was small and squalid. Over the next 500 years, the median house became both much bigger and much better built. Looking at square footage alone, when account is taken of probable second stories, the change of the median house is more than 350%—from ca. 80 m² to ca. 360 m². Given the striking improvement in building standards, the total increase in the economic value of a house would actually have been substantially greater. Morris notes the difficulty of measuring the change in other consumption goods, but based on archaeological evidence of sites destroyed suddenly, he posits that, over the period 800–300, “a five- to ten-fold increase … seems reasonable.”¹⁸

Moving from these numbers to total per capita consumption is a complex problem; a big part of premodern consumption was in the form of food and (where applicable) taxes and rents. Morris argues, on very reasonable grounds, that per capita consumption in ninth century Hellas must have been close to the subsistence minimum. By 300 BCE, however, he suggests that consumption had increased by at least 50% and perhaps as much as 95%. Thus, by 300 BCE, a typical Greek household was consuming half again to twice what an ordinary household had been consuming 500 years before. This range yields a per annum growth rate in per capita consumption of 0.07–0.14%. By comparison, the growth in the Roman per capita growth rate has been estimated at 0.1%.¹⁹ I return to the question of Greek per capita growth below, showing that Morris’ upper-range estimate is more likely than any lower estimate and that the actual rate of Greek per capita growth during 800–300 BCE was probably about 0.15%—one and a half times the estimated Roman growth rate.

Combining his estimate of demographic growth with his estimated growth in per capita consumption, Morris posits that total aggregate consumption growth (number of people × rate of consumption) in Hellas increased roughly 15-fold (assuming his lower per capita rate) to 20-fold (assuming the higher per capita rate) in the period 800–300 BCE, for an annual aggregate economic growth rate of 0.6–0.9%. As Morris points out, Holland is the gold standard for a high-performing early modern economy. The annual aggregate growth rate for Holland in 1580–1820 was about 0.5%. And so, as Morris notes, even if we were to cut his estimate of growth in half (and, per above, we have no reason to think we ought to do that), the Greek economy compares favorably with an exceptionally high-performing premodern economy.20

Morris’ conclusions about relatively high per capita and aggregate Greek economic growth are consistent with other indirect proxies that point to substantial growth in the late archaic and classical periods. Based on data made available in the on-line version of the Oxford-based Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, I calculate that the number of known (from literary or archaeological sources) names of people in Attica (the territory of Athens) grew from ca. 1,200 in the sixth century to ca. 17,000 in the fourth century, an approximately 14-fold increase in less than 300 years. The increased visibility of individuals is obviously the product of multiple variables, notably growing rates of literary and epigraphic production. This high rate of growth in name visibility is consistent with a world in which many more people were consuming substantially more. Counterfactually, a world with a declining population in which most people lived at a level of bare subsistence would clearly be less conducive to rapid growth in the literary and epigraphic visibility of people’s names.²¹

Based on data taken from the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards, David Teegarden and I estimate (in an unpublished study) that the volume of coined money circulating in the Greek world increased substantially as well. between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, the median size of a Greek coin hoard (an indirect proxy for per capita rather than aggregate growth) roughly doubled, from 23 coins to 48 coins per hoard. Meanwhile, the average hoard size quadrupled, from 52 coins to 213 coins, reflecting the increasing incidence of some exceptionally large hoards.²²

When looking at the total number of hoards, and at the total number of coins in all known hoards (which ought to be indicative of aggregate growth), the sixth century numbers are misleading since coinage was introduced in the Greek world in the course of that century. Yet even when we restrict our survey to the classical period, the numbers are suggestive. The number of hoards more than doubled from the fifth century to the fourth, from 238 to 564 hoards, while the number of total coins in all hoards grew threefold, from about 34,000 coins to about 109,000. These numbers cannot readily be translated into a given annual growth rate. Short-term growth in hoarding may, in fact, indicate economic crisis.²³ But over the long term, the substantial growth in both hoard size and numbers of hoards is likely to reflect a world in which there was more money in circulation and in which more people could afford to save some part of their income in the form of cash. This ought, in turn, to mean a world in which more people were living substantially above the level of bare survival.

TABLE 4.1 Summary of Proxy Indicators of Economic Growth

NOTE: Dates represent centuries BCE.

Table 4.1 sums up the evidence for change over time in the proxy indicators discussed in this section: They all move in the same positive direction; they all point to substantial growth over time in the classical Greek economy.

DENSE, HEALTHY, URBANIZED POPULATION

In addition to the relative measures of growth over time, we can evaluate population and welfare in a given era in absolute terms and thereby compare societies over time and space. Denser populations and high levels of urbanization tend to be correlated with higher economic performance and are, therefore, commonly employed by economic historians as proxies for economic growth.²⁴ Among the important results achieved by the Copenhagen Polis Center, directed by Mogens Hansen, has been to give us a better sense of the total population of the extended Greek world in the late classical period and the distribution of that population. As we have seen (ch. 2), by the later fourth century, there were an estimated 1,100 poleis in the Greek world. The territorial size of about two-thirds of all documented poleis (672/1,035) is now known or can be plausibly approximated.

Beginning with the extensive empirical evidence of his inventory of poleis, Hansen uses what he calls a “shotgun method” to estimate late fourth century Greek population and distribution. The method employs the evidence of the physical size and estimated population densities of relatively well-documented poleis, along with the size and estimated densities of intramural areas and the known distribution of poleis across a range of sizes, to arrive at overall estimates of population. On the basis of his shotgun method, and in comparison with 22 poleis for which there is literary and documentary evidence for individual polis populations, Hansen offers new estimates for the minimum total population of the Greek world, the distribution of the Greek population among large, middling, and small poleis, and the relative scale of urban and extraurban populations.²⁵

It is based on this method that Hansen estimates that the extended Greek world in the late fourth century BCE had a population of at least 7.5 million, and more probably 8.5–9.5 million people. The extended Greek world considered in Hansen’s estimate includes regions of Greek settlement excluded from Ian Morris’ estimate of ca. 4 million for the Aegean, Sicily, and southern Italy, but Hansen also argues for a somewhat denser population overall. As we have seen, assuming a late fourth century population of 8.25 million means that the number of Greeks, taken in toto, had—through a combination of natural growth, immigration, enslavement, and the Hellenization of formerly “barbarian” towns—multiplied by a factor of about 25 in 700 years, from the Early Iron Age nadir in ca 1000 BCE to the classical peak in ca. 300 BCE. As noted in chapter 2, using these figures we can estimate that by the late fourth century the Greek world had an overall population density of ca. 44 people per km²—very similar to that of Holland in the mid-sixteenth century and to England and Wales in the late seventeenth century.²⁶

Hansen argues that what I am calling “core Greece,” the parts of Hellas defined by the extent of the Greek state in the later nineteenth century, had a population of at least 3–3.5 million people.²⁷ By way of comparison, in 1889 a census by the state of Greece counted 2.2 million people—this should probably be corrected upward to 2.3 million, per discussion at the beginning of this chapter. As Hansen points out, and as is confirmed by historical demographer Vasilios Valaoras’ analysis of the causes of Greek unemployment and large-scale emigration, there is reason to believe that the population of Greece in the late nineteenth century had already exceeded Greece’s agricultural carrying capacity. The land of Greece simply could not produce enough food to feed any more people. If these figures are in the right range and if the assumptions about carrying capacity are correct, it has considerable bearing on the performance of the ancient Greek economy.28

Unless we are willing to assume that fourth century BCE Greece was much more agriculturally productive than nineteenth century CE Greece (which seems on the face of it unlikely—although it would be interesting if true), if we adopt Hansen’s figures, we must suppose that a substantial part of the fourth century Greek mainland population was fed from food imported from abroad. Something like 0.7–1.2 million Greeks, i.e., roughly a quarter to a third of core Greece’s population in the fourth century BCE, thus may have lived on grain imported (e.g.) from the western Mediterranean, from the Bosphorus/Crimea, or from North Africa.

Once again, even if we were to cut the number of Greeks (derived from Hansen’s estimates) who must be presumed to have lived on imported food in half, we would still be left with some 350,000–600,000 people in excess of the presumed carrying capacity of core Greece.²⁹ This means, in turn, that Athens cannot have been the only major grain-importing Greek polis. And so, the core Greek world can no longer be regarded as entirely defined by subsistence agriculture or local exchange. The imported food had to be paid for somehow—by commodity exports (oil, wine, silver), manufactured goods, services, or the extraction of rents (i.e., by the use of power to obtain resources at prices lower than those that would pertain in a competitive market).³⁰ The general point is that by the fourth century BCE, the mainland Greek world evidently pushed back the standard premodern limiting factor: the “low Malthusian ceiling” of resource constraints.

Total population is only one part of the equation. If we are to understand the conditions of Greek economic growth, it is important to determine how the population was distributed. My calculations, based on Hansen’s analysis of the numbers of large, middling, and small poleis that ever existed in the Greek world shows that most poleis (ca. 900 of ca. 1,100) were small (sizes 1–3), with populations of ca. 1,000–7,000 people. Yet only about a third (36%) of the total Greek population lived in these small poleis. Another quarter of the population (26%) lived in fairly large poleis, that is, in communities with a median population of about 17,000 people (size 4). About 4 in 10 (38%) of the polis-dwelling Greeks lived in very large poleis (sizes 5–7), with a median population of about 35,000 people or more. The results are tabulated in table 4.2.³¹

Along with population density, the rate and level of urbanization are commonly used by economic historians of premodernity as a proxy for economic growth. Among Mogens Hansen’s most striking claims, based once again on the shotgun estimation method, is that about half of the population of late fourth century Greece lived in intramural “urban” centers.³² Combined with the distribution into small, middling, and large poleis, this suggests that about a third (32%) of all Greeks lived in towns of 5,000 people or more: the standard for “urban” that is used by many demographers studying premodernity. A 32% urbanization rate means that, across the Greek world, about 2.5–3 million Greeks lived in what modern demographers define as cities. Assuming that these estimates are in the right ballpark, the Greek world of the fourth century BCE had a much higher urbanization rate, overall, than the Roman imperial world of the first and second centuries CE, in which some 10–12% of the population (7–8.5 million people) lived in similarly large towns. Rome’s urbanization rate was roughly similar to that of England and Wales in the seventeenth century, or France in the eighteenth century.³³ Classical Hellas was less urbanized than mid-seventeenth century Holland (45%); but England and Wales reached classical Greek urbanization levels (and a similar number of total of urban dwellers) only in the first years of the nineteenth century (table 4.3). Modern Greece did not equal the fourth century BCE urbanization rate until the 1930s (figure 4.1). The picture does not change significantly when we use a more demanding standard of urbanization.³⁴

TABLE 4.2 Estimated Distribution of Greek Population by Polis Size

NOTE: Based on ranking of polis size distribution modeled in table 2.1.

The high urban population of classical Hellas fits comfortably with the conclusion that a good many Greeks living in the core areas of Hellas (as defined by the frontiers of the late nineteenth century Greek state) consumed imported rather than locally grown food. It would be wrong to imagine that the set “urban residents” completely overlapped with the set “imported food consumers”; a substantial number of urban Greeks may have lived in “agro-towns” from which residents commuted to their fields. Some very extensive intramural areas may have enclosed gardens or even fields. Nevertheless, the estimate that about a third of the Greek world lived in urban areas is compatible with the finding that roughly a quarter to a third of the core Greek population was fed from imported food. Both results push against the standard modern premise, which assumes that the ancient Greek economy was overwhelmingly defined by subsistence agriculture; together the two demographic results point to a relatively sophisticated and diversified economy, one in which many people lived well above bare subsistence. These population figures are, in turn, in line with recent work, notably by the Chicago-based economic historian, Alain Bresson, to the effect that trade, in commodities as well as luxury goods, was much more important in the Greek economy than was long thought to be the case.³⁵

TABLE 4.3 Comparative Urbanization Levels and Populations

	Urban %	Urban Total (millions)
Hellas 350–300 BCE	32	2.5–3
Rome 100–200 CE	10–12	7–8.5
Holland 1651	45	0.44
England and Wales 1688	13	0.74
France 1788	12	2.8
England and Wales 1801–1803	30	2.78

NOTES: Urban = Town of more than 5,000 people. Figures for Rome: Wilson 2011. Figures for Holland, England and Wales, and France: Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson 2011: Table 1.

Higher levels of urbanization correlate, historically, with higher incomes and economic intensification,36 but not necessarily with improved health and welfare: Rapid growth of urban populations has historically been associated with the spread of disease, and, e.g., in nineteenth century England and Holland, with squalid living conditions in crowded tenements. There is no evidence that these dismal conditions pertained in fourth century Greek towns. While the data on change over time in the health of Greek populations are difficult to interpret, and in some ways contradictory, it is clear enough from studies of human bones found in Greek archaeological excavations that the average life span of Greek men and women reaching adulthood increased substantially from the end of the Dark Age to the fourth century BCE. Based on the more recent (1990s) analyses, the ages at death of individuals surviving childhood seem to have increased by about 10 years for both men and women over this period: from about 26 to 36 for women, and from under 30 to about 40 for men.37

Life expectancy at birth (which in all premodern populations is much lower than average age at death for those surviving into adulthood, due to high levels of infant and child mortality and to the effects of disease) in fourth century Greece would still have been very low by modern standards, perhaps not exceeding the mid- to upper twenties.³⁸ But it was certainly substantially better than it had been 500 years previously, in Early Iron Age Greece, when there was probably no town of as many as 5,000 people. Moreover, despite intensive archaeological exploration, there is not as yet any evidence in excavations of classical Greek towns for extensive tracts of small and squalid urban dwellings. As we saw above, the median Greek house, urban as well as rural, tended to become much larger and better built in the five hundred years after 800 BCE. Given the intensity of the archaeological exploration of Greece, it seems unlikely that slums have simply escaped notice.³⁹

In sum, by the late classical period, Hellas was relatively densely populated. The number of Greeks who lived in urban areas was remarkably high by premodern standards. They lived in much bigger settlements, in much bigger houses, and in substantially healthier conditions than their ancestors could have dreamed of. A good part of the population of mainland Greece was fed from imported food. The classical Greek world had not fallen victim to the Malthusian trap, and its economy cannot adequately be explained by reference to subsistence agriculture alone.

EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND INCOME

A third measure of economic development is the distribution of wealth and income. Historically, all complex societies have been characterized by economic inequality. Yet when wealth and income are distributed extremely inequitably, such that society is bimodally segmented into a tiny elite of the very wealthy and a great mass of individuals living at subsistence, there is correspondingly little room for sustained economic growth. It is only with the emergence of a substantial and stable middle class of people living well above the level of subsistence, and therefore willing and able to purchase goods unnecessary for their mere survival, that societal consumption becomes a driver of economic growth.⁴⁰

How equitably was the wealth of Hellas distributed across its relatively dense and urbanized population? Once again, house sizes can be used as an indirect proxy. Ian Morris shows that archaic/classical Greek settlements were never characterized by a few mansions and many huts. Rather, across the entire half-millennium from 800 to 300 BCE, the distribution of Greek houses tends to cluster around the median house size. The size of larger houses (the top quartile in floor plan) failed to diverge markedly from that of smaller houses (the bottom quartile). The size of larger and smaller houses grew more or less in lockstep across the period: by 300 BCE, houses in the 75th percentile of the distribution were only about one-fifth again (roughly 50 m²) as large as those in the 25th percentile.41

A comparative survey of house sizes at Olynthos (i588) and other well-preserved Greek urban areas by Geoffrey Kron of the University of Victoria confirms this general picture: unlike (e.g.) nineteenth century England, the distribution of house sizes at mid-fourth century BCE Olynthos describes a bell curve: most houses fall in the middle, rather than on the far left (tiny house) side, of the distribution. Overall inequality among house sizes at Olythos was very low.⁴² Not every Greek family could afford to buy a substantial house—which may have cost something in the neighborhood of 6–15 years of income.⁴³ But many could afford to own a home: Based on recorded house costs and the Athenian census of 322 BCE in which some 9,000 citizens (of a presumed total of ca. 31,000) owned property amounting to more than 2,000 drachmas, Kron estimates at least nearly a third, and possibly as many as three-quarters, of Athenian citizen families could afford to purchase a house.⁴⁴

Kron has attempted to calculate wealth distribution in late fourth century Athens more directly by reference to the standard Gini index: a coefficient (from 0 to 1) of inequality in a given population. The lower the Gini coefficient, the more equitably the good in question is distributed across the population (so 0.1 is very equal; 0.9 very unequal). The Gini coefficient may also be displayed visually by a Lorenz curve; the further below a line describing a 45-degree angle (perfect equality), the greater the level of inequality. In Kron’s calculation, the good is household wealth; we calculate the Gini index and Lorenz curve for Athenian household income below.

Athenian private wealth was certainly not distributed with anything approaching perfect equality. Based on reports of the census of 322 BCE and other sources, Kron calculates that in late fourth century Athens the richest 1% of the population owned about 30% of all private wealth; while the top 10% owned about 60% of the wealth. This yields a Gini index of 0.708. Kron compares this figure to the Gini wealth coefficients for several modern societies. The late-classical Athenian level of total-wealth inequality is roughly comparable to that of the United States in 1953–1954 (0.71). It is less equal than Canada in 1998 (0.69) but more equal than Florence in 1427 (0.788) or the United States in 1998 (0.794). It is much more equal than the United States or England in the early twentieth century (0.93 and 0.95, respectively).⁴⁵

Kron’s conclusion on the comparatively equitable distribution of private wealth in late classical Athens is consistent with estimates of landholding in Athens: Two independent studies by British classical scholars concluded that about 7.5–9% of citizens owned about 30–35% of the land of Attica; some 20% owned little or no land. Excluding those at the top and bottom of the distribution, we are left with roughly 60–65% of the land being owned by about 70–75% of the citizen population.46 Ian Morris points out that the resulting range of Gini coefficients, 0.382–0.386, is strikingly low in comparison to estimated distributions of landholding for other ancient and medieval societies. Although the baseline Athenian figures do not tell us anything about some relevant factors affecting the value of land, e.g., distribution of especially productive land or financial encumbrances on landholdings, Morris is certainly right to conclude that, “the basic point is clear: landholding was unusually egalitarian in Classical Athens.”⁴⁷

Economists typically assess material inequality by measuring income. although it is not possible to calculate an income Gini for all Hellas, on the basis of what I take to be a plausible model of wealth distribution for later fourth century Athens (table 4.4, with discussion below), I estimate the income Gini for the whole of Athenian society (including slaves and resident foreigners) in the later fourth century to be in the region of 0.40–0.45, based on two models (an optimistic model assuming lower inequality and a pessimistic model assuming higher inequality). The corresponding Lorenz curves are illustrated in figure 4.2. This is similar to the income Gini estimate of 0.42–0.44 suggested by the ancient economic historians, Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen for the high Roman Empire. Yet, based on the relevant income distribution models, the shapes of the Lorenz curves for the two societies are quite different; the difference arises from the substantially larger Athenian population of people who fall in the middle range, between the richest and poorest.⁴⁸

What we really want to know about income in a premodern society is how many people lived near, or well above, subsistence. Stanford’s Walter Scheidel has analyzed the real wages of unskilled workers (i.e., those at the lower end of the economic distribution) in a number of ancient and medieval communities. Scheidel’s approach is to convert daily income into a “wheat wage”—a well-established method of assessing the level of income in different currencies or in kind by reference to a single standard of liters of wheat per diem. The wheat wage can then be used to estimate the proximity of the wage earner to the base level of bare survival. Scheidel’s figures show that in most premodern societies in which daily wages can be calculated (and thus converted into liters of wheat per day), wheat wages fell in a fairly narrow “core” or “customary wage range” of 3.5–6.5 L of wheat/day with a median of 5.5 L/day.⁴⁹

TABLE 4.4 Athens, Late Fourth Century BCE Income Distribution Models

NOTES: Elite = liturgical fortune, which is >3–4T (Davies 1971), and >10× subsistence. Subsistence minimum = 100 dr/year. Middling = 2.4–10 × subsistence (Scheidel and Friesen 2009).

FIGURE 4.2 Athenian inequality, late fourth century BCE (Lorenz curves)

NOTE: Based on income models in table 4.4.

Scheidel suggests that 3.5 L/day defines the lower limit of the customary wage range—this level of adult male wage cannot have been far above bare subsistence (i.e., close to the edge of survival).⁵⁰ If we take that level as a baseline “head of household” contribution, below which it is not possible to fall very far or for very long, if an ordinary family were to survive (3.5 L/day adult male income = subsistence baseline = 1S), we can then calculate more generous income regimes, featuring higher wheat wages, as multiples of that baseline. Thus the median of the “customary wage range,” at 5.5 L/day, is about 1.6 × bare existence (= 1.6S). This is enough to get by but is still not far enough above the level of survival to be described as comfortable, or even decent conditions of life.

Scheidel and Friesen suggest that wages in the 1–2.3S range (i.e., up to about 8 L/day) may be regarded as constituting the general category of living at the level of subsistence.⁵¹ Adult male incomes of 2.4–10S (about 8–35 L/day) are considered to define a decent, “middling” existence—families with an income earner at this level could be expected to consume some goods not necessary for bare existence. This suprasubsistence-level consumption is an important driver of economic growth if the “middling” families constitute a substantial part of the total population. Those whose incomes were greater than 10S (more than 35 L/day) are categorized as elite. This elite group was a very small part of every premodern population. Thus, the conversion of wages to wheat wages allows the possibility of estimating the distribution of the population of a given society across the broad, but analytically useful categories of subsistence, decent/middling, and elite levels (table 4.5).

Distributing populations into three income tiers (subsistence, middling, elite) is obviously artificial and reductive; it obscures meaningful differences in levels of welfare and ignores how people defined themselves relative to others. Yet it is analytically useful in assessing and comparing the economic performance of ancient societies. As noted above, if a given society is divided into a tiny wealthy elite on one end and a mass of people living at subsistence at the other, there is relatively little social surplus, and so economic performance is correspondingly low. If there is a substantial “middling” population of people living comfortably above subsistence, then there is correspondingly more demand for surplus production, making possible relatively higher economic performance.

TABLE 4.5 Per Diem Income (Real Wages Expressed as Wheat Wages)

NOTE: Based on Scheidel 2010 and Scheidel and Friesen 2009.

Scheidel and Friesen argue that Roman wages fell within the low “customary wage range” and that most Roman laborers thus remained at the Subsistence level.52 On the basis of these assumptions, they offer two simple models for the distribution of income across Roman imperial society. Their “optimistic” model is based on assumptions pointing to a relatively more egalitarian income distribution (and thus, per above, to more consumer demand and a correspondingly higher expected rate of economic growth); the “pessimistic” model employs assumptions that lead to a less egalitarian distribution (and so less demand and less growth). The goal is not to specify a single distribution (we do not have the evidence to do that) but to develop a general range into which the actual distribution of incomes can reasonably be assumed to have fallen (table 4.6).

The key point here is that even on the optimistic scenario, only a small percentage of the total Roman population fits into the middling category; most residents of the empire lived close to subsistence and thus had relatively little surplus to spend on nonessential goods. On the basis of this model, Scheidel and Friesen argue that imperial Rome, overall, failed to generate a sufficiently large social surplus to push back the Malthusian constraints that, as we have seen, limit the growth of subsistence-level economies. Once again, however, it is important to keep in mind that the Roman Empire was very large and that there must have been considerable regional economic variation.⁵³

TABLE 4.6 Income Distribution, Roman Empire

NOTE: Based on Scheidel and Friesen 2009.

Athens is the only pre-Hellenistic Greek community for which we have figures for daily wages.54 On the basis of the available evidence, classical Athens appears to be one of the very few known societies in the period 1800 BCE–1300 CE in which daily wages were substantially above the subsistence-level “customary wage range.”⁵⁵ Construction-work wages and military wages in Athens in the later fifth century BCE averaged 1 drachma/day; the wheat price was about 6 drachmas/medimnos (1 medimnos = 52–54 L), yielding a daily wheat wage of 9 L and thus a baseline multiplier of 2.6S. This is just above the “middling” floor of 2.4S. In the 320s, unskilled laborers were paid 1.5 drachmas/day; wages for skilled laborers were up to 2.5 drachmas/day; the wheat price was 5–6 drachmas/medimnos. This yields a range of wheat wages of 13–16 L/day and a baseline multiplier of 3.7–4.6S: thus solidly within the “middling” range of 2.4–10S.⁵⁶ By way of comparison, median wages in Holland, ca. 1500–1800, translate to a wheat wage ranging from 10–17 L/day, and thus a baseline multiplier of 2.9–4.9S (table 4.7).

The evidence for late fourth century Athenian wages is anecdotal, but it is consistent with what Athenians were being paid for especially important forms of public service: Citizens attending a meeting of the Athenian Assembly (which typically lasted a half-day) were paid 1dr (30 annual ordinary meetings) or 1.5 dr (10 annual principal meetings).⁵⁷ The key point is that both in later fifth century BCE and, a fortiori in the later fourth century, Athenians who were engaged in unskilled as well as skilled labor (at least on construction of state-sponsored buildings) were paid wages sufficient to elevate them to a decent, middling premodern standard of living: They no longer hovered at a subsistence level perilously close to bare survival. Based on data currently available, this was rare anywhere in the world before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵⁸

If we assume that the available data about Athenian wages is more or less accurate, we can make informed guesses about the distribution of the late fourth century Athenian population into the three general income categories of subsistence, middling, and elite. The figures on which the following estimates are based are detailed in table 4.4. Following the lead of Scheidel and Friesen, I posit two possible distributions: a “pessimistic” (less equitable, ergo lower consumption, lower expected growth) distribution and an “optimistic” (more equitable, higher consumption, higher expected growth) distribution. For each distribution, I assume a total population for Athens of just under a quarter million people, of which about a third were slaves, and about a tenth were resident foreigners.⁵⁹

TABLE 4.7 Athens and Holland, Wheat Wages

NOTE: Based on Scheidel 2010.

Elite status in Athens can be defined by a liturgical fortune of 3–4 talents.60 Assuming a conventional annual return of 1:12, such a fortune would in fact yield a living standard of roughly 10 times bare survival. The elite population of Athens amounts to a little over 1% of the total. In the optimistic scenario, I assume that most citizens and metic (resident alien) males, and even a small number slaves (those who “dwelled apart” from their masters) would be able to make at least one drachma/day on average and so would achieve middling status. In the pessimistic scenario, I assume that only about two-thirds of citizens, a minority of metics, and no slaves received regular wages at or above the one-drachma/day level. In this simplified model, I do not take into account women’s or children’s paid labor; the middling women and children in table 4.4 are assumed to be members of “middling” families. Nor do I make any allowance for the historically exceptional absence of heavy taxes or steep rents paid by Athenian citizens below elite status.⁶¹ Both productive labor by women and children and the low-tax/rent regime may push in the direction of more optimistic scenarios than I have presented here.

The results are tabulated in table 4.8 and illustrated in figure 4.2.

Table 4.8, based in the first instance on the evidence for relatively high Athenian wages, incorporates a number of assumptions, some of which may be too pessimistic (per above). Other assumptions may be overly optimistic, notably that the wages recorded in our sources represent something approximating the market standard and that unemployment and underemployment were not rampant. On the other hand, because achieving middling status required average wages of only 1 drachma/day (rather than the reported late fourth century wage level of 1.5–2.5 drachmas/day) there is a fair amount of discounting already built in—even without taking the relative absence of exploitative taxes or rents into account. In sum, it appears likely that a substantial number of residents of fourth century Athens lived far enough above subsistence to enable them to live decent lives. The surplus consumption capacity of a comparatively large middling population would have been a major driver of the Athenian economy.

Assuming that my model of income distribution in later fourth century Athens is more or less correct, can we extrapolate from Athens to the wider Greek world? Were high Athenian wages at all typical of the Greek world generally? The answer to that question will depend on how we imagine Greek labor markets as operating. If (counterfactually) we assume labor markets with zero transaction costs (i.e., that there was no restriction or cost, material or psychic, to movement from one part of the Greek world to another and that people would choose to move to where wages were highest), then Athenian wages would reflect the equilibrium conditions of the Greek world and we could assume that high Athenian wages reflected Hellenic norms. The no-transaction-cost assumption is, of course, false: the value of the Athenian evidence for the rest of the Greek world depends on how high the transaction costs associated with moving from one labor market or polis to another actually were.62

Many non-Athenians did choose to live in Athens as metics, and at least some of them did so for economic reasons. Indeed it is likely that most Greek poleis had populations of noncitizen residents. Thus, the costs of moving were not so high as to preclude all economically motivated movement.⁶³ It is, therefore, at least a plausible starting hypothesis that the Athenian wages reflect a Hellenic wage regime that is substantially higher than the 5.5 L/day wheat wage postulated by Scheidel as the ancient/medieval “customary wage range” median.

TABLE 4.8 Income Distribution, Late Fourth Century BCE Athens

NOTE: For model on which these figures are based, see table 4.4.

Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that in modeling the distribution of consumption across the Greek world, we cut the percentage of middling people in the pessimistic Athenian model in half. The resulting percentage of “middling” Greeks (a little over 20%) would still nearly double the estimated middling percentage in Scheidel and Friesen’s optimistic Roman Empire model (12%). Moreover, as we have seen, the late classical Greek world was highly urbanized (table 4.3), and modern studies have demonstrated a high correlation between urbanization and real wages.⁶⁴ All of this suggests, in turn, that there is quite likely to have been, at least by the later fourth century, a substantial number of Greeks living well above subsistence, and thus that there was likely to have been a correspondingly substantial social surplus produced by the Greek economy. This conclusion is compatible with the two premises of strikingly high per capita and aggregate economic growth and a remarkably dense and healthy urban population, discussed above.

In light of the evidence about income in Athens and what it might have to say about income distribution in the Greek world, I posit that Morris’ upper range estimate about Greek per capita economic growth is more likely than his lower range. Morris’ upper range assumes that consumption roughly doubled from 800 to 300 BCE. This assumption makes sense when translated into wheat wages. If we assume that in 800 BCE an ordinary family’s per capita daily consumption was fairly near the subsistence minimum (1.5S), and thus that the adult male wage earner contribution was about 5.25 L/day, doubling consumption would mean that by the later fourth century BCE the adult male wage earner contribution would be 10.5 L/day (3S). Given that fourth century Athenians were being paid at roughly 13–16 L/day, a late-classical Greek median daily income for adult male workers of more than 10 L seems plausible. Under this model, the rate of per capita Greek economic growth in the half-millennium 800–300 BCE would have been around 0.15% per annum, compared to ca. 0.1% per annum for the early Roman Empire.⁶⁵

CONCLUSIONS

When the whole of Hellas is compared to the whole Roman Empire at its height, or when the presumptively most advanced Greek state (Athens) is compared to the most advanced early modern European states (Holland and England), Hellas, in the classical era, may reasonably be described as wealthy. The classical efflorescence was the high point of Greece’s premodern economic history—both population and consumption were much higher than the premodern normal and exceeded the levels of the Middle Bronze Age efflorescence centered on Crete and the robust Greek economic recovery of the fifth and sixth centuries CE.

Figure 4.3, which breaks out the development index of figure 1.1 into its population and consumption components, illustrates the long history of economic development in “core Greece.” Although the figures on which the chart is based are only rough estimates, if the main arguments of this chapter are on the right track, they must be of the right order of magnitude. The premodern normal population of “core Greece” (the territory controlled by the Greek state in 1881) was under a million; premodern normal median consumption probably hovered at 1.5 to 2 times subsistence. When we multiply population (in millions) by consumption (in multiples of subsistence) to create a simple development index, the premodern normal range is 0.5 to 2 (figure 1.1). The classical peak, from about 600 to 200 BCE is, in each instance, much higher.⁶⁶

FIGURE 4.3 Population and consumption estimates, core Greece, 1300 BCE–1900 CE.

Notes: Population estimated in millions. Median per capita consumption estimated in multiples of subsistence minimum. LBA = Late Bronze Age. EIA = Early Iron Age. EH = Early Hellenistic. LH = Late Hellenistic. ER = Early Roman. LR = Late Roman. EB = Early Byzantine. MB = Middle Byzantine. EO = Early Ottoman. LO = Late Ottoman. Ind = Independent Greek state. Core Greece = Territory controlled by the Greek state 1881–1912. Estimates based on evidence discussed in chapters 2, 4, and 6.

Developing similar graphs that would trace long-run changes in population and consumption, for the whole of the territory occupied by Greeks in ca. 300 BCE, or for non-Greek regions of the Mediterranean/western Asia worlds, currently appears unfeasible: The intensity and quality of archaeological fieldwork and the availability of documentary evidence, across the many regions (and today, many countries) that constituted the classical Greek world and its neighbors, vary too greatly for plausible estimates. If, counterfactually, such charts could be produced, I believe that the “Greek world” chart would show a pattern somewhat similar to that of figure 4.3—although certainly not identical to it in light of diverging trajectories of development in different regions (e.g., Crete, eastern Sicily, Black Sea coast). By contrast, hypothetical long duration population/consumption graphs for most regions outside the Greek world would, I believe, look very different from figure 4.3.

The rest of this book explains how Hellas became wealthy in the archaic/classical era, why the wealth of Hellas did not prevent the Macedonian conquest of the late fourth century, and how efflorescence was sustained and Greek culture preserved after the loss of full independence by most of the great city-states.