CREATIVE DESTRUCTION AND IMMORTALITY
Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!
—BYRON 1812
In the poetic lines with which we began, Byron described Greece as immortal, fallen, and great. We have followed the rise of classical Greece to greatness, understood as efflorescence. We have traced the fall, understood as the loss of full independence by the major city-states. This concluding chapter reviews the causes of greatness and fall and turns to the question of immortality.
FALLEN, GREAT …
Both greatness and fall had similar causes: high levels of specialization, innovation, and mobility of people, goods, and ideas as the result of distinctive political conditions. I characterized those political conditions as fair rules and competitive emulation. Those conditions were emerging in the eight century BCE, had crystallized by the sixth century, and continued to develop through the fourth century in self-governing citizen-centered polities within a decentralized marketlike ecology of many small states sharing a common language and background culture.
In the most developed Greek city-states, relatively impartial rules, backed by the willingness of citizens to act in their defense, protected citizens (and some noncitizens) from historically common forms of domination and expropriation. That gave individuals and communities reason to invest in themselves. Investments included acquiring education, perfecting skills, and deferring short-term payoffs in favor of anticipated long-term rewards. The Greek world was characterized by intense competition between individuals and between communities but also by institutions and cultural norms that enabled extensive interpersonal and interstate cooperation and that lowered the costs of transactions. Competition, along with growing human capital and lower transaction costs, drove continuous innovation, both institutional and technological. Successful institutions and technologies, along with goods and ideas, were readily transferred within and among states. Because transaction costs were low, the value gained from the exchange of specialized goods and services was high. These political conditions promoted economic growth that was driven by a large middle class of consumers: non-elite families living well above subsistence. Economic growth in turn underpinned spectacular levels of cultural achievement. The same conditions paved the way, however, for an entrepreneurial and opportunistic authoritarian leader to borrow selectively from Greek institutions and technological innovations and thereby to conquer the mainland Greek states, ending the era of full great-polis independence.
Fair rules and competitive emulation in an ecology of small states do not explain every historical example of efflorescence. The historical sociologist Jack Goldstone’s survey, discussed in chapter 1, shows that premodern societies with different political trajectories have experienced efflorescence.1 But in Greece, the distinctive political situation that arose beginning around 800 BCE and persisted for at least the next half-millennium was the differentiator that enabled the world of the city-states to perform economically and culturally at a level much higher than the premodern normal, defined by conditions in the Late Bronze, Early Iron, and early modern periods of Greek history—and indeed, at a level that in some respects matched the exceptionally high-performing early modern societies of Holland and Britain.
Those conclusions are important to us in modernity, not because Greece was the unique origin of the Western tradition or the spark that ignited a putative “great divergence” between East and West but because classical Greece is the earliest documented case of “democratic exceptionalism plus efflorescence”—a historically rare combination of economic, cultural, and political conditions pertaining among developed countries in the contemporary world.
Insofar as we value democracy and prefer wealth to poverty, then we have good reason to care about explaining the rise of the society in which the wealth and democracy package is first documented. We have equally good reasons for wanting to explain why the major states within that society failed to maintain their full independence in the face of entrepreneurial authoritarians willing and able to appropriate institutions and technology. In the long run, the loss of city-state independence was coincident with a long economic decline. By the seventh century CE, core Greece had reverted to the relatively impoverished condition of the “premodern normal.” The world of Greek antiquity was obviously very different from our own, and some of the factors that led to both the rise and fall of classical Greece are unlikely to be repeated. Yet for those who do recognize certain features of our modernity in the history of classical Greece, that history may serve as a cautionary tale.
… BUT WHY IMMORTAL?
We have one more puzzle to solve: Whence Greek immortality? How is it that Byron (and we) could know so much about the history and cultural accomplishment of classical Greece? If the political fall had coincided with the end of Greek greatness—if Greece had quickly reverted to the depressed economic situation of the premodern normal after Philip’s victory at Chaeronea, Byron could not have learned enough about ancient Greece to regard it as immortal. Much of the literature, science, art, and architecture that are associated with “immortal Greek greatness” were indeed produced during the classical era. Even more was, however, produced in the subsequent Hellenistic period, drawing on that classical heritage. Self-consciously classicizing Greek literature continued vibrant during the high Roman Empire with the literary renaissance called the “Second Sophistic.” In late antiquity, Greek philosophers and historians were still producing important work, actively drawing on classical models. Moreover, the cultural achievement that was a primary basis for Byron’s belief in Greek greatness was preserved and canonized, as well as built upon, in the postclassical era: We would be severely limited in our knowledge of the history of the Greek world in the era 800–300 BCE if it were not for the sustained efforts of librarians and copyists during the centuries that followed the fall.2
Neither Byron’s famous lines nor this book would have been written if the political fall of classical Greece had meant an abrupt end of efflorescence. But if the fall did not terminate economic growth and cultural achievement, we must ask why it did not. I have argued that distinctive classical-era political conditions that supported fair rules and competitive emulation—conditions not pertaining during the Bronze or Early Iron Ages nor in the medieval through early modern periods of Greek history—produced the sustained specialization and innovation that drove efflorescence. Then why did the loss of full independence not precipitate a quick and steep decline?
The answer is that the initial loss of Greek independence turned out to be only partial: Although the power of the Macedonian dynasts was real, many postclassical Greek poleis enjoyed considerable independence in the Hellenistic period. Some smaller Greek states were more independent than they had been in the classical era of hegemonic city-states. We now know that, contrary to what most scholars of Greek antiquity long believed, important aspects of Greece’s political exceptionalism survived the classical fall.3
The political conditions of the postclassical Hellenistic world included the persistence of a multistate ecology: Until the Roman takeover of Greece in the second century BCE, there were always multiple rulers rather than a unitary empire. Meanwhile, ongoing institutional innovations promoted new forms of interstate cooperation. The political institutions and values of classical Greek democratic exceptionalism—federalism, rule of law, citizen self-government, and civic values of freedom, equality, and dignity persisted long after the fall, albeit sometimes in modified forms. As a spate of new scholarship has proved, many polis governments were democratic well into the second century BCE, and robustly so.4
Under these conditions, enough of the Greek poleis were able to preserve sufficient levels of rule egalitarianism and competitive emulation to sustain efflorescence for some two centuries after the “fall”: Economic growth, while harder to measure after 323, appears to have continued long after Chaeronea. Cultural production certainly remained high. Important new advances were made in the fields of Greek historiography, drama, philosophy, science, technology, medicine, art, and architecture. While Athens remained an important cultural center, Hellenistic cultural production was widely dispersed across a large number of major cities. Cultural centers now included royal capitals—including Egyptian Alexandria, Anatolian Pergamum, and Syrian Antioch, each functioning as a polis with its own laws, citizens, and local government—along with poleis that had already been major centers in the classical period: Rhodes, Cos, Corinth, Sicyon, Kyrene—as well as Syracuse, Athens, and others. The political fall of classical Greece proved, in short, to be yet another example of creative destruction, rather than a ruinous destruction leading to quick economic and cultural collapse.
By the time imperial Rome took over a still-flourishing Greek world, Romans had become eager consumers of Greek culture. By the second century BCE, Roman elites were deeply enough Hellenized to ensure the subsequent preservation and dissemination of Greek thought and culture throughout the huge and still-growing Roman Empire and across the next several hundred years. Having jumped scale to become a dominant imperial culture in one of the two biggest empires of the premodern world (the other was Han China), the immortality of Greece was, if not ensured, at least made possible.
After the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth to seventh centuries CE, classical Greek culture was sustained by the successor Eastern (Byzantine) empire and by scholars and scientists in the medieval Arabic-speaking world. When, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, in the face of Ottoman Turkish imperial expansion, Greek literature was reexported to the West during the Italian Renaissance, and when Greek learning was popularized in northern Europe by Erasmus and other luminaries in the sixteenth century, its immortality was ensured.5
None of that was inevitable in the late fourth century BCE: Not every Empire has encouraged, or even allowed, the preservation of the intellectual heritage of conquered small-state ecologies.6 The immortality of Greek culture hinged on its uptake by the Hellenistic kingdoms after the political fall. That uptake was in turn predicated, at least in part, on the capacity of a number of the Greek poleis, in the two centuries after the fall, to negotiate terms of local independence and reasonable tax rates with powerful and rapacious Hellenistic dynasts. The dynasts were forced to concede more independence and to charge lower rents than they would have preferred because Greek cities were hard targets: While a given dynast often had the power to capture a given city, the cost of doing so was likely to be high (appendix II). Greek cities were hardened through Greek institutional and technical innovations—especially democracy, federalism, and military architecture—devised in the classical era and robustly sustained and further developed in the Hellenistic period.
ALEXANDER’S CAMPAIGN AND ANOTHER FALL
Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Persian Empire had immediate and profound effects on the Greek world. The Greek cities of western Anatolia were liberated from Persian imperial control—whether or not they wished to be—following Alexander’s battle with Persian satraps at the Granicus River (map 9). The battle, fought just east of Abydos in northwestern Anatolia in May 334, was a great victory for the young Macedonian king. Things might, however, have gone otherwise. There would have been no battle to win had the Great King Darius III accepted the strategic advice of his Greek general, Memnon of Rhodes. Memnon advocated a scorched earth policy aimed at starving the invaders while avoiding direct battle. Moreover, in the course of the battle, Alexander was nearly killed. Leading a cavalry charge, he was cut off from most of his men, and his helmet was cleaved by a Persian axe. Alexander thus came close to suffering the fate of the brilliant would-be usurper of the Persian throne, Cyrus II, who died leading a cavalry charge at the battle of Cunaxa in 401 (ch. 9). The near-doublet need not have been happenstance: Persian tactics in both instances seemed well designed to isolate an impetuous commander. Only a fortuitous spear thrust by Alexander’s companion, Cleitus “the Black,” saved the young Macedonian king from suffering Cyrus’ fate. The history of a counterfactual world in which Cleitus had been just a bit slower would have diverged radically from what in fact followed.7
After his victory at Granicus, Alexander moved inland and replaced the Persian governors of Lydia and Phrygia with men of his own choosing. He left intact the existing Persian satrapal system of local governance, however, perpetuating the principal-agent problem that had long bedeviled the governance of the Persian Empire. Once the Macedonian army returned to the coast, most of the Anatolian Greek poleis accepted their liberation, but Miletus in central Ionia resisted, as did Halicarnassus in Caria. Miletus fell fairly quickly to Alexander’s siege machines. Halicarnassus, though, whose defense was led by the redoubtable Memnon, held out for much longer by making effective use of catapults mounted on the city walls. Each of the Anatolian Greek cities, now subject to Alexander, paid taxes to him in the form of suntaxis—the Greek term was borrowed from the “contribution” system of the Athenian naval league of the fourth century—and avoided the coercive associations of the “tribute” (phoros) system of the fifth century Athenian empire.8
Alexander actively promoted democracy in the Anatolian poleis, in place of Persia-supported oligarchies. He thus broke with Philip’s Corinthian League regime policy, guaranteeing that subject states kept their existing constitutions. He also broke with Philip’s preference for oligarchy, a preference that had been expressed in the new government imposed on Thebes after Chaeronea. Presumably Alexander felt that he had good reason to distrust the Greek elites who had gained most from Persian rule. New democracies would be more likely to support the new king—especially if the alternative was the return of the oligarchs with bloody reprisals to follow. The incumbent satrap of Caria, Ada (sister of Mausolus and wife of the previous satrap), was left in control of her province. The Greek cities of Ionia and Aiolis (regions 37 and 38: map 1 and appendix I) seem, however, to have arranged the terms of their allegiance directly with the Macedonian king, thus anticipating the situation of many Anatolian Greek poleis in the Hellenistic period.9
Meanwhile, after leaving Halicarnassus, Memnon, Darius’ Greek commander, moved west into the Aegean, where he quickly gained control of Cos, Chios, and four of the poleis of Lesbos. He besieged the fifth and most important Lesbian city: Mytilene, the site of the Athenian campaign in 427 BCE (ch. 8). Alexander now faced the prospect of losing the Aegean. He hastily regrouped naval forces that had been prematurely dismissed after his victory at Miletus. Memnon, however, fell ill and died before the walls of Mytilene. Persian commanders carried on with Memnon’s Aegean strategy, eventually taking Mytilene and the island of Tenedos (i793). But Alexander’s lieutenants contained the Persian advance and later retook the north Aegean islands. Once again, Alexander had dodged a bullet and thus was free to continue his fast-paced advance south to Syria and Egypt and then east across Asia.10
The rest of Alexander’s extraordinary campaign—from the victory at Issus to the great sieges of Tyre and Sidon, to the conquest of Egypt, and to his greatest victory at Gaugemela; the burning of Persepolis, the pursuit of Darius and then of Darius’ murderers, the difficult Afghan and Indian campaigns, the voyage down the Indus River, and the horrific march back through the Gedrosian Desert to Babylon—falls outside the ambit of this book. What matters for our purposes is that, during his lifetime, the diplomatic arrangements that followed the Macedonian victories over the Greeks in 338 and 334 remained for the most part intact. There was one dangerous challenge to Macedonian authority while Alexander was still campaigning deep inside Asia: By spring of 331 BCE, King Agis III of Sparta had built an anti-Macedonian Peloponnesian alliance that included most of the poleis of Arcadia, Elis, and Achaea. Megalopolis (i282) stood by Macedon and was besieged by Agis. Athens hesitated but eventually stood aloof, as did Corinth and other major poleis. The uprising was crushed by the Macedonian general, Antipater, after a big battle before the walls of Megalopolis (reportedly some 65,000 combatants: equivalent to the number who fought at Chaeronea). Sparta, defeated, was forced to join the League of Corinth.11
Upon Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, there was another uprising, this time led by Athens. Relations between the king and the city had soured when, in 324, Alexander had ordered the return of political exiles to the Greek cities—thereby threatening Athens’ cleruchy on Samos. Alexander had also demanded that he be offered divine honors as a godlike king in each of the Greek cities. When, soon thereafter, news came of the king’s death at Babylon, the Athenians had already raised funds and gathered a large mercenary army. There were several hundred warships (triremes, and the new quadriremes and quinqueremes) ready for action in the shipsheds. Athens declared war, joined by Rhodes, the Aetolians, Phocians, Locrians, and some states of the Peloponnese. Leosthenes of Athens was elected commander by the council of the allies. The Boeotians, most of the poleis of Euboea, and many other Greek states remained loyal to Macedon.
Leosthenes gained quick victories over Antipater, besieging him in the southern Thessalian city of Lamia (i431)—the town that would give its name to the war. But the siege was broken by Macedonian reinforcements. The Athenians meanwhile launched a fleet of 170 ships—an armada comparable in size to the great imperial navies Athens had put to sea during crises of the Peloponnesian War. But in July 322, the Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Macedonian navy in battles fought off Abydos at the Hellespont and the island of Amorgos in the central Cyclades. The Macedonian victories at sea were sealed a month later by a big land battle (again with about 65,000 combatants) at Crannon (i400) in central Thessaly (map 9).
After the Macedonian victory at Crannon, there was another negotiated settlement, but this time, with its fleet lost and vulnerable to being starved (as in 404 at the end of the Peloponnesian War), Athens was forced to accept a new government: The robust democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries was abolished. Athens was to be ruled as a moderate oligarchy in which citizenship was determined by a property qualification of 2,000 drachmas. The cleruchy on Samos was disbanded. In September 322, a Macedonian garrison took up residence in Piraeus. Athens’ political fall appeared complete. Yet a few years later, the democracy was briefly restored. For the next century, the Athenians would repeatedly struggle, sometimes successfully, to regain democracy and a measure of independence.12
AFTER THE FALL: HELLENISTIC WORLD
The possibility that the era in which great and independent Greek city-states dominated the eastern Medieterranean might be rebooted after 338 was shut down by the Macedonian victories against Agis in 330 and in the Lamian War of 322. In 304, however, a failed siege of the island-polis of Rhodes by Demetrius “the Besieger” proved that even the most redoubtable of the Hellenistic warlords risked failure when they sought to capture the greatest of the fortified Greek cities. Then, in 301, at Ipsus in central Anatolia, an epic battle was contested by more than 130,000 infantry, 25,000 cavalry, and 500 war elephants. It pitted several of Alexander’s ambitious former commanders against one another. The victory of Seleucus “the Victorious” and his allies at Ipsus determined that Alexander’s mega-empire would not survive to be governed by a single emperor but rather would be subdivided into several rival kingdoms, each ruled by a Macedonian warlord.13
By the beginning of the third century, the framework of the postclassical Hellenistic world had been set. Which colorfully nicknamed dynast would control what territory remained in doubt. But by 300 BCE, in the wake of Ipsus, it was certain that at any given moment several kings, most of them Alexander’s former generals or their descendants, would share in ruling the eastern Greek world.
Sicily quickly followed the lead of the Greek east. After the collapse of the constitutional order established by Timoleon (ch. 9) and a brief oligarchic interlude, the military adventurer and mercenary general, Agathocles, had become tyrant of Syracuse. He eventually became master of eastern Sicily along with (occasionally) parts of south Italy. In 304, Agathocles declared himself king. Breaking with the practice of earlier Sicilian tyrants and emulating the practice of the Macedonian kings, Agathocles issued coins featuring his own image in his own name and with the royal title that the Greeks had ordinarily reserved for legendary heroes and eastern monarchs: basileus. By the third century, the main Hellenistic kingdoms were centered in Syria and Mesopotamia, ruled by descendants of Seleucus “the Victorious”; in Egypt, ruled by descendants of Ptolemy “the Savior”; and in Macedonia, ruled by descendants of Antigonus “the One-Eyed.” Substantial second-tier kingdoms were centered in Pergamon, Pontus, and Syracuse.14
These were extremely important developments for the city-state ecology. Rather than a single empire, able to bring matchless resources to bear on dissidents, the greatest power holders of the Hellenistic world were both limited and counterbalanced by rivalry with one another. With authority divided and the now much-expanded Greek world remaining in many ways decentralized, there were ample openings for city-states and federal leagues to play the Macedonian dynasts against one another. While there was no question of most Greek city-states remaining fully independent of the will of kings, the citizens of the poleis were not reduced to the status of docile royal subjects. Meanwhile, as the noted historian of the ancient Greek world, John Ma, has emphasized, the end of city-state hegemonies left many smaller poleis (for example, the poleis of Boeotia) with more freedom of action than they had experienced in the classical era.15
While the citizen-centered world of city-states that Aristotle had described in the Politics was certainly changed in many ways, the new world that emerged from the dramatic late fourth century era of creative destruction did not bring forth a Leviathan of the sort that would have satisfied Thomas Hobbes (ch. 3). Just as the destruction of the Athenian empire had brought into being new and creative political and economic possibilities (ch. 9), so too the end of the hope and the fear that Alexander’s empire could be consolidated as a single state spurred the creation of new polis and interpolis institutions.
There had been, in the course of the later fourth century, reason to fear that the end of the political conditions that had sustained the classical efflorescence would precipitate a quick and severe economic decline. As we have seen, Philip’s Macedon was far from an open-access order. Whatever grand plans Alexander might have had for the cities of his empire were lost in the struggles that culminated at Ipsus. Alexander’s successors were, as the British historian of the Hellenistic era, M. M. Austin, has emphasized, warlords: pirates writ large. By the third century BCE, several of the dynasties founded by Alexander’s generals were able to maintain control over core regions. But in the generation immediately following Alexander’s death, the Macedonian kings treated much of the extended Greek world as up for grabs and a source of booty. An early Hellenistic warlord’s two primary policy goals were closely related: gain control of an army of well-trained, well-armed Greeks and Macedonians, and find the means to pay them.16
Under these conditions, we would expect ferocious rent-seeking. Cities would be plundered to pay mercenaries. Extortionate taxes on surviving cities, arbitrarily collected, would drive up transaction costs, reducing individual and collective incentives to invest in human capital. Increased costs of trade and declining economic specialization would result in a long-term drop in the value of exchange and thus economic contraction. Places where central authority was strong, notably Egypt under the Ptolemies, settled quickly into an equilibrium that was productive in the long run for the ruling elites. But in Asia and the mainland, with authority contested, armies large, and the stakes high, we might expect an economic decline similar to that suffered by the poleis of Sicily in the mid-fourth century (ch. 9). Yet this grim scenario was not played out—or at least not consistently enough to put an end to Greek efflorescence.
Because the data on Greek poleis in the Inventory do not extend beyond 323 BCE, the conventional end point of the classical era, it becomes more difficult to measure the performance of the Greek economy in the late fourth and third centuries. There was considerable migration of Greeks, east and south out of mainland Greece, as Macedonian kings established new cities in Egypt and other former provinces of the Persian Empire. This movement presumably reduced population density in core Greece. But it seems highly unlikely that late fourth or third century saw a general or sustained economic decline across Hellas. Indeed, in at least some parts of the Greek world, notably in western Anatolia, the Greek poleis probably reached new economic peaks.17
EMULATION, CONVERGENCE, AND COOPERATION AFTER CHAERONEA
Athens in the era after Chaeronea provides a particularly well-documented and exhaustively studied example of the postclassical economic and cultural potential of a leading Greek state. As we have seen, after Chaeronea Philip II negotiated a diplomatic settlement with Athens rather than seeking to force submission by besieging the city. Athens joined the League of Corinth and thereby lost its independence in foreign policy. But there was no change in government, no garrison, no extortionate taxes. In the years between 338 and 322, Athens was robustly and actively democratic. Politicians debated policy in the Council and citizen assembly and prosecuted one another in the people’s courts over alleged breaches of public trust. The democratic government passed numerous laws and decrees and ordered them published on marble stelae. Many public documents from this era have been unearthed by archaeologists, including the law passed on the motion of Eukrates in 336, which reiterated the legality of tyrant killing and specified punishment for magistrates who collaborated with a nondemocratic government.18
Athens also flourished economically. Under the expert financial management of the statesman Lycurgus and his associates, annual state income rose to the point that it roughly equaled that of the high imperial era before the Peloponnesian War. Public funds were expended on important building projects, civic and military alike: The city and Piraeus fortification walls were modernized, and more warships were built, along with shipsheds and dockyards to house them. A monumental new arsenal for the storage of naval equipment was constructed in Piraeus. Among major civic projects was a new stadium for the Panathenaia festival. The Theater of Dionysus was given a massive overhaul, as was the civic assembly place of the Pnyx. This was also the period in which Athenian wages—at least for laborers (including slaves) on public projects—reached levels similar to those of Golden Age Holland (table 4.7). Similarly high wages were offered for especially important forms of public service. The civic education and military training of 18- and 19-year old Athenian citizens was formalized and intensified through the institution known as the ephebeia.19
Athens in the 17 years after Chaeronea serves as a model for the semi-independent postclassical Greek city-state. The Greek historian John Ma has documented what he calls the “great convergence” of the Hellenistic poleis around institutions that were especially associated with, and in some cases directly borrowed from, classical Athens. Greek states in the Hellenistic period took on signature democratic institutions, including elimination of property qualifications, people’s courts, pay for public service, and formal accountability procedures for magistrates.20 The Athenian “epigraphic habit” of publishing democratically enacted laws and decrees on stone spread widely across the Hellenistic world. Hellenistic Greek cities have provided modern epigraphers with extensive dossiers of public decisions on a variety of matters—including detailed records of negotiations with the kings to whom taxes were paid. Young citizens were trained in military skills and civic values in institutions modeled on the Athenian ephebeia. Wealthy citizens were expected to contribute generously to public goods. They were honored publicly, with inscriptions and sometimes with statues, when they did so with sufficient enthusiasm. New public buildings were erected. Many states now constructed theaters, stadiums, and stoas—as well as new temples and religious sanctuaries. Special attention was lavished on military architecture. Some states, most notably Rhodes, built navies of modern warships.21
Meanwhile, although in certain respects subject to the constraints imposed by membership in the League of Corinth, Athens, like other Greek poleis, remained actively engaged in cooperative interstate relations that remained unregulated by royal authority and yet essential for sustained prosperity. In the late 330s, Greece was hit by a severe grain shortage, probably as the result of an especially bad harvest in Egypt—a big and reliable exporter of grain in normal years. A unique document from Kyrene (i1028), the leading Greek polis in North Africa west of Egypt, records shipments of grain to 43 beneficiaries, 41 of them Greek city-states. In each case, the beneficiary state would have sent commissioners to Kyrene, requesting a specific amount of grain; the government of Kyrene in turn bought grain (wheat or barley) locally and granted export licenses to various poleis. Under the circumstances, the authorities in Kyrene could set the price of grain wherever they wished. As the University of Chicago’s Alain Bresson argues in his definitive analysis of the document, the actual price charged by the Kyrenean state authorities was probably well below what they could have demanded in light of the grain shortage.22
Athens received the biggest shipment (100,000 medimnoi: 12.4% of the total grain recorded in the inscription). If distributed across the entire Athenian population, this would be about 21 L (at ordinary prices, about 1.5 days’ wages for an adult male) per capita.23 Other major poleis (Argos, Larissa, Corinth, Rhodes, Sicyon, Megara) received 30,000–50,000 medimnoi; relatively tiny poleis, including Karthaia and Koresia on Keos, also received several thousand medimnoi. In every case, this must represent substantially more grain per capita than was exported to Athens.
As Alain Bresson cogently argues, the Kyreneans erected the inscription because they were proud of having saved the other Greeks from a potential famine. They did not exploit the grain shortage by charging extortionate prices, but they did not lose from the deal either. Both the local farmers of Kyrene and the state itself stood to gain, financially as well as in prestige, from the evidently well-managed relief effort. The point is that the Greek world remained decentralized and productively interdependent after the political fall. Interstate exchange of information and goods buffered what could have been severe local conditions of famine. There was no intervention, or need of intervention, by an imperial Leviathan. The effective response was predicated on good information (identifying local deficits and surpluses across the ecology) and on a form of rational cooperation that used market mechanisms while rejecting profit maximization as the only relevant value.24
Several years later, in 325, the Athenians erected an inscription detailing the dispatch of a number of warships to a naval base that Athens had established somewhere in the Adriatic. The inscription states that the purpose of the expedition was “so that the demos may for all future time have its own commerce and transport in grain and that the establishment of their own naval station may result in a guard against the Etruscan pirates … and that those Greeks and barbarians sailing the sea, and themselves sailing into the Athenians’ naval station, will have their ships and all else secure….” Athens was obviously continuing its policy of using its naval power to suppress pirates and thereby push down the costs of exchange, especially for the essential trade in grain. The primary beneficiaries are the Athenian citizens themselves (the demos). But the decree is explicit in recognizing that the interests of the Athenians were conjoined to those of their trading partners, both Greek and non-Greek (“barbarian”) and that those interests involved security in respect to property: “[they] will have their ships and all else secure.” The inscription points to the continuation of actions by a Greek state, acting independently to secure overseas trading routes as a public good. That public good was among the underlying cooperative conditions that had sustained the classical efflorescence.25
After the Lamian War of 322 had effectively eliminated Athenian naval power, Athens could no longer defend interstate commerce against pirates. But Athens was not the only Greek polis concerned with trade: In the later fourth and third centuries, Rhodes, which had a huge trade in wine, grain, and other commodities, took on the responsibility of patrolling the Aegean and thus keeping the costs of exchange reasonably low.26
Meanwhile, the relatively independent Greek cities of the postclassical era continued to compete vigorously with one another. But competition was carried out in the context of an increasingly rich array of cooperative interstate institutions. Some disputes were still settled by interpolis warfare, but other interstate conflicts were resolved by resort to formal and binding third-party arbitration. Sometimes the arbitrator was a king, but often it was a peer polity—another city-state or federal league. The results of arbitration clarified which states had a recognized claim to what borderland territories. Such clarification reduced the border disputes that had been a perennial source of violent interstate conflict in the classical period. Piracy and privateering were at least to some extent controlled by formal interstate agreements banning the compensatory seizure of assets from residents of one state by the residents of another community. Once again, the upshot was to keep transaction costs relatively low. And once again, all this was accomplished without the intervention of a central authority.27
Interstate cooperation included the refoundation of important cities. When Thebes was rebuilt in 316, some 20 years after its destruction by Alexander, and with the collusion of the League of Corinth, a number of Greek poleis contributed to the cost—including Thebes’ one-time rival and sometime ally, Athens. The Athenian contribution was focused on the reconstruction of the Theban city walls. A half century before, after the battle of Leuctra, Messene had been refounded as a polis under the auspices of the Thebans, as a counterweight to a potentially resurgent Sparta. A big part of the refoundation of Messene had been the construction of a massive, state-of-the-art, stone city circuit wall, complete with towers designed to house catapult artillery. So too, 22 years after the fall of 338, the refounding of Thebes began with the construction of a fortification wall capable of protecting citizens against coercive threats.28
DEMOCRACY, FEDERALISM, FORTIFICATIONS
Insofar as decentralized forms of interstate cooperation, along with fair rules and competitive emulation, remained the norm for the poleis of Hellas—after as well as before the political fall—the continued vitality of Greek economy and culture after the loss of full independence by most of the great poleis does not falsify the causal explanation that I have offered for the classical efflorescence. Many Hellenistic Greek states remained, by comparative historical standards, surprisingly independent and surprisingly democratic. Their ability to remain so owed little to charity on the part of the Macedonian kings. Rather it was because rent-seeking kings were unable to impose a settlement more heavily weighted in their own favor.29
The creative potential of a postclassical Greek world was realized, and the classical efflorescence gave way to a Hellenistic efflorescence, rather than collapsing into economic and cultural decline, both because interstate cooperation continued in the absence of a unitary empire and because the Greek cities were able to defend themselves against the warlords—well enough, at least, to secure a high level of independence and low rents. The poleis were able to make coercive rent extraction difficult for the Hellenistic kings in part by playing the dynasts off against one another. But the cities would not have been in a position to play that diplomatic game had they been unable to defend themselves when necessary. The Hellenistic poleis’ capacity to look after their own security was, in large measure, the result of three related developments: the consolidation of democracy as the local government for many of the Greek poleis; the expansion and consolidation of federal leagues; and continued innovations in military architecture and technology. together, those three developments tipped the offense–defense balance back in favor of the defenders of cities and against would-be attackers.
As we have seen, Greek democracy did not perish in the fall; many Greek poleis of the Hellenistic period adopted signature institutions and cultural norms familiar from classical Athens. Indeed, by the end of the fourth century BCE, it is likely that more Greek poleis were democracies than ever before. Based on the evidence collected in the Inventory, David Teegarden, a historian at the University of Buffalo, counted the number of Greek states recorded as experiencing different regime types in each half century from the early seventh to the late fourth century BCE. The number and percent of poleis known to have experienced oligarchy increased every half century from the early seventh to the late fifth century (from 40% to 59%) and decreased (to 37%) thereafter. By contrast, the number and percentages of states known to have experienced democracy increased markedly from the early sixth to the late fourth century (from 4% to 46%).30 Extrapolating from these trends, we may guess that as many as half the poleis of the Greek world were democracies by 300 BCE.
While Hellenistic democracies were in some ways different from classical Greek democracies, they were democratic in the meaningful sense of being states that were collectively self-governing, ruled by an extensive and socially diverse body of citizens. The trend toward democracy seems not to have been reversed in the course of the third and early second centuries.31 There are various ways to explain this postclassical floruit of citizen self-governance, including Alexander’s strategic choice to depose Persian-supported oligarchs in the poleis of western Anatolia. The question remains why the trend was not reversed over time: Why did the new democracies prove so robust against oligarchic and tyrannical coups d’etat?
David Teegarden has provided an answer: By emulating legal institutions that had helped to stabilize classical democracies, notably legislation legitimating the killing of tyrants, democrats in postclassical Greek poleis in effect set up an “oligarchs and democrats game” that favored the perpetuation of democracy. The rules of the game were established by legislation that was partially modeled on classical Athenian antityranny laws. The new rules reduced the level of pluralistic ignorance among citizens regarding one another’s regime preferences, provided strong incentives for first movers to initiate attacks on antidemocratic revolutionaries, and thereby enabled a cascade of cooperative action in defense of the regime by prodemocracy citizens. Would-be oligarchs, looking back down the “oligarchs and democrats” game tree to that unhappy (for them) outcome, were rationally dissuaded from revolutionary activity and chose instead to cooperate with the democrats. The resulting social equilibrium stabilized the democratic regime.32 This equilibrium was clearly an important part of the story of postclassical democracy. In this section I suggest a similar and complementary argument for why self-interested elites in cities threatened by warlords might choose to support democracy despite relatively high internal tax rates.
A Hellenistic version of the classical Athenian democratic solution to the “mass and elite game” (ch. 9) helped to bring the interests of elite and ordinary citizens into closer convergence. The elaboration of a public language of reciprocity, reinforced by institutionalized practices of civic honoring, at once encouraged high levels of generosity on the part of elites and imposed restraint on the democratic majority’s impulse to tax the wealthy minority at extortionate rates. Stable regimes promoted polis security because attackers were less able to take advantage of internal divisions by holding out a credible option of regime change. Democratic poleis also enjoyed advantages in respect to mobilization and morale, as well as in disclosure and aggregation of useful knowledge dispersed across the citizenship. Those democratic advantages, as we have seen, helped to make Athens a preeminent polis in the classical period.33
The late fourth through early second centuries BCE saw the fulfillment of the potential of Greek federal leagues (koina). As we have seen (ch. 9), the Greek koinon was a new and innovative form of strong interstate cooperation, predicated on shared identities, religious practices, and economic interests among the member states. As the Berkeley historian Emily Mackil has shown, koina of the late classical and Hellenistic eras were not throwbacks to primitive forms of prestate, tribal association. The Boeotian League of the mid-fourth century was aberrant in being the hegemonic instrument of a single imperial state. For most of their history, Greek koina were innovative and adaptive voluntary associations of peer polities. Each koinon managed regional affairs among states that treated one another as political equals and promoted strong forms of citizenship, both locally and regionally.34
The federal leagues fostered economic welfare at a regional level by lowering transaction costs among member states. They also promoted the welfare of member states through military organization. The league charter enabled each member state to commit credibly to defending the interests of the other member states—thus solving the commitment problem that had doomed so many Greek classical-era alliances and peace treaties. Koina were thus, on the whole, able to provide a measure of security for small states against external threats by much larger predatory states. The Achaean and Aetolian leagues, the most powerful of the Greek koina in the Hellenstic era, never managed to displace the kingdom of Macedon as the single most powerful player on the Greek mainland. But they did serve to limit the Macedonian king’s power to dominate the states of central and southern Greece and to extract rents from them.
By the end of the classical era, almost all relatively large and prominent Greek poleis were heavily fortified (table 2.5). For many large and mid-sized poleis, fortifications served a function similar and complementary to that of democracy and federalism: providing a measure of security against the predatory tendencies of Hellenistic warlords, based on an improved negotiating position. Relatively low rents and royal acquiescence to relatively high levels of local polis independence were, in part, the products of a balance struck between the offensive potential of the warlords’ armies to take fortified cities by force and the ability of the cities to defend themselves against sieges.
The political role of military mobilization and investment in fortification has been a recurring theme in this book: Although siege technology and technique advanced in the classical era, so long as there were enough well-motivated men to defend them, well-built fortifications markedly increased an attacker’s costs. In the Hellenistic period, the costs of offensive siege operations remained high enough to induce the kings to negotiate a reasonable level of taxation with the cities within their zones of control. Kings could not afford to use too much coercion, too often, against heavily fortified and well-defended Greek cities—especially when the kings remained in fierce competition with one another. A king might offer aid to a city besieged by a rival—as the Great King had done when Philip II besieged Perinthus and Byzantion in 340 (ch. 10), and as Ptolemy I had done (thus gaining his nickname of “Savior”) when Demetrius besieged Rhodes in 304.
The equilibrium that emerged from the game played by the democratic, federalized, and fortified Greek cities and the kings of the Hellenistic age left many of the Greek poleis as self-governing and free to continue to compete with one another—militarily as well as in other ways. The resulting “king–polis” equilibrium was superior in terms of economic performance to a counterfactual equilibrium predicated on unlimited royal coercive power (i.e., closer to the “Pareto optimal” condition in which at least one player gains and none loses). This robust Hellenistic equilibrium extended the efflorescence of “wealthy Hellas” well past the end of the classical era.
In seeking to explain the persistence of efflorescence after the classical fall, the factors of federation, heavy local investment in city fortifications, and the prevalence and stability of democracy are not entirely separate. Substantial manpower was required to take on a royal army in the field or to defend an extensive system of fortifications against a concerted attack by a large army with a big siege train. Defenders must be reliable, which meant that mercenaries were less than desirable. Democracy was a proven way for a beleaguered Greek city to mobilize a large part of its potential manpower. As we have seen (ch. 7), Syracuse proved to be a more formidable opponent than imperial Athens had expected during the long siege of 415–413—in part because Syracuse was at the time a democracy. On the other hand, while there were a number of reasons for residents of Greek states to favor democracy and federation, poleis chose to invest heavily in bigger and better fortifications specifically in response to an evolving military threat: the presence of predatory warlords with big armies, who were capable of making full use of late classical and early Hellenistic advances in artillery and siegecraft.35
KINGS, DEMOCRATIC CITIES, ELITES: THE HELLENISTIC EQUILIBRIUM
There is no space, in a book devoted to explaining classical Greece, to offer a detailed account of the centuries between the political fall and the final Roman takeover of the Greek world. Instead, I offer a simple model to illustrate certain Hellenistic-era relations relevant to political and economic exceptionalism. By constructing a game played by a Hellenistic king, a democratic Greek city, and an elite citizen of that city, it is possible to model choices of kings about whether to attack a fortified city, the choices of citizens about whether to invest in fortifications and military training, and the choices of elite citizens in respect to supporting or subverting a democratic regime. Although some of the particulars would be different, a similar game could be constructed to model the choices of a king, a federation of cities, and elite citizens of the federation. Indeed, as my Stanford colleague, the political scientist Barry Weingast, and I show in collaborative work in progress, analogous games can readily be constructed to illustrate other equilibria discussed in this book: between elites and ordinary citizens in Solon’s Athens, between hoplites and poorer citizens in Themistocles’ Athens, and between elite orators and ordinary citizens in Demosthenes’ Athens.36 Our King, City, and Elite Game, is presented more formally in appendix II.
In this kind of game, each player moves (makes a choice) in turn. When no player has a move to make that would better his or her situation, in light of moves he or she knows could be made by other players, the game ends. The (Nash subgame perfect) equilibrium outcome of this game is a negotiated settlement in which the King declines to attack the fortified city, the city pays to the king a reasonable rate of taxes (substantially lower than would be demanded if the city submitted), and the elite citizen chooses to support democracy, despite a relatively high internal taxation rate.
Of course, simple games do not capture the complexity of historical reality. In many real-world situations, the outcome would differ from that of the game sketched in appendix II. In the real Hellenistic world, kings did sometimes choose to besiege even very well fortified cities. Sometimes cities were destroyed or forced to submit and pay high taxes. Sometimes elites chose revolution rather than cooperation with democratic regimes. The game offers only a general model, not a reliable prediction of what would happen in a specific instance. But the model’s historical realism is affirmed both by general trends in Hellenistic military, political, and economic history, and by consideration of an often-overlooked passage in Aristotle’s Politics.
Writing in the later fourth century, at the cusp of the classical and Hellenistic eras, Aristotle, in books 7 and 8 of the Politics, developed his own model for a “best practically achievable polis.” Most of his discussion regarding the “polis of our prayers” concerns social, political, and educational institutions. Notably, his best polis, although in many ways aristocratic, is also democratic insofar as all native free males turn out to be citizens. The best polis’ citizens possess both civil rights to property and legal redress, and participation rights, in the sense of “ruling and being ruled over in turns.”37
A central part of the duty of these citizens is to defend the state as soldiers. Like Plato, in the Republic and Laws, Aristotle was very concerned to ensure that the citizen-warriors of his best polis had the right motivation (to this end, Aristotle specified that each citizen would own property in militarily sensitive border zones) and the right training. The goal was to ensure full mobilization of a military that was effective in time of war. Unlike Plato, Aristotle also specifically advocates for city walls. Moreover, he insists that fortifications be militarily advanced and defended by the best available technology. His reason is the necessity of deterring aggressors:
As regards walls, those [i.e., Plato] who aver that cities which pretend to valor should not have them hold too old-fashioned a view—and that though they see that the cities that indulge in that form of vanity are refuted by experience…. [Because] the superior numbers of the attackers may be too much for the human valor of a small force, if the city is to survive and not to suffer disaster or insult, the securest fortification of walls must be deemed to be the most warlike, particularly in view of the inventions that have now been made in the direction of precision with missiles and artillery for sieges…. not only must walls be put round a city, but also attention must be paid to them in order that they may be suitable … in respect of military requirements, especially the new devices recently invented. For just as the attackers of a city are concerned to study the means by which they can gain the advantage, so also for the defenders some devices have already been invented and others they must discover and think out; for [potential aggressors] do not even start attempting to attack those who are well prepared.
—Aristotle, Politics 7.1330b–1331a, trans. Rackham (Loeb) adapted
The King, City, and Elite Game described in appendix II explains the relationship among four distinctive features of the Hellenistic Greek world—more democratic states, lower than expected levels of rent extraction by warlords, heavy investment in fortification by city-states, and elite cooperation with local democratic regimes. The key to their relationship is called out in the italicized phrase of Aristotle’s Politics: potential aggressors “do not even start attempting to attack those who are well prepared.” That disinclination of the potential aggressor to begin an attack is an important outcome of the game.
Aristotle is sometimes criticized for being excessively “polis-centric”—for putatively failing to attend to the great changes that were already well advanced when he was writing the Politics. I have argued elsewhere that, quite to the contrary, Aristotle’s “best practical polis” was designed with the emerging world of Macedonian hegemony very much in mind.38 If this is right, then we may suppose that among the unnamed aggressors who will not “even start attempting to attack” the presumptively well-prepared (with Fortifications, artillery, and defenders) polis is, as in our game, a potentially predatory Macedonian king.
Among Aristotle’s primary goals in the Politics is to show that the autonomous polis is the best, indeed the only possible, environment for the pursuit of an essential moral end: the fulfillment of human flourishing (eudaimonia). I would suggest that Aristotle was very well aware of the military developments of his age. He took those developments into account in designing his best polis and, most particularly, when writing the passage cited here. If the morally essential (as he supposed) autonomous polis were to continue into the era that had been set in train by Aristotle’s employer, Philip II, and by his pupil, Alexander, the polis would have to be able to defend itself against levels of coercion that could destroy its autonomy and thus ruin the environment in which human lives might be perfected.
Aristotle knew from experience that Macedonian kings could often, although not always, expect to win when they chose to besiege major Greek cities. He knew that Philip, Alexander, and their warlord successors put a great deal of energy into developing technology (torsion catapults, siege towers) and techniques of siegecraft. Their sieges, when attempted, were frequently successful. Aristotle’s hometown of Stageira had, like its neighbor Olynthos in 348, been razed as a result of Philip’s effectiveness as a besieger of cities. Aristotle also knew, however, that there had been some spectacular failures: Philip failed to capture either Byzantion or Perinthos, despite major sieges, in 340. Moreover, even a successful siege was likely to be costly—tying up essential manpower and resources for months—Alexander’s famous siege of Tyre, a prominent Phoenician city-state, delayed him for seven months in 332. All of these facts were readily available to Aristotle when he was writing and revising the Politics.
Aristotle imagines his best polis as a new colonial foundation but one that will exist in an ecology of other poleis—potential partners in exchange and allies in war, as well as potential rivals. Aristotle also knew that the major Greek cities were well fortified and well defended, and that there were many of them. While it goes beyond the text of the Politics, Aristotle might well have reasoned that if a king attacked cities within his realm without provocation in an obviously predatory manner, the rest of the fortified cities in his realm would lose their incentive to cooperate with him. They might stop paying taxes, coordinate with other cities in revolt, or invite in a rival king (as Perinthus and Byzantion had done in receiving aid from the Great King of Persia). Given these conditions, a potentially predatory king had good reason, on the face of it, not to “even start attempting to attack” a well-fortified, well-defended city—so long as he could gain the revenue he needed to pursue his ends by other, less risky means.
Aristotle certainly knew all that. Importantly, the Hellenistic kings who dominated the Greek world in the era after Aristotle also knew it, as did the residents of the fortified Greek cities within their realms. Moreover, each participant knew that the others knew it, and so on. That is to say, the predatory king’s disincentive to attack, if a city were well fortified and well defended, was a matter of common knowledge.39
Common knowledge regarding the probability that a king’s attack would succeed and concerning the costs he incurred in mounting an attack is a premise of the game between a predatory King, a democratic fortified City, and a potentially revolutionary Elite citizen of the City (formalized in appendix II). The game predicts that the King will decline to attack the City; the City will agree to pay moderate taxes to the King; and the Elite will support the democracy. The King declines to attack because, although he has a good chance of taking the City if he does attack, he also faces a significant chance of failure. In light of that chance, the cost of attacking is prohibitively high. The City willingly pays some tax because to refuse to do so would change the King’s cost–benefit assessment in the direction of an attack that really does have a good chance of succeeding, leading to plunder and higher taxes. The Elite citizen supports democracy because an oligarchic city would be less able to defend against the King’s attack. Because the King also knows that, the taxes the King could demand from the City might be proportionately higher if the City were oligarchic.
These outcomes generally track historical trends across much of the Hellenistic world in the third and early second centuries. Moreover, if we change the assumptions of the game in ways that violate Aristotle’s recommendations for the defense of his best city, the outcomes of the game change in ways that track historical reality less well. Appendix II offers a fuller defense of the claim that the equilibrium solution of the game is a reasonable approximation of historical relationships between cities, kings, and elites in the early Hellenistic era.
There are various possible contributory causes of continued growth after the classical fall: Most importantly, with Alexander’s conquests the greater Greek world continued on the path, traced in chapter 9, of expanding in size while converging on a common polis culture—and this increased the potential payoff to Greek cities from specialization and exploitation of relative advantages in production and distribution of goods. Counterfactually, however, had predatory early Hellenistic warlords been free to tax the Greek cities at very high rates, the underlying conditions that had (so I have argued) produced the classical efflorescence—vigorous competition between relatively wealthy and relatively independent city-states in the context of social orders that encouraged individual and collective investments in human capital—would have come to an end.
Most of the early Hellenistic kings had short time horizons and were ready to forego the uncertain prospect of long-term gains for short-term payoffs in the form of booty and high rents. The conjunction of fortifications and/or federalism with democracy forced upon the kings a certain level of restraint in coercive rent extraction. That restraint helped to create the conditions that sustained a strong economy and thereby enabled the Greek world to continue to make substantial cultural advances long after the fall of classical Greece.
ENVOI
The victories of imperial Macedon and the loss of full independence in the later fourth century were very painful for great city-states like Athens, and at least temporarily eliminated others, including Thebes. But by the end of the fourth century BCE, it was clear that the fall had not been fatal for the polis ecology overall. The Hellenistic equilibrium maintained both political exceptionalism and efflorescence through the third century and well into the second century. That equilibrium was the enabling condition for the survival of Greek culture in the vibrant form in which it was taken up by the Romans, when they conquered the Greek world. Because Greek culture flourished for long enough to be adopted by the imperial Romans, it was eventually, albeit in fragmentary form, passed along to us.
While Greek city-states remained in existence long after the Roman takeover, the Hellenistic equilibrium did not endure indefinitely. Roman military capacity was of a different order from that of any Greek state, so a different game was to be played in the Greek world after Rome arrived as imperial hegemon. The Greek cities, like most of the cities of the Roman Empire, were eventually stripped of their fortifications.40 The federal leagues were disbanded. But by that time, they had done their work: Greek political culture, in the form of democratic exceptionalism, had survived the fall and had been deeply embedded into a developing literary canon. Greece, once great and though fallen, was on its way to immortality.
Because of the immortality of classical Greece, democratic exceptionalism has been preserved as a real-world possibility ever since. Because that which once was could again be, domination could no longer be authoritatively presented as the only secure form of social order, as the only route to economic growth and cultural achievement, or as the inevitable fate of humanity. Although autocracy and domination have remained historically common, whenever and wherever domination is challenged, political theorists and legislators know that there is an alternative. They know that the alternative could be a brilliant age of citizen-centered politics and high culture. Readers of history also know that regression to the historical mean of elite domination is possible, that citizen-centered regimes can be oppressive in their own right and can be overthrown, and that political, economic, and cultural development can be reversed.
The purpose of this book has been to present anew the inspiring story and cautionary tale of the rise and fall of classical Greece, using newly available evidence and the explanatory tools of twenty-first century scholarship. I have thereby sought to keep faith with my predecessors: the generations of scholars and writers—from Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle onward—who made the political history of ancient Greece a living resource for all who aspire to end domination and to advance toward citizenship.