A Periclean Economy?
Today, an “economy” means the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, both material and immaterial. But this term, which was forged in Athens in the classical period, had a sense that was very different from its contemporary one. In the fourth century, oikonomia defined, first, the way of managing an oikos, an agricultural property. It was only by extension that the term came to designate the management of the resources of a city, or even an empire. This mismatch between oikonomia and “economy,” the ancient formulation and the modern definition, for a long time led historians to doubt the existence, in the Greek world, of any economic sphere separate from all other social activities.
One group of ancient historians thus maintains that the cities knew of nothing more than a primitive form of economy, characterized by the preponderant part played by agriculture, the role of self-subsistence, the limited place of crafts and money, and an absence of major exchange systems. That view has long since been challenged by experts who, on the contrary, emphasize the dynamism of the ancient economy. In this battle between “primitivists” and “modernists” that started at the end of the nineteenth century, the Athens of Pericles constitutes a particularly animated scene of disagreement.
The fact is that, in the course of the fifth century, the democratic city experienced a phase of extraordinary prosperity. Its silver coinage was developing so rapidly that the little Athenian “owls” became the common currency of a large part of the Greek world. Its port, Piraeus, became the major seat of exchange for the eastern Mediterranean. However, historians are not in agreement as to the nature of the economic prosperity of Athens: did it result from an internal dynamic, in particular a rational management of resources both private and public, or was it no more than a by-product of Athens’s exploitation of the Delian League? What were the bases of the Athenian economy under Pericles? Was this an economy based on the revenues that Athens obtained from the hegemonic position that it acquired, or did its vitality spring from the rise of new economic ways of proceeding within the city? And, in any case, is it really possible to assign to Pericles a specific role in any such evolution?
To find answers to these questions, we must begin by focusing upon the private sphere: can we detect the existence of any Periclean oikonomia—that is to say, any specific way of managing an oikos and one’s own personal assets? According to the ancient authors, the stratēgos administered his own patrimony extremely carefully, radically rejecting extravagant behavior and the kind of practices that led one into debt and that were then favored by the Athenian elite.
When we pass from the private sector to the civic level, the questions change. They now concentrate on the part that the empire played in the economic dynamism of Athens. Even if it is clear that the Athenians drew substantial benefits, both direct and indirect, from the empire, this does not mean that their prosperity stemmed solely from the tribute that they levied on their subject cities. Today, most historians think that the policy of “major constructions” associated with the name of Pericles was financed only partly by the league treasury, which was transferred to Athens before 454.
Whatever the exact degree of the economic exploitation of the allies, the city also profited from other large revenues—what the Greeks called prosodoi. The Athenians took to using these sums of money in a new way: they redistributed part of them to the community in the form of wages and civic allowances. Perhaps this was the true specificity of the Periclean economy: a new way of redistributing wealth to beneficiaries who, in return, became more strictly controlled. In this major development, Pericles certainly played a decisive role.
PERICLES AND A RATIONAL MANAGEMENT OF THE OIKOS: THE BIRTH OF A “MARKET ECONOMY”
The Oikonomia Attikē
Etymologically, oikonomia designates the controlled management (nomos comes from nemein, with the root meaning “distribute” and so “manage”) of a household. Far from identifying with the modern notion of an economy, initially it concerned only the private sphere and, above all, affected only agricultural activity, to the detriment of other forms of production and distribution, such as artisan activity and commerce.
It is true that agriculture constituted the essential part of the wealth that was produced in the Greek world—as much as 80 percent of its total value.1 This predominance of agricultural activity has sometimes led historians to represent the Greek economy as a static world, characterized by technological stagnation and an ideal of self-sufficiency. But was that really the case? It is certainly what one might think, reading ancient history sources that set such a high value upon the autourgos, the citizen who worked on his land with his own bare hands within the framework of direct exploitation. Yet that representation corresponds only partly to the reality.
In plenty of cities, the majority of citizens did not possess a property large enough to assure the viability of such an ideal of self-sufficiency. In Athens, the only city for which it is feasible to guess at a few figures, fewer than one citizen out of three was in a position to live off his own land. Close on two-thirds of the civic population either owned no land at all or else not enough for them to live off; most citizens owned plots of land less than one hectare in area (that is, less than 2.5 acres) and were consequently forced to engage in other activities, as craftsmen or as wage-earning agricultural laborers, in order to make a living.2 So only a fraction of the citizen population lived off its land, a number that corresponded to the number of those who, in the fifth century, belonged to the census class of zeugitae. To these should be added a tiny elite composed of large-scale landowners, such as Cimon and Pericles—probably no more than one thousand individuals in all—who owned estates of over 20 hectares (that is, 50 acres), which were in many cases run by specialized managers (see later).
Two conclusions may be drawn from that summary. First, the model of small-scale landowners was far from dominant in Athens; and second, self-sufficiency is not the appropriate term to describe the lifestyle of either largescale landowners or landless citizens. While the latter were obliged to find something to live off by buying in from outside, the former had to profit from their surpluses by selling them in some local, regional, or international market. Selling surpluses, buying what was lacking and paying taxes: that is an accurate enough definition of the oikonomia attikē that was characteristic of the fifth-century democracy of which Pericles is the ambiguous symbol.
Pericles in His Oikos: Agriculture Destined for the Marketplace
As we have seen,3 Pericles was a large-scale landowner and the heir to a family possessed of great wealth. According to Plutarch, far from living glued to his estate, the stratēgos managed his oikos in strict symbiosis with the market, selling his agricultural produce outside the city: “The wealth which was legally his, … so that it might not cause him much trouble and loss of time when he was busy with higher things, he set into such orderly dispensation as he thought was easiest and most exact. This was to sell his annual products all together in the lump, and then to buy in the market each article as it was needed” (Pericles, 16.3–4). Such buying and selling practices depended on confidence in the way the market functioned, for they implied retaining no stocks at all and relying throughout the year on continuous supplies from the agora. Such marketing operations also presupposed not only the existence of local or even regional markets but also an in-depth monetarization of Athenian society. Purchases were made using silver currency, which of course had first to be acquired from sales. We should remember that minted coins, invented in the sixth century, had spread rapidly throughout the whole of Greece, but particularly in Athens, and that ever since the early fifth century the city had been able to mint many issues of coins, thanks to its intensive exploitation of the Laurium district, in southern Attica. Pericles therefore had no compunction about resorting to money, unlike some of the traditional elite, who blamed this tool for dissolving traditional social relations by bringing fortunes into circulation and thereby upsetting status-based hierarchies.4
Pericles’ oikonomia was also characterized by another distinctive feature, this time involving the management of “human capital.” The stratēgos chose not to manage his property himself, preferring to delegate the task to Euangelos, a slave (oiketēs) whom he had previously trained. In this way, Pericles showed his attachment to the aristocratic ideal of skholē, leisure, freeing time to devote himself to political and military activities. This practice of delegation was in no sense a sign of aristocratic disdain for agricultural work. Rather, it testified to a desire for rational specialization: the estate was entrusted to a strictly efficient man5 who devoted himself full time to it and could even show inventiveness at the level of agricultural techniques.
Pericles’ attitude toward his oikos reflects not so much the development of market-agriculture—that would be an exaggerated claim—but rather of “marketable agriculture”—that is to say, agriculture whose products were destined for the marketplace.6 In this respect, the Periclean oikonomia testifies to a world that certainly did not operate within a closed space, on the model of self-sufficiency. But now we need to understand the reasons that led Pericles to act in this way. Was his behavior prompted by a desire for gain or by avarice (of which he was accused by some of his own relatives) or was it, rather, an effective way for the stratēgos to hold on to his patrimony, meanwhile maintaining his allegiance to the people?
The Periclean Mode of Management: Marked on the One Hand by a Refusal to Borrow and on the Other by a Rejection of Speculation
Pericles adopted a mode of managing his oikos that enabled him never to spend more than he produced. By selling the whole of his agricultural produce on the market, in one fell swoop, the stratēgos was in a position to know exactly how much capital he had at his disposal and so to proceed to make his purchases. He was now able to calculate exactly how much he could spend in order to meet both his private needs and his public commitments, such as liturgies, without drawing on his patrimony or running into debt.7 As Plutarch explains, his family “murmured at his expenditure for the day merely and under the most exact restrictions, there being no surplus of supplies at all, as in a great house and under generous circumstances, but every outlay and intake proceeding by count and measure.”8
This attitude toward accounting differed radically from the usual practices of members of the civic elite who, for the most part, preferred to run into debt rather than calculate their expenses. Wealthy Athenians felt no compunction about borrowing and pledging their land as collateral, in order to maintain their rank in society, as can be seen from the numerous pledged boundary markers (horoi) found in Attica and dating from the fourth and third centuries B.C. Strictly speaking, such boundary stones were placed in the fields in order to announce to one and all that this particular field was pledged to a mortgage or a guarantee.9 Far from being a sign of the endemic indebtedness of the small-scale Athenian peasantry—which may well have existed in the fifth century but is not documented—these boundary stones instead testified to a system of credit and mortgages that operated within a group of affluent citizens. As specialists have shown, debtors and creditors were all members of the same elite, so it was not poverty that drove borrowers to mortgage their land; rather, the need to finance heavy prestige expenses, such as dowries and liturgies, or else a desire to make productive investments.10 This was precisely the kind of sumptuary or speculative behavior that Pericles wished to avoid, so anxious was he to cover his expenses without risk of encroaching on his patrimony.
Pericles’ attitude was certainly marked by a measure of rationality, but there was nevertheless a negative aspect to it. In the eyes of many members of the elite, it smacked of stinginess to the point of creating serious tensions within his own family. His children bitterly resented the mediocre lifestyle that he imposed on the entire household. As Plutarch reports, his son Xanthippus was a “natural big spender [phusei te dapanēros] and was married to a young and extravagant woman” (Pericles, 36.1). So he did not take at all kindly to the fact that Pericles was so parsimonious with his allowances.11 Xanthippus was steeped in an ethic of aristocratic generosity and regarded his father’s carefully calculated moderation as pure avarice.
In reality, Pericles was above all determined not to be placed in the position of a debtor, a situation that he reckoned to be incompatible with the authority that he was keen to maintain. In this respect, an anecdote reported by Plutarch provides a striking illustration of his horror of debt. Exasperated at not receiving enough money from his father, “Xanthippus eventually sent to one of his father’s friends and got money, pretending that Pericles had bade him do it. When the friend afterwards demanded repayment of the loan, Pericles not only refused it, but brought a suit against him to boot. So the young fellow Xanthippus, incensed at this, fell to abusing his father” (Pericles, 36.1–2). Because he refused to incur any debts, the stratēgos apparently had no hesitation in quarreling not only with one of his friends, but even with his own son!
The historical truth of this episode is far from well established, but the anecdote does testify to the hostility that Pericles’ behavior aroused among members of the Athenian elite, who were accustomed to a quite different attitude to expenditure. When stripped of its polemical aspect, this episode also reveals the deep-seated reasons for Pericles’ attitude. His mode of expenditure stemmed neither from avarice nor from speculation, but constituted a way of protecting his patrimony, by ruling out resorting to loans. Its aim was to defend his authority by avoiding being placed in a position of indebtedness.
Nevertheless, the stratēgos’s behavior is still astonishing, for it seems to defy the most elementary economic rationality. If Pericles refused to fall into debt, well and good. But that does not explain why he proceeded to sell all his produce in one go: to sell everything at once ruled out the possibility of obtaining the best prices, if only because, by pouring all his surpluses into the market, Pericles automatically drove prices down, to his own disadvantage. The iron law of the market would have favored him selling his products as circumstances dictated—for example, at points when gaps needed to be bridged and the price of cereals was soaring. It is therefore hard to portray Pericles as a model of novel and rational economic behavior. While the Aristotelian school defined the oikonomia attikē by the twofold action of selling and buying,12 it certainly did not recommend selling all one’s produce at once!
So how is it possible to explain this strange decision that not only alienated his closest relatives but also deprived him of substantial profits? In truth, in behaving in this way, Pericles was obeying rationality of a political rather than an economic nature. Because all forms of speculation were liable to damage the people—who depended on cereals for their survival—the stratēgos was absolutely determined not to pass for a profiteer or even a monopolist, however much this harmed his own interests. Pericles wished to be the protector of the dēmos even in the manner in which he managed his own property.
Although he was sometimes accused of avarice in the private sphere, the stratēgos had a fine reputation for generosity in the public sphere. Throughout his career, he manifested an unfailing concern for the well-being of the people, not only through the liturgies that he delighted in providing with munificence (see earlier, chapter 1), but above all by passing on to the dēmos the profits that resulted from the exploitation of the empire.
PERICLES AND THE EXPLOITATION OF THE EMPIRE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ECONOMY BASED ON REVENUES
Under Pericles’ leadership, the Athenians derived from the functioning of the Delian League both direct benefits in the shape of pay and cleruchies, and indirect ones thanks to Athens’s control of commercial routes.
The Direct Benefits of Imperialism: Military Pay and Cleruchies
Military pay constituted one means of enrichment for the city: the empire made it possible, de facto, to feed a by no means negligible proportion of the civic population. According to Plutarch, Pericles sent out “sixty triremes annually, on which large numbers of the citizens sailed about for eight months under pay [emmisthoi], practising and at the same time acquiring the art of seamanship” (Pericles, 11.4). Was this an innovatory move on the part of the stratēgos? That is a matter for debate, for it was a practice that may have gone back to Cimon or even to Aristides.13
Whatever the case may be, soldiers and oarsmen, thetes, but also metics, were certain of being remunerated well enough when they enrolled on the Athenian triremes. At the cost of one drachma per day for every man who embarked, Athens supported over 10,000 citizens and metics during those eight months of seafaring.14 If Plutarch is to be believed, that already represented an expenditure of over 400 talents a year and it was all funded by the league’s treasury!
Remaining in the domain of the military and the direct administration of the empire, we must, as the author of Constitution of the Athenians suggests,15 add to this all the pay for sixteen hundred bowmen, twelve hundred cavalrymen, and five hundred guards for the arsenals located in Athens. The empire furthermore mobilized seven hundred magistrates who were despatched throughout the league to control it and protect Athenian interests. These were specialized employees such as the hellēnotamiai, the league treasurers, and the episkopoi (the overseers), whose salaries were, in all probability, directly financed by the federal treasury.16 All this represented no fewer than 4,000 men who, at that time, were all Athenian citizens. If the oarsmen are added to these, the total amounts to almost 15,000 individuals supported directly by the empire, the majority of whom were Athenians, out of a population of between 40,000 and 50,000 citizens.
Thanks to Pericles, citizens benefited from the empire in other ways too. The stratēgos increased the number of cleruchies—that is to say, the installation of military garrisons in the territories of allied cities. This was part of a tradition that had been initiated well before his time and was then developed by Cimon.17 “He [Pericles] despatched a thousand settlers to the [Thracian] Chersonesus, and five hundred to Naxos, and to Andros half that number, and a thousand to Thrace, to settle with the Bisaltae, and others to Italy, when the site of Sybaris was settled, which they named Thurii.”18 But the list provided by Plutarch is incomplete: cleruchies were also sent to Chalcis and Histiaea after the revolt in Euboea,19 and to Sinope and Amisos on the Black Sea (Pericles, 20.2), to Aegina (Pericles, 23.2), and to Astakos in the Propontis.
What exactly was a cleruchy? It was composed of Athenian citizens who were installed, as a garrison, on a portion of the allied territory that had been confiscated for their use. The cleruchs, who retained their original citizenship, had to remain, under arms, in the lands that the allies cultivated for them and from which they received the income. So these were not peasant-soldiers, but soldier-landlords of the occupied territory. In all likelihood, they did not become owners of the land but simply enjoyed the usufruct, in the name of the city of Athens as a whole.20
This system certainly helped the poorest of the Athenians, the thetes and the zeugitae, who were the principal beneficiaries of these territorial initiatives: the decree that founded the city of Brea, in Thrace (between 446 and 438), testifies explicitly to the role that fell to them in this type of operation.21 The cleruchs in this way became eligible for the archonship, at least they did once this prestigious magistracy was opened to admit the third census class, from 457 B.C. onward. It would, however, be wrong to treat the cleruchies simply as a way of benefiting the poorest citizens. Everything leads us to believe that wealthy Athenians were also beneficiaries, although they were not forced to reside in the garrisons.22
Over and above their direct exploitation of the empire, the Athenians enjoyed other, more indirect, benefits from their hegemonic position at the heart of the Delian League. By constructing a vast commercial zone that was, if not unified, at least under Athenian control, the city confirmed its position as the economic center of the Aegean world at the time of Pericles.
The Indirect Benefits of Imperialism: The Control of Commercial Routes
Thanks to its powerful navy, very early on in the fifth century, Athens obtained control of the wheat route that led to the Pontus Euxinus, today’s Black Sea, the location of one of the principal granaries of the Greek world—the kingdom of the Bosporus. Much was at stake here: cereals (sitos) formed the basis of the staple diet of the Greeks of Antiquity—almost three-quarters of their daily nutritional intake23—and, as Attica was, for ecological reasons, deficient in grain,24 every year the city was obliged to import almost 25,000 tons of cereals in order to feed its large population.25 That is why, ever since the foundation of the league, the Athenians had taken care to control the stopping-off points along this vital commercial route, at a time when navigation was mostly a matter of hopping from one Aegean island to another: Lemnos and Imbros remained under Athenian control throughout the Classical period; Skyros was captured in 475; and the revolt of Thasos was mercilessly crushed in 465–463.
This policy was pursued and strengthened in the years when Pericles played a major role in the city. First, the stratēgos encouraged the creation of the colonies of Brea, in Thrace—between 446 and 438—and Amphipolis in Chalcidice in 437, both so as to distribute land to Athenian citizens and also in order to secure supplies of cereals for Athens (Thucydides, 4.102). Next, he launched an expedition to the Chersonesus, a narrow spit of land that controlled the routes through the straits. According to Plutarch, this was the most popular of all his military ventures (Pericles, 19.1). This campaign, which may have begun in 447 B.C., made it possible to set up cleruchies26 and to establish control of the straits leading to the rich wheat-lands of the Pontus Euxinus. Finally, Pericles may have led a military expedition to the Black Sea, if we are to believe Plutarch, who, however, is the only author to mention this little-known episode (Pericles, 20.1). This campaign, probably launched between 438 and 432, after the Samos War, testifies to the stratēgos’s concern to ensure cereal supplies to the city.
This preoccupation of his found expression in the elaboration of an ad hoc legal framework and the creation of a specific magistracy, probably in Pericles’ time. An Athenian decree drawn up between 432 and 426 for Methone in Pieria (on the Macedonian coast at the end of the Thermaic Gulf) reveals the existence of “guardians of the Hellespont,” the hellespontophulakes. The text authorized the city of Methone each year to import a fixed quantity of grain, for which it had to apply to these magistrates.27 The “guardians of the Hellespont” in this way controlled all the convoys of grain in the Hellespont (today known as the Dardanelles), for the allied cities had first to apply to them for authorization to transport wheat directly to their own territories. Even if, as it happened, those arrangements suited the allied cities, they nevertheless show how very intrusive Athens’s control of the trading of cereals was. No city was allowed free passage in the straits leading to the Black Sea: the Athenians were determined not only to safeguard their own supplies and prevent these deliveries from being diverted by the enemy, but possibly also to make supplies to the allies dependent on their loyalty.28 Thanks to the empire, the Athenians in this way benefited from guaranteed supplies of cereals that enabled them to feed their large population at a strictly controlled price, at the same time manipulating an effective means of making the allies toe the line.
At an economic level, there was yet another consequence to this imperial dynamic: in the course of the fifth century, in step with its increase of military power, Athens became the commercial hub in the eastern Mediterranean. Under Pericles, Piraeus became the spot on to which the riches of the “whole world” converged. As the stratēgos himself emphatically stated, according to Thucydides, in the funeral oration of 431 B.C., “Our city is so great that all the products of all the earth flow in upon us, and ours is the happy lot to gather in the good fruits of other lands with as much home-felt security of enjoyment as we do those of our own soil.”29 This position at a crossroads was a great financial advantage to the city. All the imports and exports that passed through Piraeus were subject to 2 percent taxation: the pentekostē, the tax of one-fiftieth, brought in large sums of money that filled the coffers of Athens, making it possible to pursue an ambitious policy of redistribution (see later).
Finally, the city benefited from one more trump card that was linked to its hegemonic position. To cover certain military expenses, the city raised tribute (phoros) the total sum of which is known to us from 454 onward, thanks to great lists engraved in stone. These monumental inscriptions, situated on the Acropolis, consigned one-sixtieth of the sums paid by each member of the league to the goddess Athena, as “first fruits” (aparkhē).30 These sums paid by the allies were partly diverted by the Athenians, who used them for purposes other than their original one, which had been to prevent the Persians from returning to the Aegean. It has to be said that the extent of that diversion of funds is, still today, a matter of controversy.
The Treasury of the Delian League Placed at the Service of Athens?
According to Plutarch, Pericles’ enemies accused him of having drawn on the treasury of the allies to finance the great works on the Acropolis that were undertaken from 449 B.C. (Pericles, 12.2). This is the famous passage that led to those great works, in particular the construction of the Parthenon, being regarded as the petrified symbol of Athenian imperialism.31 Several other sources also testify to the size of the sums mobilized for this vast building project: according to Diodorus Siculus, who probably draws his information from the fourth-century historian Ephorus, the Athenians spent 4,000 talents (out of a total of 10,000) on building simply the Propylaea and on funding the siege of Potidaea (432–429 B.C.). In Thucydides’ work, Pericles himself suggests a comparable sum.32 However, some historians question not the use of the league’s treasury to finance the great building works, but the degree to which the allies were made to contribute. Did the phoros cover the entire costs of the monumental building policy initiated by Pericles, or did it contribute only a part of it?
The core of the problem lies in the exact status of the league treasury at the point when it was transferred to the Acropolis, no later than 454: was it at this point amalgamated with the treasury of the goddess—that is to say, the city treasury—or did it remain distinct, stored in a separate coffer? The Athenian Tribute Lists, which recorded the sum of one-sixtieth of the contributions of all the members of the league, seem to favor the latter alternative: after all, why keep a scrupulous record of the total aparkhē offered to the goddess (one-sixtieth) if the whole of the treasury fell to her in any case?33
There is one further element that favors this hypothesis. Athens was sufficiently prosperous to finance the essential part of the works with its own funds and to do so despite the scale of the expenses simultaneously incurred not only in the town (for new constructions in the Agora and the erection of Pericles’ Odeon), but also in the khōra, for the building of the Telesterion of Eleusis, the sanctuaries of Nemesis in Rhamnous and of Demeter and Kore at Thorikos, and even the construction of the temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunium.34 The city had abundant financial resources at its disposal, thanks to the income accumulated from the exploitation of the Laurium mines, commercial taxes such as the pentekostē, and the tenth part levied on booty that systematically swelled the city treasury. In his play The Wasps (656–660), Aristophanes underlines the composite nature of Athens’s financial resources, which accrued both from the exploitation of the empire and from its own economic dynamism: “And not with pebbles precisely ranged, but roughly thus on your fingers count / The tribute paid by the subject States, and just consider its whole amount; / And then, in addition to this, compute the many taxes and one-per-cents, / The fees and the fines, and the silver mines, the markets and harbours, and sales and rents. / If you take the total result of the lot, it will reach two thousand talents or near.”
For those two reasons, on the one hand the probable maintenance of two distinct coffers and, on the other, Athens’s own economic dynamism, some historians believe that only the aparkhē was used to finance the constructions on the Acropolis—that is to say, about seven talents per year.35
Adalberto Giovannini even maintains that this allocation was decided by Athens and its allies together in 454, at the point when the treasury was transferred to the Acropolis on account of the military threat hanging over Delos. That, he thinks, was the precise moment that Athena Polias replaced Delian Apollo as the tutelary deity of the League. The reconstruction of the goddess’s temple would in these circumstances logically enough involve the allies’ participation. Clearly, this argument rests upon an irenic and idealized view of the international relations that prevailed; it nevertheless has the huge advantage of not reducing the Athenian system purely to a simple matter of an economy based on imperial revenues.
Far from living off the empire like a parasite, the city possessed an economic dynamism of its own, quite independent of its exploitation of the allies. When Athens embarked on an expensive policy of redistribution of wealth, it did so drawing partly on its own funds. In the period when Pericles was repeatedly elected as stratēgos, the Athenians were indeed setting up a full-scale system of redistributions not only by means of its great constructional undertakings but also through the general introduction of civic pay. It was probably here that the true originality of the Periclean economy lay.
PERICLES AND THE MISTHOI: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A POLICY OF REDISTRIBUTION
The Social Impact of the Great Works: The Establishment of a State Socialism?
If we are to believe the famous passage from Plutarch, those great works provided misthoi, wages, for a great many skilled professions:
It was true that his military expeditions supplied those who were in the full vigour of manhood with abundant resources from the common funds, and in his desire that the unwarlike throng of common labourers should neither have no share at all in the public receipts, nor yet get fees for laziness and idleness, he boldly suggested to the people projects for great constructions, and designs for works which would call many arts into play and involve long periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes, no whit less than the sailors and sentinels, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial share of the public wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress-wood; the arts which elaborate and work up these materials were those of carpenter, moulder, bronze-smith, stone-cutter, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers of the material, such as factors, sailors and pilots by sea, and, by land, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, and drivers. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners. And since each particular art, like a general with the army under his separate command, kept its own throng of unskilled and untrained labourers in compact array, to be as instrument unto player and as body unto soul in subordinate service, it came to pass that for every age, almost, and every capacity, the city’s great abundance was distributed and scattered abroad by such demands.36
Despite a tenacious tradition that denies the historical reality, Pericles clearly took measures that were advantageous to craftsmen, as Max Weber was one of the first to recognize.37 The great construction works benefited all those who, to varying degrees, were involved on the building sites, and they did so regardless of the status of the workers.38 There were many noncitizens present on those public building sites, as can be deduced, with very little risk of error, by extrapolating from the construction accounts relating to another Athenian temple, the Erechtheum. The accounts preserved are those for the years 409/8 and 408/7 B.C., but the actual building had commenced as early as 421. In 408, the building site employed 107 individuals, mostly stonemasons and carpenters. Their legal statuses varied considerably, since epigraphists have worked out that there were definitely 23 citizens, 42 metics, and 20 slaves among them. All the various components of the Athenian population were thus represented on the building site. However, those statutory differences were not reflected at the level of wages, for every worker received one drachma per day, although the slaves no doubt handed their wages over to their master, who in most cases would himself be working on the same building site.39
Let us now try to evaluate the aims and the scope of those great building works. Some historians have interpreted them in terms of modern economic behavior. Was it a matter of relaunching economic activity? Was it an attempt to establish a veritable “State socialism,” as Gustave Glotz claimed in his day?40 It seems to me that that would be to adopt a misleading point of view and to slip into anachronism, for the Greek cities in truth had no economic policies, as such. If a city intervened in economic life, it was above all so as to increase its prosodoi, its revenues, even if it did then redistribute them among members of the community; it was not ever a matter of investing and increasing economic activity; in the Greek world, growth and the fight against unemployment were not, as such, political objectives.
The monumental policy initiated by Pericles in truth had a twofold purpose: In the first place, it was intended to adorn the city with imposing monuments and, once and for all, wipe out the outrages of the Persian Wars. So the primary ambition of the “great works” was at once political and symbolic. Second, the intention was to proceed to share the common benefits between all the members of the community. In this respect, these building sites were part of a policy to redistribute wealth to the people on a scale never before seen in history.
Although the redistributions that stemmed from the great works benefited both the citizens and the metics who worked side by side on the building sites, Pericles also promoted measures destined to benefit solely the Athenians, for it was they who were the principal supporters of his policies and, as malicious gossip did not fail to point out, he needed to make sure that they would vote for him.
The Creation of Civic Pay
In the first place, the stratēgos is said to have increased the number of banquets and religious spectacles laid on for his fellow-citizens and he did so at a by no means negligible cost.41 It was a way to win the favor of the poorest citizens who, on the occasion of a sacrifice, would receive a portion of the sacrificed animals. The stratēgos was said, for the same reason, to have created a public fund, the theorikōn, grants from which were designed to cover the costs of citizens who attended the festivals of Dionysus. According to one late text, “Given that many wished to go to the theatre so competition for places was fierce among both citizens and foreigners, Pericles wished to please the people and the poor and decreed that city revenues should be devoted to the festivals.”42 The assertion should nevertheless be considered with a degree of caution, for the theorikōn is not attested until the mid-fourth century, so some historians doubt that its creation should be attributed to Pericles.43
What is certain, on the other hand, is that the stratēgos submitted to the Assembly the proposal that a number of grants, receiving of misthoi, should be created as remuneration for citizens for the time that they devoted to serving the city. These misthoi were so closely associated with the actions of Pericles that, in the Gorgias, Socrates confides to Callicles: “What I for my part hear is that Pericles has made the Athenians idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious, by starting the system of public payments [misthophoria].”44
Clearly, the stratēgos did play a pivotal role in this development that enabled the poorest citizens to take part in the functioning of democracy without fear of forfeiting their means of livelihood.
But again, we should consider what this innovation really amounted to. In the first place, contrary to Plato’s assertion, the stratēgos did not introduce such payment for all public services. Only the dicasts, the judges of the people’s lawsuits, benefited from them, and possibly the council members;45 attendance at the ekklēsia was not remunerated until the beginning of the fourth century.
Furthermore, initially, the sum paid as misthos was not enough to compensate for the loss of even the most modest of wages. Not only were the 6,000 dicasts only paid when they were actually sitting, and this did not happen every day,46 but the two obols initially paid as compensation and even the three later paid under Cleon, by no means equaled the pay of a skilled manual worker, which was at least three times greater (about one drachma per day).
Despite those limitations, the establishment of this kind of pay marked a further stage of the city’s democratization, at a date that is hard to specify; the measure was probably introduced after the reforms of Ephialtes, in 462, which certainly gave more power to the lawcourts, and probably before the death of Cimon in 451, if it is true that the compensation system was introduced, as Plutarch claims, in a context of rivalry between Cimon and Pericles.47
Whatever the exact number of these payments introduced by Pericles, as a result of them citizenship became a privilege that found expression in the pecuniary gain of those who received them. From then on, the Athenians became keen to restrict the number of those who potentially possessed such rights. Access to the first misthoi coincided with restrictions on citizenship.
Redistributions and Redefinition of the Civic Body
In 451, the Athenian political community was redefined more strictly. Not only were women and domiciled foreigners excluded, as was customary elsewhere in Greece, but now the city also rejected bastards (nothoi) with only one Athenian parent or who were born from an extramarital liaison between Athenians.48 In the wake of Aristotle and echoing his words, Plutarch explicitly attributed this initiative to the stratēgos:
Many years before this, when Pericles was at the height of his political career and had sons born in wedlock, … he proposed a law that only those should be reckoned Athenians whose parents on both sides were Athenians. And so, when the king of Egypt sent a present to the people of forty thousand measures of grain, and this had to be divided up among the citizens, there was a great crop of prosecutions against citizens of illegal birth by the law of Pericles, who had up to that time escaped notice and been overlooked.49
This restrictive measure, earlier mentioned by the author of the Constitution of the Athenians, Pseudo-Aristotle, should be understood bearing several parameters in mind. The first was of a political and ideological order: the new law chimed with one of the founding Athenian myths—namely, that of autochthony. From the mid-fifth century onward, Athenians took to calling themselves “autochthonous,” born from the very soil of Attica, unlike most of the rest of the Greeks, who were considered to be the descendants of invaders, such as the Spartans, who were said to be descended from the Dorians.50 In rejecting those of “mixed blood,” the Athenian citizens were emphasizing their own prestigious origin, their eugeneia, thereby collectively laying claim to a distinctive attribute, birth, which had, in principle, been the preserve solely of the aristocracy.51 This illustrious birth of theirs moreover constituted one of the bases upon which the Athenians relied to claim their hegemony over the rest of the Greeks. In the eyes of the Athenians, their noble ancestry justified their domination within the framework of the Delian League.
Within the city, that law may have reflected a certain hardening in the Athenians’ attitude to the growing influence of its metics.52 It is difficult to put a precise figure to the domiciled foreigners in Athens, but in the second half of the fifth century, they represented between one-fifth and one-half of the city’s citizen population—between 10,000 and 20,000 individuals.53 Socially, they were well integrated and some of them were probably married to Athenians—and to Athenian women—producing children who, by law, had citizen status. The law of 451 was intended to exclude “those with mixed blood” from the civic community.54 However, there is no indication that this should be regarded as the result of an identity-crisis on the part of alarmed or xenophobic Athenians, for there is no mention of any such fear in the ancient sources; again, that would be to transfer certain contemporary anxieties onto the societies of the past.
The purpose of the measure introduced by Pericles seems to have been above all of a socioeconomic nature: it was voted in so as to limit the number of potential beneficiaries of the civic redistributions of wealth “because of the excessive number of citizens,” as the Constitution of the Athenians explains (26.3–4). Was it prompted by any particular event? Plutarch’s assertion should be viewed with caution: it is by no means certain that the vote on this measure was linked to the gift of wheat from the Egyptian Psammetichus, for the consignment from the pharaoh was sent in 445/4 B.C., six years after the introduction of the law on citizenship. All the same, even if he is mistaken about the details, Plutarch the moralist hits on the basic truth: the reason why the Athenians decided to redefine their civic body certainly was because it was necessary to regulate the sharing of the city’s wealth, in particular, the distribution of the many instances of compensatory pay that had just been approved—for the members of the heliaea and of the boulē—and all the types of advantages that stemmed from the increasing imperialism of the city. A restrictive redefining of the circle of potential beneficiaries now became a matter of the first importance.
Progressively, a democracy that was more radical but also more closed upon itself was thus being set in place. At the same time as the Athenians began to receive pay for participating in the city institutions, they hardened the criteria governing the attribution of citizenship. There is really nothing surprising about this: mutatis mutandis and to introduce a cautious anachronism, that measure of 451 evokes the early days of the Social Republic in France, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first redistributive measures voted in under the Third Republic went hand in hand with a stricter differentiation between nationals and foreigners. At the very moment when the first social laws were passed, new techniques of documentation and police control were set in place—in particular, the invention of passports and identity cards.55
Through a historical irony, after the deaths of his two legitimate sons, Pericles was finally forced to beg the people to waive this law in the case of his own bastard son. Now without a male heir, the stratēgos wanted Pericles the younger, born from his union with Aspasia, to be allowed to enter a phratry—an essential move in the process of acquiring citizenship—in order for him to be entered in the deme register and to inherit his father’s fortune and social network. He was claiming that an exception should be made for his own family—he who liked to present himself as a man unaffected by the influence of family and friends. This tension that had grown between the oikos and the polis, relatives and the city, now needs to be examined.