The Athenian Empire (478-404 BC)
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Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics The Athenian Empire (478-404 BC) Version 1.0 December 2005 Ian Morris Stanford University Abstract: In this paper I raise 3 questions: (1) How, and how much, did the Athenian Empire change Greek society? (2) Why did the Athenian Empire (or a competitor state) not become a multiethnic empire like Persia or Rome? (3) In the long run, how much did the Athenian Empire’s failure matter? I conclude: (1) The Athenian Empire increased the tempo of state formation in classical Greece and is best understood as an example of state formation not imperialism. (2) Counterfactual analysis suggests that Athens failed to become the capital of a multi-city state because of human error, and as late as 406 BC the most predictable outcome was that Athens would emerge as capital of an Ionian state. (3) Not much. © Ian Morris. [email protected] 1 The Athenian Empire (478-404 BC) Ian Morris Circulated at SSHI conference “Ancient Empires II,” Stanford University, May 2001. Rough version 1. Questions I begin with three observations about the fifth-century Athenian Empire (Fig. 4.1; also known as the First Athenian Empire, or the Delian League), and then ask three questions about it. First, by the standards of the other empires discussed in this book, it was tiny. It covered just a couple of thousand square miles, barely enough to make a respectable Roman province. Its total revenues were probably between 1 and 2 percent of those of the early Roman Empire.1 Fewer than a million people lived in the Athenian Empire at its height, and, compared to Assyria, Persia, Rome, or (in most periods) Byzantium, they were ethnically and culturally remarkably homogeneous—not just all Greeks, but almost all Ionian Greeks. The other empires discussed in this book dwarfed it in almost every sense, and lasted much longer. Second, for something so seemingly insignificant, it has attracted a remarkable amount of attention. So far as scholarship is concerned, size seems not to matter: the Athenian Empire is more discussed and written about today than any other ancient empire except Rome. If it were worth taking the time to calculate the number of pages written on each empire per square mile of their territory, head of population, or year of existence, I suspect that Athens would easily beat out Rome. Third, with a few striking exceptions—to which I will return frequently—the dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the empire are mostly rather similar to each other. They pose a narrow range of questions and deploy a still narrower range of methods to answer them. People want to know when the Athenian Empire stopped being a cooperative league and became an imperialist venture; whether the Peloponnesian War was inevitable; and if not, who was to blame for it. In some ways, this vast literature shows classical philology at its outstanding best. It is learned, precise, and operates at a level of technical excellence that few, if any, fields can match. But it is also hard to avoid seeing a certain 1066 And All That quality to it—the real questions are when Athens became Top Nation and whether this was a Good Thing. 1 Xenophon (Anabasis 7.1.27) says that the Athenian Empire brought in 1000 talents per year, which, despite all the controversy over the “normal” tribute level, seems to be in the right area (e.g., Meiggs 1972: 258-59). I assume an average wheat equivalent intake of 250 kg/person/year (c. 2000 calories/person/day) and an average cost of 2-3 obols/adult/day in 400 BC prices (Loomis 1998: 35; 1 talent = 6000 drachmas = 36,000 obols). Keith Hopkins (1980: 118-19) plausibly estimates the annual revenue of the Roman Empire in the early first century AD as >824 million sesterces. If one modius of what (6.55 kg) cost something like 3 sesterces, we get a conversion rate of 1 drachma (Athenian 400 BC value) = 1.6 sesterces (Roman early first century AD value). The Roman income of say 830 million sesterces would then be worth about 86,500 talents; the Athenian income of 1000 talents, about 9.6 million sesterces (i.e., Athens brought in about 1.2 percent of the Roman figure). Even the inflated demands of 425 BC (tribute of 1460 talents, plus perhaps 500 talents in indirect taxes) would only have been worth a little under 20 million sesterces, or 2.3 percent of the Roman income. 2 This presents us with something of a paradox—a tiny empire surrounded by a vast but narrow rampart of scholarship. The obvious question to ask is why this should be so, and I think the answer is not far to seek: Thucydides. Rarely does a single author so dominate the way we perceive an empire. But there is more to it than simply a source problem. Thucydides’ prose, by turns tortured and sublime, held a central place in western elite education through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. His text was a cultural icon in the fullest sense. It raised profound questions about leadership, ethics, power, and war. Any scholar who could cast light on the morality of the Athenian Empire, the culpability of its leaders, how Thucydides had written his masterpiece, or how truthful it really was—whether through philology or through putting back together inscriptions touching on Thucydides’ subject matter—had something important to say. Historical study of the Athenian Empire became a kind of exegesis of Thucydides. In this essay I want to take a different approach. There are three things I want to know about the Athenian Empire: 1) How, and how much, did the Athenian Empire change Greek society? 2) Why did the Athenian Empire (or one of its competitor states) not become a major multiethnic empire like Assyria, Persia, or Rome? 3) In the long run, how much did the failure of the Athenian Empire (and its competitor states) matter? For all its strengths, the existing literature does not answer these questions. In fact, it obscures them. I suggest that this is not because the evidence is inadequate (though it certainly has its problems), but because ancient historians have been quite content to continue asking the same questions that were popular in the nineteenth century. As a result, there has not been much reason to think about the kinds of methods we need to answer more analytical questions like the three I ask here. In section 2, I review the evidence and the main trends in the twentieth-century historiography. In section 3, I explain the methods that I deploy in this paper, which involve comparative and counterfactual methods that classical historians (indeed historians generally) do not use much, but which are well established in the social sciences. To answer my three questions I have to break them down into a series of smaller and more focused questions, defining the categories of analysis as closely as possible. These smaller questions, which I analyze in detail in sections 6, 7, and 8, raise all the issues outlined in this volume’s introduction, and more. Therefore in section 4 I define some of my basic concepts, and in section 5 set out the basic parameters of the world of the Athenian Empire—ecology, demography, economics and standards of living, technology, social structure, politics, and religion. Briefly, my answer to the first question is that the major change that the Athenian Empire wrought in Greek society was to accelerate the tempo of state-formation, both within its own territory and by stimulating secondary state-formation elsewhere. I explain what I mean by state-formation in sections 4.1 and 4.2. I suggest that calling the political organization that the Athenians ruled in the fifth century an “empire” is something of a misnomer. Classicists have worried a lot about exactly what Thucydides meant when he used the word archê to describe the political organization that the Athenians led, but have worried far less about what they mean when they use the English word “empire” as a 3 translation for archê. I suggest that this has caused some confusion: our analytical tools will be much more precise if we translate archê as meaning something like “Greater Athenian state” and distinguish it from multiethnic empires like the Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and Byzantine. This distinction becomes very important for my argument in section 7. However, because the expression “Athenian Empire” has now entered standard historical parlance, it would be pedantic to ignore it systematically. I therefore retain it in this essay, but use it throughout as a colloquial expression for “Greater Athenian state.” I argue that Athens was not solely responsible for speeding up the tempo of state-formation in the fifth century, but did massively contribute to this acceleration. War and preparation for war drove state-formation, which speeded up dramatically in the 420s. But that said, even by 404 neither Athens nor her rival states had succeeded in centralizing state power enough to become the capital of a durable, territorial Greek state. Where I think my argument departs from earlier treatments is in suggesting that had Athens avoided defeat in 404, this process of state-formation would have continued, and during the fourth century Athens would have broken through to become the capital of an Aegean-wide territorial state. This brings me to my second question: why did the Athenian Empire (or one of its competitor states) not become a major multiethnic empire like Assyria, Persia, or Rome? The answer here has to be rather more complicated.