Population Dynamics in Ancient Greek Civil Wars, Insurgencies, and Revolts: a Systems Approach to Stasis
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POPULATION DYNAMICS IN ANCIENT GREEK CIVIL WARS, INSURGENCIES, AND REVOLTS: A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO STASIS By JEFFREY P. YEAKEL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2014 © 2014 Jeffrey P. Yeakel 2 uxori parentibusque 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank first of all my dissertation advisor, Andrew Wolpert. His guidance and support throughout all stages of this project and my graduate career have been invaluable. I am especially grateful for our many conversations about Greek history which inspired a number of the ideas in my dissertation. I would also like to thank Konstantinos Kapparis, Victoria Pagán, and Leslie Paul Thiele for serving on my committee and for the tremendous help they have provided. Additionally, I thank the other faculty members of the Classics department, especially Mary Ann Eaverly, Tim Johnson, Jim Marks, Jennifer Rea, Gonda Van Steen, and Robert Wagman, for all the time and energy they put into teaching enlightening courses and encouraging my professional development. I am also sincerely grateful for the support I have received from the UF Graduate School Dissertation Scholarship and the Langadas Graduate Fellowship from the Center for Greek Studies. I lastly wish to thank my friends and family. I owe special thanks to all of my fellow Classics graduate students who have been both great colleagues and friends. Finally, I cannot thank my parents, Glenn and Nancy, and my wife, Lauren, enough for their consistent love and encouragement. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................. 4 LIST OF TABLES ..................................... 7 LIST OF FIGURES ..................................... 8 ABSTRACT ......................................... 9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ................................... 11 1.1 Previous Studies ................................ 14 1.2 Problems .................................... 19 1.3 Systems Theory ................................ 25 1.4 Methodology .................................. 32 2 POPULATION DYNAMICS ............................. 35 2.1 The Significance of Popular Support ..................... 36 2.1.1 Was Stasis an Elite-Controlled Phenomenon? ............ 36 2.1.2 The Military Role of Non-Elites .................... 41 2.2 The Mutability of Popular Support ....................... 57 3 INFORMATION DYNAMICS ............................ 70 3.1 Information Dissemination ........................... 71 3.1.1 Messengers ............................... 73 3.1.2 Assemblies ............................... 81 3.1.3 Inscribed Decrees ........................... 88 3.2 Information Manipulation ............................ 94 3.2.1 Political Slogans ............................ 95 3.2.2 Misinformation and Dissimulation ................... 102 3.2.3 Political Identities ............................ 109 4 SYSTEMS DYNAMICS ............................... 117 4.1 Aristotle and the Emergence of Stasis .................... 119 4.2 Quantitative Feedback ............................. 122 4.3 Geographic Control .............................. 130 4.4 Violence against Non-combatants ...................... 135 4.5 Military Conflict ................................. 150 5 CASE STUDY: THE ATHENIAN CIVIL WAR OF 404/3 .............. 158 5.1 Phase One (Prior to Phyle) .......................... 165 5 5.1.1 Phase One Population Dynamics ................... 165 5.1.2 Phase One System Dynamics ..................... 169 5.1.2.1 Legitimacy .......................... 170 5.1.2.2 Limiting democratic communication ............ 172 5.1.2.3 Violence and fear ...................... 173 5.2 Phase Two (Residence at Phyle) ....................... 178 5.2.1 Phase Two Population Dynamics ................... 178 5.2.2 Phase Two System Dynamics ..................... 186 5.2.2.1 Geographic control ..................... 187 5.2.2.2 Eleusis ............................ 189 5.3 Phase Three (Residence at Piraeus) ..................... 194 5.3.1 Phase Three Population Dynamics .................. 195 5.3.2 Phase Three System Dynamics .................... 199 5.3.2.1 Insurgent recruitment .................... 199 5.3.2.2 Oligarchic counter-measures ................ 204 6 CONCLUSIONS ................................... 210 LIST OF REFERENCES ................................. 213 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ................................ 224 6 LIST OF TABLES Table page 3-1 Delian League loyalty oaths ............................. 93 4-1 Incidents of stasis by quarter century, 600-325 BCE ............... 156 5-1 Democratic manpower figures ........................... 160 5-2 Phase One incumbent manpower ......................... 167 5-3 Phase Two total manpower ............................. 186 5-4 The Archinus Decree ................................ 190 5-5 Phase Three total manpower ............................ 198 7 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 1-1 Population growth .................................. 27 4-1 Manpower escalation in Corcyra .......................... 123 4-2 A faction with a revolutionary coordination problem ................ 128 4-3 A faction without a revolutionary coordination problem .............. 128 4-4 Geographic control .................................. 131 4-5 Violence against non-combatants .......................... 145 4-6 Military conflict .................................... 153 4-7 Incidents of stasis by quarter century, 600-325 BCE ............... 157 5-1 Democratic manpower in 403 ............................ 160 5-2 Phase One systems model – Sept. 404 to Dec. 404 ............... 167 5-3 Phase Two systems model – Jan. 403 to May. 403 ................ 187 5-4 Phase Three systems model – May 403 to Aug. 403 ............... 198 8 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy POPULATION DYNAMICS IN ANCIENT GREEK CIVIL WARS, INSURGENCIES, AND REVOLTS: A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO STASIS By Jeffrey P. Yeakel August 2014 Chair: Andrew Wolpert Major: Classical Studies Previous comprehensive studies of stasis have either reduced the internal struggles of ancient Greek city-states to a single, linear cause (Ruschenbusch 1978, De Ste Croix 1981) or provided diachronic narratives (Lintott 1982) and catalogs (Gehrke 1985, Berger 1992) with limited explanatory power. My dissertation takes a new approach to the problem of Greek civil war that can help explain its most explosive and unpredictable aspects. I use systems modeling to map the behavioral dynamics of a war’s internal and external participants. A unique explanatory insight gained by systems theory comes from its focus on feedback loops. When the output of an element also functions as its own input, a nonlinear feedback loop forms that can induce either exponential (reinforcing) or homeostatic (balancing) behaviors. The presence of feedback mechanisms helps to explain why civil wars could cause such unanticipated and devastating outcomes, yet prove so ineradicable for poleis infected with them. In Chapter 2, I argue that population support was both a significant and dynamic quantifiable variable. Factional support was not dictated by any single factor and could change over the course of a conflict. Chapter 3 focuses on the informational channels that connected groups of people during an internal war: messages, assemblies, and public inscriptions. I argue that information was frequently disrupted and manipulated by whichever group controlled the geographic territory through which it had to pass. In Chapter 4, I create textual and visual models for the most commonly attested examples 9 of nonlinear, feedback-induced behaviors, such as the surprising outbreak of civil strife, the intensity of non-military violence, and the decisive importance of pitched battles. Chapter 5 is a case study of the Athenian civil war in 404/3 BCE. I explain how and why Thrasybulus’ army achieved such dramatic and exponential growth. The complex interaction between elements like territorial control, civilian massacres, the size of the factions, and the Greek cultural importance of battles meant that the insurgency found little support under its initial conditions, but as some variables activated feedback loops, the entire system adapted and caused an explosion of popular support. 10 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION For the poleis of the Classical Greek world, internal warfare – civil wars, insur- gencies, and revolts – posed an omnipresent threat. Greek poets portrayed stasis as a terrible natural force, a destructive disease or natural disaster, lying dormant inside every polis. In Solon Fragment 4, stasis and polemos sleep among all the tribes, waiting to be awoken and destroy the youth of many: ἣ στάσιν ἔμφυλον πόλεμόν θ᾽ εὕδοντ᾽ ἐπεγείρει, ὃς πολλῶν ἐρατὴν ὤλεσεν ἡλικίην (Fr. 4 W, 19-20). In Alcaeus’ allegorical ship of state poem, staseis are the winds that stir up the sea and threaten to sink the ship and its passengers (fr. 208). In his Ninth Paean, Pindar equates “deadly stasis” with other types of destructive natural disasters portended by an eclipse: war, famines, floods, blizzards, and storms (ἢ στάσιν οὐλομέναν, ant. A 4).1 When the ghost of Darius hears of his people’s destruction in Aeschylus’ Persians, his first two guesses are that they fell either to plague or stasis (τίνι τρόπῳ; λοιμοῦ τις ἦλθε σκηπτὸς ἢ στάσις πόλει;, 715). The avoidance of stasis constituted one of the primary