Pericles of Athens (16 page)

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 man
⁵
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.

P
ERICLES AND THE
E
XPLOITATION OF THE
E
MPIRE
: T
HE
D
EVELOPMENT OF AN
E
CONOMY
B
ASED ON
R
EVENUES

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.