The Classical World (34 page)

On a wider view, the behaviour is not a very pronounced sort of luxury, least of all when compared with the new age of Macedonian conquerors or the stories of the various kings on Cyprus. Even so, how did the richer Athenians assure their rather limited riches? Land-holdings, though often scattered, were the main source of it, in a state where there was no inheritance tax, no income tax and no worrying inflation. As the liturgies and capital levies had to be paid for in cash, this land would need to be farmed quite intensively with crops which could be sold for coin. There was no ‘subsistence farming’, and at all social levels coinage was in widespread use.
¹⁰
At busy seasons hired labour would be brought in to back up the owners’ basic workforce, the ever-present slaves. For there was no retreat from slave-owning in fourth-century Attica and, as before, most of the slaves were foreign imports. Manufacturing was also based on slaves, who were almost always working in small units. It is not that the Athenian economy was suffering from foreign ‘copies’ of Athenian goods, like Far Eastern copies of modern European luxuries. That impression is misleadingly given by archaeology’s great survivor, painted pottery. Attic styles are indeed copied, but painted pottery was of marginal importance to the Athenian economy.

What mattered, above all, was the mining of silver and the export of olive oil. The silver-mines were the state’s property, but citizens took on leases and then worked them for profit, usually with wretched slaves. By the early 360s the number of known mining leases had fallen away somewhat, a sign, perhaps, of temporary economic caution
among Athenian lessors, but the fall was then reversed in the next three decades (to the benefit of the state, which received payments for the leases). What never fell was the export of olive oil, a main Athenian item of exchange for the wheat which shippers (not all of them Athenian) brought in bulk from Egypt and especially from the Crimea (which also sent hides for leather and shoe-making). The soil of Attica was good for growing poor barley, but very seldom good for wheat. This big import trade was largely paid for by exports of olive oil (olive trees could not grow round most of the northern Black Sea) and probably by raw silver too, exported as bullion from the mines.

Richer Athenians did rent out property too, and their income from rents remained an important element in their yearly revenues, not least because the resident foreigners, or metics, could not own land or houses in Attica and had to rent where they lived. The rich did also engage in moneylending, although most of their fellow Athenians’ borrowing was small-scale and short-term. Above all, many of them took on the bigger risks of maritime loans which were made to a shipper or trader so as to finance his cargo or his ship. Returns here could be very high, at least 30 per cent for the duration of a voyage, but so were the risks: if the ship sank, the lenders lost everything. These loans were not a new Athenian speciality: surely they went back by origin into the archaic age. But they were important for many rich Athenians’ revenues. Any one ship or cargo might be the security for a number of different loans, advanced by different individuals. They were a genuine speculation on commerce which enabled the shippers and traders to pass on risk and increase their scale of operation. They have nothing to do with ‘insurance’ as we understand it: there was no concept of a premium in them, to be paid in advance to insure a bigger loss. Like many modern investors, the lenders were taking part of a total risk in the hope of a big return. In my view, there were links between most of the prominent Athenians and characters from the port, the Piraeus, and its ‘shipping world’. But it was bad form for a citizen to boast about them socially and so the evidence is very oblique.
¹¹

Without the Empire’s tribute and the services which the days of Empire encouraged, how did the city as a whole and the poorer majority survive without discontent? From the mid-360s the main
answer was simple: once again, Athenian citizens had taken over land in another city-state. In the mid-360s they had begun by expelling pro-Persian ‘traitors’ off the Aegean island of Samos; they then returned, here and elsewhere, to take yet more of the farmland for Athenian citizens. The beneficiaries could either reside on this new bonus or rent it out. By the mid-340s the ‘Athenians on Samos’, as we know from a recently found inscription, maintained a half-sized rotating council of 250, implying that the populace there numbered many thousands.
¹²
In the 350s orators back home had said in the city’s assembly that ‘they recognize what is just as much as any other man, but owing to the poverty of the masses they are compelled to be rather more unjust in their treatment of the city-states’.
¹³
Samos was an example.

For their allies (the Samians perhaps not being one), those same Athenians had forsworn in 377
BC
the taking of land for settlements abroad. In the kaleidoscopic foreign politics of the fourth century Athenians had had to make hard choices: in the 390s they had to make alliances with hated Thebes and Corinth and then, after the Thebans’ victories, an alliance in 369
BC
with the Spartans, the old enemy. In 357
BC
the Athenians’ own confederate allies would rebel against them too. But the origins of this rebellion are not recoverable (was much of it provoked by dissident oligarchs in allied states?) and even after peace returned the Athenians’ Confederacy did not fall apart. Once the Spartan menace of the 370s had been tamed, the Confederacy’s main aim had been satisfied. But it continued to exist, and the wrongs were certainly not all on the Athenian side. In the mid-360s the Thebans took the crucial harbour-town of Oropus on Attica’s borders. Justifiably, the Athenians appealed for allied help under their treaty so as to recover it. None came, and it was left to Philip to restore the place to them after his victory in 338
BC
.

In difficult years, the Athenian citizenry thus retained stability and their own democratic system. In what survives from the Athenian orators, there is only one text which addresses the citizens as if the rich and the poor have differing sources of discontent: it occurs in Demosthenes’ Fourth Philippic (probably composed
c.
340
BC
), but it concentrates on the rich’s discontent against payments to maintain the poor and their (justified) dislike of attempts to divert their property
for the poorer citizens’ use.
¹⁴
The latter, it seems, is a grumble against vexatious prosecutors, the hated ‘sycophants’ in Attica who would denounce a fellow citizen in the hope of receiving part of his property if their case was proved. But ‘sycophants’ had been hated in the Periclean age, too; they were not a new phenomenon (there was no public prosecution service in Attica), and in the fourth century they were still checked by the risk of penalties if the cases which they brought were heavily defeated in court.

The good Athenian, meanwhile, was expected to arbitrate any disputes put to him by his fellow citizens: arbitration was often informally sought and carried out, and it was an accepted way to keep a dispute out of a law court. If a citizen was rich enough, he was also expected to contribute to liturgies, to voluntary ‘donations’ and to collections in a time of need for other fellow citizens. Orators dramatised exceptional cases, and their speeches should not mislead us about the solid backbone of thoughtfulness, co-operation and civic spirit which made fourth-century Athenians as ‘classical’ as their much-praised ancestors.

What has most blotted their reputation is an undeserved charge of apathy, even of cowardice. Again, it derives from surviving speeches of the orators, which so often castigate their hearers and exhort them to war, to the point where we might think the hearers had lost their previous spirit. They had not; war and finance, rather, had changed. Distant naval campaigns were needed to safeguard Athenian interests, but there was not the money to pay Athenian crews properly. For long absences, hired mercenaries were preferred anyway, to be funded by whatever means their generals abroad could contrive. At critical points, nonetheless, Athenian soldiers would still turn out to risk their lives, in 359
BC
in Macedon, in spring 352 against Philip at Thermopylae, in 348 in Euboea and in the north and in 338 against Philip (almost successfully) for the vital battle of Chaeronea. These expeditions are not directly the subject of major surviving speeches on foreign policy, but they are proofs of Athenians’ civic commitment.

Among these speeches, the masterpieces are by Demosthenes, the greatest of Athenian orators. Though slow to wake up to Philip’s menace, Demosthenes was then his most effective Athenian opponent, from
c.
350
BC
to his own brave death in 322. At intervals, the
situation was better suited to peace and compromise, as Demosthenes well realized. But the best option (as, arguably, he had long recognized) was for Athenians and Thebans to stand together against the encroaching Macedonians. When this alliance eventually came, Demosthenes’ oratory continued, we may be sure, to inspire it. Philip won, but Demosthenes’ speeches on the need to defend freedom against a king whom, increasingly, he saw as the enemy of democracy, were a victory too. Philip’s biography was never written in antiquity, but for more than a thousand years Demosthenes’ speeches were to be the texts which men imitated, copied and knew by heart.

The reconstruction and transformation of the bureaucratic system of the East, according to a general plan and with a definite purpose, must be recognized as one of the most astonishing achievements of the Greek genius, and as evidence of its flexibility and adaptability.

M. I. Rostovtzeff,
The Social and Economic History of the
Hellenistic World
, volume II (1941), 1080

Some historians have written of the equilibrium established by the early Ptolemies. The phrase will serve if analysed as follows: Egypt was a country of, say, seven million Egyptians and 100,000 immigrants. The latter class could not expect to maintain a claim to an equal, much less to a larger, share of the products unless they contributed (or were considered to contribute) a qualitatively much more important share. To create the illusion was the task of statesmanship. (Ptolemy I) Soter, and more surprisingly (Ptolemy III) Euergetes, succeeded in the task. (Ptolemy II) Philadelphus had every advantage in his favour, but pressed his successes too hard and frittered away his assets. After the battle of Raphia in 217
BC
followed sterile stalemate.

Sir Eric Turner, in
The Cambridge Ancient History
,
volume VII part 1 (1984, 2nd edn.), 167

Alexander the Great

When King Darius sent him a letter asking him to accept 10,000 talents in return for the prisoners, all the land west of the river Euphrates, one of his daughters in marriage and friendship and alliance, Alexander put the terms to his companions. ‘If I were Alexander,’ Parmenion said, ‘I would accept these terms.’ ‘And so would I,’ said Alexander, ‘if I were Parmenion.’
                  Plutarch,
Life of Alexander
29.4

The rise of Macedon marked the end of the classical age by curtailing Greek freedom and placing kings and their courtiers at the centre of power and the city-states’ public affairs. Luxury, increased by conquest, now characterized the new ruling class and the big showy style of so much of their post-classical ‘Hellenistic’ art. Philip’s ‘Hellenic Alliance’ did proclaim the ‘freedom’ and the ‘autonomy’ of its members. It did also impinge on the conduct of justice: disputes between city-states were to be referred to arbitration, and, by a ‘letter’, the king could ‘advise’ the judicial treatment of ‘traitors’. But freedom and justice are not the explanation of his Macedon’s success. Philip and his men were not really fighting for Greek freedom: it was proclaimed as a means to an end, the advancement of their own power.

Philip’s rise is better explained by his military innovations, his personal skill as an absolute king and once again, by conquest and access to new sources of precious metal, the two great agents of economic growth in antiquity. By conquest, Philip increased his sources of military manpower and changed the social profile of his
kingdom. Macedonians were settled on rich land taken from the free Greek cities on his eastern borders; they could then sustain horses and become his new cavalrymen. War captives were brought back into Macedon as slaves, a labour-force for the newly developed mines and, surely, for farms whose owners could then be recruited as a professional standing army, available throughout the year. There was also, as we shall see later at Rome, a motivating set of values. A Macedonian king grew up to admire glory won in war, as did his followers. If he won it, he continued to enjoy their support. In this post-Homeric world, there was no question of ruling by being peaceful. The more a king conquered, the more secure his personal kingship became, and the more his resources for yet more conquest.

These values were to be realized by Philip’s most famous memorial, his son Alexander the Great, who took the dynamic of glory, gain and conquest to unprecedented lengths. Born in July 356, Alexander succeeded his murdered father in 336; five years later, aged twenty-five, he had conquered the great armies of the Persian king in Asia and had taken over the palaces and treasures of the Persian Empire which were more than two hundred years old. Incomparably richer than anyone known in previous Greek history, he pressed eastwards into India, bound for the Outer Ocean, so he believed, which encircled the world. Nobody from Greece had ever seen India and, like his tutor Aristotle, Alexander underestimated its vast size and population. Like conquistadors, his troops entered the kingdoms of an unknown Indian world. They believed they were following the trail of the god Dionysus and the hero Heracles. They saw elephants and Brahmins, but they only heard of people who lived up in the high mountains, our Himalayas, and ran with their feet turned backwards. These people could not survive at low altitudes, they believed, and so they could not be brought into camp: Alexander’s troops were the first westerners to hear of the fabled yeti, the Abominable Snowman of these mountain-peaks. Forty years earlier, their fathers had been the playthings of warring Athens and Thebes.