The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Abstract

As a student of modern history (US diplomatic and military history), I tended to think that ancient history offered few insights into current life. Josiah Ober's book, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, has disabused me of such a sentiment. Ober, a classicist and political scientist at Stanford University, achieves a compelling history of the ancient Greek city-states and their relevance to modern times. Contrary to the view of many twentieth-century historians, the peoples of ancient Greece were relatively prosperous: Ober finds ancient Greece to have been richer, more populous, and more urbanized than most other premodern societies. More importantly, the ancient Greeks enjoyed greater economic equality (at least among its citizens, and especially in Athens) than many societies ancient or modern. Ober demonstrates that the ancient Greek-speaking city-states enjoyed an affluence comparable to that of seventeenth-century Holland or eighteenth-century Britain in the modern era. Ober also refutes the view that the relative prosperity during the golden age of Greece (roughly fifth century BCE) declined precipitously in the fourth century BCE.Because I am interested in modern, not ancient, events and people, I questioned the veracity of ancient accounts, given the vast time period (2,500 years) and the limited amount of surviving material. Ober, again, convinces me of my errors. He utilizes a wealth of data on ancient Greece from a variety of perspectives, including archaeological, economic, demographic, and the like. Especially important is the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis, compiled under the direction of Danish historian Mogens H. Hansen. This is a collection of data concerning 1,035 Greek poleis from the eighth to the fourth centuries BCE. Ober also consults a collection of data by John Bintiff, University of Leiden, which includes analysis of demographic change over time (5). Ober's work also draws on “the new institutional economics” that have been pioneered by Nobel-winning economist and political scientist Douglass North, MIT social scientist Daron Acemoglu, and Harvard social scientist James Robinson. Ober shares their view that “institutions (i.e., the ‘rules of the game’) and organization,” along with markets and networks, “are the fundamental determinants of economic change” (5).Ober, being a classicist as well as a political scientist, also draws on original sources, such as the historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle. In chapter 3, “Political Animals,” Ober contrasts Aristotle, who believed that human institutions, properly constructed, could steer his fellow Greeks toward beneficial cooperation, and away from selfish rivalry, to the seventeenth-century political theorist, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes believed that selfish chaos was the natural state to which humans would revert without the intervening force of a centralized authority. While Hobbes thought efficient production and the fair distribution of public goods were impossible without a central authority, Aristotle saw human nature as social, interdependent, and justice seeking. Aristotle believed that individuals could be persuaded to cooperate through good public institutions, using a mixture of ideology, federalism, altruistic punishment and existential threats (70). In Athens and elsewhere, there were institutions (action-guiding rules) and civic culture (action-guiding social norms) that made cooperation feasible (not impossible, as in Hobbes's “natural state”). Ober returns to Aristotle in his last chapter (311–313), agreeing with the fourth-century BCE philosopher, who believed, in Ober's words, that the “autonomous polis” was the “best, indeed the only possible, environment for the pursuit of an essential moral end: the fulfillment of human flourishing.”The ancient Greek public institutions worked because they were democratic, even though they lacked important aspects of modern liberal democracies (15–17). Slavery existed and only males had full citizenship rights. Nonetheless, the ancient Greeks, particularly the Athenians, had a strong tradition of civic rights. Ober explains that, for the ancient Greeks, civic rights meant immunity against arbitrary action by powerful individuals or governmental bodies, security against physical assault, freedom from humiliation, and security against the confiscation of property (16–17). Much of the work of governance in democratic poleis, such as Athens, was done by amateurs or, as Ober writes, “citizen farmers,” “citizen shoemakers” and “citizen soldiers” who chose to “dedicate themselves to the tasks of rule-making, judgment and administration” (18). And it was this political system of “collectively created and collectively managed” citizens who played a fundamental role in the creation of the ancient Greece efflorescence. The “good” political institutions that were designed for organizing the dispersed knowledge of citizens were decentralized and democratic (that is, for free males over eighteen years of age). In Athens, Ober writes, success came by setting up a democratic federalist structure: demes (neighborhoods), tribes (larger groups that were supposedly ethnically related, but were in fact artificially constructed), and the city (or polis) as a whole. The large political bodies, such as the Council of 500 and the citizen Assembly, were organized on a polis (or citywide) level, but these larger institutions worked because they were based on the smaller social networks (chapter 7).As an example of how these institutions worked, Ober discusses a key meeting of the Athenian Assembly in 483 BCE at which the Athenians decided to construct a great fleet of warships. When the state-owned silver mines at Laurion produced an unexpected windfall, a proposal was made to divide the profits among all the Athenian households. But the Athenian statesman, Themistocles, persuaded the Athenians to forego individual payoffs and instead build and man a fleet of warships. The implications of this decision were enormous. An enlarged navy would give employment, as rowers, to thousands of poor Athenian men, recently enfranchised; previously, these new citizens would have been unable to serve in the military, which had been limited to those who could provide their own arms and armor. Ober argues that Themistocles achieved good policy by making a persuasive argument in a public decision-making forum. His argument was persuasive because ordinary Athenians knew enough to know that the proposal would work (168–69). Moreover, writes Ober, there is no hint in the sources that the hoplites (Athenian infantrymen) felt the need to protect their monopoly on the art and practice of warfare. In other words, the decisions about the “Athenian military, how it would be developed, and how deployed, were being made by the citizenry and not by a closed coalition of specialists in violence” (169).Another example of successful public decision making occurred in the Athenian Assembly's debate on the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. The Athenians faced the choice of fighting with their ships or surrendering to the much larger Persian army and navy. In the Assembly's decision-making process, they began by seeking religious counsel. But the Assembly, which included “ordinary” men (rowers, steersmen, marines), understood the operational capacity of the Athenian navy and rejected the advice of the traditional sources of authority—supposed experts in oracle interpretation or community elders—both of whom urgently warned against the sea fight. And in this new institutional order, the “democratic value of ‘equality in respect to public speech’ ensured that the opinions of neither oracle interpreters nor elders would be authoritative. Because the advice of experts in relevant domains was given proper weight, both by the Council and by the Assembly, the choice of ‘fight at sea’ was selected over the other options” (173–74). The outcome was victory at sea at the Battle of Salamis.In contrast, however, the Athenian Assembly's decision to undertake the ultimately disastrous Sicilian Expedition (415 BCE) was made under conditions of ignorance and suppressed dissent (217–220). According to Thucydides, “Athenian voters were largely ignorant of the physical size, demography, and political history of Sicily” (217). Furthermore, the Athenians were misled both by the overly optimistic arguments of the hawkish Alcibiades and by the equally manipulative arguments of the dovish general, Nicias. Nicias's arguments against the Expedition backfired, causing the Athenian voters to irrationally decide to “risk everything” for the chance of enormous profits. As a result, Ober concludes, “Athens' most important single decision of the long Peloponnesian War was thus made under a cloud of constitutional violation, explicable but potentially disastrous irrationality, and false consensus bought at the cost of stifled dissent” (219). Once again Ober argues—this time through a counterexample—that open, honest, and fact-based discussion among equal citizens who trust one another and communicate freely for the benefit of the common good is the best way to produce a happy and flourishing human society.Ober's arguments are, for the most part, persuasive, but his use of social science jargon can sometimes be maddening for the average reader. Consider Ober's explanation of how the Athenians bonded through “performance-enhancing” institutions (171): As men's lives extended beyond their home deme to the level of the tribe and the polis, possibilities opened up for the formation of “weak ties” that bridged the gaps between deme-level “strong-tie” networks, which were trust-based, but potentially exclusivist and parochial. By identifying “structural holes” in the burgeoning web of Athenian social interactions—that is, by making connections linking local networks that had formerly been isolated from one another—social entrepreneurs could gain material benefits for themselves (e.g. potentially lucrative marriage alliances). Weak-tie bridges between local networks thus benefited individuals who, in a sense, became specialists at networking. As a positive externality, their bridge-building helped to increase the flow of social knowledge and useful information across the citizen body as a whole.Ober has argued forcefully that clear communication is the key to success, but such esoteric verbiage may inhibit his ability to communicate successfully with his readers.