that Athens was the only Greek state to create a special class of overseas citizens or ‘cleruchs’, who were given colonial lands confiscated from rebellious allies abroad and yet – unlike all other Hellenic colonists – retained full juridical rights in the mother city itself. The steady plantation of cleruchies and colonies overseas in the course of the 5th century enabled the city to promote more than 10,000 Athenians from there to hoplite condition, by endowment of lands abroad, thereby greatly strengthening its military power at the same stroke. The brunt of Athenian imperialism, however, did not lie with these settlements. The ascent of Athenian power in the Aegean created a political order whose real function was to coordinate and exploit already urbanized coasts and islands, by a system of monetary tribute levied for the maintenance of a permanent navy, nominally the common defender of Greek liberty against Oriental menaces, in fact the central instrument of imperial oppression by Athens over its ‘allies’. In 454 the central treasury of the Delian League, originally created to fight Persia, had been transferred to Athens; in 450, Athenian refusal to permit the dissolution of the League after peace with Persia converted it into a de facto Empire. At its height in the 440’s, the Athenian imperial system embraced some 150 – mainly Ionian – cities, which paid an annual cash sum to the central treasury in Athens, and were prevented from keeping fleets themselves. The total tribute from the Empire was actually reckoned to be 50 per cent larger than Attic internal revenues, and undoubtedly financed the civic and cultural superabundance of the Periclean polis.23 At home, the navy for which it paid provided stable employment for the most numerous and least well-off class of citizens, and the public works which it funded were the most signal embellishments of the city, among them the Parthenon. Abroad, Athenian squadrons policed Aegean waters, while political residents, military commanders and itinerant commissioners ensured docile magistracies in the subject states. Athenian courts exercised powers of judicial repression over citizens of allied cities suspected of disloyalty.24
But the limits of Athenian external power were soon reached. It probably stimulated trade and manufactures in the Aegean, where use of Attic coinage was extended by decree and piracy was suppressed, although the major profits from commercial growth accrued to the metic community in Athens itself. The imperial system also enjoyed the sympathy of the poorer classes of the allied cities, because Athenian tutelage generally meant the installation of democratic regimes locally, congruent with those of the imperial city itself, while the financial burden of tribute fell on the upper classes.25 But it was incapable of achieving an institutional inclusion of these allies into a unified political system. Athenian citizenship was so wide at home that it was impracticable ever to extend it abroad to non-Athenians, for to do so would have functionally contradicted the direct residential democracy of the mass Assembly, only feasible within a very small geographical compass. Thus, despite the popular overtones of Athenian rule, the ‘democratic’ domestic foundation of Periclean imperialism necessarily generated ‘dictatorial’ exploitation of its Ionian allies, who inevitably tended to be thrust rapaciously downwards into colonial servitude: there was no basis for equality or federation, such as a more oligarchic constitution might have permitted. At the same time, however, the democratic nature of the Athenian polis – whose principle was direct participation, not representation – precluded the creation of a bureaucratic machinery that could have held down an extended territorial empire by administrative coercion. There was scarcely any separate or professional State apparatus in the city, whose political structure was essentially defined by its rejection of specialized bodies of officials – civilian or military apart from the ordinary citizenry: Athenian democracy signified, precisely, the refusal of any such division between ‘state’ and ‘society’.26 There was thus no basis for an imperial bureaucracy either. Athenian expansionism consequently broke down relatively soon, both because of the contradictions of its own structure, and because of the resistance, thereby facilitated to it, from the more oligarchic cities of mainland Greece, led by Sparta. The Spartan League possessed the converse advantages of Athenian liabilities: a confederation of oligarchies, whose strength was based squarely on hoplite proprietors rather than an admixture with demotic sailors, and whose unity did not therefore involve either monetary tribute or a military monopoly by the hegemon city of Sparta itself, whose power was therefore always intrinsically less of a threat to the other Greek cities than that of Athens. The lack of any substantial hinterland rendered Athenian military power – both in recruitment and resources – too thin to resist a coalition of terrestrial rivals.27 The Peloponnesian War joined the attack of its peers to the revolt of its subjects, whose propertied classes rallied to the mainland oligarchies once it had started. Even so, however, Persian gold was necessary to finance a Spartan fleet capable of ending Athenian mastery of the sea, before the Athenian Empire was finally broken on land by Lysander. Thereafter there was no chance of the Hellenic cities generating a unified imperial state from within their midst, despite their relatively rapid economic recovery from the effects of the long Peloponnesian War: the very parity and multiplicity of urban centres in Greece neutralized them collectively for external expansion. The Greek cities of the 4th century sank into exhaustion, as the classical polis experienced increasing difficulties of finance and conscription, symptoms of impending anachronism.
1. A. Andrewes, Greek Society, London 1967, pp. 76–82.
2. See the arguments in William McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago 1963, pp. 201, 273.
3. W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, London 1966, pp. 55, 150–6, who emphasizes the new economic growth in the countryside; A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, London 1956, pp. 80–1, who stresses the social depression of the small farmer class.
4. It is uncertain whether the poor peasantry in Attica were tenants or owners of their farms before Solon’s reforms. Andrewes argues that they may have been the former (Greek Society, pp. 106–7), but subsequent generations had no memory of an actual redistribution of land by Solon, so this seems improbable.
5. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks, London 1963, p. 33, regards Peisistratus’s policies as more important for the economic independence of the Attic peasantry than Solon’s reforms.
6. The reality of an original land division, or even a later inalienability of the kleroi, has been doubted: for example, see A. H. M. Jones, Sparta, Oxford 1967, pp. 40–3. Andrewes, although cautious, accords more credit to Greek beliefs: Greek Society, pp. 94–5.
7. The size of the kleroi which underpinned Spartan social solidarity has been much debated, with estimates varying from 20 to 90 acres of arable: see P. Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems, Amsterdam-Prague 1971, pp. 51–2.
8. For the structure of the constitution, see Jones, Sparta, pp. 13–43.
9. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, pp. 75–6.
10. Andrewes, Greek Society, p. 133. Compare V. Ehrenburg, The Greek State, London 1969, p. 96: ‘Without metics or slaves, the polis could hardly have existed at all’.
11. Andrewes, Greek Society, p. 135.
12. Oliva, Sparta and Her Social Problems, pp. 43–4. Helots also possessed their own families and were on occasion used for military duties.
13. Victor Ehrenburg, The Greek State, p. 97.
14. Finley, The Ancient Greeks, p. 36.
15. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, p. 46.
16. M. I. Finley, Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens 500–200 B.C., New Brunswick, pp. 58–9.
17. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9.
18. A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy, Oxford 1957, pp. 79–91.
19. Jones, Athenian Democracy, pp. 41–72, documents this divergence, but fails to see its implications for the structure of Athenian civilization as a whole, contenting himself
