There is discussion on the exact balance of power in "Dorian" and other serf-states. Clearly the middle and upper free classes with full political rights had a major role in politics, but generally appear to be highly influenced if not dominated by a smaller group of aristocrats. In Sparta for example, there were two hereditary dynasties which supplied its double kingship, but more powerful usually were the aristocrats who made up the senate or Gerousia of 28 members (Fisher 1998). Annual elected officials called archons, not from the wealthy class, provided limited influence from the general male citizenry.
(p. 265c) In Athens the final expulsion of the Peisistratid dynasty at the end of the sixth century ushered in a wide-ranging democracy, which by the middle fifth century experimented not only with voting and jury rights for all freeborn males, but allowed citizens of any wealth-status to stand for the highest offices
Significantly, in the final Archaic and early Classical era till the mid-fifth century, the leading politicians in Athens were from long-established aristocratic clans: both Kleisthenes and Pericles were part of the Alcmaeonid family. During the 460s-450s Athens extended its democracy under the political leadership of Ephialtes and Pericles, to bring both the middle and then lower classes into full access to all the organs of government and even the highest offices of state (Hansen 1989). As a result of the opening-up of office the later fifth century witnessed the growing importance of citizen politicians of humbler origins in commerce, notoriously the tanner Cleon, or nouveaux riches such as Nicias, whose fortune grew out of tendering for the state silver mines at Laurion (Fisher 1998). This led to growing dissension, helping to precipitate murderous coups and counter-coups at the end of the century. Even within the institutions of Classical Athens, these tensions between an elitist and populist strand can be detected in archaeological details, such as evidence for the adoption of aristocratic symposium behaviors at public dining facilities, where citizens of the upper class remained dominant figures (Steiner 2002). The Classical "Old Comedy" in Athens, with its leading representative today in terms of surviving plays, Aristophanes, conveys this social dissension very well, with Aristophanes consistently denigrating the rise of non-elite politicians and the unholy alliance of an urban proletariat and such self-made populists. In his view the greatness of Athens could return only when elitist leaders combined with the hoplite-farming class of the countryside to take back the running of the state (Rosenbloom 2002).
(pp. 265-266a) In Athens, the richest citizens were exploited through "liturgies," a requirement to subsidize warships (triremes) or choruses for a drama festival
In its Classical heyday, the Athenian male citizens numbered some 25,000-30,000. Of these the number rich enough to be asked for liturgies was around 1000-1200 citizens, while the next wealthiest group, between 1000 and 4000 but now including metics, paid a special tax to the state (for a detailed discussion of Athenian taxes and wealth see Lyttkens 1992). This imbalance, since the remainder of the citizen body paid very little in dues to the state, can be linked to the hard reality that, despite Athens being the premier democracy, equal rights definitely did not mean equal resources or socialism. It has been calculated that one-third of Attic land belonged to 8-10 percent of its citizens, with peasant farmers of middle to poor status possessing the remaining two-thirds. (For these points, see Fisher 1998.)
(p. 266b) Athens: it was city-dwellers and those living in the immediate peripheral rural suburbs (the "Asty" region) who effectively dominated in the Assembly and lawcourts
See discussion in Jones (1995), and a fuller presentation in Jones (1999). Markle (1990) focuses on rural participation within the Asty region.
(p. 266c) The democratic tide survived and even extended its influence after Athens fell from imperial pre-eminence
In the fourth century BC Athens remained a democracy until its suppression by the Macedonian state in 322 BC, while states which had hitherto been oligarchic, such as Thebes and Chios, adopted democratic constitutions, with the Thebans under Epaminondas vigorously encouraging the spread of democracy under the aegis of its victorious armies (Cartledge 1998a).
(p. 266d) Roughly half the 600-700 Classical city-states in the Aegean had at some stage a moderately democratic constitution
For this approximation of moderately democratic Aegean city-states I am indebted to Peter Rhodes (pers. comm.). Lewis (2004) calculates, including this time all kinds of political units in the Greek world, that oligarchic regimes predominated. Significantly, even in oligarchic city-states, the centrality of the hoplite-citizen class to social order is shown through the collective burial of war dead under prominent state monuments. Low (2003) compares the Athenian treatment of their war dead with monuments erected inside the city of Megara (perhaps even in the agora) and the Polyandreion monument erected along a major road into the city of Thespiae.
(p. 266e) Political control was shared between the upper-class and the middle-class males, with usually lesser but significant legal and some political rights for the lower class
According to Thomas (2000) and Peter Rhodes (pers. comm.), in most Classical city-states the lower free class below the hoplite, that serving as thetes/peltasts in the citizen armed forces, had rights but not votes, a distinction noted in ancient texts between the polites and ecclesiastes.
(p. 266f) Much of the commercial economy was left to disenfranchised, resident free aliens (metics)
Athens not only benefitted from resident aliens for the bulk of its craft and commercial population, but artists and philosophers were drawn to the city, including Aristotle, a native of Stagira in Northern Greece (Cartledge 1998b).
(p. 266g) "Democratic" and the "serf" societies sustained plentiful free time for citizens' political activity, military training, and leisure, through similar substructures of unfree or disenfranchised classes
The absence of political rights for citizen women, and the high levels of slavery, have led to a justified critique of the "the glory that was Greece" in the light of contemporary democratic values. Thus Cartledge comments in his introduction to his edited volume: "This illustrated history aims to capture the multifariousness and greatness of ancient Greece, but also to set that undoubted glory firmly into its historical perspective, even at the cost of tarnishing it a little. In some cases - the treatment of women, or of slaves, above all - tarnishing it more than a little" (1998b: ix-x). The wide availability of household and farm slaves freed the poorer citizens from poverty (Fisher 1998), while the very restriction of political activity to a mere 25,000-30,000 males out of a variously estimated total Attic population of 200,000-300,000 surely created a natural feeling of superiority toward the disenfranchised majority of women, metics, and slaves. It is not coincidental that the deepening of citizen democracy at Athens was closely tied with measures to exclude citizenship to foreigners, despite previous openness to intermarriage and immigration which many of the leading Archaic and early fifth-century families had been involved with (Georges 1993). Initially an Athenian father was required, but later both parents had to be native-born Athenians.
(p. 266h) In Athens the creation of a tribute-paying empire without political representation added another layer of undemocratic exploitation to sustain a special lifestyle for Athenian citizens
Millett (2000) states that without the resources of its empire Athens would not have been able to pay its citizens to attend political assemblies and serve on juries, or to row in the vast fleet, or envisage costly public building schemes such as the acropolis monuments of the late fifth century BC. Calculations by Cook (1990) and Samons (1993) point in the same direction. Osborne agrees: "Empire and democracy were symbiotic" (2000a: 180). At Athens' main festival, the Panathenaia, delegates from the empire processed with the citizens to the Acropolis, while at the opening of the drama festival, the Great Dionysia, the annual tribute from her "subjects" (as she referred to them) was carried on to the stage for the audience to see, in the Theater of Dionysos below the Acropolis.
(p. 266i) Hyper-democratic Athens' share of known inscriptions dwarfs those of other poleis
As we discussed in the context of the spread of literacy in Archaic Greece, it is a major point of interest and debate as to the ultimate purpose of stone public inscriptions, when just a fraction of the citizen population may have been able to comprehend their texts. Peter Rhodes (pers. comm.) also points out that from the 450s onward, the high tide of extreme democracy in Athens led to a vast production of official inscriptions, making the Athenian Acropolis (where many were set up) resemble more a cemetery than a great art installation. Finding a given law in this stone-field would have been extremely difficult anyway, and Rhodes suggests that the majority of official inscriptions were placed publicly as a symbolic statement rather than as a practical way for citizens to check the statutes or practices of their officials. When inscriptions were deliberately destroyed, as with the rule of the Thirty in Athens at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, it seems that it was still possible to republish or check older laws since a second, backup version was probably kept on papyrus in the state records office.
(p. 266j) The encroaching and enormous Persian Empire
The Persian Empire had expanded through the area of modern Turkey under Cyrus the Great (559530 BC) to conquer not only the powerful kingdom of Lydia but the Ionian Greek cities of the west coast of Anatolia. The empire then crossed over into Europe to incorporate Thrace. A revolt of the Ionian cities in the 490s prompted Athenian support, and this and the inevitable desire to expand the empire further made invasion of Greece inevitable.
(p. 266k) The innumerable small and large states of Greece failed to unite against this great Near Eastern power
It is striking that Xerxes' invasion prompted a council at Corinth to which just 31 of a possible 1000 or so Greek states sent embassies in order to prepare joint resistance (Osborne 2000a). In recent years there has been renewed interest in ancient history in the Persian Empire, a re-evaluation in fact, since it has traditionally been dismissed as a monstrous totalitarian state threatening Europe's destiny had the Classical Greeks not stopped it in its tracks in the early fifth century BC. It was clearly a long-lived and successful empire which was relatively tolerant toward its subjects and practiced considerable delegation of power to local leaders, while in the matter of human rights it is not difficult to cite numerous atrocities committed by Greek Classical states, especially Athens (Coleman 1997).
(p. 266l) The battle of Marathon, largely the victory of Athens' hoplites
Striking archaeological evidence for the Persian Wars comes from the Athenian Acropolis, where the Persian sack of the city is vividly revealed by the large number of Archaic and earliest Classical statues and temple fragments respectfully buried or built into the citadel wall after the Athenians returned to the site - known in German scholarship as the Perserschutt or Persian debris (Scholl 2006). The Athenian war dead at Marathon were buried in a "heroic" tumulus, which has been excavated and found to match contemporary accounts of the number lost (Whitley 1994).
(p. 26a7) Athens excited envy and fear among its rivals through converting a religious confederacy into a ruthless empire
By 441 BC the Athenian Empire or "Delian League" (its original focus was the sacred island of Delos in the center of the Cycladic islands), had 205 cities registered (Morris 2005). One famous victim of Athenian tyranny was the small island city-state of Melos in the Cyclades, where in 416 BC the population refused to join the Athenian League. This led to a successful siege, followed by the execution of all the adult males and the selling into slavery of the women and children. The effects of this on the island may be seen in a stagnation of settlement during the Classical era observed by archaeological survey on the island (Renfrew and Wagstaff 1982). For other archaeological traces of the Athenian Empire see Osborne (1999). Osborne challenges earlier views in which the baleful effects of Athenian tribute explain an apparent decline in investment in public buildings among the member-cities, although he agrees that major programs at Athens and Delos itself are clear signs of the benefits of empire to its controller.
(p. 267b) Its vast fleet was the basis for "the Athenian maritime empire"
As noted earlier in this volume, the chronology of the oared warship known as the trireme (from its three banks of tiered oars) is disputed. The traditional view is to see this as first appearing in the Eastern Mediterranean (Egypt or Phoenicia) around 600 BC (Cartledge 1998d), then gradually being adopted in the Aegean by the start of the Classical era. Others suggest it was invented in Greece, and use later legends to propose that the tyrant Polycrates of Samos was the first to deploy it (Kreuzer 1994). As concerns the Aegean background, there are representations on final Mycenaean, Late Helladic 3C vases, and also ninth-century BC pottery from Lefkandi, for simpler oared galleys suitable for piracy and raids (Crielaard 2006), which provide possible precursors to the trireme's Late
Archaic emergence as the premier Greek warship. In any case, a remarkable historical event changed the course of Greek development in more than one direction, when the Athenian politician Themistocles persuaded the Assembly to use the profits from an immensely rich, newly discovered, body of silver ore at the Attic mines of Laurion, in the late 480s, to construct a fleet of 200 triremes. This occurred within a short interval before the second Persian invasion, allowing Athens to lead the Greek fleet to victory and then build up its maritime empire in the Aegean (Cartledge 1998d). In recent years, an international team has rebuilt a trireme and run experimental trials on its capabilities. So far speeds claimed in ancient texts have not been achieved, so that some doubts have arisen as to how closely the modern reconstruction has recreated the original design (Coates 1987, Welsh 1988). It has even been suggested that Classical oarsmen were fitter than modern athletes to help account for the discrepancies (Pain 2007), but considering that crews were dominated by the poor and slaves, this seems rather unlikely.
(p. 267c) Historians are increasingly linking Athens' foreign military adventures in Sicily, Egypt, and elsewhere to a desire to control imports of grain and timber at source
For a review of such recent thinking see Green (1993). Athens is currently being seen as an intermediate form of state between a largely self-sufficient extra-large polis and a highly specialized empire such as the Roman (Scheidel 2008). Apart from the vital income Athens derived from tribute, it also pursued a policy of intensifying profits from its dependent states through confiscating land in its empire and allotting it to Athenian colonists (cleruchs) (Zelnick-Abramovitz 2004). Either by direct production or tenancy arrangements these colonial estates sent back food surpluses for the swollen Athenian market. For the role of investment in olive-growing within Attica in relation to international exchange see Lohmann (1993b) and Scheidel (2008). A wider use of such an export-driven model for economic expansion is presented by Runnels and van Andel (1987). Debate continues as to whether Classical states, whose economy was mostly agriculturally based, were sufficiently commercialized to support large-scale exchange (Millett 2000). Athens outgrew its own Attic surplus production, importing grain from many distant regions, but the respective contributions of its silver mines and the tribute of its empire, compared for example with its commercial trade in Attic olive oil, remain unknown.
(p. 267d) Athenian predominance in the Aegean also had longer-lasting effects well after the fall of its empire in the adoption of its dialect as the standard international form of Greek
Athenian dominance over large zones of Greece encouraged the wider use of its Ionian dialect, and in any case many of the inhabitants of its dependent cities were Ionian-speakers. By the fourth century BC this situation, formerly founded on military advantage, had become a symbol of cultural eminence, allowing this form of Greek - the koine, or "common tongue" - to form the basis for the Greek that would be spread throughout the Near East through the conquests of Alexander the Great. It also became the standard form in the Aegean itself. (For discussion see Horrocks 1999.) (p. 267) The quarrelsome nature of Greek city-states and other forms of state within the Southern Aegean resulted in hardly a single year in the fifth or fourth centuries BC without a war occurring. Large-scale conflicts involving the great powers of Athens, Sparta, and later Thebes, ultimately also the kingdom of Macedon in Northern Greece, drew in scores of lesser states as allies on either side
Davies points out acutely that the polis as an administrative and cultural unit survived well into the Hellenistic era, whereas as a power unit the vast majority of city-states in Classical times were in reality dominated by a small number of Aegean Greek states, dictators, federal organizations, or foreign powers. "The breakdown of the city as a power-unit is a sixth-century phenomenon, complete by 480 _ what was fatal was not the failure of the city but the failure to develop formulae for interstate cooperation which avoided the counterproductive resentments caused by the leagues and hegemonies of the fifth century" (1975: 98).
(p. 267e) Architectural skills deployed to make strong and beautiful temples to adorn cities and interstate sanctuaries were used in equal measure to defend cities or erect border fortresses and signal towers across the countryside (and defend isolated farms)
Bakhuizen writes: "The world of the ancient Greeks, whether before or after the lifetime of Alexander the Great, was, on the whole, without a pax Graeca, and most towns and cities were at one time or another protected by a circuit wall, and sometimes by a few signal towers in the chora or - perhaps - by a chain of frontier forts. Within the heritage of Greek civilization no class of monuments or architectural achievements stands out more conspicuously than that of city walls. If for modern tourists with their esthetic predilection these defence works do not rank high, it was different for travellers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who showed a deep interest in military remains" (1994: 199). He concludes that the historical record shows that the unsophisticated level of Classical siege equipment and the very high level of city-wall construction, made towns very difficult to conquer by direct attack, thus the considerable expense of a wall circuit was well justified. Apart from the impressive walls of Eleutherae-Gyphtokastro shown in Figure 11.1, and the still stunning (despite a crippling recent earthquake) walls of nearby Aegosthena, the largest extent of surviving Classical urban walling in Greece is that of the newly founded early fourth-century city of Messene. Created in 369 BC, after Messenia was freed from Spartan rule by the Thebans, this city boasts walls some 7 km long, following the rolling rocky terrain of Mount Ithome (Lawrence 1996, Cartledge 1998a). Lawrence (1996) comments that the quality of Greek masonry work deployed for fortifications easily excelled that used for temples. (For a general introduction to the field, see Lawrence 1979.) In the early fourth century there were dramatic changes in siege technology, with the introduction of heavy artillery and siege-towers. This forced circuit-builders to improve defenses, replacing mudbrick with stone rubble, and placing artillery in towers (van Wees 2000).
(p. 267f) Sparta yielded to a new power in the 370s-360s, the city of Thebes
Sparta, despite its vast territory and enormous agricultural income from its serfs, suffered a progressive loss of the vital citizen manpower on which its military dominance entirely depended. Population decline is clearly evidenced by the decreasing size of the armies it could field: by the 390s it could only raise 60 percent of the hoplite force it had mustered for the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, and its losses at Leuktra in 371 BC of 400 men were decisive out of what by then had shrunk to 1000 adult male citizens, the Spartiates (Osborne 2000b). Ancient sources explained this through overstrict application of laws regarding inheritance and the maintenance of estates, while modern historians also consider the unnatural separation of citizen males from their families to be relevant to the birth decline. Spartan male citizens were expected to dine in special refectories and to sleep in male communal dormitories, both of which were separate from their homes.
(p. 267g) A totally novel power in Southern Greek politics, the kingdom of Macedon from the Northeast of Greece
For the city-states of Southern Greece, the kingdom of Macedon was considered hardly Greek. In the early fifth century, when its king Archelaos wished to compete in the Olympic Games a special commission investigated his "Greekness." The same king worked hard to convince his Southern neighbors of his "Hellenic" credentials, planning a new capital by the Aegean Sea at Pella in the "Greek style," inviting the famous Athenian playwright Euripides to his court, and setting up a local version of Panhellenic athletic games at the city of Dion in South Macedonia (Cartledge 1998c). But Macedonian hegemony in the Aegean owed most to the sheer size and organization of the kingdom under King Philip II, particularly his creation of an army the match of all its Southern Greek enemies put together (van Wees 2000). Absorbing rich gold mines helped the Macedonian kingdom maintain its vast professional military force, which could be in the field at any time of the year, in contrast to the hoplite armies of the Southern poleis where citizens who could fight usually did so only in the summer when their fields did not need attention.
(p. 268h) The florescence of town and country in the fifth-fourth centuries BC spread more widely, encompassing much of the Southern Mainland from Central Greece down to the Central Peloponnese, and the Ionian islands
The evidence from Central Greece comes from the regions of Boeotia-Phocis-Lokris; that from the Central Peloponnese from Laconia and Arcadia. Intensive and extensive survey in the coastal regions of the Northwest Greek province of Acarnania (Lang 1994) show that here the fifth - and especially fourth-century landscape was also filling with regular walled towns with typical public infrastructures.
(p. 269a) Estimating city size combines topographic survey, evidence from urban excavations, surface survey where towns lie today in cultivated or at least open ground, and (more rarely) textual sources
The detailed study of ancient urban sites is blossoming. Standard analyses of the difficult task of interpreting major towns beneath their modern successors can be seen in the fine monographs on Athens (Travlos 1971, Camp 2001) and Thebes (Symeonoglou 1985). For surface survey of cities see Bintliff and Snodgrass (1988), Alcock (1991), Bintliff et al. (2009 [2007]). For an extraordinary feat of data collection and analysis, collecting size, and other data for all known Greek cities see Hansen and Nielsen (2004). Hansen (2008) helpfully revisits many of his earlier methods and calculations for estimating urban size and number, and demographic densities in Greek town and country.
(p. 269b) Defensive walls can be used, but critically, to suggest minimum areas for Classical towns
Our knowledge of the internal plan and built-up areas of Greek towns in the Aegean is confined to a tiny proportion of the cities recorded through texts and extensive or topographic survey (Nevett 1999). If we wish to make some first approximations of the relative size of towns then features such as dated wall circuits and associated extramural cemeteries are our primary archaeological source, which can be brought into relation with contemporary ancient sources providing information on the population of a particular town. Rarely, as with the case of ancient Thebes in Boeotia, we possess additional information that a city was notable for the large areas of gardens within its walls, which in this case helps account for its Classical wall circuit being some one and a half times larger than that of Athens, arguably a more populous town. A wall, of course, reflects a combination of fitting a defense work to the local topography and the citizens' estimate of the space required for their public and private buildings. In several known cases a city extension wall is known to have overestimated anticipated population growth, or be much larger than necessary for accommodation owing to the desire to enclose highly defensible features of the landscape. Thus using city walls as a guide to city size is a first estimate only, to be used wherever possible alongside complementary sources of information. But since we have very little other data so far for almost all Greek cities it is a useful working hypothesis, and in Boeotia we have found that the relative scale of enclosed areas matches well with other evidence for population, especially where additional data can be used to refine the calculations (Bintliff 1997a).
(p. 269c) Cemeteries: an additional helpful tool for confirming the likely edge of a nucleated settlement
As we saw in Chapters 9 and 10, there was also a conceptual aspect to the creation of separate "cities of the dead" and of "the living," part of the materialization of social boundaries which marks the rise of the corporate community of the city-state.
(p. 269d) The city-state emerged almost entirely from the smaller nucleations, hence the term "village-state." Although most became incorporated as satellite settlements of slightly larger city-states (the Normalpolis), or the rarer, much larger "territorial states" (megalopoleis), their function usually continued throughout Greco-Roman antiquity as district centers of population, trade, industry, and farming
Kirsten (1974) describes the appearance and proliferation of the Greek polis as predominantly a phenomenon of small landscapes of agrarian-focused citizens, which by the fifth century undergo a selection process either into larger units, still states, official villages in city-states, or "dependent towns" such as in the vast city-state of Sparta (the perioeci). He argues that the larger units or surviving independent towns are with very few exceptions political and military entities rather than functioning as the industrial or commercial sectors for dependent agricultural satellites. Thus if the megalopolis or Normalpolis weakens, the larger of their satellites may assert their autonomy as fully functional mini-states in their own right. The massive output of the Copenhagen Polis Project coordinated by Mogens Hansen (for an overview see Shipley 2003) also recognizes that size is not a factor in city-state function, and that dependent poleis existed, as well as komai (villages) which could be either genuine small rural settlements or city-state-like small rural towns within a larger polis. Hansen argues that it is the organization of a settlement, so that it has the behavior of a polis, that is the most significant element. For further discussion of "feeding the city" see Bintliff (2006).
(p. 269e) There were exceptionally even smaller formal poleis which claimed independence despite limited demographic and economic resources
As noted earlier in this volume, the tiny polis of Chorsiai in Boeotia (Fossey 1986), with its estimated 500 citizens, was obviously smaller than innumerable villages (komai) to be found within most other city-states. In practice, micro-poleis such as Chorsiai were usually semi-autonomous satellites of more powerful neighbors. Hansen (2000) makes the same important point that absolute autonomy (autonomia) was not a critical feature for most Greek city-states even in the Classical period, since there were always larger states that intervened in the foreign affairs of smaller neighbors and attracted them as willing or unwilling satellites into their military and economic needs. But our earlier discussions of the "corporate community" have already stressed the global tendency for nucleated communities of 500-600 people or more, in the absence of a totally dominant external power, to behave as small world states, and the types of interference Greek poleis suffered rarely stifled significant city-state behaviors internally.
(p. 269f) Athens: rural demes formed a systematic grid of similar-sized territories, appropriate to villages or small towns
In the Village-State (Dorfstaat) model of Kirsten (1956) every ancient Greek nucleation has the potential to become a city-state, with the lower empirical boundary for such a transformation being little higher than 500 free citizens, including families (Bintliff 1999). Given the stimulus provided by the Kleisthenic reforms which created the Athenian democracy at the end of the sixth century, making the deme the primary unit of political registration and representation, this potential was partly realized even within the giant Athenian state. Thus the historian Thucydides commented that when the Attic rural population was compelled to seek shelter within the walls of Athens-Piraeus in the Peloponnesian War, they were disconcerted at having to leave their own polis (Bosworth 2000) or deme. The deme was indeed a polis in miniature, with an assembly, public officials, and its own versions of the main city festivals such as the Dionysia, while some had resident alien merchants or manufacturers (metics) (Cartledge 1986, Katz 1998).
Lohmann (1993b) suggests that Sounion, for example, was already townlike by the Late Archaic period, and suspects the same for Eleusis, Rhamnous, and Thorikos. Thomas (2000) describes the large Attic demes as small poleis, adding to the above list Marathon and Acharnae.
Although it has been suggested that large numbers of landowners dwelt in Athens, so that rural estates were only seasonally in use, the logistics of distance in this large, 2500 sq km province would have made effective commuter farming impossible outside of the inner district (Asty) around the city (Bintliff 1994), indicating the need elsewhere for local residence of the workforce. Of course for larger estates an owner may have lived elsewhere when he could afford to run a farm with resident tenants, overseers, or slaves. In South Attica Lohmann (1993a) notes that inscriptional evidence shows that only a quarter of the landowners were based in Athens in the fourth century. Their estates would have been run by bailiffs or tenants.
We have suggested (Bintliff 1994) that the inner Asty region of suburban demes around Athens, much denser than further out in the deeper Attic countryside, was especially concerned with market gardening and small stock-raising for feeding the Athens-Piraeus giant conurbation, while the remaining country demes were focused on more extensive crops such as cereals and olives. Significantly, during the later phases of the Peloponnesian War, when Attica was regularly invaded and ultimately permanently occupied by the Peloponnesian Alliance, the Asty region was defended while the outer districts of Attica were left to be pillaged (Bosworth 2000). Around one-third of Athens' population have been calculated as living within 9-10 km from the city center, either in the city or in the surrounding rural demes (Thomas 2000), allowing this sizeable minority to participate in public life and to conduct intensive food production for urban needs.
(p. 270a) Small rural sites: most examples indicate significant domestic use if not permanent habitation. The evidence includes lamps for evening use
My colleague Anthony Snodgrass once observed in this connection: "Goats don't read at night."
Hans Lohmann (1993a) was able to excavate one of the tower-farm estates in the deme of Atene mapped by his intensive survey, that at Thimari, where he confirmed other evidence that these were mostly permanent residences.
(p. 270b) Sampling tens of Classical "farms" reveals a variable picture for the representation of functional features _ However, there is always a sampling problem
One has to calculate the likely percentage representation of all potential categories of artifact in a typical household assemblage in all the original house contents, then consider the size of sample actually gathered from the surface during survey, with the aim of asking if that sample is likely to be truly representative of the original house assemblage.
(p. 270c) Sensible to allow for a minority of sites to have been small non - or only periodically residential rural sites, with the majority being permanent residences
A significant compensation for the loss of some discovered sites to "non-residential functions" can, however, result from consideration of site discovery rates. When an area fieldwalked has been revisited in a subsequent season, both Greek and Italian field-surveyors have confirmed that some sites have become invisible, while new and previously unknown sites become apparent. This is due to differing crops and cultivation practices from year to year, but the problem is mainly focused on small sites, such as the "family farm" type, with a diameter of say 30 m and an area of 0.1-0.3 ha. I have suggested that up to half of such sites may go unrecorded if field survey visits a district only on a single occasion (Bintliff 1997a). The addition of such "seasonally invisible sites" to likely numbers goes a long way to compensating for the reduction of the "farms" recorded when we allow for a minority being non - or only periodically residential. Because of the very thin soils, Lohmann (1993b) was able to identify most sites in the Atene deme of Attica from surface-visible architecture. But even here he estimates that some 15-20 out of a possible original total of 49-74 farms have been destroyed or buried. Finally a recent suggestion, that carpets of offsite pottery scatters of Classical date (Pettegrew 2001) lying between recognized small rural sites might have been created by a vast number of rural sites belonging to poor people, can be ruled out on evidential grounds. Their surface finds never betray an origin in subsurface occupational debris deposits, and the extent of these scatters in our best-studied case, Boeotia, includes every field in the landscape up to several kilometers radius of cities, thus excluding most of the arable land from cultivation (Bintliff et al. 2002). Moreover, as noted later in this chapter, the household equipment of poor people found eroding from their house deposits in many different periods and cultures is far richer than the secondary or even tertiary redeposited dustbin refuse which constitutes the typical offsite sherd carpets.
(pp. 270-271a) For the Argolid and Boeotia Projects the size and population density of regional cities, compared to the potential inhabitants in hamlets and farms, place 70-80 percent of the population in towns. A wider analysis of Greek city sizes (Hansen 2004) has produced similar results
This was achieved as part of Hansen's impressive long-term Polis Project, with numerous monographs, in which this ancient historian and his team have collected all available evidence for ancient Greek city dimensions and demography (Hansen and Nielsen 2004, with references). In terms of population levels and demographic change, then, the appearance from Late Archaic times of rural farms and hamlets, and their climax in the Southeast Mainland in the fifth to third centuries BC is a minor though not insignificant component in Classical population calculations.
(p. 271b) Why did anyone bother to live in a rural farm? Living on the estate certainly allowed more time investment in its management
In general the Greek city-state was preoccupied with autarky or the aim for agricultural selfsufficiency, a model which also applied to the ideal household. The self-sufficient farm which covered almost all the needs of the family was a significant element, so that investment in one's estate center and the settlement of oneself or one's workers or tenants there might be considered to fulfill such ideological preferences (Green 1993). In contrast, Runnels and van Andel (1987) argue that periods of small-site dispersion across Southern Greece, from Early Bronze Age onward, may indicate a reorientation from regional auto-subsistence farming to emphasizing export crops, such as oil and wine. Nonetheless, several hundred olive trees were required to supply a reasonably well-off household in its own oil needs (Forbes and Foxhall 1978, Foxhall 2007, Scheidel 2008), while sheep, goats, and cattle need to be taken to water twice a day, so that estates outside of easy commuting from the city, or deme center if it was a nucleation, were more effectively managed by onsite labor.
(p. 271c) Wealthier peasants and upper-class estate-owners, may have settled tenants to carry out everyday work
The large body of resident aliens in Athens, the metics, were not allowed to own land, but were allowed to rent houses and farm as tenants of citizens (Fisher 1998).
(p. 271d) The Atene Survey revealed large and small estate centers, some beginning in Late Archaic times
Although most of these farmsites had surface finds whose dating began only in Classical times, some also yielded occasional sherds of Late Archaic date amid commoner Classical finds. This phenomenon is rather characteristic of multiple-period sites, and might misleadingly be interpreted as some form of casual activity of a non-residential type before the full occupation of the settlement. In fact we need to consider that the earliest levels of site use will have been buried and otherwise disturbed by later use, and even more significantly that Archaic ceramics are usually not distinct from Classical ceramics apart from a minority of rare fine tablewares. We would thus rather expect to find just small numbers of recognizable Archaic ceramics even when the estate center was fully operational before Classical times (cf. similar evidence from Boeotian rural sites in Bintliff et al. 2009 [2007]).
(p. 271e) Atene: the heyday of the dense farm system was the fifth to fourth centuries BC, followed by abandonment in Hellenistic times
What has so far been unique in Greece is the remarkable survival till Hans Lohmann's (1993b) survey of a well-preserved Classical rural landscape in Southeastern Attica, where the surface architectural foundations of the estate complexes remain visible and mappable on the surface. This is due to a combination of two factors. First, as in many other parts of lowland Southern Greece, the population in the Classical countryside and the associated intensity of land use have not been paralleled since; after Hellenistic depopulation no subsequent culture left widespread traces in this landscape until the last 30 years. Second, erosion on the hard schist hill-land of Atene has removed most of the overburden of soil, which leaves the building foundations standing while removing most of the cultural levels and ceramics. In contrast, surface surveys in other regions study rural estates through collecting surface pottery disturbed by the plough rather than through the still buried buildings.
(p. 271f) Whereas most other Southern Greek surveys uncovered innumerable small farms, Atene possessed few such, the majority being extensive estate centers indicating upper-middle-class to elite landowners
Another unusual feature of Atene might just be relevant. Unusually, the village community or "deme" appears to have had no built-up central nucleation, but was merely the sum of all the dispersed farms. Wealthier farmers elsewhere might have lived in the deme center, commuting to their estates or leaving them to tenants or slaves, but here they either lived completely out of the deme (perhaps in Athens itself) and left land use to such lesser folk, or lived on the land themselves. The latter case might account for the unusually expansive farm plans.
Atene's parish (deme) size is close to the average of 19 sq km for Attica. If Lohmann's (1993b) estimate of 50 or more farms is accepted, then there were some 2.5 farms per sq km. This is comparable to their density in Boeotia, but there soil fertility is some 2.5 times that of Atene. The difference may be explained by the distance of Atene from either Athens or other towns of Attica. In Boeotia much of the countryside was within commuting range of "urban" nucleations or genuine villages, so that the majority of farms will have been cultivated from these population centers and lacked a farmhouse. In Atene there was no village or larger agglomeration, thus the landscape must have been farmed by the inhabitants of the estate centers found by Lohmann's survey. This naturally would lead to a far greater density of built estate centers, whose boundaries will have met each other. The 70-80 percent of the population who were urban farmers in the normal, small city-states of Greece cannot have applied to the large rural areas of Attica, where those working (but not necessarily owners of) the estates had to live on the land owing to their remoteness from Athens or the few other townlike centers of the state.
A similar situation could be argued for some of the Greek colonies, whose territories were often on a larger territorial scale from those in the Aegean. A good example that the author has studied is the city of Metapontum in Southern Italy (Carter 2002), where we find countryside sectors lying too far from the city for urban commuter farmer to reach, while no rural villages have yet been found. The loss of a postulated 70-80 percent of farmers normally resident in the city would require an increase by a factor of 3 to 5 in rural population in order to work the land, and hence approximately that kind of increase might be expected in the number of farms. Compared to South Aegean Classical farmsite densities, often around 3-4 sites per square kilometer, a simple calculation would suggests that regional survey would find around 15 farms per square kilometer in the outer countryside of Metapontum. This is not far off the actual density discovered for the outer countryside of Metapontum by intensive survey.
(p. 271g) Koressia: textual sources suggest a total population around 1300 for town and country
Although other historians favor a lower figure from the same sources of 770 people.
(p. 272) The mapped Classical sites number 46, but only 22 had more than five Classical sherds brought back. The significance of more than half of the localities with Classical finds is left unresolved and they were excluded from further analysis
This is, however, a difficulty found in evaluating almost all other surface surveys with the same methodological limitations. Since the conditions of recording and sampling limit the resolution of the Methana rural site database and we lack a clear methodology for dealing with such problems of sampling, it remains possible that many more than 22 locations were Classical rural occupation sites, or that they represent another form of rural activity. We shall return to these difficulties later in the chapter.
(p. 273) The invaluable aid of subsurface electrical, magnetic, and radar geoprospection to reveal groundplans of farmsteads, as well as the use of soil chemistry to indicate large-scale accumulations of household rubbish at these sites, have strengthened the case that most Classical rural surface sites represent permanent residence
I can add more detail on this topic here, which can deepen the analysis of a Classical rural site. First, the activities indicated by the surface ceramic finds can inform us about life at the site. A triangular diagram, for example, deployed on Classical and Roman rural sites in Boeotia by Anthony Snodgrass (Bintliff et al. 2009 [2007]), shows the functional balance of the household crockery by situating the assemblage of each site in the share of its ceramics between tableware, cookware, and transport ware, and food preparation.
Fragments of a wine or olive press, more rarely found, show us that some specialized cropprocessing took place, generally with a more commercial emphasis, as self-consumption does not require such stone presses.
Let us now turn to the invaluable aid of subsurface geoprospection for surface survey. Some skeptics suggest that concentrations of surface finds need not relate to underground structures but could be rubbish dumps. In fact, we do have a clear idea about the difference from ploughed-up habitation deposits and rubbish dumps by virtue of the increasing evidence for "site haloes" around sites, and more widely dispersed "offsite scatters" due to field manuring, so most surface surveyors are well skilled in distinguishing occupation-site debris. Not only to answer the skeptics, but also for its own value, a selection of surface sites on several projects has been probed non-destructively by various forms of geophysics.
Two case-study examples from Boeotia can be mentioned here (Bintliff et al. 1990, Bintliff 1992, 1997b). A small Classical farm of the characteristic "peasant farm" type so familiar on South Aegean surveys, PP17, had its surface ceramic data brought directly into relation with a follow-up resistance anomaly survey. Directly underneath the main surface build-up of roof tile was revealed a small two-roomed farm structure, around which a small yard enclosure stretched to the north and south. The main accumulation of domestic pottery, in contrast, was found spread to the east, probably originating in farmyard debris and rubbish dumps, as well as a small kitchen garden perhaps. The other example is a larger, probably wealthier rural estate center, VM70: the site was of course recognized and defined spatially from an isolated dense zone of disturbed occupation debris of Classical date, below which once again resistivity survey brought to light a larger and more elaborate building, with maybe four rooms (a single wall leading out from this square structure could be ancient, but might also be a later reuse of the debris for a boundary wall). Fascinating and unexpected is the opposite of the strong resistance of the farm walls, that is the weak resistance to the electrical currents of the survey device of a multi-angular farmyard boundary ditch, here picked out on at least four sectors around of the farmhouse - on a large scale suiting the above-average size of the latter. Another complementary non-destructive technique - trace metal analysis of surface soils - deserves a brief note. On some but not all surface sites a high concentration of lead was detected in the soils immediately above a putative farmyard. Lead and copper appear to build up in all areas where humans live, cumulatively over time (the so-called "habitation effect"), although this little researched phenomenon awaits detailed explanation; nonetheless the house and its surroundings reveal exactly the same results as studies of century-old gardens in England. However, our research showed that except in urban sites, much of the "habitation effect" or soil pollution tends to be removed by being absorbed by plants growing over the site after it is abandoned. At this site a complementary result of the analysis of the surface soils for phosphate accumulations (reflecting usually human and animal waste), also marked out the same general area of the ditches.
(p. 274) 5.4 ha: customarily the landholding expected of the official status of a (hoplite) middle-class landowner
Fully discussed in Burford (1993).
(p. 276) Tanagra: urban manuring into the inner landscape is documented. Almost certainly, the vast majority of the city-dwellers were farmers whose estates were concentrated into the first 5 km or one-hour travel radius out from the urban center (the outer landscape used for comparison lies some 7 km distant)
If we extend the map shown in this figure several kilometers further, where we also surveyed, we find that the manure spreads drop off significantly to lower levels around the 2.5-3 km mark. This falls short of the potential range (some 5 km or a one-hour radius) of urban-based farmers commuting out to their rural estates, which geographic and ethnographic studies have shown can occur. This does, though, reflect another ethnographically supported observation that highly intensive farming involving much labor tends to be concentrated within a half-hour radius commuting distance from the residence of the farmers. Land at further distances tends to be less intensively cultivated owing to the travel times involved ("the friction of distance"). In this case, the carting by wagon or mule of very heavy loads of undifferentiated rubbish (in which we can see a large component of potsherds and tile was buried) would have been the prime constraint. Under these circumstances, you might wonder how survey archaeologists can recognize the inner-territory rural farms at all, since the suburban manure carpets are at the level of site haloes and site cores in the outer countryside more than 4-5 km away. The answer lies in the fine detail: these maps display the average densities for strips fieldwalked over 100-200-m lengths, or "transects." First, the presence of qualitatively distinct freshly broken sherds and tiles usually indicates a buried site, generally distinguishable from the worn fragments of manure spreads. Second, normally within these long transects a smaller focus of much higher values is observed during walking, prompting a return of the team to test a potential site discovery. These local anomalies are gridded to a much smaller scale (10 x 10 m or 20 x 20 m grids) and in these the site core will be found, if a domestic site, to be much denser than the long transects crossing it.
This can be confirmed statistically from the following analysis (see in detail Bintliff and Howard 1999). It was carried out in a directly parallel landscape context, the inner 2-3 km of countryside to the south of the ancient city of Thespiae. Here the density of surface finds has been mapped at different distances out from rural habitation sites: sherd densities in the first 50 m from the site center, then between 50 and 100 m out from the site core, next between 100 and 150 m out, and finally densities well away from any visible site halo effect. It is clear that fields on and closest to the site core are consistently denser with pottery than those in a band between 50 and 100 m out from the site core, and in turn lower values are found for areas 100-150 m distant. Areas yet further away are lower-density than all fields closer to the site. The implication of a cumulative analysis such as this, made possible only through combining total landscape counting of sherds and computer mapping (Geographical Information Systems, or GIS), is that rural sites have a measurable "impact zone" up to 100 m away, but this effect flattens off to 150 m where densities begin to resemble the wider landscape. In addition, when we separate the data into two diagrams, one for small and one for large rural sites, it is also clear that the widest impact is created by a few hamlets, while small farms are elevating their surrounding sherd scatter densities over a much narrower radius.
The other major question is whether the Boeotia carpets are to be found in other Greek landscapes. Here the problem lies in the fact that very few, even the most recent, survey projects collect, date, and publish their offsite pottery. Nonetheless we know that some surveys have looked for offsite carpets and found virtually none (such as the Dutch Halos Project in Thessaly: Vladimir Stissi, pers. comm.), while others have identified at least large sectors of their survey landscape as having carpets which are putatively argued to be due to ancient manuring (the Methana Survey). For almost all the rest of our survey database, the offsite was either never formally studied, or the evidence has not been analyzed. So we simply cannot give a view on whether or not the intensive boosting of crop yields in Classical Greek times in Boeotia, through urban manuring, was widespread in the contemporary Aegean. However, although doubt was raised on the manuring carpets by Alcock et al. (1994), based in particular on their Nemea Survey Project, more recent research on its database (Chris Cloke, pers. comm.) has shown that there is actually a major manure halo of Early Roman date around the urban site of Phlius in this district.
(p. 281a) Classical pottery assemblages are rich in forms, although many of the dominant shapes are also found in Archaic and Hellenistic times _ there is a tendency to squeeze sherds which could be Classical into the fifth to fourth centuries, making the periods either side appear problematically impoverished
It is commonplace on a Classical site to find rare finds of well-dated Archaic or Hellenistic fine tableware, without accompanying forms from the domestic or cookware assemblage. In reality, those pieces are probably present but because they resemble Classical forms too closely they are generally given that age. On surveys one then gets the impression that people came to a rural farmsite to inhabit it in Classical times, but only visited it to drink wine in Archaic or Hellenistic times!
(p. 281b) Red-figure tablewares were not expensive. We lack reliable statistics to clarify how far down the social scale they were in use, although Lohmann (1993b) suggests they are confined to a minority of rural farmsites in comparison to wider use in the city
This observation is problematic. First, Lohmann's farm sample is actually biased toward the wealthier end of Attic estate centers, so it is difficult to imagine why those landowners were unwilling (certainly not too poor) to buy RF wares, which were well within the budget of a skilled craftsmen. Second, we lack analytical calculations on the expected frequency of RF pots within the original assemblage of rural and town houses, in order to estimate the chances of recovering sherds of such ware in a limited surface collection or limited urban excavation. My own suspicion is that those chances are too low to place much reliance on sporadic finds of such wares in small collections.
(p. 281c) Amphorae appear less frequently
For a pioneering review of Greek amphorae see Whitbread (1995).
(p. 281d) The major proportion of cups in typical assemblages Indeed there are many varieties of similar forms of cup as well.
(p. 281e) The high occurrence of ceramic beehives on town and rural sites is thus not surprising
According to Vickers (2004), in modern values the equivalent of a bottle of wine was around 6 euros, with a full amphora being 286 euros. A quarter of a liter of honey fetched 14 euros. A painted vase by the Achilles Master has a price of 0.40 euros a piece. However, since cereals and oil were so much cheaper, the potter could make a decent livelihood: for the price of that vase he could purchase 4 liters of flour.
(p. 281f) Our assemblage illustration will present the everyday household wares
The pots illustrated here are all abstracted from the excellent paper by Sparkes (1962). We miss the wooden and other organic utensils which our sources record, however, and metal containers (usually recycled), which may explain some of the imbalances in frequency of types of Classical pottery (Gill 1988).
(p. 281g) Giant storage vessels (pithoi) were expensive
Prices for fourth-century pithoi from Olynthus were comparable to what was required to purchase a house, and some examples from that site could hold 1000 liters (Ebbinghaus 2005). Naturally their size meant hand construction, with considerable technical skill required for manufacture and then transport to their purchaser's residence. There they were often set into the floor, while the difficulty of moving them has led to their distinctive rims being regularly encountered on rural farmsites of the Archaic to Hellenistic period found by field survey.
(p. 281h) Mines brought relatively short-lived wealth to Athens (silver and lead), and Siphnos (gold and silver)
The precious metal wealth of Siphnos allowed this small island to dedicate one of the finest and most expensive treasuries at Delphi. The relationship between the island's economy and social organization and the iconography of its treasury are subtly explored in Neer (2001).
(p. 281i) The Athenian Laurion mines
Research at the 128 sq km mining zone around Lavrion has been revived since 2002 by a French-Greek project.
(p. 281j) Other aspects of the economy are not easily analyzed from ancient sources due to their imbalance toward Athens
"Any account of the ancient Greek economy in practice becomes an analysis of the economy of Athens" (Millett 2000: 24).
(p. 281k) Craft workshops seem very rarely to have employed significant groups of artisans
An exception is the literary evidence concerning the Athenian politician Demosthenes' father, who owned two workshops, each with 20-30 slaves, making swords and couches (Millett 2000).
(p. 281l) A few cities where Aegean trade was focused, such as Athens-Piraeus and Corinth, made substantial profits from import-export taxes
For a useful review and discussion of these aspects of the economy see Millett (2000). A 2 percent tax on imports and exports through Piraeus in 399 BC yielded 1800 talents (a talent was 6000 drachmas), which is a vast sum. Geoffrey Kron (2011) has made a number of innovative studies of Greek and Roman economy and demography using a quantitative approach called econometrics, including an insightful paper on the distribution of wealth in Classical Athens with comparisons to Renaissance Italian town populations.
World History
