The First Athenian Empire? Athenian Overseas Interests in the Archaic Period. (original) (raw)
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2006
In this paper, I address the role of Athenian grain trade policy as a driving factor of the city’s growing power in the 5 and 4 centuries. Recent explanations of increasing Athenian hegemony and dominance over other poleis during this time period have focused on the role of warfare. I present an equally important, yet often-overlooked factor: food supply. Athens was dependent on grain imports throughout the Classical Period. Through examination of the ancient sources, I demonstrate that the increasing need to secure subsistence goods for Athens significantly propelled its ambition for power, causing a fundamental shift from a noninterventionist government policy to one of heavy intervention between the 5 and the 4 centuries BCE. This shift corresponded to an increasing complexity within the mechanisms of the city’s politics. It helped propel Athenian state formation and affected the dynamic of power and politics in the ancient Mediterranean world. © Ulrike Krotscheck. ulrikek@stanfo...
Between ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’ and The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (and beyond)
Polis 41: 176-202, 2024
This article discusses the fortune of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s famous article ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, and reassesses its basic thesis that the Athenian Empire was popular among the lower classes of the allied cities in the light of recent developments in the field. After surveying the article’s immediate and more recent reception, and discussing its relation with The Origins of the Peloponnesian War and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, it isolates four key new trends in Greek history that, while going against some of Ste. Croix’s basic convictions, end up reinforcing his overall case. These are: a renewed attention to the mass and elite dichotomy, with recent work interpreting Greek oligarchy as a fundamentally reactive and anti-demotic regime; the recognition of the continued relevance of Persian med- dling in the later fifth-century; a sea-change in Attic epigraphy which has led to the post-dating of several ‘imperial’ decrees; the new recognition of the dynamism of the Greek economy, and of the economic function of the Athenian Empire itself. Finally, the article addresses the paradigm of class struggle and stresses how democracy and economic dynamism, to which the Athenian Empire contributed, fostered the growth of slave markets and worsened the exploitation of ‘marginal’ regions as slave suppliers.
THE ORIGINS OF THE ATHENIAN ECONOMIC ARCHE
Histories of the Athenian Empire (478-404 BC) have traditionally been offered as political and military narratives. They explain the origins of a naval alliance created in 478/7 BC, the so-called Delian League under Athenian leadership and its development into an 'empire' (arche) sometime in mid-century. Moreover, most treat the phenomenon as comprehensible as a self-contained period of enquiry. This article takes issue with both approaches. Through close examination of a wide variety of evidence connected with Athenian activity during the formative years of the 'Delian League' (478 to ca. 465), it argues that the Athenians made immediate use of the League navy and funds to appropriate resources, profits and territory for themselves, especially in Thrace, beginning with the capture of Eion on the Strymon, but also that these interests explain other early activities. Finally, it argues that the Athenians' economic behaviour should be understood in the context of Athenian aims and activities in the Archaic period.
Classical Athenian trade in comparative perspective
I examine the importance of maritime trade in the Greek world of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, arguing that it played a role in the economy of many Greek poleis comparable to that of the highly urbanized and prosperous civilizations of Renaissance Northern Italy or 17th century Holland, and significantly greater than in England, the early Modern world's other major international trading power, in the early 19th century. Two important indices of trade activity will be examined first: the taxes levied on maritime trade in the harbours of Athens, Delos, Rhodes and the member states of Athens' Delian league; and evidence for the size and cargo capacity of merchant ships. The rest of the paper will offer a synthesis of recent archaeological research, which corroborates this literary and epigraphic evidence for a high level of trade activity. Leaving aside agricultural products and transport amphoras, which are the subject of other papers, I will briefly discuss the evidence for the trade in commodities such as timber, metals and building stone, and discuss in greater depth a series of recent studies, which show how Greek manufactured goods, including painted or glazed fineware pottery, stone and terracotta statuary, jewelry, gold and silver plate, metalwork, furniture and housewares were imported and exported throughout the Mediterranean.
Tribute, the Athenian Empire and Small States and Communities in the Aegean
""It is well known that the Athenian empire had a great impact on the economy,politics, and culture of the Aegean world during the fifth century BCE. Narratives,however, of Greek history concentrate, perhaps inevitably, on the history of Athens. Using the Athenian Tribute Lists and the reassessment decrees as my starting point, I will be looking at communities and small poleis of the Athenian empire. By taking the communities of the island of Rhodes as case study, I will propose that the process of becoming a member of the empire and the practicalities that such membership involved, most particularly the payment of tribute, had an impact on the political organisation of such communities and more importantly perhaps on their economic integration in the wider Aegean networks of production, consumption and redistribution. Finally, a careful examination of the quota lists and assessment decrees reveals that there was such a thing as a ‘hidden’ empire, that is that the impact of the Athenian empire on the communities of the Aegean was perhaps greater than our sources reveal.""
2018
In this dissertation, I argue against the conventional view that economic activity during the Archaic Period of Greek history (8th c. to the early 5th c. BCE) was a by-product of broader social and political developments, but instead constituted an essential element in the transformation of the Greek world. I examine the contemporary literary sources (the Homeric epics and the poetry of Hesiod and Theognis) as well as the material record (shipwrecks, ceramics) in which I identify the outlines of an ideological struggle between the traditional landed nobility and an emerging class of free, landholding farmers that centered on establishing norms for economic activity favorable to the respective groups. Meanwhile, the archaeological evidence demonstrates the existence and growth of sophisticated distribution networks that were capable of responding to specific regional consumer demands, as well as communicating consumer preferences to producers who in turn altered their production strategies in response to those demands. Ultimately, these conditions presented opportunities for the acquisition of wealth by previously marginalized groups, who then leveraged their newfound wealth to bring about changes to the prevailing power structure; the expansion of maritime trade in this period broke the monopolistic control of resources by the traditional landed nobility and led to a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, which in turn contributed to a shift in the balance of power that was a central element in the growth of democracy and the rise of the polis. Consequently, no examination of archaic Greek history would be complete without a fuller appreciation of the powerful impact of expanding maritime trade in the broader transformation of Greek society during the Archaic Period.