The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Abstract

In this ambitious book, Josiah Ober attempts to achieve four challenging and disparate goals, any one of which would have been sufficient for most academic books. Insofar as it achieves these goals—and it does to a large extent—the book can be considered a success. The book's faults (in the opinion of this reviewer) come from the fact that it would be impossible for any one book to fully achieve four such different and worthwhile goals.Each of the book's four goals is aimed at a different audience. For classical scholars, Ober aims to make a significant contribution to current debates about ancient Greek history. For political scientists, Ober attempts to provide an answer to widely accepted theories claiming that domination by a single, powerful leader and his elite coalition is a “natural state” (10), and that a decentralized, cooperative society could succeed only on a minute scale (not in a city-state or polis) because any rational individual would try to manipulate the system for his own benefit unless he were constantly monitored (i.e., policed) by the rest of the group (46). For the educated public, the book not only attempts to provide a coherent and well-told history of the classical Greek city-states, but also to explain why this history still matters. And finally, Ober takes on the role of a public intellectual for anyone who cares about the future of American society and its institutions. Written at a time when the Tea Party was just beginning to take hold on the mind of the American public, bringing with it the erosion of trust in public institutions and a profound mistrust of experts in any field, the book seeks for the key elements that contribute to the economic, political, and cultural flourishing of any society, and finds them in a decentralized, citizen-led government, a trust in experts and the knowledge they possess, and the creation of trustworthy and well-run public institutions.Ober's argument in this book is twofold. First, he maintains that the city-states (poleis; singular—polis) of ancient Greece enjoyed a prolonged period of economic growth (from approximately 800 to 300 BCE) that was unique in the premodern world and led to significant cultural developments that still influence us today. Second, Ober argues that it was the Greek poleis' distinctive, citizen-centered, political institutions, along with their shared cultural values, that were the driving force behind these extraordinary economic and cultural achievements.Following current trends in the social sciences, Ober divides all governments into two types. In “centralized authority systems,” which have a pyramidal structure, the ruler and a handful of elites control most of the society's wealth and power. Most people live at the base or near the middle of the pyramid, at or near subsistence level (8–9). In “small-state systems,” on the other hand, “free and politically equal citizens” govern themselves collectively; power is dispersed over a broad range of institutions, and many citizens have the opportunity to hold offices and participate in various forms of decision making (10). Ober points out that small-state systems, with their decentralized authority structure and constant opportunities for conflict, seem to be inherently less stable than centralized authority systems (10). Furthermore, widely accepted theories in the field of political science have argued since the 1960s that such cooperative governmental systems can succeed only in extremely small communities of only a few hundred people, because unless the community members are constantly monitoring one another, most individuals will try to “game the system,” that is, act to maximize their own self-interest at others' expense (46). Given the inherent difficulties of small-state systems, Ober asks why the small Greek poleis, with their decentralized authority structures, succeeded so well and for so long a time (10, 45). This is the central question of Ober's book.Ober first demonstrates that the classical Greek world actually did enjoy a prolonged period of economic growth (chapter 4). In my view this is one of the book's greatest achievements. Based on newly available data on the number, size, and characteristics of the ancient Greek polis, produced by the Copenhagen Polis Centre, Ober argues persuasively that during the five-hundred-year period between 800 and 300 BCE, a large number of Greek poleis enjoyed increasing prosperity, accompanied by a fairly equitable distribution of wealth. In fourth-century BCE Athens (for which we have the best data), between 40 and 60 percent of the population lived at a middle-class level—well above subsistence level (91). And while there are less data for the other poleis, the evidence we do have indicates that most poleis enjoyed “a relatively sophisticated and diversified economy … in which many people lived well above bare subsistence” (88). Here Ober has successfully resolved an important dispute in the field of ancient Greek history, and he has provided a solid basis for much future work.Having settled the factual question of ancient Greek economic prosperity, Ober turns to Aristotle's discussion of Greek polis institutions to help answer the question of how those institutions could have provided the basis for such extraordinary economic success and cultural development. When Aristotle states in the Politics (1253a) that “man is by nature a political animal” (ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον), he means, at least in part, that human beings are uniquely able to “employ reason in pursuit of common ends and to communicate prosocial plans through the use of language” (49). In other words, the members of a community, working together, are able to produce more goods than they could individually and they are able to distribute those goods fairly enough so that each member of the community has as much as he or she needs (52). Of course, Aristotle was aware that the same human capacities for reason and communication also allow people to act in a selfish and greedy, that is, an antisocial, manner. But Ober argues that “the purpose of political institutions in a well-ordered state was, in Aristotle's view … to align individual and factional interests with the collective good of the state as a whole” through a system of rewards and punishments (53).Building on Aristotle's insights, Ober argues that citizen-centered communities are able to produce more goods than hierarchical, pyramid-shaped societies and to distribute them more fairly because they are able to promote a stronger sense of the public good among their members than hierarchical societies can (54). Because Greek poleis were characterized by egalitarian institutions (“fair rules”), Ober maintains, they were able to motivate large numbers of people to work toward common, prosocial goals. And because the ancient Greeks shared cultural norms that favored just distribution, they were able to limit the expropriation of wealth by their more powerful citizens. Furthermore, well-regulated competition among citizens within a polis (and among the poleis themselves) created opportunities for “rational cooperation,” which, in turn, encouraged the political, social, and technological innovations that drove economic and political development (103).The second half of Ober's book (chapters 6–11) is devoted to demonstrating how these innovations were used by the Greeks in socially advantageous ways throughout the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods (800–300 BCE). The archaic period (800–550 BCE), for example, saw the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to the Greek language, promoting both economic and cultural advances (130), and the development of the hoplite phalanx (135), a form of warfare that not only assured the Greek poleis' success in war but also enabled the rising middle class to demand a greater share of polis government because it now assumed a larger share of the fighting. This demand for greater participation in government led, in turn, to the development of completely new citizen-centered political institutions in the classical period (chapter 7).Ober is, of course, not the first to notice the significance of these innovations, and it would have been helpful if he had more clearly delineated his own contribution, that is, showing how these innovations arose within the political context of decentralized, citizen-centered communities, and explaining why that matters. I also would have liked to have seen a fuller discussion of the specific polis institutions that helped to produce such remarkable economic and cultural achievements. And finally, a few passages from Homer, Hesiod, Solon, and other ancient authors would have enabled Ober to more fully explain his vague references to Greek cultural norms.But, on the whole, Ober's book makes a strong case that the Greek poleis owed their prolonged period of economic prosperity and cultural growth to their citizen-centered, small-state institutions. In the end, the book's greatest accomplishment may be its ability to furnish persuasive arguments for those of us who may be called upon to articulate the value of strong and resilient public institutions that can provide knowledge-based solutions to social and economic problems.