The Tribute Lists and the Non-Tributary Members of the Delian League

Abstract

THE purpose of this paper is to reexamine in the light of the so-called Athenian tribute lists the ancient evidence for the acceptance of tributary status by such members of the Delian League as had originally agreed to furnish ships for the allied fleet. This form of commutation was an important step in the transition by which the Athenian Empire was created out of the Delian League, and upon it ancient and modern historians have placed much emphasis. The tribute lists are audited records of the aparche (first fruits) paid in the name of the tributary members of the Delian League (Athenian Empire) to the goddess Athena out of the tribute which Athens collected. Since the aparche was one-sixtieth of the tribute paid by each city, it is easy to compute from these records the amount of tribute received from each tributary state, so far as the records are preserved. At the end of each year the names of all cities that had made a payment were inscribed in columns on stone, and the amount of aparche was set opposite each name. The series of tribute lists was begun in 454/3 and was continued for forty years, until Athens devised another method of collecting money from her subjects. The tribute lists therefore are documents of prime importance for the history of the Athenian Empire, and a knowledge of them is indispensable to the historian of the period. Unfortunately, the stones on which these documents were inscribed have suffered great damage since they were first erected on the Acropolis. The first stone, the one with which this paper is particularly concerned, is now broken into more than one hundred pieces, some of them scarcely larger than a man's fist; and in several of the fifteen annual lists which were inscribed on this block the lacunae are larger than the fragments now preserved. Four years ago Professor B. D. Meritt and I became convinced that published copies of the tribute lists on this block could not be used with safety for historical studies. Even the width and height of the block and the length of most of the lists were unknown. In fact, the very uncertainties had opened the way to extravagant theories as to the number of tributaries and the amount of tribute collected from year to year. We came to the problem as students of history, but when we turned to the actual stones for answers to our questions, we deserted