Wealthy Hellas

Abstract

Wealthy Hellas Josiah Ober The early twenty-first century is shaping up as a golden age for research on ancient economies.1 Roman historians have been leading the way. A sophisticated body of work offers estimates of several key economic indicators for the period ca. 100 B.C.E.-200 C.E.: first, the rate of intensive (per capita) and extensive (aggregate) economic growth; second, population density, distribution, and urbanization; third, distribution of wealth and income. The ultimate goal is to trace changes in human welfare over time and across regions. Helpful surveys of "the new Roman economy" are now available.2 Meanwhile, although there have also been substantial advances in the study of ancient Greek economies, and although much of the new work on Greece is focused on the same core areas of growth, demography, distribution, and welfare, there is, to my knowledge, no readily accessible summary of the most [End Page 241] recent developments in archaic and classical Hellenic economic history.3 This article sketches a few preliminary results of an emerging area of scholarship that will, I believe, revolutionize how classicists and social scientists think about the Greco-Roman world.4 The results repor ted here are based on the ongoing research programs of several leading specialists in ancient Mediterranean economic history, along with some of my own recent work. I argue that commonly held premises about Greek economic performance are wrong (Sections 1 and 2), make three factual claims about the performance of the Greek economy in ca. 800-300 B.C.E. (Sections 3-5), and advance two hypotheses to explain Greek economic performance in this era (Sections 6-8). In the concluding Section (9) I discuss how my argument might be falsified or verified. Caveat lector: the results I report here are not yet definitive and I do not pretend to offer anything like an adequate review of a large and growing literature. Nor is this article a statement of consensus conclusions endorsed by all specialists in Greek economic history. It also addresses only the archaic and classical periods of Greek history, both because of the availability of data and because the definition of "the Greek world" changed dramatically at the end of the fourth century B.C.E.5 I hope and expect that the premises and hypotheses offered here will be refined in years to come. Nevertheless, the main outlines of a new and more realistic picture of the Greek economy seem to me tolerably clear: archaic and classical Hellas, taken as a whole, was a wealthier place than most historians once imagined. Indeed, late classical Athens (and perhaps other advanced poleis of the fourth century B.C.E.) appears to have been among the most prosperous communities of premodernity.6 [End Page 242] 1. The Standard Assumptions are Wrong Among the assumptions about the archaic and classical Greek world with which I grew up as student in the 1970s was that the world of the Greek city states was relatively poor. This assumption was based in the first instance on what we may call "the standard ancient premise." It is stated succinctly in Herodotus, Book 7: "Hellas has always had poverty as its companion" (τῇ Ἑλλάδι πενίη μὲν αἰεί κοτε σύντροφός ἐστι, 7.102.1). Herodotus's statement, put into the mouth of Demaratus, deposed King of Sparta, in the context of a conversation with Xerxes, King of Persia, is frequently cited.7 This quotable line, along with other passages in Greek authors, contributed to the formation of what we may call the "standard modern premise." In Alfred Zimmern's pungent early-twentieth century prose: "the pioneers who created our European civilization were stricken with poverty all of their days … it was the cdoom of Athens that Poverty and Impossibility dwelt in her midst from first to last" (Zimmern 1911: 219). Along with the claim that it was the Greeks who pioneered "our European" civilization, Zimmern's comment is notable for its assumption of Athenian exemplarity: for Zimmern, "Athens" stands for "Hellas."8 How exemplary or exceptional Athens really was, and how much we can extrapolate from Athenian economic performance to the wider Greek economy, remain questions that are important and difficult to answer.9 In the imperial fifth...