Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute : A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens 9780857734334

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SHIPS AND SILVER, TAXES AND TRIBUTE 'With this important book Hans van Wees is the first historian systematically to approach ancient Greek economy and society along the lines of the "new fiscal history''. The results are highly

A FISCAL HISTORY OF ARCl·IAIC ATHENS

rewarding, and go far beyond the area of public finance. In

addition to a fresh perspective on key aspects of the archaic Greek world, the author provides numerous insights into the elusive process of state formation in Athens and elsewhere:

HANS VAN WEES

Paul Millett, Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Cambridge, author of Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens

'Hans van Wees, in this groundbreaking study, demonstrates that already from the time of Solon at the beginning of the

sixth century .BC, Athens was indeed a state and did have public finances and financial institutions. Themistocles' navy and the Delian League with its tribute were not startling novelties but were built on foundations laid in the previous century. This is an impressive tour de force of scholarship and imagination which joins up the dots of our evidence to produce a coherent

and credible picture of Athens' gruwing financial needs and responses to them. It adds an important further dimension to the accounts of Athens' development given elsewhere:

.P.J. Rhodes, FBA, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History, University of Durham, author of A History of the Classical Greek World 478-3238c

I I.B. '

AU RIS 1.~.oN_po~• N"w_Y_o"'_9

Contents

Paperback edition first published in 2015 by LB.Tauris & Co. Ltd London e New York www.ibtauris.com First published in hardback in 2013 by l.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vii

ix

A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens: Wby and How? Public finance and.the legend of'Ihemistocles

3

Public finance and the Athenian state

5

Public finance and the Athenian economy

l

11

Copyright© 2013 Hans van Wees

2 Athens in Context: Public Finance in Archaic Greece

17 17

The right of Hans van Wees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Before Solon: heroic precedents

Beyond Athens: late archaic inscriptions and oral traditions

23

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or othenvise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Outside Greece: the impact of Persian expansion

30

3 Ham-Collectors and other Financial Institutions

References to ·websites were correct at the time of writing.

Naukraroi and naukrariai: the evidence

39 39 44

ISBN: 978 l 78453 432 S e!SBN: 978 0 85773 433 4

Captains and captaincies: an interpretation

53

Treasurers, Ham-Collectors, Sellers and Receivers

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

4 Ships, Soldiers and Sacrifices: Public Spending

Ships Ships' crews and soldiers

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Cult, hospitality and other expenses

63 64 69 75

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY MIX Pe?ar from rasponsll:rle !IOU/~e•

FSC"' C013604

5 Taxes, Tolls and Tribute: Public Revenue '!he 'contribution' (eisphora) under Solon and the tyrants 1be eisphora after Cleisthenes Hippias' levies and liturgies Other revenues: trade, silver mines and tribute

83 84 91

97 101

6 From Oxen to Silver to Coins: Media of Public Finance Measures of weight and volume before Solon Measures of value before Solon Pheidon, Solon and after: archaic reforms of measures

Wappen, Gorgons and Owls: coinage in archaic Athens Coinage, public spending and economic development

7 Conclusion: Public Finance and the State in Archaic Athens

107

108 112 1!5 124

Acknowledgements

128

135 Jn writing the conclusion to my previous book, I found myself arguing

Appendix: Persian Naval Expansion and the Ionian Cities Notes Bibliography Index

205

General Index Select Index of Passages

212

147 149 189 205

that if archaic Greek warfare seemed restrained by comparison to the Peloponnesian War, this was not because early Greeks were inhibited by the chivalrous ideals of an 'agonal' culture but because they lacked the central organization and above all the financial resources to do as much damage to their enemies as they would have liked. The sketch of the rise of the State and public finance which I offered in that context was quite rough, not least because there was rather little scholarly work to draw on. A logical next step was therefore to investigate the history of archaic public finance in more detail, which in view of the limited sources and scholarship on the subject seemed a small project which might result in a modest academic paper. As it turned out, the ancient evidence could be made to yield much more information than scholars had so far been able - or indeed willing - to extract, but only at the expense ofletting what was intended to be at most a long article grow into a short monograph. 'Ibis book has benefited greatly from comments offered by audiences at lectures, seminars and conferences where I presented related papers. The advice of Simon Hornblower, Michael Crawford and Riet van Bremen, my (former) colleagues at UCL, was particularly helpful. The

core of the material was presented as a paper in a seminar series on 'public finance in antiquity: hosted and funded by the Institute of Classical Studies in London, and convened by myself in 2008. Two of the other speakers in this series, Peter Rhodes and Peter Fawcett, subsequently read and commented on a complete draft manuscript, as did Peter van Alfen. Rhodes' own paper on classical Athenian public finance will appear in Greece and Rome, and Fawcett's study of classical Athenian vii

SHIPS AND SILVER, TAXES AND TRIBUTE

taxation should also be published in the near future. The three Peters saved me from more errors and oversights than I care to mention and they stimulated a good deal of further research and re-interpretation.' Finally, Alex Wright and Amy Himsworth of I.B.Tauris were extremely

Abbreviations

efficient and encouraging in helping me turn my text into a book at short notice. To all of the above I am very grateful.

For the conventional abbreviations of names of ancient authors and titles of ancient works used in this book, see the list in the Oxford

Classical Dictionary. BCH CEG CH

Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique P.A. Hansen, Carmina epigraphica Graeca: saeculorum VIII-V a.Chr. (Berlin and New York, 1983) Coin Hoards

F/fr. FGrH

drachma fragment F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker

FHG

(Berlin and Leiden, 1923-) K. Miiller, Fragmenta historicorum graecorum (Paris,

dr

Fornara

1841-70) C.W. Fornara, Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War. Second edition (Cambridge, 1983)

I.Ephesos

The Collection of Ancient Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum (Oxford, 1874-1916) H. Wankel et al., Die Inschriften von Ephesos (Bonn,

l.Priene

1979-84) F. Hiller von Gaertringen, Inschriften van Priene

IC

(Berlin, 1906) M. Guarducci, ed., Inscriptiones Creticae (Rome,

ICS

1935-50) 0. Masson, Les inscriptions Chypriotes syllabiques

GIBM

(Paris, 1983)

Inscriptiones Graecae (Berlin, 1873-) viii

ix

SHIPS AND SJLVER, TAXES AND TRIBUTE

IGCH

M, Thompson et al., An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (New York, 1973)

JvO

W, Dittenberger and K, Purgold, Die Inschriften van Olympia, in E, Curlius, ed.,, Olympia, vol. V (Berlin, 1896) Late Bronze Age

LBA L-P

LSAG ML

E, Lobel and D,L, Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955) L,H, Jeffery,

H. van Effenterre and F, Roze, Nomima, vol.! (Rome, 1994)

Nomima II

H, van Effenterre and E Ruze, Nomima, vol. 2 (Rome, 1995) obol

R RO Rose

SEC SGDI

A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens: Why and How?

Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, Second

edition, revised edition by A,W. Johnston (Oxford, 1990) R, Meiggs and D.M, Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century. Revised edition (Oxford, 1988)

Nomima

ob,

1

E, Ruschenbusch, So/onos Nomoi: die Pragmente des Solonischen Gesetzeswerkes (Wiesbaden, 1966) P,J, Rhodes and R. Osborne, Greek Historical Inscriptions 404-323Bc (Oxford, 2003) V Rose, Aristoteles Pragmenta (Stuttgart, 1966) Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum H. Collitz and E Bechtel, Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften (Giittingen, I 885- 1915)

tal

talent

Wehrli

E Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles: Texte und Kommentare (Basel and Stuttgart, 1967-9)

X

Ancient Athens' most under-appreciated achievement is the sheer scale and sophistication of its system of public finance. In one peak period, the city's chief treasurer Lycurgus is said to have spent 18,650 talents over twelve years (336-324Bc), an average of about 40 tonnes of silver a year, for a total population of about 250,000, or 160 grammes per head, In relative terms, this exceeds the annual expenditures of France during the Napoleonic Wars, which at its peak amounted to 3,600 tonnes of silver for a populatiou of 30 million, or 120 grammes per head, No modern European stale exceeded Athens' financial performance before Britain in the Industrial Revolution made a quantum leap to another level.1 The figures are all the more impressive if we take iuto consideration that Athens' large budget was supplemented by devolving a sizeable part of the city's military and religious expenditure onto wealthy private individuals who were required to perform so-called 'liturgies', Moreover, at least two features of classical Athenian public finance are otherwise associated ouly with the most modern fiscal regimes. First, ., taxation was 'progressive', siuce property taxes were levied only upon the richest of citizens, Secondly, expenditure involved a remarkably generous redistribution of wealtb, since the treasnry paid all citizens wages for fulfilling their military, political and ritual duties, which became a major source of income for the poorest families. In the 350s BC, Xenophon's pamphlet Ways and Means went so far as to advocate that the city should aim to generate enough revenue from taxes, duties and public assets to provide a subsistence income of 3 obols of silver per day for every single citizen family, 2 1

SHIPS AND SILVER, TAXES AND TRIBUTE

A FISCAL HISTORY OF ARCHAIC ATHENS

How and when did this extraordinary system of finance, which paid for Athens' democratic government, famons military victories and stunning public architecture, come into being? Many scholars believe, that it was created in the classical period (c, 480-320Bc), and that as late as the 480s BC Athens had had almost no public funds, Indeed, it is thought that before 500 BC Athens' governmental organization had been barely worth the name 'State: and that in the preceding centuries the city's economy had produced hardly any surplus which could have contributed to public funds controlled by the State - if there had been any sucb thing, The consensus is that later developments were made possible by a lucky strike in Athens' silver mines in 483 BC, the proceeds of which were unprecedentedly pnt to public use by funding the construction of a war fleet, which in turn made Athens an international power with previously inconceivable streams of imperial revenue, On this common view, the Athenian state and its system of public finance were created almost at a stroke, along with the navy, the empire and radical democracy, 3 The story is dramatic and appealing, but history it is not 1his book will show that the roots of Athens' public finance lay much further back, in the archaic age (c, 700-480), Athens did not transform itself in and after 483 BC but merely expanded a navy-centred system of public finance that had already existed for at least a generation and had forerunners another century earlier, A detailed reconstructiou of the scattered and often obscure evidence for all aspects of public finance - administrative institutions, expenditures, revenues and financial media - will reveal that a complex machinery of public funding and spending was in place from at least tbe time of Solon's reforms in 594 BC and steadily became still more sophisticated throughout the turbulent sixth and early fifth centuries, Public finance will emerge as the most highly developed part of the Athenian apparatus of government, and indeed as a driving force in the rise of the State itself, Without it, the new revenues from silver mines and imperial tribute might never have come into being, or would at any rate not have been put to public use with such momentous historical consequences, Whereas classical Athenian public finance has been relatively well studied, the financial dimension of archaic Athenian history

has never yet been investigated systematically or in any detail. One simple reason may be that the activities of figures such as Solon and Cleisthenes as tax-reformers and architects of financial institutions seem mundane compared to their role as founding fathers of democracy. But even if taxation is as widely disliked as democracy is cherished, we can hardly ignore the immense importance of public finance never more obvious than when it falls short or fails, as it has done so spectacularly in recent years, A 'new fiscal history' which treats public finance as a matter of primary historical importance and a potential driver of major change has emerged since the 1980s, but historians of ancient Greece have not yet taken up the baton, 4 The major work of reference on public finance remains August Boeckh's monumental Die Staathaushaltung der Athener (1817), which has been superseded only by its own second and third editions (1850, 1886), and like almost ali subsequent scholarship, discussed barely any archaic evidence. 5 Before we can embark on our new reconstruction ofarchaic Athenian public finance, however, we mnst address the standard objections that no such thing could have existed because (a) our sources imply that it did not; (b) the archaic city was not a 'State' and could not have had a system of public finance; and (c) the archaic economy was too simple to have produced significant surplus resources for public use.

2

3

PUBLIC FINANCE AND THE LEGEND OF THEMISTOCLES

The greatest single influence on modern ideas about the development of Athenian public finance and the Athenian state is the story of Themistocles' proposal in 483 BC to build a new fleet of triremes. According to Herodotus, when the Athenians, who had in their common treasury (Ev t(p KoLv ANU :-:>lLV.l:\K,

1·/\X.t~:-:> ANl.J

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to the community rather than kept or spent centrally. 63 Even in. Siphnos, the sums annually distributed were evidently only what was left after large public spending needs had been met. Increases in pnblic spending , after 525 BC will have made such surpluses rarer and rarer even in cities with large mining revenues, and we have no good reason to think that they were ever common. For all we know, the planned honanza of 483 might have been the first of its kind in Athens, and Themistocles' intervention amounted to blocking an unusual proposal rather than breaking with a long tradition. His own proposal to expand the fleet to a size unmatched in mainland Greece was certainly radical, but its financial basis in drawing on income from the mines need not have been anything new, let alone revolutionary. A final form of regular revenue which did transform Athenian public finance was the 'tribute' (phoros) and associated 'imperial' income which accrued to Athens from 478/7Bc onwards. -nie Delian League formed under Athens' leadership had two kinds of member States: those which provided ships (and troops) for military expeditions, and those who contributed sums of money amounting to a total 'tribute' of 460 talents p.a. (Thuc. 1.96.1-2). It seems self-evident that the. money, paid into the treasury of the Hellenotamiai on Delos (above, p.44), was meant to pay the wages of the ships' crews and soldiers. The largest campaigns of the League against the Persian empire invo!yed fleets of 200 ships, which would have cost l 00-200 talents a month in v,,;ages, so that the tribute was easily enough to cover a typical campaign of tyio to four month$' duratiou. 64 The story of how Cimon raised four months' wages for the entire Athenian force by ransoming prisoners (above, pp.70-1) shows that the allied fleet would not defray its expenses from the League treasury if it could meet its costs from booty instead. 65 -nie States which provided ships presumably paid the wages of their own forces initially and afterwards claimed back from the League treasury whatever part of their expenditure was not covered by profits from plunder. As a result, Athens was able from 478/7 onwards to wage war without incurring any of the costs, other than the building and basic maintenance of ships, safe in the knowledge that its military expenditure would be met from the tribute if not from the spoils. An apparent obstacle to this interpretation of how the tribute functioned is the claim made by Ephorus that tbe treasury on Delos 104

TAXES, TOLLS AND TRIBUTE

contained as much as 8,000 or even 10,000 talents at the time when it was transferred to Athens, whicb almost certainly happened in 454/3 nc. Some surplus clearly did accumulate on Delos: since full-scale 200-ship expeditions did not happen every year, and some expeditions paid for themselves in plunder, reserves of tribute were large enough to cope with occasional campaigns which exceeded the annual budget, such as the long siege of Thasos in the mid-460s." But a surplus on the scale indicated by Ephorus would imply that the tribute had been left virtually untouched since the foundation of the League, and therefore that Athens and the other cities which provided ships paid all their own military expenses. Another implication would be that (almost) the whole of Athens' surplus at its peak c, 450Bc - 9,700 talents according to 'Thucydides (2.13.3) - consisted of accumulated tribute and that Athens had previously had (almost) no surplus at a!L67 Some scholars have accepted that the Athenians did continue to pay for their own crews and soldiers until at least 454Bc, 68 but this seems highly improbable, Why would the Athenians have demanded an annual tribute which they had no intention of using, except perhaps as an emergency reserve? Why would the Athenians have imposed on themselves an expenditure of, say, 150-300 talents in wages for 100 ships' crews over three months while never charging any of their allies more than 30 talents in tribute? If the Athenians had somehow decided to sustain the bulk of the League's costs in money, material aud manpower from their own resources, why did they completely reverse this policy in 454/3 and start to pay all of Athens' expenses, military and nonmilitary, from the confiscated League treasury1 69 And if there was such a change, why did other fourth-century sources claim that from the outset, the tribute was of great benefit to Athenian public finance? 70 lt seems much more likely that Athens did from the start recoup its military expenses from the tribute and that, as fewer and fewer allies contributed ships to expeditions, the League treasury became de facto an Athenian treasury, which its move to Athens in 454/3 merely symbolized, and its subsequent merger into the Athenian treasury confirmed de jure. We ,hould therefore reject Ephorus' claims about the sums transferred from Delos, which may have been based on nothing but the false assumption - perhaps encouraged by anti-Athenian propaganda - that all of the 105

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money which Athens was known to have held in surplus arou.nd 450nc must have been acquired by their take-over of the common treasury a few years earlier. In sum, while the 'tribute' was not strictly Athenian· revenue, it created an international fund which paid for the single largest expenditure in Athens' budget, the wages of its naval crews and troops. From 478/7 onwards, the Athenians conducted most of their wars without cost, while their well-funded campaigns produced profits of which the city enjoyed the lion's share. Apart from surpluses of booty, Athens also acquired permanent imperial revenues such as the income derived from 'the mainland and the mines' ofThasos (Thuc. 1.101.3). By the start of the Peloponnesian War, these imperial revenues other than tribute may have amounted to more than 100 talents, and they need not have been much less by 454 BC, 71 Toese direct profits of empire, added to sizeable revenues from the silver mines and taxes from uo doubt growing trade, increased Athens' income significantly, while its expenditures plummeted as tribute took care of the cost of war. The eisphora taxes which bad previously been central to public finance rarely if ever needed to be raised again - until new levels of political and military spending during and after the Peloponnesian War made it necessary to start looking for new forms of revem1e..

106

6

From Oxen to Silver to Coins: Media of Public Finance

So long as public finance remains a matter of 'gifts' to and from kings, it can in principle function without a means of exchange, without standards of weight and volume, and perhaps even without measures of value. As it becomes more formal, complex and contractual rather than reciprocal, however, public finance requires controlled measures of weight and volume for expenditures and revenues in kind, as well as a universal measure of value and general means of exchange to facilitate increasingly numerous, varied and precise.ly calibrated transactions. In the case of archaic Greece and Athens, one part of this story has often been told: the introduction and spread of coinage is among the most significant developments of the age and has accordingly been investigated in great depth. But coinage is merely the culmination of a much longer process starting with the adoption of a distinct weight standard for silver and gold which eventually came to serve as a universal measure of value before ultimately also becoming a general means of exchange in the form of coinage. The earlier phases of th.is development have been relatively little studied and will therefore be . reconstructed in some detail in what follows. Ancient literary sources for these and other changes in the media of public finance are quite limited and much of what they tell us is misleading. With the aid of archaeological evidence we cau nevertheless reconstruct an outline of significant reforms in this area enacted by Solon and the tyrants, which resulted in a fully monetized system of public finance in Athens by 500 BC.

107

FROM OXEN TO SILVER TO COINS

MEASURES OF WEIGHT AND VOLUME BEFORE SOLON

I II

I j(

II

Records of palace administration in Bronze Age Greece show levies raised. and payments made in kind, measured by volume or weight. Some measures evidently had the same names as their classical Greek counterparts, implying a degree of continuity, but in other respects standards of weight and volume changed significantly in the Early Iron Age. 1he basic unit of volume, used to measure grain, wine and oil, is represented in Bronze Age accounts by a pictogram of a cup, which suggests that it was similar to the classical unit known as 'cup' (kotyle). Larger measures, however, were quite different. In classical dry measures, 4 cups formed a choinix, 16 cups a 'twelfth; 32 cups a 'sixth' and 192 cups a medimnos (52.18 litres at Athens), whereas the larger Bronze Age dry measures consisted of 4, 24 and 240 'cups'. In classical liquid measures, 12 cups made a chous and 144 cups a metretes (38.88 litres), but their Mycenaean Age equivalents were units of 4, 24 and 72 'cups'. 1 By contrast, in measures of weight it is the name of the largest unit, the 'talent' (ral-avwv), literally 'balance weight' and represented in the Bronze Age by a pictogram of a balance, which shows continuity, as does its subdivision into 30 unitsiwhile the smaller fractions differ. In Athens, each of the 30 units, called '~tater' (