The Athenian Empire

58 Pages·1985·9.325 MB·English

by  P.J. Rhodes

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New Surveys in the Classics No. 17
THE
ATHENIAN
EMPIRE
P. J. RHODES
PUBLISHED FOR
THE CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Greece & Rome
NEW SURVEYS IN THE CLASSICS No. 17
T HE A T H E N I AN
E M P I RE
BY
P. J. RHODES
WITH ADDENDA (1993)
Published for the Classical Association
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP
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© Oxford University Press, 1985
First published 1985
Reprinted with Addenda 1993
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
The Foundation of the Delian League 5
Chronology 12
From League to Empire 22
The Peloponnesian War 30
Athenian Imperialism 36
Addenda (1993) 46
Comparative Table of Inscriptions and Other Texts 51
I. INTRODUCTION1
The literary evidence for the Athenian empire is all too limited:
Thucydides, surveying the growth of Athenian power in 1.89-118 to
explain the origins of the Peloponnesian War, and returning frequently
to the theme of Athenian power in the remainder of his history, but
not seeing fit to tell us many things which he could have told us and
which we should like to be told; contemporary reactions to the empire
from Ps.-Xenophon and Aristophanes, and retrospective reactions
from Plato and the Attic orators; the accounts of later prose writers,
especially the history of Diodorus Siculus (1st cent. B.C.) and the
relevant Lives of Plutarch (c. A.D. 100). It is a well-known and well-
studied body of evidence, and in 1972 R. Meiggs was able to remark
that 'fifty years ago it was reasonable to think that nothing significantly
new could be written about the Athenian Empire.'2
A new era began in 1924, with the appearance of the first article on
the empire's tribute by A. B. West and B. D. Meritt, 3 and ended in
1953 with the publication of the fourth and final volume of The
Athenian Tribute Lists, by B. D. Meritt, H. T. Wade-Gery, and M. F.
McGregor.4 The primary task which Meritt and his colleagues had
set themselves was to piece together and study the fragments of the
tribute quota lists, the documents recording the one sixtieth of each
member state's tribute given as an offering to the treasury of Athena,
which were published annually in Athens from 453 onwards.5 However,
supplied with new material by the American excavations in the
Athenian Agora which began in 1931, they worked on other relevant
inscriptions too; in vol. i of A.T.L. they presented the texts and the
analysis of the tribute lists, and a collection of epigraphic and literary
testimonies, in vol. ii, ten years later, they revised their texts and enlarged
the collection of testimonies, in vol. iii studies of particular problems
are followed by a general history of the empire; and vol. iv contains
very full indexes and bibliography.
This major work has transformed our knowledge of the empire, but
is not beyond criticism. One complaint to which the authors of/!. T.L.
are vulnerable is that they have sometimes been too confident in
deciphering and restoring, and subsequently deciphering and restoring
differently, battered and fragmentary inscriptions to accord with their
hypotheses. It is, of course, a virtue, not a vice, to reconsider one's
views to take account of new evidence and new arguments, and in
general the reconstructions of A.T.L. have withstood criticism and
new discoveries very well: but there are texts with which the restorers
have allowed themselves to be carried away, and the danger then arises
2 INTRODUCTION
that hypothetical reconstructions will be treated as certain and that
further hypotheses will be built on insecure foundations.6 The authors
of A. T.L. accepted what was already a standard doctrine, that the form
given by masons to certain letters of the Athenian alphabet changed
about the middle of the fifth century, and that this criterion may be
used to date texts which do not contain any direct indication of their
date. This doctrine has been subjected to a sustained attack by H. B.
Mattingly, who has proposed to date after 430 many texts which are
commonly dated before 445: if he were right, our picture of the
Athenian empire would be seriously altered, but further work has
shown that the standard doctrine is sound.7
One other major work of importance for the Athenian empire has
been undertaken during the last fifty years: the Historical Commentary
on Thucydides, of which A. W. Gomme produced the first volume in
1945, and which has been completed since his death in 1959 by A.
Andrewes and K. J. Dover.8
In the thirty years since A. T.L. was completed there has been lively
discussion of problems concerning the foundation of the Delian
League, which will be reviewed in ch. ii. There has been much pre
occupation with chronology, in connection not only with inscriptions
but also with the events treated so briefly in book 1 of Thucydides
(on which Gomme and the authors of A. T.L. did not differ much from
their predecessors), and these matters will be surveyed in ch. iii.
Ch. iv will be devoted to the transformation of the Delian League into
the Athenian empire: this is a theme which we are much better equipped
to study thanks to the inscriptions presented in A.T.L., but some old
problems, such as the authenticity of the Peace of Callias, are as far
away as ever from a definitive solution. Ch. v will look at the Athenian
empire in the Peloponnesian War: we are better informed than our
predecessors on the history of the tribute levied from the allies, but
otherwise our approach is largely conditioned by the information and
silences of Thucydides, and this is not an area in which striking
advances have been made. By contrast the nature of Athenian
imperialism, studied in ch. vi, has attracted a good deal of fresh interest:
G. E. M. de Ste Croix in an influential article challenged Thucydides'
picture of an empire in which the Athenians unashamedly wielded
power in their own interests and their subjects all hated them for it, 9
and there have been attempts to discover more precisely what effects
the empire had on Athens and the other members. In 1969 D. Kagan
produced the first volume of a history which when complete will cover
the whole period of the Delian League's existence.10 In 1972 de Ste
Croix published The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, a book contain
ing much learning and provocative remarks on a wide range of
INTRODUCTION 3
subjects;11 and the same year saw the publication of a work of con
solidation, The Athenian Empire, by R. Meiggs, who first wrote on
the subject in 1937.12
In recent years there have been few additions to our evidence: five
fragments have been added to the tribute lists; and a new fragment of
the decree for Heraclides establishes his identity with certainty, and
thereby does appear to establish the authenticity of another disputed
treaty, the Peace of Epilycus.13 The first part of a third edition of
Inscriptiones Graecae, vol. i, was published in 1981: it contains decrees
of the Athenian assembly and other public documents prior to 404,
including the tribute quota lists; several editors have shared the work
under the direction of D. M. Lewis, and the texts most directly
concerned with the empire have again been edited by Meritt and
McGregor.14 A new edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, vol. v,
is in preparation.15
I end this Introduction with a selection of shorter books published
for students. Inscriptions relating to the Delian League were included
in collections published by M. N. Tod in 193316 and by R. Meiggs
and D. M. Lewis in 1969.17 In 1951 R. Meiggs and A. Andrewes
produced a revised and redesigned edition of G. F. Hill's Sources for
Greek History between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars: this contains
selections from texts other than those which the student of the period
should have permanently to hand, followed by full subject indexes
both to the texts included and to the texts omitted. 18 More recently
provision has been made for students who cannot read Greek. The
London Association of Classical Teachers inaugurated its LACTOR
series with The Athenian Empire, a collection of translated extracts
based on index iii in the revised Hill's Sources, and equipped with
notes by J. K. Davies in 1970 and by N. S. R. Hornblower in 1984. 19
Of other translated source books the most useful is C. W. Fornara's
Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War, which contains
both inscriptions and extracts from the less accessible literary texts.20
NOTES
1. Modern books cited in the notes to this chapter will be cited subsequently by author's
name only, except where some other form of reference is indicated at their first mention. In
references to literary texts, chapters of Pausanias and of Plutarch's Lives are subdivided into
sections as in the latest Teubner editions (some editions, including the Loeb, use a different
subdivision). For inscriptions I normally give one reference, where possible to IG (n. 14, below):
equivalent references to A.T.L., ii (n. 4), to M&L (n. 17) and to the translations of Fornara
(n. 20) may be obtained from the Comparative Table on pp. 46-7.
I should like to thank Dr. N. S. R. Hornblower for reading a draft of this booklet, and the
University of Durham for a grant from its Research Fund.
2. R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford, 1972; corr. repr. 1973/5), p. vii.
4 INTRODUCTION
3. 'ApxaioXoyiK-q \Ee/>7)^iepis (1924), 41-9.
4. Cited as A.T.L.: vol. i Cambridge, Mass., 1939; vols, ii/iii/iv Princeton, 1949/50/53. West
was killed in a road accident in 1936, and Wade-Gery died in 1972, but Meritt and McGregor
are still alive and still contributing to the subject.
5. Cf. below, pp. 15, 23.
6. I note one particularly adventurous piece of work: Clearchus' coinage decree is dated in
the early 440s by some scholars, in the 420s by others (M&L 45: cf. pp. 15-16 with 20 nn. 20-1):
in PAPS 119 (1975), 267-74, Meritt restores a phrase, which leads him to restore a clause
containing the decision to build the Hephaesteum, and since archaeologists date the beginning
of the Hephaesteum c. 449 he regards it as proved that the date of the decree is 449/8.
7. Cf. pp. 15-17. The complaint of M. I. Finley, that scholars were neglecting the important
questions about the empire to argue over this question (TLS, 7 April 1966, 289), was misguided.
8. Cited as H.C.T.: vols, i-v Oxford, 1945 (corr. repr. 1950)/56/56/70/81.
9. Historia 3 (1954-5), 1-41.
10. See p. 35 n. 1 (each of Kagan's books will be cited by its title).
11. G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972).
12. Cf. n. 2, above. He began writing on the empire with a review in CR 51 (1937), 24-5.
13. Cf. pp. 31-2 with 35 nn. 5-7: the new fragment was identified too late to be included in
any of the collections of texts listed below in the remaining notes to this chapter.
14. Cited as IG i3: Berlin, 1981.
15. Vol. v of the original edition (cited as C.A.H., v1) was published in Cambridge, 1927
(corr. repr. 1935).
16. M. N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions, (vol. i,) to the End of the Fifth
Century B.C. (Oxford, 1933; 21946 with appendix of addenda and corrigenda); vol. ii, from 404
to 323 B.C. (1948).
17. Cited as M&L: R. Meiggs & D. M. Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions
to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1969; corr. repr. 1971/5).
18. Oxford, 1951. This book is still of great value, and it is sad that the number of students
capable of using it is no longer such as to justify its being kept in print.
19. The Athenian Empire (LACTOR 1, 1968); 2nd ed., with notes by J. K. Davies (1970);
3rd ed., revised by N. S. R. Hornblower and M. C. Greenstock (1984). The series also includes
The Old Oligarch (i.e. Ps.-Xen. Ath. Pol.: LACTOR 2, 1968).
20. C. W. Fornara, Translated Documents of Greece and Rome, 1. Archaic Times to the End
of the Peloponnesian War (Baltimore, 1977; Cambridge [U.K.], 21983).
II. THE FOUNDATION OF THE DELIAN LEAGUE
Thuc. 1.95-97.1 begs many questions. (95) The violent conduct of the
Spartan regent Pausanias, continuing the war against Persia in 478,
angered 'the Greeks, especially the Ionians and those who had recently
been liberated from the King; they kept approaching the Athenians
and asking them to become their leaders', and the Athenians agreed;
Pausanias was recalled, and when the Spartans sent Dorcis in his place
the allies would not let him assume the command; the Spartans sent
no further commanders, 'withdrawing from the war against Persia,
and reckoning that the Athenians were competent to lead and at that
time friendly to them.' Can we accept that the initiative was taken not
by Athens but by the allies, and that Sparta was happy to let Athens
take over the leadership? (Contrast, on the first question, Her. 8.3.2,
Ath. Pol. 23.4; on the second, Ath. Pol. 23.2 (unemended and taken
in its natural sense), Diod. Sic. 11.50, and the story of the rebuilding
of Athens' walls in Thuc. 1.90-2 and elsewhere). (96) 'In this way the
Athenians took over the leadership, the allies being willing because of
their hatred of Pausanias': what was the alliance of which Athens
became the leader, and what became of the anti-Persian alliance of
481-478, led by Sparta, which Athens renounced in 462/1 (1.102.4)?
'They determined which of the cities should provide money against
the barbarian and which ships': was this decision, at the foundation
of the League, made simply by Athens? 'For the pretext was to obtain
revenge for their sufferings by ravaging the King's land': why pretext
(proschema), and was this the only declared objective of the League?
'This was when the office of Greek treasurers (Jtellenotamiai) was first
instituted among the Athenians, to collect the tribute (phoros) (that
was the name given to the cash payments); the first assessment of
tribute was 460 talents': were the hellenotamiai Athenian officials from
the start, and is it credible that the original assessment of tribute
payable in cash (which is what Thucydides seems to mean) was as
much as 460 talents? 'Delos was their treasury, and their councils met
in the sanctuary there': the treasury was moved to Athens in 454/3
(cf. pp. 15, 23), but did the councils move too or were they abolished?
(97) 'The Athenians were leaders of allies who were autonomous at
first and who deliberated in common councils': how much freedom
does 'autonomous' denote, and was it guaranteed? What part did
Athens and her allies play in the councils?
It has normally been believed, on the basis of Ath. Pol. 24.5 and
PI. Arist. 25.1, that Athens founded a new alliance (of 'the Greeks' or
'the Athenians and their allies', which modern scholars call the Delian