When Greece Was Rich—and Why, por Jason Sorens, em The American Conservative:
Did political
decentralization foster classical civilization? That is one of the
central claims of this fascinating new work of analytical history by the
Stanford political scientist and classicist Josiah Ober. (...)
If we convert pre-modern wages into a
common standard of liters of wheat per day, the daily wage for an
Athenian laborer or infantryman in the late fifth century (around the
time of the Peloponnesian War) was about nine liters per day. A century
later, that figure stood at 13-16 liters per day. By contrast, wages for
at least 85 percent of the Roman population of the early imperial
period stood at around the subsistence level (3.5 liters per day). A
laborer in 16th-to-18th-century Holland, when it was the richest country
in the world, could have expected to make between 10 and 17 liters per
day.
In other words, the Athens of Aristotle
was likely richer on a per capita basis than the France of Molière or
the England of Shakespeare. While Athens was an extraordinarily rich polis,
the rest of classical Greece shared in the prosperity. Ober constructs
an index of per capita consumption based on wheat wages for “core
Greece” from 1300 BC to AD 1900. He finds that per capita consumption
peaked between 400 and 300 BC, fell slightly with the Macedonian
conquest, and only fell back to pre-modern norms after a century of
Roman rule. By AD 1900, in a world of railroads, the telephone, and
transatlantic steamers, per capita consumption in core Greece was still
at least 30 percent below the prosperity attained when Plato taught at
the Academy.
What accounts for this remarkable
prosperity? Athens’ institutional innovations have already been
mentioned. Another important element of Ober’s account is the political
decentralization of the Greek world. For the Greeks, the polis was the fundamental political unit. There were over 1,000 independent poleis during the classical period. Some smaller poleis lost their political independence from time to time, but there was a natural tendency for the polis to reconstitute itself when political conditions were favorable.
The polis
ecology survived in part because of the geography of the Greek world. A
highly indented coastline and myriad islands reduced transportation
costs and promoted trade—sea travel being much quicker than
overland—while also helping to give poleis defensible frontiers. The mountainous interior also helped in the latter regard. Poleis
constructed city walls as soon as they were able, which conferred a
substantial defenders’ advantage. Some military powerhouses, most
notably Sparta, could not undertake long-term siege operations because
they had to supervise their slaves at each harvest. Athens eventually
did build an empire in the fifth century, only to see a Spartan-led
coalition demolish it. The Greek city-state world was multipolar, and poleis
were quite willing to federate together in order to maintain their
security and internal autonomy. Several of these federations were
long-lasting and successful, such as the Aetolian, Achaean, and
Chalkidian Leagues. (...)
In the end, however, the poleis
could not withstand Macedon and Rome, both of which enthusiastically
adopted Greek technologies, made their own improvements, and focused on
military discipline and conquest. The Greek polis
culture was inherently counter-imperial, and even as the Greeks gained
in freedom and wealth from their decentralized order, they paid in
coordination costs. Athens and Sparta did manage to coordinate to defeat
the vast Persian Empire in the fifth century, but after Sparta’s
fourth-century decline, the Athens-Thebes-Corinth alliance was
insufficient to stop Philip II of Macedon’s advance.
