Pericles of Athens (17 page)

What exactly was a cleruchy? It was composed of Athenian citizens who were installed,
as a garrison, on a portion of the allied territory that had been confiscated for
their use. The cleruchs, who retained their original citizenship, had to remain, under
arms, in the lands that the allies cultivated for them and from which they received
the income. So these were not peasant-soldiers, but soldier-landlords of the occupied
territory. In all likelihood, they did not become owners of the land but simply enjoyed
the usufruct, in the name of the city of Athens as a whole.
²⁰

This system certainly helped the poorest of the Athenians, the thetes and the
zeugitae
, who were the principal beneficiaries of these territorial initiatives: the decree
that founded the city of Brea, in Thrace (between 446 and 438), testifies explicitly
to the role that fell to them in this type of operation.
²¹
The cleruchs in this way became eligible for the archonship, at least they did once
this prestigious magistracy was opened to admit the third census class, from 457 B.C.
onward. It would, however, be wrong to treat the cleruchies simply as a way of benefiting
the poorest citizens. Everything leads us to believe that wealthy Athenians were also
beneficiaries, although they were not forced to reside in the garrisons.
²²

Over and above their direct exploitation of the empire, the Athenians enjoyed other,
more indirect, benefits from their hegemonic position at the heart of the Delian League.
By constructing a vast commercial zone that was, if not unified, at least under Athenian
control, the city confirmed its position as the economic center of the Aegean world
at the time of Pericles.

The Indirect Benefits of Imperialism: The Control of Commercial Routes

Thanks to its powerful navy, very early on in the fifth century, Athens obtained control
of the wheat route that led to the Pontus Euxinus, today’s Black Sea, the location
of one of the principal granaries of the Greek world—the kingdom of the Bosporus.
Much was at stake here: cereals (
sitos
) formed
the basis of the staple diet of the Greeks of Antiquity—almost three-quarters of their
daily nutritional intake
²³
—and, as Attica was, for ecological reasons, deficient in grain,
²⁴
every year the city was obliged to import almost 25,000 tons of cereals in order
to feed its large population.
²⁵
That is why, ever since the foundation of the league, the Athenians had taken care
to control the stopping-off points along this vital commercial route, at a time when
navigation was mostly a matter of hopping from one Aegean island to another: Lemnos
and Imbros remained under Athenian control throughout the Classical period; Skyros
was captured in 475; and the revolt of Thasos was mercilessly crushed in 465–463.

This policy was pursued and strengthened in the years when Pericles played a major
role in the city. First, the
stratēgos
encouraged the creation of the colonies of Brea, in Thrace—between 446 and 438—and
Amphipolis in Chalcidice in 437, both so as to distribute land to Athenian citizens
and also in order to secure supplies of cereals for Athens (Thucydides, 4.102). Next,
he launched an expedition to the Chersonesus, a narrow spit of land that controlled
the routes through the straits. According to Plutarch, this was the most popular of
all his military ventures (
Pericles
, 19.1). This campaign, which may have begun in 447 B.C., made it possible to set
up cleruchies
²⁶
and to establish control of the straits leading to the rich wheat-lands of the Pontus
Euxinus. Finally, Pericles may have led a military expedition to the Black Sea, if
we are to believe Plutarch, who, however, is the only author to mention this little-known
episode (
Pericles
, 20.1). This campaign, probably launched between 438 and 432, after the Samos War,
testifies to the
stratēgos
’s concern to ensure cereal supplies to the city.

This preoccupation of his found expression in the elaboration of an ad hoc legal framework
and the creation of a specific magistracy, probably in Pericles’ time. An Athenian
decree drawn up between 432 and 426 for Methone in Pieria (on the Macedonian coast
at the end of the Thermaic Gulf) reveals the existence of “guardians of the Hellespont,”
the
hellespontophulakes
. The text authorized the city of Methone each year to import a fixed quantity of
grain, for which it had to apply to these magistrates.
²⁷
The “guardians of the Hellespont” in this way controlled all the convoys of grain
in the Hellespont (today known as the Dardanelles), for the allied cities had first
to apply to them for authorization to transport wheat directly to their own territories.
Even if, as it happened, those arrangements suited the allied cities, they nevertheless
show how very intrusive Athens’s control of the trading of cereals was. No city was
allowed free passage in the straits leading to the Black Sea: the Athenians were determined
not only to safeguard their own supplies and prevent these deliveries from being diverted
by the enemy, but possibly
also to make supplies to the allies dependent on their loyalty.
²⁸
Thanks to the empire, the Athenians in this way benefited from guaranteed supplies
of cereals that enabled them to feed their large population at a strictly controlled
price, at the same time manipulating an effective means of making the allies toe the
line.

At an economic level, there was yet another consequence to this imperial dynamic:
in the course of the fifth century, in step with its increase of military power, Athens
became the commercial hub in the eastern Mediterranean. Under Pericles, Piraeus became
the spot on to which the riches of the “whole world” converged. As the
stratēgos
himself emphatically stated, according to Thucydides, in the funeral oration of 431
B.C., “Our city is so great that all the products of all the earth flow in upon us,
and ours is the happy lot to gather in the good fruits of other lands with as much
home-felt security of enjoyment as we do those of our own soil.”
²⁹
This position at a crossroads was a great financial advantage to the city. All the
imports and exports that passed through Piraeus were subject to 2 percent taxation:
the
pentekostē
, the tax of one-fiftieth, brought in large sums of money that filled the coffers
of Athens, making it possible to pursue an ambitious policy of redistribution (see
later).

Finally, the city benefited from one more trump card that was linked to its hegemonic
position. To cover certain military expenses, the city raised tribute (
phoros
) the total sum of which is known to us from 454 onward, thanks to great lists engraved
in stone. These monumental inscriptions, situated on the Acropolis, consigned one-sixtieth
of the sums paid by each member of the league to the goddess Athena, as “first fruits”
(
aparkhē
).
³⁰
These sums paid by the allies were partly diverted by the Athenians, who used them
for purposes other than their original one, which had been to prevent the Persians
from returning to the Aegean. It has to be said that the extent of that diversion
of funds is, still today, a matter of controversy.

The Treasury of the Delian League Placed at the Service of Athens?

According to Plutarch, Pericles’ enemies accused him of having drawn on the treasury
of the allies to finance the great works on the Acropolis that were undertaken from
449 B.C. (
Pericles
, 12.2). This is the famous passage that led to those great works, in particular the
construction of the Parthenon, being regarded as the petrified symbol of Athenian
imperialism.
³¹
Several other sources also testify to the size of the sums mobilized for this vast
building project: according to Diodorus Siculus, who probably draws his information
from the fourth-century historian Ephorus, the Athenians spent 4,000
talents (out of a total of 10,000) on building simply the Propylaea and on funding
the siege of Potidaea (432–429 B.C.). In Thucydides’ work, Pericles himself suggests
a comparable sum.
³²
However, some historians question not the use of the league’s treasury to finance
the great building works, but the degree to which the allies were made to contribute.
Did the
phoros
cover the entire costs of the monumental building policy initiated by Pericles, or
did it contribute only a part of it?

The core of the problem lies in the exact status of the league treasury at the point
when it was transferred to the Acropolis, no later than 454: was it at this point
amalgamated with the treasury of the goddess—that is to say, the city treasury—or
did it remain distinct, stored in a separate coffer? The
Athenian Tribute Lists
, which recorded the sum of one-sixtieth of the contributions of all the members of
the league, seem to favor the latter alternative: after all, why keep a scrupulous
record of the total
aparkhē
offered to the goddess (one-sixtieth) if the whole of the treasury fell to her in
any case?
³³

There is one further element that favors this hypothesis. Athens was sufficiently
prosperous to finance the essential part of the works with its own funds and to do
so despite the scale of the expenses simultaneously incurred not only in the town
(for new constructions in the Agora and the erection of Pericles’ Odeon), but also
in the
khōra
, for the building of the
Telesterion
of Eleusis, the sanctuaries of Nemesis in Rhamnous and of Demeter and Kore at Thorikos,
and even the construction of the temple of Poseidon on Cape Sunium.
³⁴
The city had abundant financial resources at its disposal, thanks to the income accumulated
from the exploitation of the Laurium mines, commercial taxes such as the
pentekostē
, and the tenth part levied on booty that systematically swelled the city treasury.
In his play
The Wasps
(656–660), Aristophanes underlines the composite nature of Athens’s financial resources,
which accrued both from the exploitation of the empire and from its own economic dynamism:
“And not with pebbles precisely ranged, but roughly thus on your fingers count / The
tribute paid by the subject States, and just consider its whole amount; / And then,
in addition to this, compute the many taxes and one-per-cents, / The fees and the
fines, and the silver mines, the markets and harbours, and sales and rents. / If you
take the total result of the lot, it will reach two thousand talents or near.”

For those two reasons, on the one hand the probable maintenance of two distinct coffers
and, on the other, Athens’s own economic dynamism, some historians believe that only
the
aparkhē
was used to finance the constructions on the Acropolis—that is to say, about seven
talents per year.
³⁵

Adalberto Giovannini even maintains that this allocation was decided by Athens and
its allies together in 454, at the point when the treasury was
transferred to the Acropolis on account of the military threat hanging over Delos.
That, he thinks, was the precise moment that Athena Polias replaced Delian Apollo
as the tutelary deity of the League. The reconstruction of the goddess’s temple would
in these circumstances logically enough involve the allies’ participation. Clearly,
this argument rests upon an irenic and idealized view of the international relations
that prevailed; it nevertheless has the huge advantage of not reducing the Athenian
system purely to a simple matter of an economy based on imperial revenues.

Far from living off the empire like a parasite, the city possessed an economic dynamism
of its own, quite independent of its exploitation of the allies. When Athens embarked
on an expensive policy of redistribution of wealth, it did so drawing partly on its
own funds. In the period when Pericles was repeatedly elected as
stratēgos
, the Athenians were indeed setting up a full-scale system of redistributions not
only by means of its great constructional undertakings but also through the general
introduction of civic pay. It was probably here that the true originality of the Periclean
economy lay.

P
ERICLES AND THE
M
ISTHOI
: T
HE
E
STABLISHMENT OF A
P
OLICY OF
R
EDISTRIBUTION

The Social Impact of the Great Works: The Establishment of a State Socialism?

If we are to believe the famous passage from Plutarch, those great works provided
misthoi
, wages, for a great many skilled professions:

It was true that his military expeditions supplied those who were in the full vigour
of manhood with abundant resources from the common funds, and in his desire that the
unwarlike throng of common labourers should neither have no share at all in the public
receipts, nor yet get fees for laziness and idleness, he boldly suggested to the people
projects for great constructions, and designs for works which would call many arts
into play and involve long periods of time, in order that the stay-at-homes, no whit
less than the sailors and sentinels, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial
share of the public wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold,
ebony and cypress-wood; the arts which elaborate and work up these materials were
those of carpenter, moulder, bronze-smith, stone-cutter, dyer, worker in gold and
ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers
of the material, such as factors, sailors and pilots by
sea, and, by land, wagon-makers, trainers of yoked beasts, and drivers. There were
also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders, and miners. And since each
particular art, like a general with the army under his separate command, kept its
own throng of unskilled and untrained labourers in compact array, to be as instrument
unto player and as body unto soul in subordinate service, it came to pass that for
every age, almost, and every capacity, the city’s great abundance was distributed
and scattered abroad by such demands.
³⁶