With his latest thematic study of democratic Athens P. reassesses the argument, originally offered by Demosthenes and Plutarch and subsequently championed by A. Böckh, that the Classical Athenians were guilty of spending more on their theatrical spectacles than on their military exploits. Here, by assembling the fragmentary fifth- and fourth-century evidence and then judiciously deploying financial analyses, P. hopes to ‘settle debates about public spending in classical Athens’ and confirm ‘the priorities that the Athenians set for their state’ (p. xv). P.’s consideration of that diverse evidence – both literary and epigraphic, and dating largely from the 420s, 370s and 330s – allows him not merely to confirm (contra Böckh) that the military was far and away the Athenians’ most expensive public undertaking, but also to develop a clear model of Athenian public expenditures that ancient historians will find useful both in its own right and as a catalyst for future study.

Early in his introductory remarks P. sets forth a programmatic tricolon worthy of Lycurgus: ‘The major public activities of the Athenian dêmos (“people”) were the staging of religious festivals, the conducting of politics, and the waging of wars’ (p. 1). The scholarly ‘public spending debates’ subsequently outlined by P. concern both the absolute and the relative levels of Athenian expenditures on such activities: was more money spent on festivals or on fighting? Was the money necessary for maintaining the democracy available domestically or only as a result of empire? Writing two centuries after Böckh and his Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (1817) set the agenda for the modern study of Athenian finance, P. takes advantage of the additional sources at his disposal: beyond the hundreds of newly-uncovered Attic inscriptions and the text of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, he readily employs recent studies by scholars such as E. Csapo, W. Slater and P. Wilson detailing the financial as well as cultural contexts of (e.g.) the City Dionysia and the Athenian khoregia. Throughout this volume P. is scrupulous in his use of these primary and secondary sources: he readily acknowledges the conclusions reached by other scholars, the limitations of the ancient evidence and those occasions when – all too often – he must proceed more speculatively. Some more sceptical readers may be surprised by how adamant P. is about the dêmos’ knowledge and control of Athenian finance; they will benefit from reading his arguments (pp. 16–24) and considering his cited sources, even if they still wonder exactly how well, and how often, Athenian practice followed theory.

As the aforementioned tricolon suggests, the body of this volume models Athenian expenditures on – i.e. provides ‘costings’ for – festivals (Chapter 2), democracy (Chapter 3) and war (Chapter 4). Of the remarkable number of festivals celebrated by the Athenians two were especially significant, culturally as well as financially: the annual City Dionysia and, every fourth year, the Great Panathenaia. Following in the footsteps of P. Wilson's (2008) costing of the City Dionysia (28 t. 5200 dr., with slightly more than half deriving from the baseline of private liturgical expenditures), P. begins by costing the Great Panathenaia. Drawing together the prize (c. 1,447 amphorae of sacred olive oil) and public and private liturgical contributions, P. reaches a total of 25 t. 1725 dr., or – amortised over the four-year period – some 6t. 1931 dr. annually. Ultimately P. reckons that these two festivals accounted for some 35% of Athenian festival expenditures, and thus he suggests a regular annual expenditure by the Athenians of approximately 100t. 3231 dr. (p. 49). This amount approximates, we learn in the following chapter, the sum spent annually by the Athenians in support of their democracy. Here, in light of the available evidence, P. considers the 330s as well as the 420s and 370s. Jurors, councillors, assembly-goers, magistrates, under-secretaries and public slaves each receive their due, with a final coda on the provision of golden crowns. Greatest attention is given to the magistrates, who – contra M.H. Hansen – continued to receive misthos during the fourth century. On the basis of two payment data, for the nine archons and for the Eleusinian epistatai (pp. 76–80), P. establishes the regular daily pay rate for full-time magistrates as 4ob.; this rate, applied across the approximately 658 archontes attested for the 330s, suggests an annual wage bill of 29t. 3025dr. on magistrates (pp. 78–9). At the end of the chapter P. helpfully tabulates his costings for the 420s, 370s and 330s and concludes, with A.H.M. Jones, that even in its darkest days the Athenian democracy would have been able to pay the bills – be they the nearly 157t. of the 420s or the more modest 98.4t. of the 370s – for its democratic institutions out of domestic revenues. The democracy might well have been founded upon the backs of chattel slaves, but it did not require – though it may (or may not) have encouraged – the oppression of other Greeks.

With the sacrifices secured and misthos distributed, P. turns finally to Athenian military expenditures. Here he moves chronologically from the Archidamian War through the years of the Second Athenian League. Notably, based on the claims (Xen. An. 7.1.27) that Athenian revenues were 1000t. at the start of the Peloponnesian War and that 600t. derived from ‘other income’ (Thuc. 2.13.3), P. argues that domestic revenues were 400t. and that – given the roughly 100t. allotted above to festivals and politics alike – the Athenians could easily have spent another 100t. on their military. By adding the amounts from the loan lists of the 420s and also factoring in various imperial and domestic revenue streams, P. estimates Athenian military expenditures during the Archidamian War at 1485t. per year. While evidence for the remainder of the fifth century is sparser, P. envisions expenditures of well over half that amount continuing throughout the war. For the fourth century P. champions L. Burckhardt's work on the continued centrality of citizen soldiers (rather than mercenaries) and warns against Demosthenes’ pessimistic characterisation of Athenian ‘military behavior as morally questionable and a source of shame’ (p. 100). Indeed the Athenians, P. argues, campaigned even more often than their fifth-century ancestors and remained a significant force on land and sea alike. Updating F.E. Robbins’ century-old costing of the 370s-era Athenian military, P. emerges with an annual average of 522t., reflecting capital costs (c. 7t.), fixed operating costs (133t.) and highly variable operating costs (ranging from 0t. to 858t., depending on the year's campaign[s]).

With these costings complete, P. tallies up the figures and concludes that the Athenians always spent more on their military than on their religious or political pursuits – indeed, in any given year, on the order of five to fifteen times as much. While P. acknowledges that these figures will not surprise those who have joined the scholarly fray alongside Athenian hoplites or triremes, they may well occasion others’ reflections about democracies ancient and modern alike. Here, as in his earlier studies, P. has argued convincingly that polemos was central to Athens’ institutions and ideologies, to individual Athenians’ conversations and experiences. While P. establishes beyond doubt that the Athenians spent a tremendous amount of money on their military, the extent to which we may determine a community's priorities simply by reviewing a series of line-items or price tags remains open to debate – one of many value-laden conversations that will be catalysed by this clearly-argued study.