Introduction
Most of this article will be concerned with the institutional organization of Athens’ public finances, but to provide the background to that I begin with some basic facts about income and expenditure. Athens’ finances, and Athenian administration generally, were on a larger scale and more complex than those of most Greek states – partly because Athens itself was an exceptionally large state, with a territory of 1,000 square miles (2,600 square kilometres) and a body of adult male citizens numbering perhaps 60,000 before the Peloponnesian War and 30,000 after;Footnote 1 and partly because, in addition to its domestic business, for much of the fifth century Athens had the business of the Delian League to deal with and for forty years in the fourth century it had the business of its Second League. The Delian League was without precedent in the Greek world as an alliance founded with a view to ongoing warfare, and as an alliance to which many members from the beginning and almost all members after a while made contributions by annual cash payments of phoros (‘tribute’).Footnote 2 Athens thus needed to develop skills in managing large and small sums of money to a much greater extent than other states.Footnote 3 Athens’ administration depended largely on annually appointed officials, and our evidence gives prominence to the principle of accountability and to various accounting procedures; but, although Athens applied the principles in its own way, the principles were not distinctively Athenian or distinctively democratic: the use of rotating officials and of accounting procedures was widespread in Greek states of varying political complexions.Footnote 4
Athens’ main sources of regular income will have been taxes and leases.Footnote 5 Some leases were of property belonging to gods, rented out to provide an income for the gods and their sanctuaries and rituals,Footnote 6 and the gods would also receive valuable objects dedicated in their sanctuariesFootnote 7 and in some cases firstfruits of agricultural produce (which could then be sold).Footnote 8 Beside taxes in the strict sense we should set liturgies, as a device by which the rich were made to spend their money directly for public purposes without the intervention of agents of the state to collect the money and spend it.Footnote 9 Among leases were those for working the silver mines, a major source of wealth for Athens. Many of these survive from the fourth century; often they are for just 20 or 150 drachmae, but the highest attested is for nearly 3 talents. Most recently K. M. W. Shipton has suggested that these are overall totals for a concession, representing a standard rate of 5 drachmae per prytany, with the large sums referring to multiple concessions in a single mine.Footnote 10 Frustratingly, we do not know how and on what terms the lessees disposed of the silver which they mined.Footnote 11 Further income would be derived from lawcourt fees, fines, and sales of confiscated property, notably the property of those condemned for involvement in the religious scandals of 415,Footnote 12 and from the sale of booty after successful fighting. The tribute from the Delian League certainly benefited Athens both indirectly, by paying for activities which Athens would otherwise have had to pay for itself, and directly, through the sixtieths which were given to the treasury of Athena from 453 onwards; it is possible that after the ending of regular warfare against Persia some of the tribute was diverted to pay for buildings on the acropolis.Footnote 13 As far as we can tell, the syntaxeis of the Second League did not produce large sums of money by comparison with the fifth-century tribute, though they were probably large enough to make a significant contribution to campaign expenses,Footnote 14 and Athens probably did not have direct control of them.Footnote 15
In some crises Athens invited epidoseis (‘voluntary contributions’). In the Persian War and the Peloponnesian War rich men provided triremes at their own expense.Footnote 16 The first occurrence of the word is in 394 in the Corinthian War, when cash contributions were asked for, and lists were published of those who paid and those who promised but failed to pay.Footnote 17 References to epidoseis become more frequent from the middle of the fourth century, and continue into the Hellenistic period.Footnote 18
Objects of expenditure included public works – roads, walls, administrative buildings, temples, and so on: there was an exceptionally large amount of building in Athens in the fifth century, and again in the third quarter of the fourth century.Footnote 19 Religious festivals had to be celebrated.Footnote 20 Public slaves had to be bought and maintained.Footnote 21 Ships had to be built and repaired.Footnote 22 Sailors had to be paid, and so did soldiers, except on short campaigns against neighbouring states.Footnote 23 From the Persian Wars onwards Athens was exceptional in the size of its navy; and, although almost all of that was lost at the end of the Peloponnesian War, it was built up again in the fourth century, until in the 320s Athens had more ships than ever before, but no need for them all and no prospect of manning them all.Footnote 24 Athens was not unique in paying civilian stipends,Footnote 25 but it was surely exceptional in the range of stipends that it paid, beginning with jury pay, probably in the 450s, and culminating in assembly pay, at the beginning of the fourth century.Footnote 26 (Incidentally, while fourth-century Athens certainly had fewer offices without the Delian League, I do not accept the argument from silence of M. H. Hansen that many offices that were paid in the fifth century were not in the fourth.Footnote 27 For the Hellenistic period there is a total lack of evidence for civilian payments. However, dikasteria (law courts) presumably with substantial juries, continued to exist and are mentioned in connection with grants of citizenship and other major awards, and with euthynai (see below for an explanation of this term), until the end of the second century; from 307 onwards, as a result of the creation of new tribes, the council was larger than the 500 of the classical period; and I find it hard to believe that the dikasteria and the council could have been manned unless payment at least for these was retained.Footnote 28)
One other general point is that Athens’ finances involved a good deal of record-keeping. Day-to-day records were kept in temporary form, and deleted when no longer needed;Footnote 29 but a great many transactions generated detailed inscriptions on stone – and, while I do not deny that these had symbolic value, displaying the resources of Athens and the punctiliousness of the officials who handled those resources, they could only have been produced because there was a habit of keeping detailed records, and I believe that inscriptions of these kinds were produced because it was thought in principle that information ought to be made available to be consulted by ho boulomenos (‘whoever wished’).Footnote 30
The beginnings of the classical organization
I turn now to financial organization. Because of the nature and quantity of our evidence, we have detailed information on the matters which I discuss only from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the fourth, and the beginnings of Athenian public finance are mysterious. An attempted reconstruction is offered by H. van Wees in his forthcoming book;Footnote 31 I say a little here in order to show how much of what we can see in the second half of the fifth century can be traced back earlier.
The Aristotelian Athenaion politeia (Athenian Constitution; hereafter cited as Ath. pol.) quotes the phrases ‘the naukraroi shall exact’ and ‘disburse from the naucraric silver’ from ‘the laws of Solon which are no longer in use’, and I believe those laws to be authentic.Footnote 32 It is now generally accepted that Athens had no coinage before the middle of the sixth century, but I think that we can believe in a period before then in which weights of uncoined silver could be used as a means of payment.Footnote 33 As for the naukraroi, and the naukrariai whose officers they presumably were, the only thing that can be stated with near certainty is that they no longer existed after the Persian Wars;Footnote 34 I still think that the traditional etymology which makes them ‘ship-chiefs’ is more likely than the alternatives that have been proposed.Footnote 35
Among the officials said in Ath. pol. to have existed in the time of Solon are the treasurers (of Athena), the poletai (‘sellers’), and the kolakretai (‘ham-collectors’).Footnote 36 In the classical period these, like other civilian officials, were appointed by lot for one year, with no possibility of reappointment: the Athenians seem to have thought that what mattered most was to share the work fairly among men considered equally eligible, in accordance with what Aristotle regarded as the principle that citizens were men who ruled and were ruled in turn,Footnote 37 rather than to find the men most competent to do the work; and the frequent use of boards of ten men and the division of the work between a number of officials and boards meant that a capable man had little opportunity to do good and an incapable man little opportunity to do harm. Like other officials, the financial officials had to undergo a vetting process known as dokimasia before entering office,Footnote 38 and a check on their conduct in office, involving a financial logos (‘account’) and more general euthynai (‘straightening’), on leaving office.Footnote 39
The poletai were sellers, particularly of property confiscated after judicial verdicts,Footnote 40 and makers of public contracts of all kinds, as, for example, for building works, for the inscription of documents, for working the silver mines, and for the collection of taxes by syndicates of tax-farmers.Footnote 41
The kolakretai in the second half of the fifth century were the principal spending officers of the Athenian state: the name supports an early origin, and van Wees plausibly argues from it that they must originally have collected funds as well as spent them.Footnote 42 As to how public expenditure was organized in the sixth and early fifth centuries, there remain considerable uncertainties. There was still room for the private initiatives of rich individuals: Cimon was responsible for various public works, of which Davies remarks, ‘It is impossible … to distinguish clearly which of them were paid for out of Kimon's private fortune rather than booty’;Footnote 43 Themistocles was responsible for rebuilding the telesterion (initiation place) in Phlya and for building a sanctuary of Artemis Aristoboule in Melite.Footnote 44Ath. pol.'s version of the story in which Themistocles had the surplus from the Laurium silver mines spent on building triremes – by lending a talent to each of a number of rich men – may be correct for the mechanism if not for the motif of secrecy.Footnote 45 But what about the development of the Piraeus at Themistocles’ prompting;Footnote 46 or the building of the bouleuterion (‘council house’), perhaps soon after Cleisthenes’ reform, and the tholos (‘round house’, the headquarters of the prytaneis, the tribal contingent within the council on full-time duty), perhaps soon after Ephialtes’ reform? Or the temple of Athena begun in the 480s, and the Athenian stoa at Delphi, the latter dedicated by Athenaioi and probably funded from the sale of booty?Footnote 47 R. T. Neer has argued that both of these, which in their iconography echoed the Alcmaeonids’ temple of Apollo at Delphi, were emphatically works of the Athenian people, claiming the Alcmaeonids’ temple for the Athenian people too.Footnote 48 But how was all this work and the payment for it organized? I wish we knew.
The middle and late fifth century
Let us move on to a period for which we have more evidence, that after Ephialtes’ reform of 462/461. In this period Athens had its sacred treasuries: primarily the treasury of Athena but also various others, to which I shall return later. Religion was an integral part of the Athenians’ life. Although they could distinguish between the sacred and the secular,Footnote 49 and did distinguish the property of the gods from the property of the polis and of other units within the polis, the state involved itself in religious matters just as it did in others: one aspect of that involvement was that sacred treasurers and other sacred officials were appointed by the state in the same way as officials of other kinds were appointed, and (as we shall see below) decisions of various kinds about the sacred treasuries were taken by the state.Footnote 50 For ordinary public expenditure there seems to have been a central state treasury, whose revenue was collected by the apodektai (‘receivers’) and from which payments were made by the kolakretai. And there was the separate treasury of the Delian League.
One matter which is not entirely clear is the extent to which the secular apparatus of poletai, apodektai, and kolakretai was involved with the sacred treasuries and sacred property as well as the main state treasury. A decree for the Praxiergidae is perhaps to be dated to the 450s. This provides for the inscription of various texts: the poletai are to make the contract (restored); the money is to come from the treasury of Athena in accordance with tradition (sufficiently preserved), and is to be paid by the treasurers (restored) and the kolakretai (preserved).Footnote 51 The poletai were still making contracts in the time of Ath. pol.,Footnote 52 and they are recorded as making contracts for inscription in many fifth-century decrees.Footnote 53
After mentioning the poletai as makers of contracts, Ath. pol. writes of the apodektai as receivers of revenue.Footnote 54 Van Wees suggests that they were introduced by Cleisthenes,Footnote 55 but they make only two appearances in fifth-century texts. One is a fragmentary decree of 407/406 for Archelaus of Macedon, which begins with emergency arrangements for the building of new ships: the generals are to borrow money from the a[podektai], and this is to be repaid by the trieropoioi (‘trireme builders’, who in the time of Ath. pol. were a sub-committee of the council).Footnote 56 Comparison with fourth-century decrees that order the apodektai to make direct payments suggests that at a time of financial shortage the normal procedure – of paying revenue into the treasury and then paying expenditure out of it – was bypassed and the apodektai had to pay out revenue directly as soon as they received it.Footnote 57
The other fifth-century appearance of the apodektai is in the decree for the sanctuary of Codrus, Neleus, and Basile, of 418/417.Footnote 58 In the original proposal the contract for fencing the sanctuary (temenos) is to be made by the poletai, and the leasing of the temenos is to be done by the basileus (‘king’, the member of the board of nine archons with particular religious responsibilities). In an amendment the basileus and the poletai are to do the leasing – which I suspect was always the correct formulation, though it was not used in the original proposal and is not made clear in Ath. pol. Footnote 59 There is now not a separate contract for the fencing, but the lessee is to fence the sanctuary at his own expense; the rent is to be paid to the apodektai, and they are to hand it over to the treasurers of the Other Gods in accordance with the law. So, as in the decree for the Praxiergidae we had the kolakretai involved in making a payment from a sacred treasury, here we have the apodektai involved in receiving income derived from sacred property for a sacred treasury.
Until 411 or slightly before the kolakretai regularly pay for inscription;Footnote 60 and they pay for various other purposes including the stipends of the Eleusinian epistatai (‘overseers’) and of the priestess of Athena Nike.Footnote 61 Fragmentary accounts for Eleusis include monies taken over from the previous epistatai, monies from the kolakretai, and rents for buildings;Footnote 62 and monies received from the kolakretai are a recurring item in what have been identified (but perhaps wrongly) as the accounts for the statue of Athena Promachos.Footnote 63 In most cases, such as payment for the inscription of ordinary decrees, the natural assumption is that the kolakretai are making their payments from the ordinary state treasury. The decree of the Praxiergidae is the only text in which they are explicitly involved in a payment from a sacred treasury; but it is not unthinkable that that was also the case with the payment of religious stipends,Footnote 64 and perhaps with a payment in a fragmentary decree for the cult of Bendis.Footnote 65 On the other hand, there is another fragmentary decree restored to mention a payment to a man given a religious appointment of a drachma a day for maintenance, from the treasury of Athena by the treasurers, without any mention of the kolakretai.Footnote 66 The extent to which the kolakretai could be, or had to be, involved with payments from the sacred treasuries remains uncertain.
One other point is worth noting about the kolakretai. Most Athenian appointments were made for a year; but Wilhelm noticed that the kolakretai, perhaps because the risk of peculation was considered exceptionally great in their case, served only for a part of the year. Orders to make a payment are addressed once or perhaps twice to the kolakretai who will be in office in a specified prytany, and once, for the payment of the stipend of the priestess of Athena Nike, to those who will be in office in a specified month.Footnote 67 How their term of office was defined must remain uncertain, though if they already served for less than a year before the introduction of tribal prytanies (I suspect in the time of Ephialtes), I should expect the original definition to be by month; I imagine that the short term will have made it necessary to allow reappointment, perhaps after an interval.
The Delian League had its own treasury, funded substantially but perhaps not solely from the tribute paid by an increasing proportion of member states. It was originally kept at Delos, but moved to Athens apparently in 454; the treasurers, the hellenotamiai (‘Greek treasurers’), were, according to Thucydides, Athenians from the beginning.Footnote 68 A. G. Woodhead thought that at first the hellenotamiai should have been League officials appointed by the League, even if the men appointed were in fact Athenian; but I think it more likely that Athens as hegemon provided the treasurers just as it provided the commanders.Footnote 69 While the state treasury had separate receiving officers and paying officers, the apodektai and the kolakretai, the hellenotamiai performed both functions: Cleonymus’ tribute decree instructs the hellenotamiai to produce lists of defaulters and payers, while in the accounts of loans from the sacred treasuries for the Peloponnesian War payments are commonly made to the hellenotamiai to be spent on campaigning.Footnote 70
The Peloponnesian War saw a series of financial reorganizations, to make it easier for the state to gain access to the funding which it needed to fight the war. The first was the consolidation of a number of sacred treasuries in a single treasury of the Other Gods with a single board of treasurers, to be kept with the treasury of Athena in the opisthodomos (‘rear chamber’, whatever that was).Footnote 71 The restorations which attributed both of a notorious pair of decrees to the same day were fragile (though retained in IG i3 by Meritt and McGregor); C. W. Fornara, on the basis of a squeeze in Berlin, thinks that the Callias who proposed the first decree cannot have been the proposer of the second.Footnote 72 However, I still think that the two decrees could belong to the same year; that the first decree ordered the creation of the treasury of the Other Gods and is therefore earlier than their earliest attested existence, in 430/429;Footnote 73 and that the second decree is later than the beginning of the Propylaea in 437/436 and belongs to a year of the Great Panathenaea.Footnote 74 The inscribed records of the treasurers of Athena are based on Panathenaic quadrennia and begin in 434/433,Footnote 75 and that is still the most likely year for the two decrees and for the creation of the treasury of the Other Gods.
Further reorganizations came towards the end of the war. The ‘future constitution’ drawn up by the oligarchs in 411 provided for a single board of ten treasurers of Athena and of the Other Gods, and a single board of twenty hellenotamiai to administer the funds of the Delian League and all other secular funds.Footnote 76 The kolakretai are last attested in 418/417, paying for the inscription about the sanctuary of Codrus, Neleus, and Basile,Footnote 77 while in and after 410 the hellenotamiai do number twenty (rather than ten as before) and do make payments which previously would have been made by the kolakretai.Footnote 78 (The apodektai, however, still existed in the late fifth and fourth centuries.Footnote 79) I do not believe that the ‘future constitution’ was ever put into effect; we cannot say whether its amalgamation of the state and League treasuries was a new idea, implemented by the intermediate regime or the restored democracy, or whether it reflects a change which had already taken place slightly earlier. As for the sacred treasurers, it appears that Athena and the Other Gods were in fact amalgamated at the beginning of 406/405.Footnote 80 The two boards were separated again at the beginning of 385/384,Footnote 81 and amalgamated again, but now with no mention of the Other Gods in their title, in the 340s;Footnote 82 the amalgamated board is last attested in 299/298.Footnote 83 A law which for many years was publicly known only from a photograph in Scientific American has been cited in various placesFootnote 84 as evidence for treasurers of the Other Gods in the third century: there is now a published text and discussion of the first part of the stele, but I am increasingly certain that, although the inscription seems to be of the third century or even the second, the law inscribed was enacted not later than the 340s.Footnote 85
Since the treasury of Athena and the treasury of the Other Gods were kept in the same place, and since the amalgamation of the two could later be undone, there was presumably no physical change when they were amalgamated. We do not know where the state treasury and the Delian League treasury were kept, either before or after their amalgamation.Footnote 86
The fourth century
At the end of the Peloponnesian War the Delian League ceased to exist, and so too did the hellenotamiai.Footnote 87 We can trace a development in the arrangements for paying for the inscription of decrees, which shows that there was not a single reform which created a new steady state, but a development in the funding of the state's expenditures.Footnote 88 The poletai are no longer mentioned in this context, except in the law on the testers of silver coinage,Footnote 89 but they certainly still existed, and I agree with Langdon that the silence need not mean that they were no longer involved.Footnote 90 At first payment was made by the joint sacred treasurers; then from 385/384 to 377/376 by the newly separated treasurers of Athena, in the last two of those years from a special 10-talent fund.Footnote 91 Occasional payment directly by the apodektai was an emergency measure taken when money was short.Footnote 92 Subsequently, perhaps from 376/375, the money came from the assembly's fund for expenses, τὰ κατὰ ψηϕίσματα ἀναλισκόμενα τῶι δήμωι (‘the monies expended by the people in accordance with decrees’), administered by the treasurer of the demos: the first dated mention of the treasurer is in 373/372 and the first dated mention of the fund is in 368/367.Footnote 93 The council similarly had a fund for expenses and (plural) treasurers, first attested in the 350s.Footnote 94
The institution of those funds is a consequence of a major innovation in Athens’ financial organization in the fourth century. As Ath. pol. tells us, the apodektai did not now pay secular revenue into a central treasury, but instead made a merismos (‘allocation’) to different spending authorities. On one day in each prytany the apodektai received the monies which were due and allocated them to the various authorities, and on the next day they brought before the council and read out a record of their allocations, and there was an opportunity for men to be accused of malpractice.Footnote 95 The earliest evidence for this procedure is a decree of 386: ‘The said sum of money shall be allocated by the apodektai from the funds being deposited, when they make the allocations required by the laws.’Footnote 96 There is no text later than 404 which shows the old central treasury still in existence, and the new system may have been included in the revised code of laws completed in 400/399,Footnote 97 but the later institution of the assembly's fund (certainly) and of the council's fund (probably) shows that the system was developed over time. Other funds to which an allocation was made included the trireme-building fund, ta trieropoiïka,Footnote 98 and the treasury from which jurors’ stipends were paid.Footnote 99
This new system shows Athens engaging in a budgeting exercise, deciding in advance how much money to make available for spending in different areas. In the fifth century there had been a separation between sacred and secular monies (and separate treasuries of separate deities), and until c.411 between the secular monies of the polis and those of the Delian League,Footnote 100 but no further subdivision within the secular monies of the polis. The disadvantage of ‘devolved budgeting’, as people working in British universities nowadays know all too well, is that extra money for one area can be found only by taking money away from another area, and that will inevitably encounter resistance. For fourth-century Athens, I have already mentioned the occasions when the apodektai had to make a payment directly because there was no money available in the fund which ought to have paid. We also have three decrees which commit the assembly to additional expenditure and then call on the nomothetai (‘legislators’, a special board which enacted the nomoi, ‘laws’, which in the fourth century were distinguished from psephismata, ‘decrees’ of the council and assembly) to adjust the merismos and increase the allocation to the assembly's fund in order to provide for this.Footnote 101
In the first half of the fourth century Athens was perpetually short of money, largely because it was trying to maintain an ambitious foreign policy which, without the tribute from the Delian League, it could no longer afford (the syntaxeis of the Second League seem never to have produced large sums of money, by comparison with the tribute of the Delian League). Nevertheless, pursuing and paying for this foreign policy was considered a high priority.Footnote 102 In the realm of civilian expenditure, maintaining the law courts was expensive, because up to 6,000 jurors had to be paid on 175–225 days a year.Footnote 103 The stipend for jurors was kept at the 420s rate of 3 obols when other stipends were raised;Footnote 104 even so, there were occasions when sittings of the courts were suspended because there was no money for the jurors’ stipends.Footnote 105 But M. H. Hansen has plausibly argued that one reason why from about the 350s eisangeliai were always tried in a court rather than in the assembly is that a session of a court cost much less than a meeting of the assembly.Footnote 106
Not later than 373, one of the funds which received money in the merismos was the stratiotic (military) fund, ta stratiotika.Footnote 107 What happened later suggests that this fund also received any surplus revenue in excess of the sums needed for the merismos. At some time – we do not know when – the Athenians had started charging for admission to the theatre, allegedly to reduce fighting over seats;Footnote 108 and then or later the theoric fund (ta theorika: theorein was used particularly of visiting sanctuaries and festivals) was introduced, to provide grants to citizens to cover the cost of admission. The fund is variously attrributed to Pericles, to Agyrrhius, and to Eubulus and Diophantus.Footnote 109 Since Pericles introduced jury pay and Agyrrhius introduced assembly pay,Footnote 110 and since Aristophanes never refers to grants to enable citizens to attend his plays, it is better to follow the attribution to Eubulus and Diophantus, and to date the institution to the second half of the 350s.Footnote 111 It appears that the theoric fund now received any surpluses, in addition to its regular allocation, but there was a provision that surpluses should revert to the stratiotic fund when Athens was at war: Demosthenes and Apollodorus wanted to implement that for the Olynthian War in 349/348;Footnote 112 Demosthenes did manage to implement it for the Fourth Sacred War in 339/338 – but presumably after Chaeronea and Philip's settlement surpluses reverted to the theoric fund.Footnote 113
The theoric fund became more important than we might expect from its ostensible purpose. The treasurer of the stratiotic fund was appointed not by lot but by election (presumably by analogy with the other military officials); and, by analogy with that treasurer, the controllers of the theoric fund were elected also.Footnote 114 It is likely that, although in the time of Ath. pol. the theoric fund was controlled by a board, before the law of Hegemon in the mid-330s it was controlled by a single official, and he could be re-elected.Footnote 115 Aeschines tells us that, because of the Athenians’ trust in Eubulus, before Hegemon's law was passed the theoric officials were active in so many fields (perhaps actually supplanting some of the older officials, but it is not clear how far Aeschines’ words should be taken literally here) that they ‘virtually controlled the whole financial administration (dioikesis) of the city’.Footnote 116 This will partly have been because any surplus money that there was in Athens ended up in their fund:Footnote 117 clearly the fund was used to pay for more than subsidies for theatre tickets, and any Athenian who wanted money to be spent for some purpose would need to gain the support of the theoric official. Secondly, Ath. pol. mentions that the poletai did their work in conjunction with the treasurer of the stratiotic fund and the theoric controllers in the presence of the council;Footnote 118 and it may be that before the law of Hegemon it was simply the theoric controller who was involved with the work of the poletai, and of the other old financial officials too, and that the addition of the treasurer of the stratiotic fund – like the change from a single controller to a board – represents a dilution made by Hegemon.Footnote 119 The council and the old financial officials were appointed by lot, for one year only except that men could serve twice in the council.Footnote 120 The new officials were elected and could be re-elected; and the theoric controller, as an elected official, involved with the work of the other officials and having surplus money in his own fund, had an exceptionally powerful position in Athenian finance.Footnote 121
In 337/336 Demosthenes was the theoric controller.Footnote 122 He tended to regard his opponents as unpatriotic, while they tended to regard him as undemocratic,Footnote 123 and I suspect that a powerful position which had been accepted when held by Eubulus and his associates was branded undemocratic when held by Demosthenes – whence the law of Hegemon.
After that, for about twelve years Lycurgus and his associates exercised financial power similar to that of Eubulus, but there are various problems connected with this. It appears that a law, probably Hegemon's law, forbade the holding of the theoric office or any comparable office for more than four years, so Lycurgus held office for four years himself and was then succeeded by associates.Footnote 124 The four years do not have to be Panathenaic quadrennia, and the starting point was probably c.336;Footnote 125 I do not agree with those who argue from the story of Lycurgus on his deathbed that the ban was only on two consecutive terms and that he held office again after a four-year gap.Footnote 126
The office is not mentioned in Ath. pol., although Ath. pol. was written and revised precisely during this period: fourth-century Athens distinguished between decrees and laws, the analytic part of Ath. pol. was based on the laws, and possibly this office was created by decree rather than by law.Footnote 127 Very probably the title was one well known from the Hellenistic period, epi tei dioikesei (‘in charge of administration’). The title is used in a decree praising Xenocles (one of Lycurgus’ associates), Hyperides comes close to using it of Lycurgus,Footnote 128 and we have seen that Aeschines used the word dioikesis in connection with the theoric official in the time of Eubulus. The word dioikesis is used of regular administration in general,Footnote 129 particularly of the funding of that administration, and sometimes by extension of the actual monies used to fund it, with the precise meaning varying across that range to suit the context. It can denote either the whole of the state's regular finances or the remainder when certain items, often sacred, have been filtered out; but I have recently argued that it is never the name of a particular treasury, either in Athens or elsewhere.Footnote 130 Eubulus when he had controlled the dioikesis was in charge of a treasury, but that treasury was the theoric fund. Aeschines claims that his own brother Aphobetus had once been appointed epi ten koinen dioikesin (‘in charge of the public administration’), and it is possible that Aphobetus may have been the antigrapheus (literally ‘copyist’), a revenue clerk whose position seems to have been abolished in the heyday of Eubulus.Footnote 131 There is no indication that Lycurgus controlled a particular treasury; so what were the powers of the official epi tei dioikesei?
Texts about Lycurgus refer in general terms to his increasing the revenues and spending them on worthy objects,Footnote 132 but that is not much help. In the first prytany of 329/328, at the end of the quadrennium in which (if his twelve years began c.336) Lycurgus was certainly not epi tei dioikesei, the Eleusinian epistatai and the treasurers of the Two Goddesses made a payment to their architect Λυκούργου κελεύσαντος (‘at the bidding of Lycurgus’): either he held some other position which allowed him to give that order or recommendation (the meaning of keleuein is not always as strong as ‘order’), or else this is a careless expression of the fact that he was the proposer of a decree or law containing that order.Footnote 133
And there is a possible hint in the decree for Xenocles, which tells us that when he was epi tei dioikesei he emerisen – made a merismos – so that the Kerykes could sacrifice on behalf of the demos and the Kerykes.Footnote 134 If all Xenocles had done was to make a payment in accordance with the current merismos, that would hardly be cause for honourable mention, and Lewis argued that he had not simply done something that would normally be done by the apodektai, but had been reorganizing the merismos.Footnote 135 I suggest that he had modified the merismos to provide for an appropriate payment to the Kerykes, possibly by some kind of executive action, more probably by proposing a law, just as in the mid-330s a law of Aristonicus had modified the merismos to earmark particular revenue for funding the Little Panathenaea.Footnote 136 Any citizen could propose in the assembly that there should be a session of nomothetai, and could then propose a new law for the nomothetai to consider – one did not have to be epi tei dioikesei to do that, though it would presumably be taken particularly seriously if a financial proposal did come from the man epi tei dioikesei. However, S. D. Lambert has suggested to me that the instructions given to the man epi tei dioikesei might have included an instruction to make recommendations about the merismos, and if at this time there was a schedule of regular sessions of the nomothetai (which seems to be implied by the three decrees which impose an extra burden on the assembly's fund and then instruct the nomothetai to modify the merismos to provide for itFootnote 137), this man might have been given the right of direct access to the nomothetai, without having to go through the assembly first.
Lycurgus encouraged rich individuals to contribute to the cost of public works. He himself proposed the honours for Eudemus of Plataea, who ‘offered … to make a voluntary gift towards the war of 4,000[?] drachmae if there were any need, and … made a voluntary gift towards the making of the stadium and the Panathenaic theatre of a thousand yoke of oxen’.Footnote 138 Lycurgus’ friend Xenocles built a bridge at Eleusis in 321/320.Footnote 139 It has been suggested that in the Hellenistic period Lycurgus’ example was knowingly followed by the Ptolemies and Seleucids, who needed money to finance their armies and navies.Footnote 140
Hellenistic survivals
Xenocles’ bridge takes us into the Hellenistic period. The last dated appearance of the apodektai is in 323/322, and the last dated appearance of the poletai is in 307/306.Footnote 141 Hellenistic Athens still needed contracts, and there are a few later inscribed texts, down to c.200, which are published in the Agora collection as documents of the poletai, but no mention of the poletai survives in them and strictly we do not know which officials produced them.Footnote 142 A small fragment of a list of officials including apod[ektai] and pole[tai] has been assigned without comment to the beginning of the second century: the lettering is very careless, and I do not feel competent to suggest a date myself.Footnote 143
Otherwise we are limited almost entirely to clauses in decrees which order payments, usually for the inscription of the decree.Footnote 144 There was still a fund handled by the agoranomoi (‘market magistrates’) in 320/319.Footnote 145 Payments by the treasurer of the demos from the assembly's fund are attested to the end of 302/301;Footnote 146 but it appears that before then a change had begun, as a result of which there were no longer truly separate funds with their separate allocation, but merely accounts which could be distinguished within a central treasury, against which different officials could make payments at different times.Footnote 147 In 303/302 there was at least one payment against the assembly's account by the treasurer of the stratiotic fund, while in perhaps the same year the treasurer of the demos made one payment ek ton koinon chrematon (‘from the public funds’) and the man epi tei dioikesei made one payment with the source unspecified.Footnote 148 In 302/301 one payment against the assembly's account was made by the man epi tei dioikesei.Footnote 149 Thereafter the treasurer of the demos does not appear again.Footnote 150 There are a few later mentions of the assembly's account, in decrees of the third century, and indeed in three decrees of or concerning the Salaminians in the late second century.Footnote 151 And there is a decree of the 270s in which the assembly is to decide how much is to be spent on a sacrifice, the payment is to be made by the treasurer of the stratiotic fund and the men (plural) epi tei dioikesei, and the money is to be charged to the council's account.Footnote 152 For one payment possibly to be dated 303/302 and for the payment by the man epi tei dioikesei in 302/301 the verb used is not dounai but merisai: after this merisai increasingly becomes the standard word in this context, and it has clearly lost its sense of ‘allocate’ and means simply ‘pay’.Footnote 153
Between 301 and 295 payments were made by military officials, the exetastes (‘inspector’) and the trittyarchs (commanders of forces from ‘thirds’ of tribes).Footnote 154 After that we come to a disputed matter. The principal financial officials of Hellenistic Athens were the treasurer of the stratiotic fund and the single man (ho) or the board (hoi) epi tei dioikesei. It used to be thought that a distinction could be drawn between oligarchic periods, when the position was held by a single man, and democratic periods, when it was held by a board.Footnote 155 It eventually came to be accepted, however, that from 229 onwards there was always a board, and that when inscriptions mention a single man he is one member of the board;Footnote 156 but for before 229 orthodoxy has continued to believe in the distinction between individual and board.Footnote 157 This was made harder to defend when a decree of 250/249 mentioning the board was found, while until then 261–229 had been considered an oligarchic period with a single official.Footnote 158 Henry and Osborne tried to save the doctrine by conjuring up a short period with a board in the middle of the century;Footnote 159 but it is far better that we should be willing to accept before 229 what we accept after – that there was a board but inscriptions could mention one member of it.Footnote 160 In the present state of the evidence, there is no mention of a position epi tei dioikesei between 323 and 307 (but the evidence is so sparse that this does not prove that there was none); between 307 and 287 there are references to an individual and as yet no references to a board; after 287 there are references both to an individual and to a board.
That problem aside, after 295 it was at first normally the individual or board epi tei dioikesei who made payments, but occasionally the treasurer of the stratiotic fund paid.Footnote 161 After 229,Footnote 162 except in the case of prytany decrees, there is just one early case of payment by the board epi tei dioikesei alone; otherwise payment was made by the treasurer of the stratiotic fund, most often alone but sometimes in conjunction with the board – and indeed he can be referred to as ‘the treasurer’ without further specification.Footnote 163 Prytany decrees continued to be paid for by the board epi tei dioikesei until the early second century; but from 182/181 the stratiotic treasurer usually paid for them too. In two inscriptions each giving two decrees on one stele the stratiotic treasurer was instructed to pay for one decree but the board epi tei dioikesei for the other.Footnote 164 The board epi tei dioikesei last appears in 128/127, and the stratiotic treasurer c.30.Footnote 165
To restate the essential point after the mass of details. After the end of the fourth century there seems to have been a central treasury once more, within which separate accounts were occasionally identified; we no longer know who received revenue and paid it into that account; from 295 onwards payments from it were made either by the board epi tei dioikesei or by the treasurer of the stratiotic fund, of whom the treasurer of the stratiotic fund gradually became the more usual paying officer.
Conclusion
By the late archaic period Athens was already a developed state, with developed financial mechanisms and officials.Footnote 166 In the classical period the elaboration increased, with a larger number of citizens and a larger proportion of the citizens involved in public affairs, and with the Delian League to administer for much of the fifth century and the Second League in the middle of the fourth. This meant that Athens had more need to develop skill in organizing its public finances than smaller states with simpler financial profiles.
In the fifth century and the first half of the fourth Athens’ financial officials were like its other civilian officials: appointed by lot for one year (in the case of the kolakretai just one prytany) without the possibility of reappointment, on the principle that sharing out the work among the citizens mattered more than expertise. Sacred treasuries, as we have seen, were kept separate from secular, but they were administered by state-appointed officials and were subject to decisions of the state in the same way as secular. Financial officials like others were subjected to a dokimasia before they entered office (to check their qualifications as good citizens, not their competence for the job), and to a financial logos and more general euthynai to check their conduct when they retired from office. Detailed records were kept of transactions of various kinds, and some of those records led to the publication of inscriptions in which officials demonstrated in detail that they had done their duty: while the principle of accountablility was not, and the keeping of records need not have been, distinctively democratic, the elaboration of Athens’ business will have entailed detailed records, and it does seem to be the case that from the middle of the fifth century the Athenian democrats thought it important to keep the demos informed, and so developed the habit of publishing public documents to an exceptional extent.Footnote 167
Among the particular developments during the classical period is the payment of modest stipends for performing various of the civilian duties of the citizens, beginning with payment for serving on juries, about the middle of the fifth century, and culminating in payment for attending the assembly, c.400; to them should be added the increasing scale of payments for military service: to oarsmen, to hoplites, and also to support the cavalry.Footnote 168 Liturgies involved payments by the rich, from which many citizens benefited (though the performers supported by choregoi probably themselves tended towards the rich end of the spectrumFootnote 169). The theoric fund, probably introduced in the late 350s, offered payments to all the citizens, including but not limited to the poorest, to subsidize their attendance at major festivals.
By the end of the classical period Athens was making payments to citizens for a wide range of purposes, and although these payments were not focused specifically on the poor (as in modern states many welfare payments and other benefits are not means-tested) the overall result was a considerable transfer of funds to the poorer citizens, at the expense of the richer citizens and of the non-citizens from whom funds were acquired (for instance by tribute in the time of the Delian League, and by taxes on trade). While tribute directly or indirectly funded payments introduced in the time of the Delian League, the principle was accepted to the extent that further payments – assembly pay and the theoric grants – were added when the Delian League no longer existed. Neither liturgies nor state payments are limited wholly to democracies,Footnote 170 but the scale and range of burdens imposed on the rich and of redistribution to other citizens is undoubtedly a reflection of Athens’ democracy. In the surviving literature we do not find objections to this principle of redistribution, except from the ‘Old Oligarch’.Footnote 171
One change which seems to be due directly to the financial demands of the Peloponnesian War is the concentration of funds in fewer treasuries, to make the money more accessible, immediately before and during the war. An organizational change of a different kind was the change from a central secular treasury of the state to an allocation of fixed sums each year to different spending authorities, from the beginning of the fourth century. That presumably reflected a belief that Athens’ finances would be better controlled if there was some budgeting – that is, some advance consideration of how much money would be needed, and how much could be afforded, for expenditure in different areas – and it is probably no accident that this change was made after the Peloponnesian War, when Athens found itself with greatly reduced resources, and when democrats remembered that one argument deployed by oligarchs in 411 had been that in its military emergency Athens could not afford to continue making payments to citizens for civilian purposes.Footnote 172 We hear of moments of crisis (for instance when in 348 sittings of the law courts had to be suspended because there was no money in the fund to pay jurors’ stipendsFootnote 173) but in the reduced circumstances of the fourth century Athens did still manage to fund its festivals and its democracy and also an active foreign policy.
One spending authority created during the first half of the fourth century was the stratiotic (military) fund, and its treasurer, like other military officials, was appointed by election and could be re-elected. In a further departure from the general pattern of civilian appointments, that rule was also applied to the treasurer of the theoric fund, probably created in the late 350s at a time when some Athenians decided that they could not continue with the expensive but not very successful military policies of the past half-century. While the ostensible purpose of that fund was to cover the costs of citizens’ theatre tickets at major festivals (see above), it accumulated more money than was needed for that, and its treasurer came to wield considerable power. In the 330s, when control of that fund had passed from Eubulus and his supporters to Demosthenes and his supporters, the single official was replaced by a board with limited tenure, but a new position ‘in charge of administration’ (which became similarly powerful) was created for Lycurgus and his supporters. That position (later a board) and the treasurer of the stratiotic fund survived as Athens’ most important financial offices in the Hellenistic period.
Athens was clearly more prosperous in the third quarter of the fourth century than in the first and second quarters: this will have been due partly to better financial management, partly to increased revenues, and partly to reduced military activity and expenditure. This can be related to evidence in other matters that the Athenians seem to have been more willing in the fourth century than in the fifth to allow for expertise in various areas of public life: for instance, until the 360s the Athenians appointed the principal secretary of the state, for just one prytany, from one tribal contingent of fifty men in the council, but after that the secretary was appointed for a year from volunteers;Footnote 174 by the time of the Ath. pol. (late 330s) the appointment of one general from each tribe was no longer even a norm, but ten men were elected irrespective of tribe.Footnote 175
