This volume publishes the proceedings of the fourth Colloquium Atticum, which took place in Hamburg in June 2016. Riess hopes in his foreword that it will stimulate renewed reflection on fifth-century Athens, and that it will certainly do. The volume has been edited to a high standard, and the papers it contains provide a useful cross-section of current scholarship on fifth-century Athens in Germany and Austria, the home bases of all but two of the contributors. Though the volume is not explicitly dedicated to any particular topic, the contributions can be divided into two broad themes.
The first concerns Athenian maritime policy, naval leagues and imperialism. P. Athanasopoulos's piece offers a useful survey of the archaeological evidence for Athens’ naval bases in Piraeus, even if it never quite fulfils its promise to show how this building project impacted the development of a powerful (and eventually imperial) democracy. Two other papers delve more deeply into the historical development of Athens’ maritime empire.
P. Scheibelreiter shows that, even if the initial terms of the Delian League placed Athens and its allies on a more or less equal footing, when Athens re-integrated chastened allies back into its alliance after it had defeated them militarily, it tended to do so by means of a ὁμολογία a type of ‘Kapitulationsvertrag’. This allows him to find imperial ‘hardness’ quite early on, as such contracts seem to have been imposed on Chalcis (forced back into the league in 446/5), Aegina (457) and even Thasos (after 465).
A. Eich in his valuable contribution is also sceptical of a later ‘hardening’ of the empire. Though he eventually admits that many of the crucial inscriptions should now be dated to the 420s rather than to the middle of the century, he wonders whether these decrees should really be seen as signs of a ratcheting up of imperial control. Indeed, for Eich, far from marking the high-water mark of Athenian power, these inscriptions reveal instead a desperate state on the verge of collapse. This seems easy to say in hindsight; but can we really describe a city that listed some 400 other poleis as tributaries in 425 as on the verge of collapse?
Eich also points to military activity in the sixth and early fifth centuries as showing that Athens always had expansionist tendencies; Riess, in his conclusion, adds that this must put the significance of the Persian Wars into perspective. But there is surely a difference between the attack on Paros in 490/89 (for example) and the highly institutionalised form of hegemony that Athens was able to establish in the Aegean later on. This form of hegemony featured, as Riess puts it, a ‘gesteigerte Institutionalisierung’; but that increased institutionalisation surely took the shape it did because of the Delian League's origins in the anti-Persian alliance of 480/79.
The second broad theme that emerges concerns what we might call social relations – between individual Athenians and other Athenians, but also between the elite (including elite individuals) and the masses. C. Tiersch in the opening essay asks why members of the city's social elite can so often be found among the foremost leaders of Athens’ democracy, while elites in modernity have tended to be among the bitterest opponents of bourgeois and democratic movements. Riess returns to this question in his concluding remarks, reminding us that the Weimar Republic never quite succeeded in incorporating the old Prussian aristocracy into the new order – with disastrous results for that ill-starred regime. So how did democratic Athens do better?
Tiersch does not disagree with previous suggestions that the Athenian elite was relatively divided internally and that Athens was quite successful in constructing a public sphere in which differences of birth and class were less salient. But she also wants to argue that there was a dynamic struggle between Athens’ elite and its masses, one which came about in part precisely because the new democratic public sphere set limits on the elite – limits that provoked resistance. For Tiersch it was only after the re-foundation of the democratic order in 403 that an equilibrium was reached in which some of the limits on elite activity were relaxed in return for tightened expectations around elite contributions (especially liturgies).
H. Heftner's enjoyably contrarian article invites us to re-consider one particularly entrancing elite Athenian, Alcibiades. For Heftner Alcibiades was a cautious figure, keen to minimise costs and risks, not the mercurial maverick that both ancient and moderns have imagined. If Heftner is right, those ancient and modern sources must have got Alcibiades quite wrong, and my only real doubt about this paper is whether Heftner does enough to explain how precisely this could have come about. In the end Heftner concludes that Alcibiades’ real historical significance may be that he was, characteristically for his time, caught between tradition and free-thinking, between the claims of society and the claims of the individual.
The relationship between society and the individual is the subject of M. Dreher's learned paper, which charts a middle path between over- and under-socialised accounts of human behaviour, quite sensibly concluding that the individual is usually part of a society, society is usually made up of individuals, and that this was very much the case in the Greek polis. Dreher rejects the idea (advanced perhaps most notably by Berent) that the polis was not a state at all; but it was very much a collectivity, and a collectivity composed not only of individuals, but also of associations and civic subdivisions (tribes, demes and so on).
A final paper that touches on the relationship between mass and elite is C. Schubert's, though her main interest is in a particular anecdote about Pericles (Aristophanes’ joke at Peace 605ff. that Pericles started the Peloponnesian War to save his friend Phidias from charges of embezzlement), and how information about it has been transmitted and discussed in the textual and scholiastic tradition. Schubert is concerned that the scholia on the lines are used simply to extract a ‘fragment’ of Philochoros even though scholia, she wants to insist, represent a very particular form of expression in themselves.
Schubert shows with great clarity (through both photographs and diagrams) how the scholia are laid out vis-à-vis Aristophanes’ text in the most important codices (something that will be of particular value to students). She also makes a novel suggestion of a reference to Hermogenes (who comments on the Phidias affair in his On the Invention of Arguments) in the Venetian codex. She certainly succeeds in showing, and very elegantly, that the scholia in the different codices give us a glimpse of a 2,000-year-old discourse; whether she is correct to conclude that we can hardly speak of a fragment of Philochoros at all, or that form and content cannot be separated here, will be for readers to decide.
R. Osborne's essay also ends up delving into social relations, though it begins as a reflection on two recent books on Athenian vase-painting and history, one by Osborne himself (The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece [2018]), the other by W. Filser (Die Elite Athens auf der attischen Luxuskeramik [2017]). In Osborne's formulation he and Filser disagree mainly about how precisely to link the history of art with history more broadly. As Osborne puts it, the difference is between explaining the artistic trends in terms of ‘general attitudes and ways of seeing the world’ or in terms of ‘particular events and particular attitudes’.
Filser reads the changing subjects depicted on pots as a reflection of changes in the lifestyles of the Athenian wealth elite: the decline in symposium scenes after the Persian Wars signals the emergence of a general critique of luxury, for example. For Osborne this can make the relationship between events and images seem forced; the artistic story has to fit what we know about from our narrative sources. Another problem is that, as Osborne puts it, ‘art ceases to have a history’ – that is, there is little space to take into account independent changes in techniques and artistic fashions, fashions that sometimes seem to change less in tandem with social changes within one part of Athenian society than with artistic trends across the Greek world.
Osborne thus prefers to begin with the observation that Athenian art and Athenian life often seem out of kilter – references to homoerotic activity are plentiful in fourth-century texts, but many of the images come from the sixth and the fifth centuries, for instance; and there is a similar lack of synchronicity when it comes to military, athletic and religious references and representations. Moreover, according to Osborne, there are similar changes in the way in which all these topics were represented on vases: ‘In all cases, scenes that focussed on action were replaced by scenes that focussed on contemplation, scenes that emphasized the particular and individual were replaced by scenes that had nothing specific about them’.
Osborne briefly considers that these changes are linked to democracy, but then shies away from this, since ‘the change that occurs on Athenian pots is not limited to Athenian pots’. He suggests instead that they are due to ‘a revolution in interpersonal relations’ following the Persian Wars, after which honours for individual commanders, for example, begin to seem uncouth (though might this not, after all, have something to do with democracy?).
In the end, Osborne thinks the best characterisation of the changes in the imagery he has traced is an increased focus on ‘self-mastery’, which he links with the erotic self-control (enkrateia) emphasised in Foucault's History of Sexuality. I am not sure that this really links art history to less ‘particular’ changes than Filser's, rather than just different ones, but it is an interesting suggestion all the same, and one that Osborne re-iterates in his closing paragraph: this ‘revolution in inter-personal relations’ relating to ‘self-mastery’, he proposes, ‘created a way of logging the visual world that has remained the primary reference point for subsequent ways of seeing in the Western world’.
There has been much talk recently about how ideas about Greek exceptionalism and ‘the Greek miracle’ are part of inherited narratives that should now be cast aside; instead, we are told, we should decentre the Greek world and look sceptically at its claims to anchor the Western tradition. Much recent work on the ancient economy would suggest that Greece, and Athens in particular, was quite exceptional after all; and if Osborne is right about representation, this would only add a further way in which what happened in fifth-century Athens was, in fact, rather interesting and even special. Those who have, quite justifiably, chosen to specialise in this period will find plenty of nourishment in this volume.
