1. Introduction
Before the Persian Wars the Greeks did not rely on public finance to fight each other. Their hoplites armed and fed themselves. But in the confrontation with Persia this private funding of war proved to be inadequate. The liberation of the Greek states beyond the Balkans required the destruction of Persia's sea power. In 478 bc Athens agreed to lead an alliance to do just this. It already had Greece's largest fleet. But each campaign of this ongoing war would need tens of thousands of sailors and would go on for months. No single Greek city-state could pay for such campaigns. The alliance thus agreed to adopt the Persian method for funding war: its members would pay a fixed amount of tribute annually. This enabled Athens to force Persia out of the Dardanelles and Ionia. But the Athenians also realized that their military power depended on tribute, and so they tightened their control of its payers. In so doing they turned the alliance into an empire.
By 450 Athens had become a threat to Greece's other dominant power. But Sparta struggled to counter Athens effectively. In the Peloponnesian War Sparta realized that it could only do so if it too became a sea power. However, its weak public finances ruled this out. All changed in 412, when Persia's Great King decided to give Sparta the necessary funds. In exchange for the right to levy tribute again on Ionia's Greeks, he helped the Spartans to acquire a large fleet. In 405 this fleet destroyed the last warships of Athens. Sparta could now dismantle the Athenian Empire and force its surrender thanks to a land and sea blockade.
In the Corinthian War Persia initially funded the anti-Spartan alliance, as the Spartans had decided to fight it for control of Ionia's Greek city-states. The Athenians used Persia's gold to rebuild their fleet and with these warships they set out to re-establish the Athenian Empire. But this represented a still bigger threat to Persia. Consequently it switched its funding to the Spartans. They quickly assembled a fleet in the Dardanelles, where they stopped the grain ships sailing for Athens. The Athenians feared being starved into submission once again and so accepted the King's Peace. This treaty of 386 scuttled their attempt to re-establish their empire. To keep waging wars they now had to develop different funding sources.
In this, Athens was reasonably successful. It was thus able to keep Sparta at bay and quickly became a major regional power. But it was not successful enough to stop the rise of Philip of Macedonia. By 338 this king had defeated Greece's other regional powers and so had made Macedonia its hegemon. His success rested largely on his public-finance reforms. His son, Alexander, became less concerned about public finance as he conquered Persia, for plunder easily paid for his army. But the hellenistic kingdoms that arose after him managed their public finances carefully. With vastly larger tax bases they fielded armies several times larger than those of classical Athens or Sparta. War for dominance among the Greeks had now moved well beyond their city-states.
2. The Persian Wars
Archaic Greeks did not depend on public finance for war. They fought wars infrequently and usually only over contested land between poleis (‘city-states’).Footnote 1 Typically, wars were initiated not by the state's rudimentary political institutions but by elite individuals in a private capacity.Footnote 2 These leaders raised volunteers by promising them a share of the booty and the land which might be won in battle.Footnote 3 The hoplites who volunteered usually only numbered in the hundreds.Footnote 4 They came along with their own armour, weapons, and food supplies. They too were drawn mainly from the elite.Footnote 5 Archaic wars lasted for days or weeks and were settled by a solitary battle. Because of the winning side's lack of military capacity, they generally did not result in the subjugation, occupation, or taxation of the other side's polis.Footnote 6 In the archaic period war was thus a predominantly private activity whose participants financed it themselves. Even after the sixth century bc, Greek poleis that did not aspire to be major or dominant military powers (such as Athens, Sparta, and Thebes) persisted with this small-scale fighting on land.Footnote 7
War changed in two big ways in the classical period, both of which can be seen most clearly in the polis of Athens. In the fifth century this state quickly became one of Greece's dominant military powers, and was largely responsible for making the wars of the Greeks reliant on public finance. The first change was that war became a fully public activity. In Athens this was a result of the democratic reforms which the elite leader, Cleisthenes, sponsored after 508.Footnote 8 These reforms gave the Athenian dēmos (‘people’) sole responsibility for initiating wars and a new public army of hoplites for waging them.Footnote 9 The second change was naval warfare. Persia forced the Greeks to get serious about fighting at sea. The Athenians knew that the Ionian Revolt of 499–494 had been lost because of Persia's superior fleet. They knew, too, that the triremes of the Persians had brought them to Marathon in 490. Persia financed its navy through a unique feature of its empire: it required each of its subject states to pay an annual tax which was based on an assessment of what it could afford.Footnote 10 This was a system for financing war that had no parallel in archaic Greece. Persia's Great King, Darius I, introduced this system of phoros (‘tribute’) in 518.Footnote 11
To ready themselves for Persia's next attempt to subjugate them, in 483 the Athenian dēmos decided on a massive expansion of their public navy.Footnote 12 As it cost about 1 talent (that is, 26 kilograms of silver) to build a trireme,Footnote 13 they could only afford this expansion because of the unexpectedly high income which they had recently earned from their local silver mines.Footnote 14 The 200 triremes which they possessed at the end of this ship-building exercise was the largest polis-owned fleet yet seen. So that there were enough captains for this fleet the Athenian dēmos created the liturgy of the trierarchy.Footnote 15 This public service required an elite citizen to command a trireme for one year and to pay for its running costs over and above the misthos (‘pay’) of its crew. A trierarchy cost about 1 talent.Footnote 16 The payment of trireme crews was the responsibility of the state. Their misthos was a logical necessity: because the trireme lacked the space for the stowing of food supplies, its crew had to purchase food each day from local markets or private houses.Footnote 17 In addition, there was no guarantee that sailors would remain with their ships if they were not paid. Athenian trierarchs usually hired their sailors from those volunteering their services in the Piraeus, the port of Athens, or in other ports along the way.Footnote 18 Because volunteers faced no sanction against desertion and could find employers elsewhere, they could, and sometimes did, desert if they were not paid.Footnote 19
3. The Athenian Empire
Athens therefore had to pay its sailors. But doing so proved to be hugely expensive.Footnote 20 A sailor was normally paid 1 drachma per day.Footnote 21 This was the same as the misthos of a skilled labourer or a hoplite.Footnote 22 There were 200 sailors on a trireme and so it cost 6,000 drachmas (that is, 1 talent) per month to keep it at sea.Footnote 23 This meant that Athens had to spend hundreds of talents to send out even a fraction of its fleet for the regular sailing season of eight months. In the Persian War of 480–479 bc the Athenians resorted to emergency measures to pay for their fleet.Footnote 24 But in order to keep on using it they had to find an adequate source of public finance. This they did in 478, when Ionia's Greeks invited them to lead the ongoing war against Persia.Footnote 25 The multilateral alliance which Athens subsequently established is known as the Delian League.Footnote 26 So that it could finance their naval operations, league members adopted the Persian method for funding war: most members promised to pay an agreed amount of phoros each year. In most cases, what each polis paid was the same as the annual tax that it had paid to Persia.Footnote 27 These tribute payments added up to 460 talents per annum.Footnote 28
In its first decades the Delian League campaigned non-stop to expel Persians from harbours across the Aegean Sea, to destroy Persia's fleet, and to liberate Ionia's poleis.Footnote 29 At the same time, Athens started to undermine the independence of league members, who, by 450, were subject to laws of the Athenian dēmos and had long been forcefully prevented from seceding from what was now the Athenian Empire.Footnote 30 Imperial income allowed Athens to employ thousands of elite and non-elite Athenians as sailors and hoplites.Footnote 31 It could now run campaigns which lasted months or, in the case of sieges, up to a few years. With phoros the Athenians could wage war more frequently than ever before and could pioneer new forms of warfare on land and at sea. Athens became, for example, the Greek world's leading sea power and its leading besieger of cities.Footnote 32 Now it was widely recognized that war relied on public finance.Footnote 33 Athenian politicians argued that their state's dunamis (‘military power’) depended on warships, fortifications, and especially money.Footnote 34 Pericles even argued that Athens would win the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 because its public finances were so much stronger than Sparta's.Footnote 35
4. The Peloponnesian War
In spite of this financial strength Athens still found the Peloponnesian War ruinously expensive. Its first ten years were called the Archidamian War. On it the Athenian dēmos spent an average of 1,500 talents per year.Footnote 36 This was fifteen times more than what they spent on state religion and ten times more than on running their democracy.Footnote 37 Because it also exceeded their state's annual income of 1,000 talents,Footnote 38 the dēmos had to find extra funds urgently. In 428 the eisphora which they levied raised the unprecedented sum of 200 talents.Footnote 39 The eisphora was an intermittent tax on the elite's property to pay for a war.Footnote 40 Three years later, the Athenians trebled the phoros of their imperial subjects to 1,200 talents.Footnote 41 Despite these public-finance measures, by 421, when Athens won the Archidamian War, it had exhausted its cash reserves of 6,000 talents.Footnote 42
The Peace of Nicias of 421–416 saw these cash reserves quickly restored.Footnote 43 Sparta had long been Greece's dominant land power, because its hoplites, as full-time professionals, fought much better than its enemies, and because it could force its allies to provide further hoplites for its wars without the need to pay them. But the enormous army which Sparta could raise proved ineffective against Athens, for whenever, in the course of the Peloponnesian War, it entered Athenian territory, the Athenians simply withdrew within their fortifications, imported food supplies by sea and waited for their enemies to leave.Footnote 44 Now the Spartans realized that they could only defeat Athens if they became a major sea power.Footnote 45 But to become one they too had to find a way to meet a fleet's astronomical costs.
Sparta found a solution in 412, after the destruction of the enormous expedition which Athens had sent to conquer Sicily. Persia saw this destruction as the best opportunity in decades to get rid of the Athenian Empire. In exchange for regaining the right to levy phoros on Ionia's Greeks, it thus provided Sparta with enough gold to build and maintain a fleet.Footnote 46 In the course of the Ionian War (the name for the Peloponnesian War's last phase), this Spartan fleet came in time to surpass what was left of the Athenian fleet.Footnote 47 In 405 Sparta easily destroyed the last of the Athenian triremes in the Dardanelles and so was able to force the surrender of Athens by a land and sea blockade.Footnote 48 With its full control of the Aegean Sea it subjugated the last of the poleis which supported Athens and so brought the Athenian Empire to an end.
5. The Corinthian War
In Greece's next ten-year war, Persia's financial support was again decisive. The Corinthian War, which started in 395, took its name from the battles which were fought around Corinth. This war pitted Sparta against three of its former allies – Argos, Corinth, and Thebes – who were now allied with Athens. Initially the Great King, Artaxerxes II, funded this anti-Spartan alliance,Footnote 49 because the Spartans had abandoned the treaty which they had struck with him during the Ionian War.Footnote 50 Instead of letting him levy phoros on Ionia's Greeks, the Spartans were now fighting him for control of them. Athens used Persia's gold to rebuild its fortifications and its fleet.Footnote 51 With these triremes it attempted to re-establish the Athenian Empire.Footnote 52 Athens was now forcing Greek poleis in Ionia and the Dardanelles to be its subjects again.Footnote 53 The Athenians reimposed the 5 per cent tax on their maritime trade,Footnote 54 which it had first introduced in 413.Footnote 55 It also reimposed another public-finance measure which dated back to the Ionian War: the 10 per cent tax on merchant ships passing through the Dardanelles.Footnote 56
These Athenian actions were manifestly at Persia's expense. By the early 380s Athens was even backing revolts against the Persian Empire in Cyprus and Egypt.Footnote 57 Artaxerxes II thus realized that by helping Athens to fight Sparta he was fighting fire with fire: the Athenians were now a bigger threat to his empire than the Spartans would be. He therefore agreed to support Sparta financially as long as he got complete control of Ionia's Greeks.Footnote 58 With Persia's financial support the Spartans quickly assembled and manned eighty warships and sailed to the Dardanelles, where they stopped the grain ships sailing to Athens.Footnote 59 This action brought the Corinthian War to a speedy end: the Athenian dēmos feared being starved into submission as they had been in 405. Consequently, when Persia summoned to Sardis all those who wished to hear the general peace treaty which its king wanted, the ambassadors of both Sparta and the anti-Spartan alliance arrived with flattering speed.Footnote 60
6. The Second Athenian League
The King's Peace of 386 scuttled the attempt of Athens to rebuild its empire. Ionia's poleis, which had been this empire's largest group, were again, after a century, Persian subjects.Footnote 61 The peace treaty also stipulated that the other Greek poleis must be autonomous. This meant that the Athenian dēmos could no longer force other states into dependent international relations. Artaxerxes promised that he ‘would make war both by land and sea, and with ships and with money’ against any polis which broke these terms. Worse still, he let Sparta use the autonomy clause as an excuse to attack other poleis or to ignore the clause altogether.Footnote 62 In the face of this resurgent Sparta, Athens had to find new allies as a matter of urgency. It took the Athenian dēmos several years to work out just how to do this: they would invite other states to join a multilateral alliance which respected the King's Peace.Footnote 63 This alliance is known as the Second Athenian League. Athens promised league members that it would not interfere in their politics nor make them pay phoros.Footnote 64 By 378 the Athenians judged that this league was sufficiently large to resume full-scale war against Sparta.
In the fifth century Athens had largely paid for its armed forces out of imperial income. But the King's Peace now ruled out this funding source. In order to support this new war the Athenian dēmos thus needed to reform public finances. In 378 they changed how the tax for war on elite property was collected.Footnote 65Eisphora-payers no longer paid individually; instead, they were placed into groups and the wealthiest three members of each paid for the whole group before collecting the tax from its other members.Footnote 66 This reform helped to ensure that funds for an expedition were always on hand for its departure. To the same end, by 373 the dēmos had established a dedicated fund to pay for war.Footnote 67 Before 350, any surplus of public income at the year's end was deposited into this stratiōtika or military fund.Footnote 68 Finally, in 373 Athens started asking league members to make suntaxeis (‘contributions’) to their joint expeditions.Footnote 69 During the Athenian Empire, the Athenians alone had complete control over the amount of phoros to be collected and how it was to be spent.Footnote 70 These suntaxeis were quite different. The Second Athenian League had an independent council of its members.Footnote 71 This council authorized the contribution amount which each polis paid and how the collected suntaxeis could be spent.Footnote 72 These contributions added up to around 60 talents per year.Footnote 73
In the 370s and the 360s Athens spent an average of 500 talents per year on its armed forces.Footnote 74 In spite of its public-finance reforms, this was often a struggle. Athenian generals were regularly sent out with insufficient funds and so had to raise more funds during their campaigns.Footnote 75 They met such shortfalls by, for example, drawing on the booty which they had captured, plundering the enemy's countryside, or forcing poleis outside the league and merchant ships to pay protection money.Footnote 76 Importantly, however, they could not treat such funds as their own private property, as the imperatores (‘commanders’) of the Roman Republic would come to do.Footnote 77 Money so raised was judged to be public property.Footnote 78 The dēmos authorized its collection and usage either before a general departed or during his campaign.Footnote 79 On his return, he had to submit an account of what he had raised in the field and to hand over any surplus to the state.Footnote 80 In the fourth century, Athenian generals were widely recognized for their expertise in raising such funds on campaign.Footnote 81
7. The rise of the hellenistic kingdoms
These different funding sources enabled the Athenians to become a major military power.Footnote 82 They could thus continue fighting Sparta successfully until the Thebans ended the Spartan hegemony of Greece at the Battle of Leuctra in 371. For the next three decades the Athenians were able to keep enemies well away from their territory and to launch the fleets that were required to protect their shipping lines through the Dardanelles, which were vital for their grain supply.Footnote 83 Athens was once again recognized as Greece's leading sea power.Footnote 84 Yet, in spite of this renewed military success, public finances were not strong enough to stop the rise of Philip II. In just twenty years this king turned Macedonia into a major military power and then, with his victory at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338, into Greece's new hegemon.Footnote 85
Certainly this rise had a lot to do with Philip's military innovations. He introduced an unrivalled training programme for the Macedonian army.Footnote 86 He employed vast numbers of non-Macedonian hoplites, horsemen, and peltasts as mercenaries.Footnote 87 By investing in siege engines, he came to surpass Athens as a besieger of cities.Footnote 88 But what made this military pioneering possible was his careful building up of Macedonia's public finances.Footnote 89 Phillip fully exploited the mineral resources of his expanding state.Footnote 90 When, for example, he captured Mount Pangaeum in 356, he massively expanded its gold mines.Footnote 91 This mining alone earned him 1,000 talents per year. As this king incorporated new territories into Macedonia he also broadened its tax base by requiring their elites to pay eisphorai on their private property.Footnote 92
His son, Alexander the Great, by contrast, grew less concerned about public finances as he conquered the Persian Empire; for plunder, he found, easily paid for his army.Footnote 93 Initially the diadochoi (‘successors’), who, after Alexander's death in 323, fought over his conquests, found the same. But in time they too had to manage their public finances carefully.Footnote 94 The Ptolemies thus introduced a 10 per cent tax on Egyptian agriculture. In Ionia and beyond, the Seleucids maintained the phoros of the Persians, while the Antigonids built on what Philip II had done in Macedonia. Such public-finance reforms enabled the hellenistic kingdoms to raise the scale of Greek warfare significantly.Footnote 95 At the Battle of Gaza, for example, in 217, the armies of Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV, which were mainly composed of mercenaries, totalled 140,000.Footnote 96 This was several times greater than the armies that Athens and Sparta had ever put into the field against each other. War for dominance in the ancient Greek world had now moved decisively beyond its poleis.
