Introduction

This collection derives from a conference panel organized by the Working Group on Athenian Hegemony. I founded this initiative as an effort to reinvigorate work on Attic classical expansionism, “imperialism,” and hegemonism. [1] We are a group of scholars who are attempting to investigate Athenian alliances, foreign policy, “imperialism,” and interstate outreach in an independent spirit, having renounced any preemptive allegiance to past interpretative schools. Our group has tried to encourage dialogue between senior scholars, each of whom may be striving to create their own new paradigm, to bring into contact with each other mid-career scholars (previously working on these issues in isolation), and to attract into the investigation of classical power politics early-career scholars (some of whom have worked with me in various guises). All of us have often been faced with a daunting scholarly history and previous intemperate contestation that has surrounded many aspects of what was erroneously called the “Athenian Empire.” Our inaugural meeting, which was organized and chaired by Sean R. Jensen and myself, took place in July 2010 at the University of Edinburgh, and was devoted to “Athenian Hegemonic Techniques.” [2] The papers given at this panel became a collection called Athenian Hegemonic Finances. Funding Athenian Domination in the 5th and 4th Centuries BC (2019). [3] For another discussion that explores some of the ideas lying behind the Working Group, see also S. R. Jensen’s “Introduction” to Hegemonic Finances (pp. ix–xx).

Thereafter, Aaron Herskowitz and Michael McGlin have ably undertaken leadership roles. They have described themselves to me as motivated by the lack of programming about Attic hegemony in other venues like the Society for Classical Studies. They started by co-organizing the sessions that included the papers of this collection among other presentations. These contributions derive from a panel “Local Effects of the Athenian Arkhē” in July 2017 in Montreal. [4] Our next meeting was delayed a year by the pandemic but was held in Coimbra in June 2021. [5] Hershkowitz, McGlin, and I again co-organized. Our papers then were devoted to “Classical Athenian Statesmanship and the Specter of Demagogy.” Our call for papers for the Montreal panel adumbrates some of the themes that are covered in the selection of papers that appear in the present collection:

This is naturally a very wide ambit to which it would take quite a few meetings and collections to mark even a start, but it is, nevertheless, worth noting in order to explain the spirit in which our Working Group has been operating.

In the first place, it is unsurprising that the acme of Athenian democracy, while it has consistently inspired awe for literary and its artistic accomplishments, has found tougher critics for its foreign policies in settings where modern democracy has found so few friends. [7] Sparta often proved the more acceptable model to the temperament of “republicans.” [8] Thus, perhaps we must conclude that any analysis at all with the potential for pro-democratic discourse in ancient history is rather a fragile and recent phenomenon. We may invoke, but then must set aside, at least partially, British liberals like George Grote (the first edition of his history was 1846–1856) [9] and Edward Bulwer Lytton (and their American admirers). [10] The more recent nineteenth- and twentieth-century discovery of documentary evidence in the form of inscriptions placed a line of division between these authors and modern analysis. Despite our lives in democratic and supposedly meritocratic societies, even public universities in America have tended ever more toward elitism over the period of my professional career, so that oligarchy may resonate quietly, but suggestively, in the scholarly submind. [11]

In that light, let me now turn to setting the papers that follow in the broadest scholarly framework. [12] I make no apologies for the personal tone of some of my remarks, since I believe that lived experience of this research may well be revealing to younger scholars. At the beginning of the [Second] Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, “Athens and her allies” constituted the largest power bloc ever assembled by a polis. Twice in his opening chapters (1.1, 1.18), Thucydides emphasizes that the conflict between Athens and Sparta encompassed the entire Greek world. It is neither surprising nor incongruous, then, that much of the scholarship devoted to the Athenian arkhē focuses on interstate relations, both within the two great alliances and between them: one thinks again of The Athenian Tribute Lists [13] and Jacqueline de Romilly’s Thucydide et l’impérialisme athénien (Paris 1948). Next, after a short generation’s life, there appeared Russell Meiggs’ Athenian Empire (Oxford 1972) and Wolfgang Schuller’s Die Herrschaft der Athener im Ersten Attischen Seebund (Berlin 1974), [14] as well as G. E. M. de Ste. Croix 1972 (about all of which there will be more below).

In general, our methodology differs (1) by integrating administrative history and the influences wielded by procedural efficiencies and habits of management; (2) by refocusing attention on economic factors that were evolving autonomously from policy decisions; (3) by emphasizing that so large a structure as the Delian League and Athenian network of alliances cannot have been dominated by a unanimity of treatment or by simple rules of thumb; (4) by recognizing the universality of conceptual systems of self-understanding (which sometimes qualify as ideology in their closure, systematic articulation, and claims to exclusive explanatory power [15] ); and (5) by a persistent emphasis on reading closely classical texts, both in a fully contextualized mode and with continual interrogation of the genealogy of transmission of material by sources.

We should always be striving to move beyond earlier paradigms, which, even if some might protest their description as outmoded, do still inhibit us from exploiting the lessons of the foreign affairs of over two generations of human experience. Thus, it is appropriate to cast our gaze backwards to these earlier constructs. The ATL outlook on what might be denominated “power politics” attributed a reductive instrumentalism to Athenian policy. H. T. Wade-Gery’s study of 1940 (reprinted in 1958) on the Peace of Kallias laid an important part of the foundation for the ATL reconstruction of fifth-century Athenian foreign policy, which I have judged misguided, [16] as did the views of A. B. West noted below. Nonetheless, the overall style of analysis of Athenian hegemonism in the ATL perhaps also reflected North American suspicions toward the nineteenth-century “great game” of European colonial powers, that was accompanied by manipulations of national sentiment by competing states. There may well have been naivety here as well, in which national character or, perhaps better, modern cultural self-understanding, was under-appreciated as a genuine driver of policy choices. Furthermore, the documentary interpretations of the ATL brought into high relief the evolution of our appreciation of epigraphical investigation as opening pathways to historical interpretations. As to the contributions of Wade-Gery, one may suspect that a social ambience of disdain for the populism of Attic dēmokratia may have rendered this legitimately acute British historian [17] rather more susceptible to following the lead of the hyperactive spirit of Benjamin Dean Meritt (himself building on West) in distilling insights out of inscriptions. Wade-Gery stood in the tradition of British historians of Classical Athenian history who were both politically left of center and thoroughly elitist in social association. [18]

The subsequent discussion was marked by the personal vicissitudes of the early careers and later history of the ATL authors. A. B. West was undoubtedly brilliant, one of the first American Rhodes Scholars (1886–1936). [19] Potentially he had years of active scholarship before him when killed in an automobile accident in 1936. He had already given initial shape to the epigraphy of the ATL, and through it to our understanding of fifth-century Athenian foreign policy. [20] Given the weight of that previous scholarship, one would doubt whether he could have led a paradigm change against his earlier stands. [21] Meritt’s long career (1899–1989) [22] had many years of active contestation ahead after the publication of ATL, in which he defended his scholarship on Athenian imperialism vigorously. [23] So too did Malcolm MacGregor, a student of West and younger man than Meritt by a decade, who continued to engage in scholarly debate over the fifth-century Athenian arkhē, although scarcely with the vigor and originality of Meritt. [24]

In advancing my assessment, I shall have to add some disclaimers, because now I must confront the topic of the intensity of struggles among epigraphists. I was not involved greatly in scholarly controversy with the surviving principal actors on the ATL side, Meritt, [25] and McGregor. [26] My work on Aigina was not aligned with ATL canons. However, my picture of Athens and Aigina with different political, ideological, and socioeconomic structures disequilibrating and re-equilibrating under the influence of stressors and dynamic agents was not easily decoded for its impact on debates over the arkhē. My monographs of 1991 and 1993 appeared too late to have an impact on the main early disputants. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the vehemence of these epigraphical conflicts repressed later serious study of the arkhē in North America, and this internecine denigration did permanent damage to the research, study, and teaching of epigraphy in the United States. [27] The looming figure of Meritt was doubtless a factor, magnified by the auctoritas and patronage of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (IAS), by his importance at the American School of Classical Studies (with influence at the Agora Excavations and with publishing in Hesperia); and finally by his international honors. I cannot offer here even a thumbnail sketch, but I shall proffer four vignettes.

The graduate school at Penn was soliciting applications for a conference designed by graduate students. I suggested to Jameson a conference on fifth-century Attic imperialism. [28] He rejected this as a bad idea: it could never be organized without offending some of the scholarly adversaries, and it would devolve into rows over letter-forms, especially the three-barred sigma. Rather than enhancing my profile professionally, senior figures would become hostile to me. Staying aloof from these arguments was good advice then, even better in retrospective.

A second observation I offer not for its truth but for its illustration of sentiments and positions held contemporaneously about the conflict over Attic epigraphy. There came into my hands briefly in the 1980s a letter written by two principals to these controversies (they were eminent scholars, not elsewhere named in this piece). This document was an indictment of Meritt from its author, who sought confirmation of various statements previously shared with its recipient. I have no knowledge of the factuality of these accusations. Yet, on the basis of over forty years of experience of university disciplinary proceedings at Rutgers, [29] I shall observe that the author claimed infliction of tortious harms on colleagues and the commission of actions probably subject to academic discipline.

This indicium of the acrimony of these scholarly disagreements can be paralleled in another exchange. The chief opponent of Meritt on the Athenian calendar and on the hypothetical missing tribute list was William Kendrick Pritchett of the University of California at Berkeley (1909–2007), who answered Meritt’s work of 1961 on issues calendric with his work of 1963. It was countered by McGregor 1966, which not only contains a sustained discussion of the issues, but remarks on Pritchett’s work (p. 213): “It is an extraordinary performance: savage in its attacks on Meritt, of little value as a contribution to epigraphic and calendric scholarship, dangerous in much of its doctrine, it will delight the sadistic, convince the gullible, and deceive the innocent. Because many who use the products of epigraphic research are innocent so far as its methods and intricacies are concerned and because a new generation is producing young historians and epigraphists, this book merits a somewhat lengthy judgement and a firm sentence.” [30] Must we admit this response as just as toxic and rather chilling toward those thinking of joining the debate?

During my Fulbright year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1976–1977, I had the great good fortune to have as the visiting professors two very eminent epigraphists and historians, Antony E. Raubitschek (1912–1999) [31] and W. K. Pritchett himself. [32] Both men taught me to my great advantage, and to different extents became supporters of my work. [33] Just before starting the seminars, someone warned of an inevitable outburst. Early on, Raubitschek prudently asked us not to discuss academic interchanges in his seminar outside our number. Pritchett soldiered on without comment until one day, almost without a trigger, he burst into a short squall of denunciation of Raubitschek. It was almost too painful for a listener to endure this self-subversive animus. Recall that these were two senior scholars who stood at the pinnacle of classical studies, with so many accomplishments, including professorships at leading institutions. Raubitschek had been an opponent of the Nazis in his native Vienna before the Anschluss; Pritchett had served with distinction in World War II (participating in the Nuremberg trials). Although Pritchett came off the worse, I must insist that this interplay shows how Greek epigraphy in America was to a real extent profoundly perturbed.

Nonetheless, the synthesis of the Athenian Tribute Lists was the ruling interpretation of the second half of the twentieth century. Meritt’s tendency to lead with epigraphical restoration affected the contribution of the ATL and has deserved interpretative correction. Yet, on a macroscopic scale we now hesitate in the midst of any expectation that epigraphical discoveries will likely answer just those questions that we most want to have addressed—I think here of the discoveries regarding Athenian monetary policy—rather than pose even further, previously unimagined, questions. And, on a focused level of restoration or emendation, we shrink from efforts to make lost text that has been adjusted through supplementation clarify the specific enigmas for which we have sought answers in the parts of inscriptions that have survived. The received views were shaped by midcentury struggles against Nazi, Fascist, and Soviet expansionism against a backdrop of growing unease about the European and American colonial systems. Subsequent modulation occurred under the influence of later twentieth-century anti-communism and anti-anti-communism. This scholarship took on additional deformation when its interpretative keys became subordinated to the single issue of the chronology of use of forms of the letter sigma (through the flawed scholarship of H. B. Mattingly and the often unhelpful responses of his detractors). The ongoing challenge is to move beyond these contextual constraints and free our analysis from the assumption that “vindication” of Mattingly provided the keys to a kingdom of understanding.

The study of Athenian hegemonism was affected by these disputes even among ancient historians. I speak of the 1970s and 1980s, which were marked by the tailing off of the “baby-boom” years, and with that came the economic decline of the professoriate in the Humanities and Social Sciences (which has never truly been reversed). The two leading separate graduate programs in ancient history were Pennsylvania [34] and Berkeley, [35] which show among their Greek historians a tendency to concentrate on other fields than the phoros system and instruments of hegemony. In part, this was owed to the turning of focus toward social history, including work in demographics, economic structure, servile systems, cultural history, women’s history, and gender and sexuality. Naturally, these were positive reorientations, but notably sidestepping what was called Athenian “imperialism.” Even the exception is corroborative. Donald Kagan, whose historical studies on the Peloponnesian War have been so influential, [36] was another great mentor of this period, initially at Cornell and then at Yale. [37] The concentration of his supervision illuminated diplomacy; the causes of war and peace, with their basis in factionalism; the constitutional and ideological aspects of struggles for hegemony; and military history. Kagan’s histories of the Peloponnesian War have naturally been an influential treatment for American scholars of various degrees of engagement with its period. However, they are perhaps surprisingly somewhat tangential even regarding many of the issues affecting the pre-war hegemony.

The German academic influence in graduate education in the Classics, which had been so influential in the nineteenth century, weakened under the effects of the world wars. Therefore, the “Greats” (Litterae Humaniores) curriculum of Oxford assumed and continued to have a disproportionate impact on American supervision of research. [38] On the graduate as well as the undergraduate level, the subjects of Oxford tutorial papers, as reflected in later examination questions, possessed a surprisingly enduring sway over the subjects of papers, exam questions in the United States, and topics for student inquiry. This doubtless magnified the lasting authority of ATL over the study of classical Athens here. That is because the findings of ATL were elaborated by influential Oxford scholars such as Antony Andrewes, [39] David M. Lewis, [40] and Russell Meiggs, [41] and with a next cohort, [42] for example, of Peter J. Rhodes [43] and John Kenyon Davies. [44] Was this scholarship marked both by socialist/social democratic inclinations (as noted above) [45] and simultaneously a touch of suspicion for any heightened demotic/populist participation, whose center of gravity seemed so non-elite? All of these scholars were too learned, too incisive in their analyses to conform to any interpretative straitjacket, so that in their hands there was always valuable extension, amendment, and supplementation of interpretative vectors. The lived humanistic spirit of all these men in my experience (although my familiarity varied in intensity with the degree of my interaction) made them proof against destructive ideological deflection in their scholarly dialogue, although their essentially Labourite affiliations or context did touch their scholarship. Let me reiterate that a straitjacket for analysis was not the issue, but an ideological ambiance that prevailed in the absence of a countervailing philosophy from the right in opposition. [46]

Geoffrey de Ste. Croix was another influential figure, who belongs with my earlier generation above (being born in 1910) of interpreters of Attic hegemonic affairs. He was avowedly Marxist, which drove a stronger sympathy in favor of Athenian policy, as in his most important work, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London 1972), [47] which creatively diverged from the ATL (cf. 3.303–325). The emergence of a general discontent within and without the Athenian alliance over the tenor of Athenian leadership had received ample airing in the ATL, especially in the mouths of the Spartans and Corinthians (and other adherents of their cause). Yet, amid the ATL efforts to account for this development, its approach had necessarily deviated markedly from a direct reading of Thucydides. And its problematic features had found for the most part no happy footing in his text. In Origins, Croix disestablished the Megarian Decree as an alternative foundation for a causation of the Peloponnesian War, an interpretation that worked at counter-point to the Thucydidean narrative, albeit with a significant degree of over-compensation in his argument. The reception of this work is most interesting for the state of studies in its time on Athenian hegemonism: people trod very carefully and perhaps with self-censorship. Origins received eighteen reviews (quite a respectable number), of which fourteen notably were in English. [48] His mainly favorable British reviewers were not the principal authorities on Athenian “imperial” policy. [49] An exception was Smart, writing in America, who raised the chronological/letter-form controversies, strongly on the side of Mattingly, and was mainly negative. [50] Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, the most visible venue in the Britosphere, George Forrest produced a meaty and salient appraisal, and it is noteworthy that he reviewed Croix’ work and Meiggs’ Empire along with it. [51] Forrest started amusingly with a lament for the plight of a fifth-century Greek historian going about his daily routine in Oxfordshire, who has the 1,000 pages of these books dropped on him. He urged accepting both books’ arguments wholeheartedly with Meiggs preferred earlier in the fifth century and Croix later. In the main, American scholars were markedly negative. [52] Two long reviews by outsiders to these debates raised many significant points: Willem den Boer alone introduced the issue of Croix’ Marxism, and the dense analysis of Detlef Lotze might profitably be read against the background of a divided Germany. [53] Croix had earlier started a major debate by arguing for the devotion of the dēmoi of the allied to Attic hegemony (Croix 1954/55). This approach was a notable corrective gambit, although I doubt whether it is across a scale of popularity that one should look to gauge the underlying phenomenon. This article sparked strong reactions from D. W. Bradeen (1960), and T. J. Quinn (1964). [54] This topic deserves reconsideration in working toward more sophisticated ideas on public feeling and foreign policy. [55]

Toward the last years of the proceeding century, I might sum up the state of analytic overviews of fifth-century Attic hegemony with the remark of T. W. Gallant that closed a thoughtful and supportive review of Figueira 1991: “a … volume that scholars of ancient Greek colonization and the Athenian empire—but few others—will turn to profitably” (Gallant 1992:1495). At one time, the vast majority of ancient Greek historians had been in some real sense scholars of the Athenian “empire.” I would also note the self-restraint of Ernst Badian, who would certainly qualify not only as one of the most prominent of ancient historians of the late twentieth century but as a notably original thinker. His collection of pieces (1993) was modest in its polemical claims, [56] although there is certainly real divergence here from ATL orthodoxy. I knew from Ernst at this time that he was quite shy of paradigmatic claims for this work. [57]

Yet, shifts in our general understanding did march forward in diverse areas: on finance (Schmitz 1988; Blamire 2001); the Attic alliance and the Peloponnesians in the Kimonian era (Steinbecher 1985), awards of proxeny and privileges (Reiter 1991), adjudication (Koch 1991), autonomy (Smarcyzk 1986), the cleruchies (Salomon 1997), and religious practices for both Athens and her dependent allies alike (Smarcyzk 1990). This development was promoted by impetus provided by doctoral candidates searching for dissertation topics (and in Germany topics for Habilitatschriften).

As to identifying the point of inflection at which the present era of studies on the Athenian arkhē began, opinions diverge. Some would point to the publication of the results of the experiment to examine the Egesta inscription by laser illumination. This seemed to establish a breach of the date for the desuetude of the three-barred sigma, dating the treaty to 418/7, although this redating has still been questioned or simply rejected. [58] I have written at length on this question and Mattingly’s overall view of the arkhē so that I limit myself here. [59] This experiment may have proved that Mattingly happened to be right, not that he was right in observation. If such an application of high technology were necessary, he and the other examiners of the stone could hardly have reached their results through autopsy. It is odd that an inscription that had already been widely believed late, and one that hardly constituted crucial evidence for Attic foreign policy, has been accorded such gravity. Athenian interests in West Greece had been well established as quite early. Mattingly’s general approach depended in large part on noting similarities of formula and phrasing. This method has questionable force in demonstration, where so little has survived, where individual styles of the drafters of legislation clearly differed, where the formulaic character and repetition of enactments on the same matter were factors, and where the postulated differentia cannot be corroborated from literary prose. Although admirers of Mattingly sometimes condemn his critics as “philological,” his scholarship has been lacking historiographically: not only does he require Thucydides as an obtuse, lacunose, and ultimately perverse historian, but also that the Attic local history (the Atthidography so visible in Plutarch’s biographies) would have to be significantly questioned or discarded. [60]

This is not the proper venue to adjudicate the successes of efforts to exploit the redating of the Egesta Decree, and the accordance of greater latitude in dating by letter forms. It has had a liberating effect not only in chronology, but also in practical research, in part quite justifiably. However, some recent work has rather cavalierly treated the weakening of the three-barred sigma “rule” as a “get out of jail free card” in order to read less systematically in earlier literature. The state of these inquiries can be gauged from two collections. One is Ma, Papazarkadas, and Parker 2009. I find here much traditional scholarship, mainly expert but without showing any significant impact of the breaching of the three-barred sigma taboo or Mattingly’s scholarship. [61] Even Ma himself depends on Achaemenid and Hellenistic history to note an Athenian application of a “surrender-and-grant” strategy (pp. 125–148). Not only am I reluctant to find here an explanation of late fifth-century grants of autonomy, but the specific application to Karpathos—despite interesting commentary—seems strained, merely a rephrasing of the discredited “divide and conquer” interpretation of the arkhē. The short and enlightening piece of Kroll on coinage (pp. 223–230) belongs truly to the new realm of discourse that I shall sketch below.

The second collection is Mattingly’s Festschrift (drawing on a conference of 2010 at the British School in Athens), which appeared (Matthaiou and Pitt 2014) at a significant remove from the new findings on the Egesta decree. It does indeed provide indications of the impact of the epigraphical “discoveries” of 1990s. The celebrants number nineteen (being joined by Mattingly himself). Two of the contributors addressed literary historigraphical subjects. [62] Others dealt with various topics in Greek history without impact on redating and Attic imperialism. [63] A majority of epigraphical discussions, however sound and valuable, do not cover inscriptions affected by Mattingly’s views on letter forms, chronology, and imperialism. [64] Bjorn Paarmann does indirectly support a date of 426/5 for IG I³ 21 (espoused by Mattingly and others), regulations for Miletos with a three-barred sigma, by arguing that the first tribute-list contains evidence for Milesian phoros payment. [65] More assertive is a contribution of Akiko Moroo reviving a later dating (abandoned by Mattingly himself) of the Erythrai decrees (IG I³ 14–16) , in the second half of the 430s. [66] However, another offering here on IG I³ 14 does not dispute the 450s dating of “most scholars.” [67] A more substantial piece is Papazarkadas 2014, making a case for dating the Sigeion decree (IG I³ 17) to the end of the fifth century amid the Ionian War. So little late fifth-century context on Sigeion renders several reconstructions feasible. Yet even in so fragmentary a document an objection could be raised against dating during the Ionian War. This redating is not consequential for understanding Attic hegemonism. [68]

Put it down to vanity (if only in part) when I find a turning point in a series of works that delved wholeheartedly into the various mechanisms that lay at the core of the arkhē in the nature, protocols, and policies of movements of material goods. I class here my monograph on monetary affairs of 1998, and the works of two important interlocutors, Loren Samons and Lisa Kallet. Samons tackled the evolution of Attic treasuries in a necessarily far-ranging work (2000), which culminated a series of tightly focused studies, and his research then widened into an appraisal of Periklean policies. [69] Lisa Kallet has offered monographs tracing Athenian finances during the Peloponnesian War, while weighing in thoughtfully on the antecedent fiscal issues of hegemony. [70] Naturally, I have considerable disagreements with my colleagues. Their research, however, does confront for the Athenian arkhē the central question, in Lenin’s formulation, of “who, whom?” Imperialism is systemized exploitation, which in societies near subsistence must be fundamentally material, however closely we must also watch transfers of symbolic goods. [71]

Now let me briefly describe the contributions contained below. Our first set of papers address ideological issues, as broadly construed. David Teegarden in Chapter One opens new ground on Athens as a champion of democracy with his discussion whether the Athenians promoted anti-tyrannical fervor as a means to suppress pro-Persian activism. The focus is on the Attic tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeition, whose statues appear on an electrum stater from Kyzikos, and what this might mean for allied knowledge of and sympathy for the tyrannicides. He then turns to the Erythrai Decree, where the formulation ‘tyrants’ (as opposed to references to a ‘tyrant’ in antityrannical legislation) is significant. He also notes the promotion of the tyrannicides at the Panathenaia and City Dionysia for its possible impact on the allies. Finally, a small group of vases celebrating the tyrannicides is explored on this issue. While minimizing readings of this evidence are possible, Teegarden inclines toward deliberate Athenian policy, which, for one thing, advanced anti-tyrannism and democracy.

In Chapter Two, Hilary J. C. Lehmann, “Lessons from Home: Remembering the Arkhē in Fourth Century Oratory,” offers a retrospective view of the Athenian arkhē from fourth-century Athenian rhetoric. She focuses on the dueling speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines on the “false” embassy to Philip II of Macedon, and their pair of speeches disputing the propriety of the crowning of Demosthenes. Aeschines pits a more intimate concept of ‘home’—oikos, centered on familial experience—against Demosthenes’ invocation of the glorious fifth-century arkhē as a common patrimony. The former’s risk-averse policy is more open to conceding hegemonic mistakes; while, for the latter, the glories of ancestral, storied accomplishments beg for emulation.

Chapter Three is “My Fair Lady: Exploring Social Change through Athenian Vase-Painting in the Fifth Century BCE.” Here, in a well-illustrated essay, Danielle Smotherman Bennet uses the evolution in vase-painting of subject matter over the course of the fifth century to explore effects of the arkhē on the role of women in Attic society. She argues that the influx of foreigners to Athens during the early portion of the polis’ dominance, and the consequent tightening of citizenship requirements by Perikles, led to the focalization of women as an important, indeed, a defining, portion of the Athenian dēmos. Smotherman Bennett shows that the depiction of women on vases, including on vases clearly meant for consumption by women, increased markedly during the fifth century, as did depictions specifically of women carrying out duties for the family and the polis, such as wool-working, playing music, marrying, and child-rearing. These images of domestication in their very increase may manifest sociopolitical pressures on Athenian women for marriage and childbirth; thus, their newfound and elevated economic profile may accompany the responsibility of living up to the messaging of these depictions. Was the binary Attic woman / Athenian male citizen (thinking of the tradition on origins of gender roles passed down to us by Varro) yielding space to a new binary Athenian woman/subject (hypēkoos) person?

Four of our papers consider the basic metabolism of Attic hegemony in that they deal with financing of military activities and the assets that could be deployed for applying power. In Chapter Four Brian Rutishauser conducts a case study on the special relationship between Athens and one of its allies, Corcyra. He argues that Corcyra holds an unusual status as a sort of half-ally, not entirely a member of the arkhē in the sense either of paying tribute or of being inextricably linked to Athens, but whose resources played a role in Attic military establishment from the eve of the war. Even in an environment of limited evidence, important conclusions emerge about the state of the Corcyrean military establishment. Rutishauser presents Corcyra’s complicated relationship with Athens as an important reminder that the relationships in the arkhē were always bilateral and necessarily fluid and urges the importance of considering what various poleis received, or perceived themselves as receiving, from participation in this interstate arrangement.

In “Loans from Attic Temples to the State” (Chapter Five), Michael McGlin hones in on Athenian finances during the Archidamian War in order to provide an analysis of the epigraphical evidence (presented here systematically) for loans from the Treasury of the Other Gods, which he juxtaposes with loans from the cult of Athena Polias. He then turns to the cult of Artemis Agrotera to explain the particular role of this specific treasury, with its monetary dedications from spoils taken from enemies. Its loans illustrate a cycle in which past military success subvened current military activity against the Peloponnesians, and such loans were in expectation of still further future dedications. The ebb and flow of temple reserves acted symbolically as a signifier of military potential to which other flows of resources had to react, such as the tribute assessments levied upon Athenian allies.

In Chapter Six, “Kleon and Tribute: Re-Examining the Import of Financial Expertise in Athenian Statesmanship,” Aaron Hershkowitz discusses the “financial expertise” theory, which claims that Kleon and similar “demagogues” were qualified for leadership by the dēmos for their financial expertise that served the management of the Athenian cycle of revenue and expenditure. Hershkowitz shows that previously posited connections between Kleon and such financial measures as initiation of the eisphora tax and the engineering of the Kleonymos and Thoudippos decrees are unsupported by the evidence. As emerges from a close reading of Aristophanes, Hershkowitz’s portrait of Kleon is not that of a financial wizard, but that of a corrupt warmonger, gifted in opportunistically exploiting one or another aspect of public opinion. Thus, the allies of Athens faced a twofold challenge in maneuvering around self-interested or venal political actors and in divining and responding to general attitudes of the Athenians about their and allied finances.

In “The Membership of the Delian League” (Chapter Seven), I try to restore the investigation of the array of likely allies to center stage, after it had been considered nearly irrelevant for understanding the phoros system of the Delian League. A reconstruction of the roster of Athenian allies not only aids in an explanation of early Delian League finances (as well as the growth of the alliance), but also assists our understanding of the aggregative and fissioning forces that affected the configuration of allied spheres of influence during the fifth-century hegemony. The finding that phoros fell in the early alliance has wide ramifications, not only in context, but for the later alliance.