Coping with Chronic Warfare. The Athenian Experience

Abstract

In Classical Athens, being at war was much more common than peace. The military expenditures were correspondingly large. The real enigmatic issue, however, is not financial but where they found the manpower needed for this policy. The number of warships (triremes) was so great that there is no way that the citizen could have dominated in the crews. The main source is likely the non-citizen, free population of Attica. Slaves, one the other hand, would have been very popular as rowers during the final phase of the Peloponnesian war, but not necessarily before. The manpower losses in connection with naval conflicts must have had a significant impact on Athenian society in several ways. We discuss three examples: the switch from ostracism to the graphe paranomon, the new law on citizenship under Perikles, and why the Athenian Assembly put the victorious generals on trial after the victory at Arginoussai.

A Brief Overview of the Political Economy of Ancient Greek Polis and Demokratia

“…More specifically, the emergence of the particular organisation of military combat as a hoplite phalanx is studied in Economou and Kyriazis (2019, p. 12-43). The role and cost of war in classical Athens were effectively both very significant (Lyttkens and Gerding, 2022), and having to make decisions about war and peace may justify the emergence of a process to handle social choice (Economou and Kyriazis, 2016). In archaic Athens, some laws addressed social conflict, and Schwuchow and Tridimas (2022) examine the optimality of one of Solon's laws, which prescribed that in the case of stasis, one had to pick a side.…”

Choice of slavery institutions in Ancient Greece: Athenian chattels and Spartan helots

“… 11 According to Hunt (2018), even though ancient authors tended to downplay their importance during the Classical period, expansion of warfare increased needs for manpower resulting in the recruitment of slaves, both in Athens and Sparta. Lyttkens and Gerding (2022) survey the literature on whether slaves were used as rowers in the Athenian mighty navy, or citizens and mercenaries were sufficiently numerous to man the fleet. As the information available is sparse, the argument is finely balanced, but they conclude that there was no widespread use of slaves as rowers.…”