Interlude: The Birth of Athenian Empire

The history of the Athenian empire is bedevilled by a set of intractable histori­cal problems. Its trajectory in short might be stated briefly:

In the aftermath of the Persian Wars (490-480 bce), Athens led thefoundation of a military alliance against Persia that we call the Hellenic League.

But virtually any detail that might flesh out this generalised two-sentence history could be contested. For example, Athens provides the bulk of Greek epigraphy relevant to this history (and a great deal of the significant epigraphy of the later fifth century bce), and yet the documentary record of Athenian treaties and decisions of the Athenian assembly between 480 and the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 is sparse; the texts are fragmentary; and some aspects of their dating are unsettled. As a result of the preponderance of Athe­nian evidence, it is very difficult to assess the extent to which cities under Athenian domination merely paid tribute or whether their institutions (gradu­ally or abruptly) came into a condition of homeomorphy with Athenian ones - and where they did so, it is nearly always impossible to say whether this came about via a mimetic response to power, or was itself an expression of network power, or whether it was ordained by Athens itself. In other words, despite our ability to speak definitively about the fact of Athenian empire, and fairly com­prehensively about its effects on Athenian political culture, we are very far from being able to describe its form qua imperial state, or its effects on, or its aspirations to effect, the political and institutional cultures of its subjects.^{[206] [207] [208]}

Nor can we easily reconstruct a political history of the process whereby this transformation from league to empire occurred, whether regards policy at Ath­ens or debate with allies.

An important exception to this pattern is the analysis of the Athenian sys­tem of government (politeia) attributed to Xenophon, which was likely written prior to the commencement of hostilities between Athens and Sparta and per­haps as early as late 440s bce. The text describes the Athenians as interfering in the public-law institutions of allied cities, and in particular as compelling allies â€?to sail to Athens for the courts’ (hoti tous symmaxous anangkazousi plein epi dikas Athenaze)!⁵ Exactly what the author means by this is not clear, nor can we wholly recover the reality that he describes. Nevertheless, the author describes many ways in which Athens benefitted from this practice beyond the assertion of a monopoly on law-applying institutions and the opportunity it provided to pick winners and losers within allied communities: it benefitted the Athenian tourist industry, in that visitors needed lodging, and it contrib­uted to the Athenian treasury, through fees on the use of its harbour.

These caveats notwithstanding, it is clear that terms of domination, enslave­ment, and empire came into widespread use to describe the role of Athens vis-a-vis those who had been and nominally remained its allies.^{[210] [211] [212] More impor­tantly, this process has a history. As late as 453 or so, the Athenians continued to refer to their allies (and the alliance overall) as just that, to wit, as allies, as if these were free states bound by treaty obligations, freely undertaken?8 But commencing sometime just after 430 B.c.E. - again, the condition of the texts permits only approximate dating - Athenian decrees regulate the internal af­fairs of a general category of �the city-states over whom the Athenians exercise power', and Athenian magistrates in the subject cities of the empire are being directed to take unilateral action on matters of currency and trade?9 Not that all cities were so treated: in the essay on the system of government of the Athe­nian people attributed to Aristotle, it is recalled that Athens long continued to treat Chios, Lesbos, and Samos as true allies, practising non-interference in respect of their internal affairs and granting them the power to dominate the communities over which they had exercised rule as the league came into being.[213] [214]}

What bears attention in comparative relation to the history of Rome in the Aegean in the second century BCE is the broad pattern of transformation, from a multipolar world in which sovereign communities of discrepant power vol­untarily bind themselves together into networks of alliance, to a world of im­perial domination, in which many cities are treated as subjects; their institu­tions of public law are designed by the suzerain; while a select few are denominated free and allied, and given permission by the centre to continue their own forms of domination over peoples of still further remove in their hinterlands.

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