Poor but virtuous. That’s how the ancient Greeks thought of themselves, according to some of their influential texts. And for decades modern scholars saw the Greeks as poor, too. When Josiah Ober was studying to become an ancient historian in the 1970s, a consensus held that there had been virtually no economic growth in the world of ancient Greek city-states. The big question to be answered was why.
In a forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press), Mr. Ober marshals a wealth of new data to make the case for a much different view of Greek history. The historian, a professor of political science and classics at Stanford University, argues that Greeks in the age of Plato weren’t poor. In reality, their economy grew at a brisk pace from 800 to 300 BC. That wealth, he says, was driven by political institutions that allowed an extensive and socially diverse body of residents to make decisions.
Mr. Ober’s book exemplifies a broader push among some classics scholars to import the tools of contemporary social science to answer big questions about the ancient world. Their basic approach involves trying to explain social change by testing hypotheses against quantifiable evidence.
That technique is unusual in classics, a discipline that emphasizes deep training in languages and texts. But it’s the norm at Stanford, a hothouse of social-science work in ancient history. One of Mr. Ober’s colleagues in the classics department, Ian Morris, combed through 15,000 years of data to write a book explaining how the West came to dominate the world. Another, Walter Scheidel, is studying the evolution of inequality since the Stone Age, hoping to find the factors that have been capable of reducing it. (The ones he has identified so far don’t make for much of a campaign platform: war, revolution, and pestilence.)
Much of the new social-scientific ancient-history research will be discussed in November at a conference Mr. Ober is organizing at the University of Edinburgh. The methods used by these scholars vary. Some draw on game theory to explain the moves made by would-be oligarchs and would-be democrats. Some use network theory to study how social connections affect behavior. Some investigate the ties between human development and geography.
With their high visibility—one classicist refers to Mr. Ober, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Scheidel as “the Stanford triumvirate"—has also come criticism. At last year’s meeting of the American Philological Association (now called the Society for Classical Studies), organizers staged a debate between Mr. Scheidel and the University of Chicago’s Jonathan M. Hall over “humanistic versus social-scientific approaches to ancient history.” Attendees, asked to vote on which side was more persuasive, overwhelmingly chose the humanities.
“There are those who feel that trying to apply the quantitative methods of the quantitative social sciences is doing violence to our field, because we simply don’t have that data,” says Emily Mackil, a former student of Mr. Ober’s who is now a historian of ancient Greece at the University of California at Berkeley.
“The biggest debate right now, as I see it, is over the question of whether we can quantify the evidence that we have from the ancient world.”
A Hunt for Numbers
The Stanford scholars think more can be quantified than people have realized. The main body of ancient Greek literary sources hasn’t changed much in 150 years, Mr. Morris says. But the archaeological side has exploded over the past century. What Greek archaeologists do has changed a lot, too. There’s a lot more work on ordinary domestic settlements—their size, quality, and contents. Mr. Morris traced a fivefold increase in the size of the average house over 400 years. “In the fourth century BC, the typical Greek house is about the same size as the typical American house now,” he says.
In his new book, Mr. Ober draws on home sizes and a range of other data points: population, urbanization, coinage, even the expanding number of names known from literary or archaeological sources (an increase “consistent with a world in which many more people were consuming substantially more,” he writes).
His hunt for numbers has been helped by an international project that aggregated records for 1,035 Greek city-states over 500 years, a monumental data set collected in a 2004 book called An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Mr. Ober converted those records into a database (now available online), allowing him to extract patterns about the fates of states.
Ancient Greek prosperity was evident in the finely carved Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, which loomed near the city of Phigalia, in Arcadia.
The story begins with a crisis.
During the Bronze Age (roughly 2000 to 1200 BC), Greece looked much like other hierarchical, palace-centered societies. That palace world collapsed around 1100 BC in a period of social disaster. The population plummeted. The remaining people were very poor, and nobody had much more than anybody else. The writing system was lost. The collapse was so complete that it knocked out all the ordinary forms of hierarchy and bureaucracy and ideological legitimacy, Mr. Ober says—"like hitting a reset button on civilization.”
What emerged, he says, was a series of social experiments across the Greek world. Some communities recreated a form of hierarchy. Others stuck with something like the equality that the collapse had forced on them. And the egalitarian communities did better, a success that Mr. Ober attributes to their superior ability to mobilize men for warfare.
People began to feel the benefits of having a say in how things were done, Mr. Ober says. As a system of fair rules developed, and people felt confident that their labor wouldn’t be expropriated by rulers, they felt more secure investing in themselves—developing a skill, say, or getting military training. There was more specialization, and specialized goods could be exchanged within and between communities.
Also driving the economy forward: competition among states. In Mr. Ober’s telling, Greek states sound like battling car companies. They had to “constantly innovate” and “borrow best practice” to keep ahead or even with rivals.
Bottom line: The economy grew. Growth was propelled by political institutions. And growth was intimately bound up with the cultural flowering that inspires our continuing fascination with Greece.
“Instead of being a culture that develops this remarkable efflorescence of high culture and philosophical thought because of some kind of virtuous poverty, it turns out that this is a society that has enough leisure, enough spare time, to create high culture because of economic growth,” Mr. Ober says.
Mr. Ober’s book draws on the “new institutional economics” developed by Douglass North, a Nobel-winning economist and political scientist. Scholars in this field start by developing a theory that explains how institutions in a society affect social choices. They then test that theory against other explanations by reference to data.
A Particular Kind of Order
When applied to ancient Greece, that method sits uneasily with some. Paul Cartledge is a prominent historian at the University of Cambridge who provided a warm blurb for Mr. Ober’s book. In an interview, though, Mr. Cartledge describes himself as “conflicted” about Mr. Ober’s approach. Insufficient data exist to apply economic theories to ancient Greece, he says. Only spotty information survives about the prices paid for commodities like barley, olive oil, and wine, for example. “If you haven’t got the data,” he asks, “how do you get off the ground?”
But views may be shifting. Until the 1990s, says Ms. Mackil, at Berkeley, an orthodoxy held that you couldn’t talk about the ancient economy as anything other than a “socially embedded phenomenon.” In other words, people traded to increase their status, not to expand a business.
“The pendulum has since sort of swung in the other direction,” she says, “toward saying we absolutely can analyze the ancient economy in fairly modern terms.”
In a twist, Mr. Ober’s modern analysis somewhat resembles an old-fashioned picture of the Greeks.
Nineteenth-century thinkers saw ancient Greece as a startling exception to the general pattern of antiquity. Greece was viewed as a place of freedom, prosperity, creativity—basically, the origin of everything great about Europe.
Scholars in the 20th century sullied that picture. They pointed out how the Greeks, who accepted slavery and denied rights to women, weren’t that different from their premodern peers. They noted that economic growth in the Greek world, as in other premodern societies, paled by modern standards.
All true, Mr. Ober says. Yet there was something distinct about the Greek world, he argues. It had nothing to do with an inherent racial or ethnic disposition to certain values, as the Victorians assumed. What set the Greeks apart, he says, was their choice of a particular kind of order—and the cultural attitudes that went with it.
Citizen self-government. Equality of standing among persons. Fair and open institutions. These ideas, unusual in history, were well developed in the Greek world, Mr. Ober notes. If we care about them, he says, we should pay attention.
Marc Parry is a senior reporter who writes about ideas, focusing on research in the humanities and social sciences. Email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com, or follow him on Twitter @marcparry.
