Athens after the Defeat: Financing Wars from 399 to 369

Claude Mossé famously argued that the inability of postwar Athens to manage well the financing of war led to its irreversible decline. Needless to say, we have moved on since the publication of her La Fin de la démocratie athénienne sixty-five years ago. In recent decades, much research has demonstrated that Athenian public finances recovered quickly in the early fourth century, which ended up being a period of wide-ranging financial reforms. The first thirty years of the century saw Athens fighting more often than previously, sending its infantry and navy on long campaigns across the eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the old idea persists that in order to finance this new surge in warfare Athens relied on Persia’s benevolence, on the heavy taxation of Athenian citizens and their allies, and the violent extracting of money from other states by their generals on campaign. This seminar incorporates new findings about the financial reforms of early-fourth-century Athens into the study of its contemporaneous wars. The financial decisions of the Athenian dēmos (‘people’) are thus considered alongside the details of actual military campaigns. The paper’s major finding is that by introducing financial innovations or by reforming others already in place, postwar Athens was able to draw significantly on its own financial resources to pay for wars.

Image credit: Athens - 450-400 BC - silver tetradrachm - head of Athena - owl - München AS.jpg