FROM DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY TO CONSENT DEMOCRACY : athenian public finances and the formation of a... competence elite in the 4th century bc

The political system of Athens experienced a rebalancing in the period between 404 and 307, which cannot be adequately captured with the keywords decline or crisis. The comprehensive analysis of Athens' public finances opens up a new approach to this hinge period between classical and Hellenism and explains the evident change in the political order through the gradual and consensual transformation of the broad-based deliberative democracy into one led from above, but through the attribution of competencies and moral-political trust Consent democracy carried into the ruling elite. Thus an adaptable mechanism had been created, as it was then to prevail in many places in Hellenism and which was constitutive for it. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Von der Deliberationsdemokratie zur Zustimmungsdemokratie by Dorothea Rohde, published by J.B. Metzler Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2019. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors Preface 5 Contents 6 1: Introduction 8 1.1 Public Finance: Ancient and Modern Concepts 11 1.2 Max Weber’s Honoratioren and Athenian Democracy: Analytical Framework and Approach 14 1.3 The Source Corpus: Documentation, Literary Reflection, and Material Evidence 20 1.4 Research Context: Public Finance and the Genesis of Honoratiorenschaft 27 2: Realized Choices: Public Finances as a Reflection of Athenian Self-Understanding 38 2.1 The Polis as a Community of Equal Citizens 40 2.1.1 A Right Is Only Worth as Much as It Can Be Exercised: The misthophoria 40 2.1.2 The System Is Self-Financing: Fines, Confiscations, Court Fees 47 2.1.3 Exploiting the “Natural” Resources: Revenues from Trade, Mining, and Metics 52 2.2 The Polis as a Community of Fate 60 2.2.1 Disability Pensions, Orphans’ Pensions, theorika: Support for the Needy 60 2.2.2 A Culture of Dependency: Securing the Grain Supplies 66 2.3 The Polis as a Cult Community 94 2.3.1 Not Only a Matter of Faith: The Religous Expenditures 94 2.3.2 Between demosion and hieron: Revenues from Sacred Property 107 2.4 The Polis as a Military Community 117 2.4.1 The Army: Citizen Hoplites, Mercenaries, and a Not-So-Elite Cavalry 118 2.4.2 Athens’ Pride and Joy: The Fleet 125 2.4.3 Tapping Foreign Sources: War Is Expensive, Yet Also Profitable 134 2.4.4 Diplomatic Expenditure 139 2.5 Results 143 3: The Counterexample: Sparta 145 3.1 The Thucydidean Legacy: The Source Situation 146 3.2 The Complexity of the Revenue and Expenditure Structure 154 3.3 The All-Dominant Discourse: The Ideology of Equality 160 3.4 The Invisible Actors: The Role of the Perioeci 166 3.5 Results 175 4: The Connection Between Economic and Social Elite 177 4.1 “My Money for Your Entertainment”: eisphora and leiturgia 177 4.1.1 From an Extraordinary War Tax of All to a Regular Annual Tax of the Few: The eisphora 177 4.1.2 The Dependence of the Civic Community on the Liturgists 185 4.2 The Formation of an Economically and Socially Defined Class 202 4.2.1 The Civil Strife in Rhodes 391 204 4.2.2 The Formation of a Liturgical Stratum 210 4.3 Reciprocity of the leiturgia and eisphora Systems 218 4.3.1 Liturgies as a Civic Duty 218 4.3.2 Prestige and the Gratitude of the Polis 223 4.3.3 Liturgies as Agonal Prosocial Behavior and as an Indicator of Leadership Qualities 231 4.4 Results 235 5: The Connection Between Socio-Economic and Political Elite 237 5.1 Demosthenes’ Second Speech to the Assembly or: How Does an Ambitious Rhetor Distinguish Himself? 239 5.2 Turning Much into More by Turning Many into Few: The Commissioner of the Theoric Fund 252 5.3 A Changed Understanding of Offices: The Liturgization of Offices 258 5.4 A Democracy on an Unprecedented Scale: The Monumentalization of Public Buildings 266 5.5 The “Glue of Democracy”: The Discussion About the theorika 271 5.6 Results 275 6: Conclusion: The Formation of a Competence Elite as an Athenian Variety of Weber’s Honoratioren 279 Bibliography 288