Ain't No Party Like a Macedonian Party Because a Macedonian Party Don't Stop Until at Least Someone Has Been Murdered During an Argument at a Symposium Where Undiluted Wine is Served (Barbarians)

By the end of the fifth century, the Macedonian court was sufficiently Hellenized to have become the "off-off Broadway" of Greek tragedy: Euripides ended his career by producing his plays for Macedonian audiences. Some elite Macedonian social customs were, however, still regarded as typically "barbarous" by the Greeks - notably the Macedonian symposium, at which heavily armed men downed mass quantities of undiluted wine (wine was always mixed with water in a proper Greek symposium). The impression of barbarism was not reduced when, as sometimes happened, drunken arguments escalated into murderous violence.

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015, 267.

Tripartite Growth Model: Classical Athens Edition

The federalist features of the system had the effect of increasing trust and widening social networks. The organization of the Council provided new avenues for the identification and gainful employment of expertise. Ostracism dampened the most dangerous aspects of elite rivalry, without reducing socially valuable forms of elite competition. And so we can begin to fill in Herodotus' somewhat telegraphic statement about why, in the era after the end of the tyranny, Athens rose to greater prominence in the Greek world. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015, 175

That's Ober's basic thesis for how Athens gained such wealth and transitioned to democracy in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. 

The chapter is great and so is the book. Buy it. 

Commerce and Culture

The palace bureaucracies were no more. With no royal accounts to record, the technology of writing was lost. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 126.

That's Josiah Ober on the destruction of the mighty Mycenaean civilization and the Greek Dark Ages (1100-750 BCE) that soon followed. It's also a very salient observation on the role of commerce in the production of culture. Here, without the need to account for royal trade and business, writing would, probably, not have existed so early around the Aegean Sea. Clearly, since it ceased to exist after the collapse of Mycenaean culture. This is one reason, to my mind at least, why we ought to praise commercial culture. In fact, it's the reemergence of large scale commercial enterprise that supported the flourishing of classical Greek antiquity:

By the eighth century, Greece was growing rapidly; there were more people and more wealth. Higher quality of luxury goods were, once again, being produced by Greek artisans. Athenian potters were, for example, now capable of turning out huge vases, beautifully decorated in the Geometric style and used in elaborate funerary rites by prominent families with enough surplus wealth to expend some part of it for dramatic public display. Literacy returned to Greece, after the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians - the dynamic, trade-oriented city-state culture centered in what is now Lebanon. The Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet by adding vowels; the Greeks' writing system would eventually be adopted and adapted to a wide variety of purposes by Etruscans, Romans - and us. Unlike the Bronze Age, when literate scribes used an arcane writing system to keep palace accounts, the new alphabet-based Greek literacy was used widely by creative writers and political innovators: by poets, lawmakers, and later by historians, philosophers, scientists, traders, and many others. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 132.

Tellus of Athens, Walmart and Economic Inequality

Tellus of Athens did not shop at Walmart. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 77.

This is a great sentence. One can picture the confused ancient Athenian strolling the great retailer's aisles whilst straining his confused, premodern mind in a vain attempt to understand what a BOGO is. 

Joking aside, Tellus of Athens is, according to the story told to us by Herodotus, Solon's happiest man to ever live. Tellus was happiest because he was a flourishing man in a flourishing city. Ober uses Tellus of Athens to illustrate the thesis of the fourth chapter of his book, that classical Greece was an unusually efflorescent society. He supports this claim first by comparing classical Greece to other periods in Greek history as well as to other premodern and modern societies. Then, data richly, he shows how the Greeks of the classical period enjoyed a relatively dense, urban and healthy lifestyle. Finally, he closes by examining the classical Greek distribution of wealth. He finds it to be particularly equitable. This point offers us today's closing thought. 

Historically, all complex societies have been characterized by economic inequality. Yet when wealth and income are distributed extremely inequitably, such that society is bimodally segmented into a tiny elite of the very wealthy and a great mass of individuals living at subsistence, there is correspondingly little room for  sustained economic growth. It is only with the emergence of a substantial and stable middle class of people living well above the level of subsistence, and therefore willing and able to purchase goods unnecessary for their mere survival, that societal consumption becomes a driver of economic growth. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, 89.

Fair Greece, Sad Relic

If we can explain the rise of classical Greece, we may gain a better understanding of what it took to bootstrap the wealth and democracy package in the first place. If we can explain the fall of the Greek political order - that is, why major city-states did not maintain full independence for longer than they did - we may better understand democratic frailty. 

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton University Press, 2015, xvi.

This is from the introduction to a new book by Stanford University Professor of Political Science and Classics, Josiah Ober. The problem of why certain societies rise to greatness and influence is of great interest to me. It's why I decided to purchase Ober's book after reading a review of it in last week's Wall Street Journal. It's also why I recently purchased In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, a book I'll be reading soon after this one.

Εἰ μὲν τοῖς πρὸ ἡμῶν ἀναγράφουσι τὰς πράξεις παραλελεῖφθαι συνέβαινε τὸν ὑπὲρ αὐτῆς τῆς ἱστορίας ἔπαινον, ἴσως ἀναγκαῖον ἦν τὸ προτρέπεσθαι πάντας πρὸς τὴν αἵρεσιν καὶ παραδοχὴν τῶν τοιούτων ὑπομνημάτων διὰ τὸ μηδεμίαν ἑτοιμοτέραν εἶναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις διόρθωσιν τῆς τῶν προγεγενημένων πράξεων ἐπιστήμης.