The controversial challenge introduced twenty years ago by actor– network theory (ANT) is well known. ‘Society’ functions so little as a concept that it should be dismissed so that the various forms of composition and association that serve as the theatre for social activity can be observed. Going against the Durkheimian tradition, Bruno Latour and those close to him intended to call into question the commonly held conception that makes society ‘as a whole’ a ‘substance’ providing all areas of activity with a type of specific causality. However, ANT did not simply take up the reservations that had long been formulated by ethnomethodology. It claimed to go beyond the canonical opposition between structure and agency. In this respect, it was less about restoring the place of actors and interactions than shedding light on the processes of assembly and composition (surpassing the distinction between nature and culture) between heterogeneous elements that would form the heart of the social, conferring upon sociology the status of ‘science of associations’.

The influence of ANT is more or less explicitly assumed in a number of recent projects in the field of classical studies that favour the description of civic societies in terms of networks and circulation. In fact, such a research perspective goes against the Durkheimian tradition that so greatly influenced Greek studies in France, making the city – which is identified with civic authorities and likened to a centralising body – the key actor in the changes affecting Greek societies. Like all epistemological advancements, this perspective is not free from the dangers of generating an uncontrolled use of certain key notions, the term ‘network’ becoming a fetish capable of defining collective action in its most diverse forms. Moreover, extensive use of the term often leads to indefinitely delaying – and even occulting – the (eminently Durkheimian) question of the constituting identity of the community (in its singularity, with its boundaries, specific values and so on).

A FORGOTTEN METAPHOR OF THE DURKHEIMIAN SCHOOL

Within the Durkheimian tradition itself, however, there is a figure – or a paradigm – that is likely to go beyond the opposition between structure and agency and, moreover, to resolve the shortcomings of the overly extensive use of the term ‘network’. This figure has a clear ‘Greek reference’, since it concerns the chorus: choros.

INTRODUCTION

The beginnings of coinage within the Lydian kingdom in western Asia Minor towards the end of the seventh century bce and its rapid spread across Thrace, Greece, Greek Italy and Libya in the second half of the sixth century are often seen as a critical juncture in monetary thinking and practice. For the first time in Western history, scores of communities were making and using items that we today recognise as money. Why the first coins were produced, particularly in a man-made gold–silver alloy, is an inexplicable problem, but their appearance marks, it would seem, the culmination of a process that began with non-monetary transactions, such as gift exchange, barter or palatial redistribution, and ended with advanced, even modern levels of money use in public and private transactions. Key to most accounts of the first coins is the equation coins = money. Few commentators doubt that the earliest coins were money. But whether there was money before coinage, in Greece especially, remains a contested issue. This, then, is a fundamental question: was there money before coinage, and if so, what was it? At stake in this question is our understanding of how revolutionary the first coins were – or were not – economically, socially and politically, especially since their appearance coincided with critical developments in the organisation of the communal life of many Greek poleis and their immediate neighbours. But to formulate an answer depends on what one means by ‘money’ – or even ‘coin’ – and this is where many arguments tend to get stuck.

Any approach to this question requires confronting several interlocking and intersecting problems. Along one axis, the historical, there are disparate traditions for early money or monetary ways of thinking that eventually became entwined, adapted or abandoned. From the Near East there came a tradition of monetised silver, which eventually engulfed contemporary traditions in the Aegean region that included the possible monetary use of cattle, grain and non-precious metals in various forms. How the Greek adoption of monetised silver relates to the beginning of coinage is not clear since the first coins were electrum, which remained the preferred coining metal for around seventy-five years.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient historians have long been interested in exploring at a granular level the lived experiences of individuals and social groups. Recently, some historians have begun using a network model, viewing individuals as members of clusters, each person belonging to multiple social groups that cut across lines of class and politics. Inside such clusters may be individuals from many points on a variety of social spectra, ranging, for example, from poor to rich, slave to free. Citizens eager to participate in the democracy could perform in a chorus, or serve in the army, or labour beside other men who leaned towards oligarchy. Free citizens and metics worked together with slaves on temple construction. Initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries included a wide range of individuals, free and slave, native and immigrant, joined together by faith, but perhaps, if citizens, voting against each other in the Assembly. In what follows I apply a networks and complex adaptive systems approach to the well-known fifth-century bce Athenian building programme associated with Pericles, as a case study in the emergence of a phenomenon that could not be predicted by analysing each of its constituent parts in isolation.

The network metaphor permits us to observe that for ancient Greek men as for us moderns, the many informal clusters and formal associations we belong to may put us in contact with people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs. These clusters, both those we choose to join and those we contingently find ourselves part of, help to constitute each person's identity. Among ancient Athenians, imagine a man who identifies himself within a cluster of labourers in the same trade-based network, as well as a fellow religious cult worshipper within a religious network, as a member of an ephebic unit within the military network, a tribesman within the network of tribes, a member of a phratry within the network of brotherhoods, and so on. Individuals tend to see themselves as parts of many different wholes.

In this chapter, I focus specifically on clusters of construction workers, grouped by their crafts or trades, who worked from c. 450 to 432 in high-performing teams. The chapter is based on three premises: first, that, within their network, the workers became codependent; next that they were also ‘entangled’ with the materials with which they worked; and finally that such entanglement between materials and craftsmen is a phenomenon of materiality.

INTRODUCTION

‘Wealth consists in abundance of coined money, ownership of land and properties, and further of movable goods, cattle, and slaves remarkable for their number, size, and beauty, provided they are all secure (ἀσϕαƛῆ), free, and useful.’ Thus Aristotle enumerates the material goods that could make a person wealthy – cash, land, movable goods, cattle and slaves – and at the same time insists that the conditions of possession themselves would determine whether or not possession would yield wealth. The first condition, security (ἀσϕαƛϵία), he defines as ‘having acquired a thing in such places and such conditions that the use of it is in our own hands’. This he follows up with a functional definition of ownership: ‘a possession is one's own (οἰκϵῖα) when it is entirely up to him whether to alienate it or not, and by alienation I mean both gift and sale’. In this passage (Rhet. 1361a15–25), Aristotle implicitly recognises two components to what we call a property right: the right to use and the right to alienate, whether by gift or sale. These rights remain at the core of our understanding of a property right. The laws and practices of the alienation and use of property have been widely studied for the ancient Greek world, whereas the condition of security has been for the most part taken for granted. In this chapter I outline the legal and economic perspectives on property security in theory and in historical practice (section 2), before turning to an examination of the forms of property insecurity in classical Greece (sections 3–5) and a consideration of the economic as well as the political implications of my findings (section 6). I suggest that these limits point towards a distinctive property regime that reflects the priorities and interests of Greek states rather than a commitment to protecting absolute, perfect ownership as a means of promoting individual economic interests and aggregate economic growth. By focusing on the issue of property security I hope both to draw attention to the political and social importance of property in the Greek world, and to suggest that while the economic growth of the period was certainly a function of many complex and interrelated variables, property security was not prominent among them.

THE CHANGED INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

With the publication of this volume, the Leventis conference of November 2015 at Edinburgh takes its place as the latest in a series of colloquia, events and projects that have been organised by historians of ancient Greece round various routes of outreach towards the social sciences. The Cambridge project on ‘The anatomy of cultural revolution’ was a precursor, focusing both on ‘change’ and on ‘revolution’ itself, and was followed by a conference in Dublin in July 2009 that tapped economic sociology and social theory in order to explore the use of networks as a structure or a metaphor for modelling social action. There followed two colloquia in Berlin, one in January 2010 that explored ‘Geld als Medium in der Antike’ in the light especially of the communication theories of Niklas Luhmann, and the other in June 2012 that used theories of modernity in order to study the contrast between ‘modernisation’ and ‘tradition’ in fourth-century Athens. I make no claim that this list is complete.

The Edinburgh conference was therefore following a ready-made trajectory. However, it was doing so in a radical way, since its theme and format not only challenged the conventions of the discipline of ‘Greek history’ but also required an active performative response. In consequence, those who participated in the conference, whether as speakers or as auditors, found themselves taking on an unusual and unsettling responsibility, since it posed wider and even more intractable issues than those tackled by its various precursors. Accordingly, to thank Josh Ober and Andrew Erskine as instigators and organisers of the conference, as well as the Trustees of the Leventis Foundation for their financial support, is more than a normal act of propriety on behalf of participants. It is more even than a grateful recognition that the instigators had had a good and timeous idea and had put effort and intelligence into the task of turning it into reality. It is to acknowledge that historians of ancient Greece were being asked to reconsider the intellectual foundations and procedures that have shaped their discipline for the past two hundred years, and to modify their attitudes and objectives accordingly.

There has been a long-running debate in scholarship between those who believe that the ancient Athenian democracy valued and strove to achieve the rule of law (RoL) and those who believe that the Athenians, while aware of the concept, did not fully embrace it. According to some scholars in this latter camp, the Athenians even deliberately rejected the RoL in favour of other values such as revenge or notions of equity. Standing firmly in the first camp are scholars such as Martin Ostwald, Edward Harris and Gabriel Herman. Equally adamant on the other side are the voices of Josiah Ober, David Cohen and Adriaan Lanni.

Who is right in this debate? How can such dramatically different positions be held so firmly and be based on a valid reading of the evidence? In this chapter, I will suggest that part of the reason for these different assessments is that scholars have discrepant understandings of the meaning of the RoL. I will further suggest that while there is considerable debate even in modern legal circles regarding the meaning of the RoL, nevertheless the concept can be broken down into three components against which the ancient Athenian legal system can be measured: legal supremacy, legal equality and legal certainty.

The history of the relationship between the disciplines constituting social science and those constituting classical studies is long and the relationship has sometimes been contentious. Indeed, it is possible to see the two fields as sharing a common origin in the work of Greek writers of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. And we might also see certain enduring features of each field as having their origins in debates, among those same writers, concerning the best way to study the Greek past (Ober 2006; Ober and Perry 2014 on Thucydides). But, whether in spite of or because of sharp disagreements over methods and ends, ancient Greek history and culture have been touchstones for some of the most important social theorists of modernity. Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt are only a few of the standouts in a much larger group of mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century social theorists who drew inspiration from their deep knowledge of classical history and culture. It is equally clear that the social sciences of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology have long been sources of productive approaches by which classicists have sought to gain a better understanding of ancient Greece.

By applying methods drawn from anthropology, sociology and psychology to the history and cultural products of antiquity, twentieth- century social scientists and classicists alike contributed in fundamental ways to our grasp of the society of classical Greece, and of its legacy. Examples of influential schools of scholarship from the mid- to later-twentieth century include the pioneering work by the Paris school based in the Centre Louis Gernet. This school was led by, among others, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; much of its work was grounded in the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. A roughly contemporary Cambridge school centred on the charismatic personality of Moses I. Finley and the Weberian sociological approach to history that he advocated. A more diverse but influential Princeton school that had close connections with both Paris and Cambridge owed much to W. Robert Connor's deep involvement with the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz (then at the Institute for Advanced Study). Meanwhile, Marx and Engels’ economic and political theory underpinned the work of an international assortment of historians of Greek antiquity, famously including, in Oxford, Geoffrey de Ste Croix.

INTRODUCTION

I take as my starting point for this chapter three remarkable recent books, all published in 2013. These volumes should make those of us that study Greek democracy very pleased with the ‘relevance’ of the object of our research and our passion – at least if we espouse Ober and Hedrick's project ‘of applying insights gained from political and social theory to problems of Greek history, and in turn using the Greek historical experience of democracy as a resource for building normative political theory’.

The first of these books is Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule, by Melissa Schwartzberg (a political scientist). This monograph presents a strong and original argument against all forms of modification to simple majority rule, understood as the use of the majority principle in political decision-making. It questions in particular supermajority rules, which have become increasingly widespread in modern constitutional democracies as instruments to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority. She argues that simple majority is the only voting system, and the only system of decision-making, that fulfils the requirements of the principle of equal respect – all modifications to majority decision-making towards supermajority automatically give some votes (and therefore some voters) more weight than others, undermining the equality on which democracy should be founded. In her own words, ‘the individual, counted vote – weighed equally through majority rule – recognizes the dignity of citizens as judges of political matters’. Schwartzberg's argument develops in new directions the key contention of Jeremy Waldron's Law and Disagreement, and of several other works of his: that checks over simple majority rule are incompatible with democracy.

INTRODUCTION

For scholars seeking to understand political transitions, ancient Greece – the birthplace of democracy and home to dynamic political entrepreneurs – represents a potentially invaluable source of information. Until recently, however, that information was too dispersed to permit systematic analysis of political data. That has now changed, thanks to the publication of Mogens Hansen and Thomas Nielsen's (2004) Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. The Inventory, which has been augmented by the work of Josiah Ober and his colleagues at Stanford University, draws together information on over 1,000 different poleis. Yet it remains to be seen how useful data derived from the Inventory will be to scholars of political transition, because for the majority of documented poleis, the Inventory contains only sparse information about political institutions. Moreover, the survival of that information was probably influenced by the economic and institutional performance of the particular polis, greatly complicating efforts to infer causal relationships – and most social scientists seek to identify causal relationships. Researchers using the data thus face a formidable empirical challenge.

Our objective in this chapter is to begin to explore the Inventory data on the political institutions of ancient Greek poleis. We will take the Inventory's classifications of political institutions as given. Before commencing, it is important to be clear as to what can and cannot be expected from our analysis. To begin with, it is very unlikely that the data will prove sufficiently rich to provide sweeping evidence for particular theories of transition; for example, to show that a particular set of factors led to democracy, or to determine whether democracy led to economic growth. (Of course, modern data have not provided conclusive answers, either.) Moreover, analysing these data cannot substitute for historical work that verifies or enlarges the set of classifications. Thus, our objective is modest: we hope to demonstrate the potential usefulness of the Inventory information when organised as a dataset, and to complement the historical record (and the empirical literature on modern political transitions) by laying out the data in a fashion that will allow us to offer a new method for approaching questions regarding political transition in ancient Greece.