As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, a great many communities in Greece were governed democratically during the Classical period. Some had relatively brief democratic interludes (e.g., Corinth and Thessaly), but most others went for decades at a time under democratic government, and several were democratic for most of the period from 480 to 323 bc. As became clear from the individual studies, certainty about the length of this or that constitutional regime is rarely attainable, since we lack anything like a continuous political narrative for the vast majority of these poleis, and only a few have even intermittent descriptions of any length. But there is enough information about enough poleis to judge that by the fifth and fourth centuries demokratia had become a widespread and persistent phenomenon in the Greek world, with examples to be found in every region of Greece from early in the fifth century to late in the fourth.

To see the truth of this at a glance, look at Figure 4.1, which illustrates the establishment and duration of demokratia in individual states grouped by region. Dark gray lines represent periods in which we can be fairly certain that democracy obtained in that city; light gray ones indicate less certainty, either about the dates or whether actual democracy existed there. (Leucas and Istrus, for example, definitely democratized at some point in the Classical period, but we do not know when, hence the long, light gray lines; Sicyon's lines are light gray because it is uncertain whether its government at the indicated times was a demokratia or not). Naturally, a chart like this loses nuance and elides ambiguities in presenting results; the individual treatments in the previous chapters, which are the basis for the results of the figures, should be sought for details regarding the basis of judgment in each case. Nevertheless, we can learn from Figure 4.1 a great deal about the general picture of democracy in Classical Greece.

The edge of Asia

‘Like the word caelum,’ notes the Latin lexicographer Varro, ‘the word Asia is used in two senses. For it is used both for that “Asia” which is not Europe, which includes even Syria; and also for the nearer part of this aforementioned Asia, in which lie Ionia, and our province.’ Since the fifth century bc, the Greeks had employed a totalising hierarchical division of the world into two unequal parts, Europe and Asia. Africa, which did not fit neatly into this schema, was sometimes added as a third distinct portion of the globe. After Attalus III's bequest of his kingdom in western Asia Minor to the Roman people in 133 bc, the term ‘Asia’ also came to be used by the ruling power in a far more restricted sense, as the proper name for the new Roman province in western Asia Minor, prouincia Asia. In the mid-second century ad, this ambiguity was exploited by the orator Aelius Aristides in his second Smyrnaean oration. Having dignified Smyrna with the title ‘the ornament of Asia’, he adds further, ‘and by Asia I do not mean only that which extends as far as the springs of the Maeander, nor that which is defined by the sortition of your proconsuls, but that which the Greeks have always called Asia, as one of the three continents distinct from the others.’

This fascinating little passage invites analysis from a number of perspectives. Aristides implicitly dismisses the division of the Roman provinces in Asia as a purely Roman spatial conception, meaningful only in terms of the administrative convenience of the external ruling power (‘defined by proconsular sortition’). Simultaneously, Aristides sets up a strategic contrast between the Roman provincia Asia and ‘that which the Greeks have always called Asia’. Cultural anxiety in the face of actually existing Roman rule is a familiar theme of elite Greek literary production in this period. Aristides reminds us that, for the Greeks of western Asia Minor in the second and third centuries ad, the compatibility of ‘being Greek’ with ‘being Roman’ was not the only problem; no less urgent was the need to reconcile ‘being Greek’ with ‘being Asiatic’.

Virtuous people

The wealth and fame of Laodicea on the Lycus had their origins in the last days of the Roman Republic. Founded by the Seleucid king Antiochus II in the middle years of the third century bc, it was only after the Mithradatic wars that the city rose to her celebrated state of prosperity. In this respect, the town's development followed a similar course to that of her near neighbour Aphrodisias: in both cases, the conspicuous loyalty of the local propertied class in the face of the mass uprisings of 89–85 bc was rewarded with large incentivising benefits from the Roman senate.

As to the origins of the city's wealth, Strabo was in no doubt. ‘Laodicea, although formerly small, was augmented in our time and in that of our fathers; and it was through the richness of her territory and the good fortune of certain of her citizens that she rose to greatness.’ Strabo often emphasises the influence of particular families and their wealth on the historical development of the cities of Asia. ‘And if there is a city in all of Asia well-populated by men of wealth, then that city is Tralles; and citizens of Tralles are always among the first men in the province, known as asiarchs.’ Implicit in Strabo's comments is the belief that the advance of the local propertied class was not a consequence, but rather a precondition of the augmentation of a city as a whole, and this idea, unpleasant though it is, deserves to be taken seriously.

The agrarian revolution: from the kleros to the great estate

The earliest documentary evidence for land-tenure conditions in the lower Maeander valley dates to 334 bc, the year of the Macedonian invasion of Asia. In the summer of 334, Alexander III of Macedon proclaimed a ‘new deal’ for the Greek cities of western Asia Minor, granting them political autonomy and fiscal immunity from the tribute they had formerly paid to the Achaemenid monarchs. Later that year, the inhabitants of the small city of Priene on the north flank of the Maeander delta plain sent an embassy to the Macedonian king asking for clarification of the status of an ethnically mixed community on their territory, the harbour-town of Naulochon. The first part of Alexander's reply survives, having been inscribed on the north anta of the temple of Athena Polias at Priene two generations later, in the context of a later land dispute between Priene and the neighbouring city of Magnesia.

As a result of Alexander's edict, the agricultural land around Priene on the north flank of the Maeander delta plain was classified under two headings. A continuous tract of land lying ‘between the sea and the hill of the Sandeis’ was assigned to the citizens of Priene and the Greek inhabitants of Naulochon, its dependent harbour-town. This land was immune from the royal land-taxes (phoroi), and individual citizen or non-citizen Greek landowners at Priene were at liberty to alienate their land as they pleased. Beyond this civic territory lay stretches of land which did not possess this privileged fiscal status, owned outright by the ruling monarch, and subject to a range of royal taxes in cash and in kind. This land, farmed by the inhabitants of indigenous villages in the Maeander delta plain, was subject to alienation by the king as he saw fit. As we shall see, the Hellenistic monarchs who succeeded Alexander regularly granted large tracts of ‘their’ lands in the lowland Aegean valleys of western Asia Minor to their officers, relatives and dependants, with major destabilising consequences for the wider pattern of landholding in the region.

This book seeks to answer vital questions about the establishment and practice of democracy (Greek demokratia) in the Greek world during the Classical period (480–323 bc). Its focus is not on Athens, the democracy for which the ancient testimony is most plentiful and about which there is an embarrassment of modern scholarly books. Instead, this study aims to take a comprehensive look at Classical democracies outside Athens, which are relatively rarely studied. If we are to understand the true nature of Greek democracy – a political legacy that is revered above all others from antiquity in contemporary politics, to such an extent that almost any non-democratic form of government is delegitimized – we need to know the range of possibilities for its practice, not just how things took shape in one city. Occasional comparison of the communities studied here with the Athenian democracy will be inevitable, but it will not happen systematically or frequently. One of the goals of this study, in fact, is to create a kind of database that in future will allow more detailed comparison of Athenian and non-Athenian practice than has been heretofore possible. It does not aim to do so comprehensively itself.

My previous book-length work on non-Athenian democracies, The First Democracies, was a very different project. There, the goal was simply to determine where and when the first democracies appeared in Greece. It covered the Archaic period (c. 700–480 bc) and concluded that by the middle of the sixth century demokratiai had formed in a number of city-states, though the thinness of the evidence precluded certainty about exactly how many there were or which had come first. But in the Classical period literary and epigraphic evidence for political history improves dramatically, enabling me to ask deeper questions in this study. The two central lines of inquiry that have driven it are: (1) how and why demokratia expanded as it did in the Greek world during the Classical period, and (2) what was the nature of democratic practice outside Athens.

West of Miletus, on a tideless shore, the waters of the Maeander flow out quietly into the Aegean sea. Like the river, this book has no conclusion. Nonetheless, certain ideas and approaches have recurred, and it may be helpful to draw out four leading themes of this study.

The first key theme of the book was that of the production of space. In Chapter 1, I argued that it would be highly misleading to regard the Maeander valley as a ‘natural’ space, objectively determined by geological facts. The Maeander valley was a historically contingent social construct, created by human communities at a specific point in past time, which ceased to exist (or at least was transformed into a different kind of spatial expression) at another specific point in past time. Within this region there existed further spatial units, produced both organically by resident groups (such as city-territories) and through creative negotiation between local peoples and external powers (such as administrative divisions). Those produced in dialogue with external powers inevitably possessed a political dimension. These ‘politicised’ spaces in the Maeander region took three notable historical forms: geographies of imperialism, geographies of resistance and geographies of appropriation.

The monastery of Boreine

Early one morning in the last years of the twelfth century ad, a Philadelphian craftsman by the name of Gregory set out on his regular climb into the hills south-west of the city, along with his apprentices, to collect charcoal for fuel. A few hundred yards above the southern walls of Philadelphia, Gregory crossed over the the great imperial highway, running south-east along the foot of Mt Kissos towards the border towns of Tripolis and Laodicea. A little above the highway, still within sight of the city, something in the geography of the place made Gregory pause: a flattened place, perhaps a natural terrace of some kind, ideally situated for a vineyard. On the spot, Gregory vowed that if God would allow him to plant his vineyard here, he would build a chapel to the Theotokos with his own hands. A stretch of woodland was duly cleared, and the vineyard planted. Gregory was still a young man, with a wife and a baby daughter; a son, Maximus, was born soon afterwards. His wife and daughter died young. Leaving his baby son to be nursed by his grandmother, Gregory ascended again into the mountain, and built his chapel, a place to retreat into the wilderness and the past. Soon, other members of Gregory's family followed: his father, both brothers and, in time, his son Maximus. A generation passed, and under Maximus’ careful financial management the little oratory had grown into the large and wealthy monastery of Boreine, home to up to twenty monks. In 1247, Maximus, approaching old age, drew up a testament, providing a brief history of the foundation, and laying down regulations for the conduct of the monks. A later copy of this testament, dating a little after 1258, with an updated register of the now very substantial real property of the monastic foundation, is today preserved in the archive of the Vatopedi monastery on Mt Athos.

Setting the scene: Claudian's Phrygia

In the spring of ad 399, the highlands of Phrygia saw a sudden and violent uprising by Gothic settlers in the region, under the leadership of a certain Tribigild. These were the survivors of the great Gothic army brought across the Danube by Odotheus thirteen years earlier, whom the emperor Theodosius I, after a decisive victory at the Danube, had settled in Phrygia in dispersed units as laeti, barbarian settlers tied to the soil and liable for military service. With Tribigild's rebellion began the dramatic sequence of events which would lead to the fall of the eunuch Eutropius and the short-lived coup of Gainas at Constantinople in ad 400.

The poet Claudian dedicates the greater part of his second invective against Eutropius to a spectacular and overwrought narrative of the Gothic uprising. The Gothic settlement in Phrygia serves as the occasion for a long geographical excursus on the Phrygians, including a beautiful thumbnail sketch of the topography and mythology of Phrygia. Claudian begins by marking out the cultural boundaries of the Phrygians: to the north lies Bithynia, to the west Ionia, and to the east the Galatians. The Lydians, not fitting neatly into this schema, are located, vaguely, ‘on both sides’; to the south live the ferocious warriors of Pisidia. Claudian then turns to the mythological and natural riches of Phrygia.

‘A great emporion of Asia’

Imperial Apamea, a city of deep antiquity and high renown, is in many respects a puzzling place. The civic elite of Apamea was undistinguished. No senators are known, and only a single individual of equestrian rank; holders of provincial office are few. Civic affairs appear to have been dominated to an unusual extent by the community of resident Romans. Already in the late Republican period, Apamea had been one of the most important centres for Roman and Italian businessmen in inland Asia Minor. One of the earliest surviving inscriptions from Apamea is a lavish ex testamento dedication set up for a freedman, C. Vennonius Eros, by his heredes. This man is clearly Cicero's friend C. Vennonius, a negotiator operating in Asia between 50 and 46 bc. Vennonius was a man of means; his will gave rise to a dispute between his heirs, settled only by means of a senatus consultum. A generation later, under Augustus and Tiberius, two Italians, probably also resident businessmen, were responsible for the minting of bronze coinage at Apamea. In ad 45/6 all five of the posts in the archon-college at Apamea were filled by Roman citizens, who proudly declared that this was the first time this had been the case. Four of the five appear to have been Italians, for each of whom descendants at Apamea or, in one instance, the neighbouring city of Sebaste, are attested, indicating that the men were permanently resident at Apamea. It comes as no surprise to find that this large expatriate Italian community was prominent in the city's decision-making process; Apamean honorific decrees and statue-bases are almost invariably set up in the name of ‘the council, the people, and the resident Romans’. By contrast, for a place often described in modern works as ‘the most considerable city of the interior’ and suchlike, the native population of Apamea, and their activities, are oddly elusive.