ANTECEDENTS

Higher education had come to Athens with the arrival of the sophists in the third and fourth quarters of the fifth century (CAH V 341–69), in order to meet the demands of a flourishing democracy for excellence in public speaking in Council, Assembly and the jury courts. Protagoras of Abdera, the earliest of these teachers to arrive in Athens, was the first to call himself a ‘sophist’, a term which came to be applied in a more or less loose way also to other teachers of rhetoric who appeared in Athens from abroad during the next two or three decades: Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos, Hippias of Elis, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus of Chios, and a number of others. None of these men spent an extended period of time in Athens, and none had a fixed home there. In the course of their visits, they were entertained at the homes of prominent Athenians, would give public displays of their rhetorical skills, and accepted on an ad hoc basis any Athenian willing to pay a stated fee as their student. Any private home or public place (palaestra, gymnasium, or stoa) might serve as the locale of their instruction.

Unlike the ‘natural philosophers’ of Ionia and of southern Italy, they were not interested in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake but in preparing their students for a happy and successful life. Young upper-class Athenians believed success to be attained through the art of persuasion, and rhetoric was what the sophists delivered.

FOURTH-CENTURY ATHENS: THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT

Formally, Athens had the same constitution from the tribal reorganization of Cleisthenes in 508/7, or at any rate from the reform of the Areopagus by Ephialtes in 462/1, until the suppression of the democracy by Antipater at the end of 322/1: the oligarchies of 411–410 and 404/3 were brief interruptions, each ending with the restoration of the democracy. The working of this democracy in the time of Pericles has been described in the previous volume. Decisions, on both domestic and external matters, were taken by an assembly of adult male citizens, which by the end of the fifth century had forty regular meetings a year: all topics on which the Assembly pronounced had first to be discussed by the Council of 500, and there were other safeguards by which the Assembly was limited, but any member could propose motions or amendments, or speak in the debate, and decisions were taken by a simple majority. It was not possible for all the citizens to be involved simultaneously in carrying out decisions, as they were all involved simultaneously in making them, but it was possible for them all to be involved in turn. The administration of the democracy was based on a large number of separate boards, usually comprising one man from each of the ten tribes, appointed by lot for one year and not eligible for reappointment to the same board; the scope for competence or incompetence was slight, and the conscientious citizen would serve on several of these boards in the course of his life.

THE MACEDONIAN BACKGROUND

Macedonia had been by the middle of the fifth century a large and populous country:

Thucydides’ summary (II. 99) well describes the kingdom at the death of Alexander I and during Perdiccas II's reign (c. 454–413).

Topographically Lower Macedonia might be described as a three-quarter circle centred approximately on the head of the Thermaic Gulf, which bites a substantial segment from its south-eastern quarter. Framing the alluvial coastal plain is an intermittent circuit of higher land and mountains, behind which a second and concentric ring of smaller plains is broken and confined by taller, more impenetrable ranges.

THE LEADER OF GREECE

The Greek world had long been accustomed to a situation in which there had been two sources of power, Athens and Sparta. The disappearance of Athenian power left the determination of the future to Sparta. Theoretically, the future was clear. The Spartans and their allies had fought the Peloponnesian War for the freedom of Greece and the day on which Lysander sailed into the Piraeus and the demolition of Athens’ Long Walls began was seen as the beginning of that freedom (Xen.Hell. II.2.24). However, the course of the war had inevitably shaped attitudes and aspirations. The simple hope of 431 that all would be well if Athens allowed her allies autonomy had become infinitely complex. It was not only that Sparta had made commitments to Persia which substantially modified the freedom of the Greeks of Asia Minor. The course of the war had produced political changes in many cities which were not easily reversible, and at Sparta itself the effect of success and growing power was to produce a taste for their continuance.

Sparta had serious disqualifications for the role of a leading power, even more for that of an imperial power. Her full citizen population was not more than a few thousand and seems to have been in continuing decline. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, she was already using perioecic hoplites alongside full citizens, and from 424 onwards we find increasing use of freed helots, a group rapidly institutionalized under the name of neodamodeis (new members of the demos).

The sources available for the reconstruction of the exciting developments that took place in Greek medical thought and practice in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. are extensive, although in places defective and in places biased. They fall into three main categories, first the extant treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, second other literary sources, and third the inscriptional evidence, and a summary analysis of each in turn will serve to illustrate both the range and the limitations of the information they provide.

The great majority of the sixty or so treatises in the so-called Hippocratic Corpus date from the later part of the fifth or from the fourth century. The main exceptions are a handful of works, such as On Nutriment, On Sevens and some of the treatises on medical ethics, that show Stoic or Epicurean influence, and one, On the Heart, that is generally thought to be approximately contemporary with the work of the Alexandrian biologists Herophilus and Erasistratus. Even when we discount these few later works, the variety within the Hippocratic Corpus is very great, and the treatises – all of them anonymous – are evidently the work of many different authors representing, in some cases, radically divergent shades of opinion. Whether Hippocrates himself was responsible for any of them is controversial. Although Hippocrates is occasionally referred to in contemporary or near contemporary writers, notably Plato, Aristotle and Aristotle's pupil Meno, the medical historian whose work is excerpted in the papyrus Anonymus Londinensis, they provide only very limited, and in places conflicting, evidence concerning the medical theories and practices he upheld, though they confirm the admiration and respect in which he was held already in the fourth century.

SICILY, 367–354 B.C.

SOURCES

The content of the two books which Philistus devoted to Sicilian history during the five years after the accession of the younger Dionysius is not determinable, though his presentation of the tyrant whom he served can hardly have been unfavourable. Evidence is also meagre on the whole decade to 357 B.C., apart from information about the relations of Dionysius with Dion and Plato. On the other hand, the crusade led by Dion, which liberated Syracuse from tyranny but terminated after three stormy years in failure and death, proved attractive to contemporaries and posterity alike, largely because of his friendship with Plato and the part played by members of the Academy. Contemporary writers tended to be prejudiced in favour of Dion, and most secondary authorities echo this prejudice, but there are also traces of a tradition hostile towards him.

The earliest extant record of his career is provided by the Platonic Epistles, especially the Seventh and Eighth. Although the vexed question of their authenticity has not been satisfactorily resolved, their value as historical evidence is indisputable. If they were not written by Plato himself, the author must have been a contemporary with an exhaustive knowledge not only of Plato and his experience in Sicily but also of his later dialogues and intellectual outlook. Features of these two Epistles indicating the genuineness of their substance are their uneasily defensive tone and the not wholly unfavourable presentation of the younger Dionysius. They are, however, by no means objective.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout Greek antiquity the ownership and cultivation of the land remained fundamental preoccupations at all levels of society, no less during the fifth and fourth centuries than at any other period. The Homeric scene of ‘two men with measures in their hands, quarrelling over boundaries in the shared ploughland’ finds its counterpart in the fourth-century lawsuit between neighbours in Attica concerning flood damage caused by one to the other's property. Instructions in the Athenian decree c. 422 for Demeter's cult at Eleusis, that ‘first-fruits of the harvest are to be offered to the Goddesses according to ancestral custom and the oracle at Delphi’ stem from the same concerns which prompted Hesiod's precept to his brother, ‘Work, so that hunger may hate you and revered Demeter may love you and fill your barn with food.’ If basic preoccupations remained unchanged, the question then arises whether or not agricultural methods and results underwent any transformation in the classical period. If they did, was this in part a response to developments in scientific thought? to increasing demand for food and growing pressure on the land? to progress made elsewhere in the ancient world? or simply to changes in climate and physical environment? If, on the other hand, they did not, was this mainly because there was no need for change, in that increased demand (generally assumed to have occurred) was satisfied by cultivating marginal land, by emigration, or by importing grain? Or, if change was needed but did not occur, was this due to the Greeks’ failure to advance technologically, or to an ingrained conservatism that preserved traditional farming practices even in the face of repeated shortfalls? Or did the proverbial poverty of Greek farmland and the harshness of the climate make further modification of technique impractical before the development of modern farm machinery and fertilizers? Had Greek agriculture already progressed as far as it could?

In the late spring of 53 BC the Roman orator and politician M. Tullius Cicero received a letter from his brother Quintus who was then occupied with Julius Caesar in the conquest of Gaul. The letter (Epistulae ad Familiares 16.6) began as follows:

The source of Quintus' pleasure was Cicero's decision, taken shortly before, to set free a family slave named Tiro, a cultured man of considerable literary capacity. The pleasure was intense. Quintus spoke in his letter of Tiro, his own son and Cicero's children – all in one breath as it were – without communicating any sense of unease, for the manumission was a joyous affair, almost, it seems, a family event. Also intense was Cicero's personal regard for the slave, as a number of other letters that passed between the two show: just prior to the manumission for instance Cicero had been very concerned about Tiro's ill-health. Tiro was a valued slave whom Cicero thought fit to translate to a condition that better suited his accomplishments and the esteem in which he was held.

The central theme of this chapter is the impact of war on the Greek world in the first half of the fourth century B.C. Thucydides described the Peloponnesian War as the greatest disturbance in Greek history, a war that came to affect almost the whole of the Greek world and part of the non-Greek world as well. His verdict was amply verified by subsequent events.

Not every Greek state was affected at once or to the same degree. The central Peloponnese, for example, was largely unscathed, and Elis was in a flourishing condition at the time of the Spartan invasion of c. 402 (Xen. Hell. III.2.21–31). Boeotia as a whole suffered only one abortive Athenian invasion in 424. In the Decelean War the Thebans enriched themselves on the plunder of Attica and acquired many of the runaway Athenian slaves (Hell. Oxy. XVII (XII). 3–5). The impact of the war on the society and economy of the two protagonists differed strikingly. Sparta's victory, and the role she chose to play in Greek affairs after 404, placed strains on her society which she could not withstand. Whereas the fifth-century Athenian empire had spread prosperity through all classes of Athenian society, and thus helped to cement political and social stability, the Spartan empire aggravated internal tensions and inequalities in Sparta. The gap between Sparta's ambitions, and the resources available to her, seemed dangerously wide. Sparta's decline in the fourth century, within little over a generation after her victory, followed as a long-term consequence of that victory.

Any synthesis of Europe north of the Alps in the first half of the first millennium B.C. is conditioned by imbalances in the archaeological record. Much of the evidence is derived from cemeteries with specialized inventories of grave-goods, or from high-status fortified sites of exceptional character and function, rather than from a full spectrum of settlement or material remains. Even these data are unequally distributed regionally, or at any rate unequally studied, and not equally represented in successive chronological phases. The effect of this imbalance and discontinuity of evidence can be the creation of artificial horizons, which may be used to justify historical episodes or socio-economic climaxes, and which compound a tendency towards a ‘selected highlights’ view of European prehistory.

The classification and chronology of later prehistoric Europe is still largely based upon the system devised by Reinecke at the beginning of the century, named after the Alpine type-sites of Hallstatt and La Tène. In Reinecke's scheme, Hallstatt A and B equate with the Older and Younger phases respectively of the Urnfield Culture, in absolute terms spanning the twelfth to eighth centuries B.C., whilst Hallstatt C and D, dating from later eighth to early sixth, are generally recognized as the first Iron Age in central and western Europe. The system is essentially a Central European one, with important transalpine correlations, and it has been developed in large measure from the concentration of systematic research on the rich cemetery assemblages in these regions. West of the Rhine, in both Urnfield and Iron Hallstatt phases, the cemetery inventories show a more limited range of types, with fewer examples that could be regarded as diagnostic of the Central European culture, and local regional variants that progressively lend assemblages a distinctively Atlantic aspect.

INTRODUCTION

To study mint-output year by year, we need big hoards and coinage which is dated by year. This evidence can reveal big fluctuations. Thus annual differences in the Egyptian hoards illustrated in fig. 8.1 show a coefficient of variation of 245% (hoard 3) and 230% (hoard 6). This is primarily due to the enormous production surge in the mid-60s AD. In denarii of Severus Alexander (fig. 8.3), the coefficient is still high, 80% overall at Reka Devnia and 81% at Elveden. At Reka Devnia between 148 and 161, the variation in year-dated coin of Antoninus Pius struck for the Emperor is 55% (n = 4,081). Emperor coin under Commodus at Reka Devnia shows variation of 42% (n = 2,364).

These results undermine any assumption that annual output was constant. Usually there seems to be movement within the year-to-year figures, a movement which at times becomes regular and even systematic. Nevertheless, precious metal output from the Rome mint appears to have been broadly continuous in the main period studied. This contrasted with mints for provincial coinage, which were sometimes closed for years on end. But usually lack of year-dating means that the Rome evidence has to be conflated into blocs of several years. The longer blocs still show some fluctuation. Gold and silver indices run in parallel reign by reign for part of the period (Table 8.8). But over shorter periods they do not do so consistently.

COIN-HOARDS AND MINT-OUTPUT

Roman coin-hoards of a given date tend to show chronological similarities, which can be extremely close. No records of Roman mint-output survive. But in a later case where a large hoard can be compared with year-by-year mint records, the two chronological profiles are very similar. Even without this specific example, close resemblances between the chronology of Roman hoards would be very difficult to explain if the hoards did not reflect mint-output.

These similarities are illustrated in figs. 8.1–8.4. The best test is year-by-year analysis based on large samples. The first diagram compares year-totals for the period AD 41–71 in the two largest hoards of Egyptian tetradrachms listed by Milne. Hoard 3 ends in AD 165, and Hoard 6 in 191. Milne's totals of dated coins are 4,344 and 2,243 coins; 3,548 and 1,700 belong to the period shown here. Figure 8.1 shows that the annual percentages are extremely close (r2 = 0.983). Both hoards clearly illustrate the enormous surge in tetradrachm output in the last years of Nero.

The second diagram comes from the reign of Trajan. Trajan's coinage, like most of the central coinage of our period, is not dated by year, but is divided into six chronological segments. The hoards are the gigantic Reka Devnia hoard from Moesia ending in AD 251/3, and the via Braccianese hoard from outside Rome which ends in 230. The reported coin-samples for the reign of Trajan are 5,216 and 1,051.

COINAGE AS SEEN BY CONTEMPORARIES

Ancient writers say notoriously little about currency. The accounts of change under Nero, Commodus and Septimius Severus that might have been expected are not there in the narrative sources. And their fleeting allusions to changes by Trajan and Caracalla would be misleading by themselves. The most interesting coinage initiative of all, Domitian's revival of earlier standards, is also passed by in silence. Dio's text says nothing of Trajan's change in silver fineness or in the weight of the aureus. Caracalla's new denomination Dio apparently ignores, although as a contemporary he presumably knew of its existence. And Dio's complaint about plated gold currency under Caracalla is not borne out by the coin evidence, which shows only a weight-reduction. It is natural to infer from all this that there was little awareness of coinage change among the upper classes. The gold currency on which they mainly depended altered little before Caracalla, and once that had changed, some criticism of minting policy does emerge, even if not in a coherent form.

Another pointer is the failure to exploit the propaganda potential of the coinage to the full. The obverse of a coin from the central mint showed the Emperor, his consort, or another member of his family. But most coin reverses have motifs of a quite conventional kind, whether symbolic, religious, or mythological. This use of iconography may be merely unimaginative.

INTRODUCTION

Loss of weight through circulation is an important constant of coin behaviour. In coin of the late twentieth century, wear tends to be masked by the use of hard alloys, and by frequent replacement with new coin. But the effects of wear were still very obvious in the Victorian pennies circulating in Britain a few decades ago. Roman coin was not deliberately hardened by alloy, and it was often allowed to go on circulating for very long periods. As a result, surviving coin often shows obvious effects of wear, and large coin-hoards reveal different stages in this process.

Coin-hoards offer samples whose approximate date of deposit is normally indicated by the date of the latest coin. A hoard will generally represent a sample of the coin circulating at a particular date in antiquity. By contrast, museum or dealers' collections, however large, offer no scope for analysing wear, because they do not represent single samples of known date.

Few large hoards of the period have so far been published in detail. But the position has recently improved, and the biggest samples available provide enough detail to show patterns of coin-wear. From these hoards we can examine the rate of weight-loss over the extended periods for which weight-standards remained approximately the same. In big samples, the results suggest that the rate of wear was approximately linear, as in modern evidence (n.33). These results can be compared with the much fuller modern data.