Eric W Driscoll (Harvard University)
This paper uses the Milesian islands (Haussoullier 1902) as a case study to argue that Athens’ extraction of tribute, or phoros, from its allies in the fifth century BCE inadvertently augmented governmental capacity in those states. The paper draws on epigraphic, literary, and archaeological evidence to suggest that the Milesian islands (Leros, Patmos, and other smaller isles) possessed fragmented and informal governmental institutions in the wake of the Ionian Revolt at the start of the fifth century, passed through a fluctuating, semi-formal yet effective institutional structure, discernible in the Athenian tribute lists, and were thereafter—by the time they developed into formalized, juridical demes in the early Hellenistic period—indelibly stamped by their role in collecting and transferring phoros to Athens in the fifth century.
The necessity of transmuting prosodoi into phoros—civic revenues into imperial tribute—impacted communities within the Athenian empire differently. In some cases, we can trace responses to the tribute in the form of apotaxis and synteleia, or the “breaking-apart” and “paying-together” of corporate groups of communities (most extensively studied by Jensen 2010). Scholars have previously argued that the appearance of new groups in the Athenian tribute lists can be a sign of their growing integration into Aegean economic networks and perhaps of the monetization of their small, local economies (Constantakopoulou 2013; cf. Jensen 2012). The case of the Milesian islands has been analyzed on similar lines (Jensen 2010), but this paper instead situates these phenomena of Athenian imperial finance within a broader ecology of governmental practices over the long term. It does by drawing on the rich, but largely ignored, archive of public inscriptions and new archaeological data from the Milesian islands themselves (Manganaro 1963-64; Triantafyllidis 2006 and 2010). The epigraphic texts reveal a continuing emphasis on fiscal practices during the Hellenistic period—the islands’ major magistrates were the chrysonomoi or “gold managers”—that echoes the concerns of the Athenian tribute lists in the fifth century and is readily intelligible given the islands’ significance as nodes within Aegean networks of commerce and communication over the long term, attested by archaeological finds (cf. Horden and Purcell 2000; Purcell 2005).
This new scenario (which builds on insights from Piérart 1974, 1983, and 1985) rewrites the regnant narratives of Milesian history and territoriality (Meritt 1972, Robertson 1987, and Paarmann 2014; cf. Talamo 2003). But the paper also intervenes more broadly in the history of Athenian imperialism qua fiscal system. Bringing its new conclusions together with the history of the empire, the paper offers a postcolonial perspective on the life and afterlife of Athenian imperialism (inspired in particular by Mbembe 2001). From such a vantage, the Milesian islands’ development from local nodes within the variegated network of Aegean interactions, in the fifth century, into centers of taxation and expenditure, participating in the moral and political economies of the Hellenistic world, can be seen as a result of their obligation to develop extractive fiscal governance in order to pay tribute to Athens.