Foreign Policy

This paper presents a new method for gauging the cost of waging the naval struggle of the First Punic War (264-241 B.C.E.). Scholars have tended to be sharply critical of Carthaginian strategy, presented as passive and sluggish in the face of Roman boldness and willingness to endure losses (Thiel 1954; Lazenby 1996, 2004; Grainger 2011; Hoyos 2015). This paper presents a reassessment of this view in three main parts, beginning with an effort to estimate the cost of naval operations during the war.

After narrating in detail the Spartan campaign led by Dercylidas against the Persians in Asia Minor, Xenophon states that the Spartans waged a war against Elis ‟at the same time” (κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν χρόνον; Hell. 3.2.21). This is at odds with both Diodorus’ (14.17.4-12) and Pausanias’ (3.8.3-5) accounts, which place Dercylidas’ campaign at least a year after the Elean War. Since the discovery of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia as an independent source for this time period, scholars generally reject Xenophon’s synchronism in Hell. 3.2.21 as a historical blunder.

The present paper places the wars of Andriscus and Aristonicus in dialogue with later Roman provincial revolts, particularly the Pannonian and Judaean Revolts. The goal of such a dialogue is to correct an unfortunate trend in the current scholarship of Roman revolts. Despite the proliferation of detailed studies of individual provincial revolts during the Imperial Period, relatively few comparative analyses of these conflicts exist—a clear shortcoming of our field given comparative revolt studies in other traditions (e.g. Hobsbawm 1959; Goldstone 1991, 2011).

In my presentation I will challenge the belief, long dominant among scholars of the ‘Athenian Empire’, that the Athenian exaction of phoros (tribute) from its allies was particularly odious to those allies. Lisa Kallet (1993 p.