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• W4205657995 abstract "424 PHOENIX Ober’s hypothesis represents an up-to-date, intriguing, and worthy addition to the long tradition among scholars of attempting to explain the glory that was Greece. While I have my doubts about aspects of the case he makes, and would place more explanatory weight on factors of geography and historical circumstance beyond the control of any of the Greek city-states, I admire the breadth, ambition, and resourcefulness Ober brings to the task. His book deserves to be read, perhaps especially by those who teach surveys of Greek history and thus routinely confront, and may find themselves having to address, the challenging question Ober seeks to answer. Indiana University Eric W. Robinson Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens. By David M. Pritchard. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 191. David Pritchard sets out in this book to settle two debates about the public finances of classical Athens. The first, which goes back to Demosthenes’ claim that the Athenians spend more on the Panathenaea and Dionysia than on any military expedition (4.35), is whether Athens devoted greater resources to religious festivals than to the waging of war. The second is whether the operation of its democratic system depended on imperial revenues. The book falls into three substantive chapters, bookended by an introductory chapter and a brief conclusion. In Chapter One Pritchard establishes the parameters of his enquiry. He proposes to examine expenditure in each of three areas—religious festivals, democracy, and war—for two decades, one from the fifth and one from the fourth century. He selected the 420s and the 370s because of the quality and quantity of the available evidence, although in both cases it could be argued that the choice is not neutral in relation to the question at issue: the 420s were chosen because we have inscriptions from them recording heavy public borrowing to fund the Pelopponesian War, the 370s because Xenophon provides detailed information about the campaigns of this decade (14). Pritchard limits himself to expenditure at the polis-level, but includes private spending by liturgists and others. He also usefully distinguishes between capital costs, fixed operating costs, and variable operating costs. Chapters Two to Four deal in turn with the costs of festivals, of democracy, and of war. The annual cost of religious festivals is reckoned to have stayed broadly constant at about 100 talents, whereas spending on Athens’ democratic institutions fluctuated. Despite the introduction of assembly pay in the early fourth century, the combination of numerous imperial magistrates and public slaves, along with more business in the courts, made democracy significantly more expensive in the 420s than in the 370s. But the cost of war far exceeded both. For the earlier decade Pritchard calculates an annual average of 1,485 talents; half a century later this had dropped to a still substantial 522 talents. Pritchard’s desire to quantify Athenian expenditure is an undeniably worthwhile project which no one has tried to undertake in any detail since August Böckh in the early nineteenth century. Pritchard wrestles gallantly with a mass of difficult material. The book contains valuable discussions of specific issues, such as the competence of the Athenian assembly to make informed financial decisions (16–24), and whether fourthcentury magistrates were paid (66–68). It will be required reading for anyone interested in the public finances of classical Athens. I am persuaded by Pritchard that even in the BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 425 370s Athens spent more on war than on religious festivals, and that non-imperial revenues were always sufficient to fund the operation of its democratic institutions (though the latter is surely self-evidently true for the fourth century, since Athens had no empire then and lacked any mechanism for running an annual deficit). There are plenty of points of detail that one might debate, but I will focus here on a few general issues. The first relates to the historiography of the debates that Pritchard sets out to settle. His main question—festivals or war?—undeniably makes an effective hook, but Böckh does not claim that Athens spent “more on festivals than on war” (2), at least not in the passages Pritchard..." @default.
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• W4205657995 title "Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens by David M. Pritchard" @default.
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