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DOSSIER THÉMATIQUE
Guerre et autorité en Grèce archaïque

Fostering a Spontaneous Military: Deregulated Violence in Archaic Athens

Encourager une force armée spontanée : la violence déréglementée dans l’Athènes archaïque
Jesse Obert

Résumés

Les études sur les poleis grecques antiques, en particulier Athènes à l’époque archaïque et classique, établissent fréquemment des comparaisons entre les politiques gouvernementales antiques et les institutions qui fondent nos démocraties libérales modernes. Cette approche anachronique de la politique antique néglige les sources primaires, tant ce que nous savons que ce que nous ignorons. Depuis cinquante ans, les chercheurs s’interrogent avec insistance sur l’existence ou non d’une organisation militaire à Athènes avant les réformes de Clisthène en 508. Plutôt que de supposer l’existence d’une institution que nos sources ne révèlent pas ou de considérer cette absence comme une omission, l’article soutient que cette lacune documentaire pourrait être intentionnelle. Des travaux récents en théorie politique, ainsi que d’importantes théories économiques du xxe siècle, affirment que certaines institutions sociales peuvent émerger de manière spontanée et passive. Ces systèmes ont des fonctions importantes et bénéficient in fine à une pluralité d’acteurs concurrents. Les numismates ont récemment invoqué ce type de système ordonné pour expliquer comment les monnaies aux chouettes athéniennes ont supplanté le monnayage des Wappenmünzen. Dans cette perspective, cet article retrace comment le pouvoir militaire à Athènes au vie siècle s’est spontanément cristallisé autour des tyrannies, comment ces tyrannies ont occupé un rôle clé dans la structuration et la distribution du pouvoir au sein de la polis athénienne, et comment ce système militaire non réglementé a été remplacé par l’armée centralisée que fait apparaître le récit d’Hérodote.

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  • 1 All dates are BCE except in reference to modern scholarship. The dates for Cleomenes’ invasion of A (...)
  • 2 Ober writes that the “unexpected Athenian victories can best be explained by assuming that Athens w (...)

1In 506,1 the Athenian polis faced invasions on three sides (Herodotus, V, 74). But Athens had a new public army, and there were new systems in place to rally the citizens, non‑citizens, and enslaved people required to fill the ranks of that army. This military organization owed its existence to Kleisthenes’ reforms in 508, just two years prior,2 but scholars have long debated: did the Athenian polis have an army before 508? Certainly, there were Athenian armies in the sixth century—that is not in doubt—but it is unclear whether these armies were operating under the command of private citizens or if these armies represented legitimate polis-sanctioned groups.

  • 3 Hansen (2006, 64).
  • 4 Ma (2024, 18).
  • 5 Contra Van Wees (2013, passim; 2018, 104–105). This is admittedly an old argument, but my contribut (...)
  • 6 Hayek (2022, 87–89).

2This debate is paramount to our understanding of Archaic poleis. Draco and Solon famously implemented a series of laws early in the Athenian Archaic period, perhaps in the late seventh and early sixth centuries respectively. If these laws and institutions did not seek to curtail or control military power, then the late Hansen’s definition of the polis, the definition that most scholars use today, requires an important caveat. Hansen describes the polis as a political organization with a defined territory, a defined people, and institutions that claimed sole legitimate control over organized violence, i.e. warfare.3 Ma has recently proposed downdating the “developed polis” to the fourth century.4 This jump is perhaps too radical, but it is worth reflecting on whether our assumption that poleis monopolized military power, in a Weberian sense, may be obscuring how we conceptualize the Archaic polis. In this paper, I argue that the Athenians had armies in the Archaic period, but that they did not centralize military power or even monitor its use until the last decade of the sixth century.5 They opted out of political regulation and instead trusted in what an economist might call “spontaneous order:”6 a mutual self‑interest among violent actors to both preserve the community and improve its economic and social standing through the enactment of violence with private armies abroad.

  • 7 Valdés Guía (2019).
  • 8 Hereafter abbreviated Ath. Pol.

3In 2013 and 2018, Van Wees took a firm stance against this reading and argued that the absence of an organized military in our primary source evidence is not sufficient justification to argue that one did not exist. Valdés Guía suggested in 2019 that the Athenians’ sixth‑century military was led by aristocrats who functionally represented the demos and raised armies through patronage, clientelism, and private wealth.7 Although Valdés Guía is no doubt correct in her reading of Archaic military organization, she still assumes that the ultimate authority to command these armies was centralized and actively monopolized by the demos within the polis system—an assumption that is simply not attested until after Kleisthenes’ reforms. Alternatively, I propose that the absence of an organized military in our evidence was intentional and that the Solonian reforms sought to foster a system that had emerged without any sort of regulation or legislation. The author of the Athenaion Politeia8 notes that some people characterized Solon’s laws as intentionally obscure: ἐπίτηδες ἀσαφεῖς (Ath. Pol., 9.2). I suggest that some of this obscurity is self‑inflicted because we are anachronistically assuming the existence of certain institutions, such as legal bodies within the polis that claimed sole legitimate control over organized violence.

  • 9 See Gabrielsen (2007 and 2013). Gabrielsen uses the word “state”, which I think creates more proble (...)
  • 10 See Gabrielsen (2013, 138–147).
  • 11 Gabrielsen (2013, 144).
  • 12 Gabrielsen (2013, 146–147).

4This reading builds on Gabrielsen’s work on raiding and piracy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean and, more specifically, his distinction between a “monopolistic violent” polis and “oligopolistic violent” polis.9 In the former, military power is concentrated in a single political institution or organization, like Hansen’s polis or Weber’s state. These types of communities deemed wielding violence outside the boundaries of the polity, as a pirate or independent actor, to be a direct violation of cultural or legal norms.10 Oligopolistic violent poleis, on the other hand, distributed military power broadly, and often unequally, to individual members of the community who could legitimately enact organized violence without central oversight.11 Although Gabrielsen is primarily interested in piracy and brigandry, the line between pirate and general was often remarkably thin in the ancient world.12

  • 13 Gabrielsen (2013, 141–142).
  • 14 Gabrielsen (2013, 142).

5In his 2013 chapter, Gabrielsen applies this theoretical framework to Classical Athens. He describes the way in which Athenians used Lavrion silver to build a public navy, following Themistocles’ proposal (Herodotus, VII, 144), as a transition from an oligopolistic system into a monopolistic system.13 The polis took on the responsibility of constructing, maintaining, and crewing their warships. Individual aristocrats still carried the brunt of this expense and commanded the ships as generals or strategoi, but they were beholden to a central authority and risked being labelled as a criminal if they acted like an independent raider.14 When Athens decided to field a public navy, the authority that determined how violence would be enacted on behalf of the Athenians shifted from individual commanders to a central polis military hierarchy.

  • 15 See Valdés Guía (2019) and below.

6The best example of how this transition impacted the ways in which Athenians raised and deployed armies comes from the final pages of Herodotus’ work. As the siege of Sestos dragged into autumn, the Athenian combatants begged their strategoi to lead them home (Herodotus, IX, 117). The strategoi responded that they could not leave Sestos before taking the city or being recalled by the Athenian koinon. Herodotus uses this term throughout his work to describe polities or collections of polities with military power (e.g. Herodotus, I, 67, 141, 148; III, 79, 82; IV, 180; V, 16, 63, 109; VI, 14, 50, 58; IX, 26; etc.), but interestingly he also uses it in the scene mentioned above: when Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to build a public navy (Herodotus, VII, 144). Since the Athenian koinon built the navy, the koinon decided when and where strategoi would lead that navy—the strategoi no longer made this decision on their own, as they had in the sixth century.15 The combatants may not have experienced any shift in individual army organization, and they probably pleaded with their strategoi thinking that they were still fighting within an oligopolistic violent system, but the Athenian koinon had clearly become a monopolistic violent polis by 479.

  • 16 As I will explain below, this argument is highly nuanced and rooted in a careful reading of our sou (...)

7The implications of Gabrielsen’s model are far‑reaching and revolutionary: publicly funded militaries centralized authority and non‑funded systems allowed wealthy individuals to use violence outside the boundaries of the polis. Following this logic, we can presume that polities with detailed military regulations monopolized violence and polities that deployed independently operating armies were oligopolistic violent polities. When the Romans demanded that Illyrians stop attacking their shipping in the third century, the queen of Illyria claimed that she had no authority to order a cessation of hostilities (Polybius, II, 8, 8). Even if she was lying to the Romans, her lie presents a picture of a type of government that is difficult for us to envision in the modern world. We generally assume that polities had to have a monopoly over violence—meaning that they carefully regulated how armies were raised, who led those armies, and where those armies moved—but that was not the case everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean. Applied to Archaic Athens, the staseis, or civil wars, of the sixth century may not have represented as much of a transgression or interruption of government as we might presume.16 Indeed, a deregulated, oligopolistic system probably even had direct benefits for the Athenian people. As we shall see, it is fruitful to compare Athens’ transition from oligopolistic violence to monopolistic violence with their transition into a single coin design. Thinking through how militaristic and economic power changed between the Archaic and Classical periods illustrates how incentivizing violent competition among private armies probably strengthened and enriched the polis.

8Due to the nature of our sources, it is best to start in 508 and work backwards. Except for fragments from Solon’s poems, our literary evidence for sixth‑century Athens is only preserved by fifth and fourth century authors. Like modern scholars, many of these authors no doubt struggled to imagine Athens before 479, when the city, as a monopolistic violent polis, became one of the key players in the Eastern Mediterranean and commanded a large publicly funded navy. Early in the Classical period, Athens paid, managed, and directed thousands of combatants, and the Athenian demos annually elected generals to carry out violence on their collective behalf.

  • 17 Fornara (1971, 9).

9Kleisthenes’ reforms in 508 initially created a rather fragile system that balanced military power between individual aristocrats and the Athenian demos, but this power gradually coalesced behind the representatives and leaders of the demos. Herodotus tells us that ten strategoi led the Athenian army in 490 by rotating leadership between themselves every day, and an eleventh official, who was chosen by lottery and called the polemarchos, had equal voting power (Herodotus, VI, 109–110). Whichever strategos was in charge ordered and deployed the army, but the polemarchos led the forces on the field (Herodotus, VI, 111). This system appears to have been abandoned by 479, only eleven years later, when Aristides led the Athenian army at Plataea as the sole strategos (Herodotus, IX, 28). Regardless, the earlier version of the Kleisthenic army appears to have depended on shared power, competition between the strategoi, and sortition to prevent any one leader from monopolizing the military.17 Miltiades’ overwhelming success at Marathon, which was by no means a sure thing (Herodotus, VI, 109–110, 112), probably contributed to the disappearance of this system.

  • 18 Ober (2007, 84). Van Wees disagrees with this reading and assumes some unnamed Athenian magistrates (...)
  • 19 See Ober (2004 and 2007).
  • 20 Forsdyke makes a similar argument to explain ostracism and how the demos incorporated the “politics (...)

10The emphasis on competition between strategoi is particularly important to the early Kleisthenic system. According to the author of the Ath. Pol., each of the ten new tribes elected a representative strategos to lead them (Ath. Pol., 22.2), while the polemarchos was appointed by lottery and therefore represented the collective demos itself (Herodotus, VI, 109). Ober has argued that on the eve of the Kleisthenic reforms, the demos acted “as a collective historical agent […] by besieging a Spartan king for three days on the Athenian acropolis”.18 The demos rejected Isagoras and his Spartan supporters, recalled Kleisthenes from exile, and radically reformed their political and military systems (Herodotus, V, 73). The anonymity of the demos in this moment is significant as well as the fact that as Ober stresses, the demos appears to operate like one of the earlier military faction leaders, such as Peisistratos, who wielded and enacted violence to acquire power.19 In a sense, the polemarchos’ eleventh vote signified the military inclination of the demos, which had already established itself as a legitimate military competitor by 508.20

  • 21 Frost (1984, 293–294). There is an important instance that he overlooked, see below.
  • 22 Pritchard (2012, 193–200).
  • 23 Valdés Guía (2019).

11After the Athenians successfully repelled their invaders in 506, Herodotus explains that the Athenian demos had been submissive, ἐθελοκάκεον, under their tyrants (Herodotus, V, 78). In 1984, Frost observed that before this moment, there is no evidence that the Athenian demos ever mobilized its own army.21 When Miltiades sought to extend Athenians’ control over the Chersonese, for example, he rallied together, παραλαβὼν, an army of Athenians who wished to join him and make a profit (Herodotus, VI, 36). Pritchard eloquently summarizes how sixth‑century Athenian militaries operated: as privately led, volunteer forces that were assembled ad hoc.22 Up until 508, Athenian armies were organized, commanded, and disbanded by individual aristocrats.23 These strategoi seemed to have no official or legal obligation to the polis but defended the Athenian peoples’ interests in an attempt to retain control and power over the largest number of constituents.

  • 24 Van Wees (2013, 52).
  • 25 This government title existed before Solon’s reforms (Ath. Pol., 3.2) but may have had religious an (...)
  • 26 Van Wees also references Peisistratus’ and Hippias’ disarming of citizens as evidence that there wa (...)

12Throughout the sixth century, individuals, rather than the Athenian demos, raised and controlled military forces, but there are two important exceptions: the Athenian raid on Aegina and Peisistratos’ first attempt at tyranny. Some scholars reference the Kylonian Affair as a third possible example, but this is a misreading. According to Herodotus and Thucydides, Kylon sought to become tyrant by seizing the acropolis with an army of friends, clients, and mercenaries (Herodotus, V, 71; Thucydides, I, 126). Herodotus simply says that he was not successful, οὐ δυνάμενος δὲ ἐπικρατῆσαι, but Thucydides provides greater detail. Evidently, Kylon seized the acropolis during a great festival outside the city, while the Athenian citizens were away. When they learned of Kylon’s attack, they returned from the countryside and besieged him. Van Wees describes this as a “general mobilization”,24 but the Athenians were clearly just filing into the city as they returned from the festival and operating as a collective group. In the next sentence, Thucydides tells us that they returned to their lives and empowered nine archons and the sanctuary guards to finish the siege of the acropolis and do what they thought was best with Kylon and his followers: ἐπιτρέψαντες τοῖς ἐννέα ἄρχουσι τήν τε φυλακὴν καὶ τὸ πᾶν αὐτοκράτορσι διαθεῖναι ᾗ ἂν ἄριστα διαγιγνώσκωσιν. This is not evidence of the demos empowering and creating an army: they either thought the archons and the guards could finish the siege on their own, or they expected the archons to raise their own private forces to finish the job. Interestingly, one of the nine archons must have been the pre‑Kleisthenic polemarchos,25 who we might have expected to oversee a siege if a centralized military system existed. Although the demos besieged Kylon collectively, there was apparently not a ready system in place once they wanted to go home.26

13Herodotus provides a clearer example of an army operating with the authority of the demos later in book five, but the inconsistency of his description should give us pause. After the Aeginetans seized several sacred statues from the Epidaurians, the Athenians sent out a trireme to raid Aegina and drag off the statues (Herodotus, V, 83–86). According to the Athenians, this trireme consisted of warriors from the city, τῶν ἀστῶν, who were dispatched by the community, ἀπὸ τοῦ κοινοῦ—using another version of the word koinon to refer to the Athenians as a whole (Herodotus, V, 85). These warriors ended up killing each other in a fit of madness when they tried to drag away the statues—a moment of divine retribution, no doubt. According to the Aeginetans, on the other hand, the Athenians invaded with a full army, pulled at the statues until they fell into a kneeling position, and were then slaughtered in an ambush (Herodotus, V, 86). Both versions of this conflict involve divinities and magical power, and both end in utter defeat for the Athenians. The use of the word koinon in the Athenian recollection both conveniently avoids naming the aristocratic strategos who led the expedition and reenforces the narrative, consistent throughout Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ histories, that the ancient rivalry between Aegina and Athens was rooted in cultural and religious opposition. The organization and leadership of this force is less important to Herodotus than the statues themselves and the story of how they came to be on Aegina.

14The second potential example of a demos- or koinon-organized army dates to approximately 560, when two Athenian aristocrats, one leading a faction from the coast and the other a faction from the plains, competed for military and political power (Herodotus, I, 59). According to Herodotus, Peisistratos then formed a third faction with the goal of becoming tyrant. He pretended to have been attacked by his rivals and implored the demos to give him a personal guard. We do not know the size of this force, but Herodotus explains that Peisistratos had already proven himself as a strategos at Megara and Nisaea, implying that this guard was substantial (Herodotus, I, 59). Peisistratos and his guards then occupied the acropolis. He ruled the Athenians for a short time as a tyrant—this was the first of three instances in which he seized power—but Herodotus stresses that his rule was well and good and according to the laws (Herodotus, I, 59).

15The demos created and gave Peisistratos his guard by enlisting men from the city: τῶν ἀστῶν καταλέξας ἄνδρας. The word καταλέγω has a complex usage in Herodotus’ work, and “enlist” is probably an oversimplification. In this instance, the word does not seem to indicate that there was a preexisting system for drafting citizens into military service, only that certain people were called out or named to be members of the guard. Herodotus goes on to explain that these guards were carrying clubs rather than spears: οἳ δορυφόροι μὲν οὐκ ἐγένοντο Πεισιστράτου κορυνηφόροι δέ. This detail is significant because it foreshadows a later section of book one: when Herodotus describes how the Medes decided to become a monarchy and set up Deiokes as their king (Herodotus, I, 96–98). Rather than imploring the people for a guard of club bearers like Peisistratos, Deiokes ordered them, ἐκέλευε, to organize a guard of spear bearers, δορυφόρους (Herodotus, I, 98). This army was similarly enlisted from the community, and Herodotus uses another form of the word καταλέγω: ἐκ πάντων Μήδων καταλέξασθαι. But rather than occupying the city’s existing infrastructure like Peisistratos, Deiokes orders the Medes to build him a new citadel. Just in case we missed the juxtaposition, Herodotus uses the walls of Athens to explain the size and scale of Deiokes’ new fortifications (Herodotus, I, 98). The similarities between Herodotus’ descriptions of Peisistratos’ tyranny and Deiokes’ monarchy speaks to many of Herodotus’ broader themes—a history of the achievements of the Persians and Greeks—and we should therefore interpret Peisistratos’ club bearers with an abundance of caution. Even if the demos created and gave Peisistratos a personal guard, we have every reason to assume that Athens was still an oligopolistic violent polis.

  • 27 I do not believe that the tyrants were sovereign (contra Hoekstra, 2016) and instead read them as e (...)
  • 28 E.g. Wallace (2007, 75–76).
  • 29 E.g. Teegarden (2014).
  • 30 See Sagstetter (2013).

16Peisistratos failed to hold onto power with his guard of club bearers and was quickly expelled from the city by his rivals’ forces (Herodotus, I, 60). After a second failed attempt at seizing power, he was only able to solidify his tyranny by raising a large fortune from foreign cities, hiring a private army of foreign mercenaries, invading Attica, and defeating his rivals’ private armies in a pitched battle (Herodotus, I, 61–63). Despite this bloody rise to power, both Herodotus and the author of the Ath. Pol. remember Peisistratos as a just administrator who never broke the laws (Ath. Pol., 16.8; Herodotus, I, 59). Thucydides also reports that the Peisistratids did not interfere with the existing laws and further explains that they simply carried out the Athenians’ wars, made dedications to the temples, beautified the city, and collected taxes (Thucydides, VI, 54). According to Aristotle, Peisistratos won the demos’ support by opposing the old aristocratic families (Politica, 1305a), and the author of the Ath. Pol. describes him as δημοτικώτατος, or the most democratic (Ath. Pol., 14.1). Our sources seem to indicate that the Athenian tyrants complimented, rather than conflicted with, Solon’s laws.27 Scholars have traditionally interpreted this as proof of the strength and genius of Solon’s laws,28 and some scholars have alternatively suggested that Solon’s laws had flaws and blind spots.29 Sagstetter’s forthcoming book, based on her dissertation, even goes so far as to argue that Solon’s reforms more closely resemble those of an Archaic tyrant than a proto-democratic lawgiver.30 I take a more traditional reading of Solon’s reforms and imagine them as targeted attempts to preempt and avoid stasis, but within this framework, the gaps in his reforms must also have been intentional. Since Athens did not have an organized military before the Kleisthenic reforms, the Peisistratids’ hegemony over violence was simply a spontaneous order that emerged within the relatively loose institutional framework of Solonian Athens.

  • 31 The etymology of ἀρχός is famously perplexing, since many ancient authors use this same word to des (...)
  • 32 A much later Roman source, Pollux, reports that that the Athenian polemarchos was a head priest who (...)
  • 33 I am thinking of the numerous scholars who have outlined the role of military entrepreneurs in earl (...)

17It is often said that Solon’s property classifications were based on military requirements and obligations, but this is not actually stated anywhere in the primary sources. According to the Ath. Pol., polemarchoi existed before Solon (Ath. Pol., 3.2), but we have no way of knowing if these individuals defended the city with public or private armies. The word polemarchos probably means something like “war leader”, but it had a remarkably fluid, non‑descript meaning in the ancient world.31 Although Herodotus describes the polemarchos at Marathon as a specific official in the Athenian democracy, he names other polemarchoi from other poleis who evidently had different roles and responsibilities (e.g. Herodotus, VII, 173). Before Herodotus, Aeschylus used the term in the plural to describe Theban royalty and singular to describe Agamemnon (Aeschylus, Chor., 1072; Sept., 828). Both in history and in myth, polemarchoi operated within complex hierarchies and led groups of warriors into battle, but the organization and structure of those groups was highly dependent on each individual community.32 There is no reason to assume that the existence of a polemarchos presupposes the existence of a polis‑organized military, and outside of the ancient world, scholars are increasingly discovering evidence of private military leaders who did not work within state institutions, despite their importance for the preservation of those complex polities.33

  • 34 Kucewicz (2022, 23–24), Van Wees (2018, 118–119). Pollux reports that each naukraria furnished, παρ (...)
  • 35 For the etymology discussion, see Gabrielsen (1994, 24), contra Van Wees (2013, 46–47). Otherwise, (...)
  • 36 E.g. the title of basileus, or “king”, within the Athenian democratic system.
  • 37 Figueira (2011, 190 and passim).
  • 38 Figueira (2011, 190). Although Figueira consistently thinks of Athens’ military as a centralized pr (...)
  • 39 See Faraguna (2015, 654).
  • 40 As Van Wees claims (2013, 52–54).
  • 41 Faraguna’s (2025) recent piece exploring record-keeping throughout the Greek world, and not just At (...)

18The fourth-century author of the Ath. Pol. also mentions a group of officials called the naukraroi in ancient Athens, who are reportedly described in pre‑Solonian inscriptions as collecting and paying out silver (Ath. Pol., 8.3). Kucewicz and Van Wees have argued that these naukraroi signal the presence of some sort of centralized military authority, citing a late Roman source who emphasizes the etymology of their title (Pollux, VIII, 108).34 These scholars, therefore, translate the awkward Archaic word naukraroi as “ship captains”. Gabrielsen makes a case against this reading and offers instead “temple leaders” or “settlement leaders”.35 Instead of the Attic ναῦς, meaning “ship”, he proposes that the first part of this word, nau-, relates to the Doric ναός, meaning “temple”, or the verb ναίω, meaning “to settle”. The etymological argument is ultimately not very persuasive, in either case—as with the word polemarchos, names and political titles changed over time, especially in ancient Athens.36 I generally prefer Figueira’s interpretation of naukraroi as the administrative officials of naukrariai, which comprised Athenians from different tribes and demes.37 According to the Ath. Pol., these officials were eventually replaced by demarchoi, who managed local enlistments but did not wield any military power within their deme (Ath. Pol., 21.5). Figueira assumes that naukraroi “had been granted by the polis the authority to muster men”,38 but there is no reason to adopt such a position if Athens was operating as an oligopolistic violent polis. The naukraroi no doubt made lists of citizens who qualified for each Solonian property class,39 but assuming that these lists were used for recruitment, like those of the demarchoi,40 unfairly and anachronistically retrojects a Classical system into the Archaic period.41

  • 42 This is my primary counterargument to Van Wees’ (2013) thesis: although I am persuaded that the Ath (...)
  • 43 Wallace (2007, 76).

19Regardless of whether or not they had a military role, the naukraroi had an important economic role that was central to Solon’s restructuring of the economic classes, implementation of a single standard of weights and measures, and forgiveness of debts. But systems of wealth regulation and extraction, such as taxation, need not be symptomatic of a centralized military institution.42 The Ath. Pol. states that Peisistratos supported ordinary Athenians by assisting them with loans and helping them financially (Ath. Pol., 16.2–3), and Wallace notes that these sorts of financial policies would have been essential following Solon’s reforms.43 Solon leveled the economic playing field, and this newfound arena must have heightened competition between the existing aristocratic families. Without additional oversight, their unregulated competition would have led to new economic monopolies and the consolidation of wealth at the top. The Peisistratids’ economic policies are all the more important considering the fact that the Athenian economy was quickly shifting into a coin‑based system towards the end of the sixth century.

  • 44 For a detailed overview of the Wappenmünzen, see Flament (2007, 9–16).

20As an analogy for institutional shift, we might pivot for a moment to reflect on Athenian minting practices, which underwent an important transformation in the late sixth and early fifth century. In many ways, the pattern by which Athenians transitioned from Wappenmünzen coins to Owl coins reflects the ways in which Athenians transitioned from oligopolistic violence to monopolistic violence. Although coin enthusiasts regard Owl coins as some of the most important symbols of Athenian economic power, the Wappenmünzen had real monetary benefits and played an important role in strengthening Athens’ economy in the late sixth century.44

  • 45 Davis et al. (2020, 7).
  • 46 Davis et al. (2020, 5).
  • 47 Kroll (1981, 30).
  • 48 Davis (2012, 139).
  • 49 The Standards Decree in the 420s or mid‑410s is the earliest evidence of Athenians trying to contro (...)

21This story has only started to emerge recently, following a seminal archaeometallurgical paper by Davis, Gore, Sheedy, and Albarède. They analyzed hundreds of Wappenmünzen and fifth-century Owl coins and made several interesting observations. First, the earliest Wappenmünzen coins were not typically made from local Lavrion silver.45 Lavrion silver increasingly became the main silver source for Athenian coins over the last decades of the sixth century, but in the fifth century, around 90% of Owl coins were of Lavrion silver.46 This illustrates how minting gradually became more centrally oriented around Lavrion, which most numismatists already assumed before knowing the chemical compositions of the coins. Most scholars date the introduction of the Wappenmünzen to Peisistratos’ tyranny in the 540s or 530s.47 It is possible that Peisistratos himself ordered the creation of all these coins from one mint, but the general consensus is that the diverse visual designs of the Wappenmünzen reflect multiple “magistrates’ devices” over the last decades of the sixth century.48 During the Persian Wars, the Athenians produced coins with one image that were forged with silver from one mine, and although the exact details of how this transition was organized and enforced have been lost, we can see the results of this centralization in the coins themselves. As we have seen, military power underwent a similar transformation: from several independent strategoi with their own armies, to a single Athenian military led by a coalition of rotating strategoi, to one strategos at Platea and several strategoi beholden to the Athenian koinon at Sestos. Both institutions changed radically, but slowly, over the course of about a generation, and both institutions reacted to the successes and failures of ancient Athens. Over the course of the fifth century, military power was increasingly dominated by only one or two strategoi, much like how Athenian Owls became the dominant coin despite the absence of any specific legislation that enforced their use in Athenian markets before the Peloponnesian War.49

  • 50 Rihll (2001, 115).
  • 51 Davis et al. (2020, 4).
  • 52 Ibid.
  • 53 Davis et al. (2020, 4–6).

22Davis et al.’s second important revelation pertains to the amount of lead and copper in Athenian coins. Silver and lead naturally occur together, and Lavrion ores were typically 99% lead and only 1% silver.50 The majority of the lead was removed during the cupellation process, but minters sometimes added it and copper post‑cupellation to strengthen the coin.51 Lead also made the metal easier and cheaper to work, so adding just a little bit of lead meant that more coins could be produced from less silver.52 Davis et al. found that Owl coins had relatively high levels of copper and lead, while Wappenmünzen coins were practically pure silver.53 Moreover, Wappenmünzen coins were remarkably consistent chemically, while Owl coins varied in composition rather radically.

  • 54 Hayek (2022, 87–88).
  • 55 Hayek (2022, 88–89).
  • 56 Hayek (2022, 89–91).
  • 57 Hayek (2022, 95–96).
  • 58 Hayek (2022, 89–90).
  • 59 Hayek (2022, 92).

23In other words, Davis et al.’s study found that as Athenian mints adopted a single coin type from a single silver source, they produced less-pure coins and experimented with different production methodologies and metallurgical recipes. Despite the earlier coins’ inconsistency in appearance, they retained a certain purity during a period of heighten competition between different visual designs; a consumer could count on the high quality of a Wappenmünzen coin despite its unique appearance. Athenians were still free to use these coins in the fifth century, but the Owls would have been more accessible, and eliminating the competition over design, freed mints to experiment with chemical composition. Hayek discusses how these sorts of economic “orders” formed, developed, and changed in volume one of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, originally published in 1973. He defines an order as a “state of affairs” that can either be created or can exist “without having been deliberately created”.54 He calls a created order a taxis, using the Greek word, and argues that it is typically imposed exogenously.55 He uses the word kosmos to describe an order that is not deliberately created and explains that this type of ordering happens passively and endogenously within a defined social group or economic system.56 This is a spontaneous order—a set of rules and norms that emerge without government or institutional intervention. Like any other institution or ideology, these systems have organizations, rules, and actors, but it is much harder to identify these parameters and factors for a spontaneous order.57 By definition, spontaneous orders emerge alongside or within constructed political systems, so the line between institution and order is necessarily vague. To return to Athenian numismatics, the Wappenmünzen coins are as close as we can estimate to one of Hayek’s spontaneous orders. The invisible hand of self‑interest created a stalemate between competing coin designs and ensured that the average coin was almost pure silver—that the quality remained consistently high.58 But as Hayek emphasizes, this status quo had little if any non‑economic purpose and instead serves a discreet social function.59 The coins facilitated large-scale transactions and strengthened the Athenian economy regardless, and potentially despite, the designers’ political and social intentions.

  • 60 Such as in Megara (Herodotus, I, 59), Nisaea (ibid.), and the Chersonese (Herodotus, VI, 34–38).
  • 61 See Lloyd, Konijnendijk & Kucewicz (2021, 7), Konijnendijk (2018, 154).
  • 62 Ober (2015, 166).

24I propose that Athenian military power experienced a similar transformation from spontaneous to imposed order. Before Kleisthenes’ reforms, wealthy citizens led independent armies and used these forces to expand both their own and the polis’ influence, both locally and in the Northern Aegean.60 As far as we can tell, these armies probably consisted of relatively smaller groups of wealthier combatants.61 In 506, the new public Athenian army overwhelmed both the Boiotians and Chalkidians, fighting two battles in a single day (Herodotus, V, 77). Herodotus says that after the second battle, the Athenians left behind four thousand settlers in Chalkidian land. This must have been a substantial fighting force, and Ober comments that Athens’ “rivals, expecting a much smaller force, were caught off guard”.62

25For Athens, a centralized military translated into a larger army but also invited experimentation. When Miltiades led the Athenians to victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490, Herodotus notes that they were the first of the Greeks to run at their enemy (Herodotus, VI, 112). Later sources report that enslaved people fought in the battle (Pausanias, I, 32, 3; VII, 15, 7; X, 20, 2), and Herodotus notably never says who was stationed in the middle of the hoplite battleline. He states that the Athenians were on the right in order by tribe, the Plataeans were on the left, and the middle had the lowest number of combatants (Herodotus, VI, 111). When the Persians defeated the forces in the middle, Herodotus explains that the Athenians and Plataeans continued fighting on the wings (Herodotus, VI, 113), so we should logically expect the middle to have been made up of combatants who were neither Athenian nor Plataean. These Athenians and Plataeans eventually defeated their opponents; drew up together behind the Persian’s middle, which was pursuing the unnamed Greek middle; and routed these final forces, encircling them (Herodotus, VI, 113). The battle of Marathon represented many firsts, and like the Owl coinage, illustrates how the imposed order of a single centralized system created opportunities for experimentation.

  • 63 Enslaved combatants fought eleven years later at the battle of Plataea (Herodotus, IX, 28–29), but (...)

26If Herodotus’ unnamed middle was composed of enslaved combatants, then it is the first of many ancient Greek battles in our sources to include enslaved people.63 And running into battle certainly became the norm in Classical warfare. Despite our incomplete evidence, Miltiades clearly experimented with new military approaches and practices at Marathon that would come to influence how ancient poleis deployed and wielded military power in the Classical period. But the successes of these imposed orders did not emerge out of nothing, and dismissing the spontaneous orders of the sixth century is clearly the wrong course of action. The function, to borrow Hayek’s terminology, of the staseis and tyrannies of sixth-century Athens is difficult to pin down, but Solon probably considered deregulation sufficient to preserve the community.

  • 64 Van ’t Wout (2010). I do not find this reading persuasive but feel that it illustrates the complexi (...)
  • 65 Goušchin argues that Solon was staunchly anti‑tyranny and wanted Athenians to fight against would‑b (...)
  • 66 Van Wees discusses this passage at length: see Van Wees (2018, 110–120). See also Kucewicz (2022, 2 (...)

27Among his many reforms, Solon included a law that punished Athenians with atimia if they either participated in or remained neutral during moments of stasis (Ath. Pol., 8.5). The ambiguity is in the original Greek: traditional readings of this passage understand it as a requirement that Athenians should not fail to take up arms and take a side, μὴ θῆτα τὰ ὅπλα μηδὲ μεθ’ἑτέρων, during a stasis. However, Van ’t Wout proposed that the meaning of τίθημι in this case was to set aside arms and that each μὴ represents a different requirement: Athenians should not fail to set aside their arms nor take a side.64 Although I find Van ’t Wout’s thesis highly unlikely, it is ultimately a matter of interpretation whether Solon sought to penalize neutrality or criminalize participation in civil conflicts.65 To add to this headache, the fourth-century orator Aeschines claims that Solon set down anti‑cowardice laws punishing deserters and reluctant combatants (Aeschines, III, 175–176).66 However we interpret these laws, it is significant that they directly regulated combatants rather than the aristocratic generals who led those combatants. If we follow Van ’t Wout’s reading, citizens who supported a tyrant faced atimia, but no law penalized citizens like Peisistratos who raised armies of non‑citizens and stationed them within or just outside the city. In other words, Solon’s few impositions on the existing spontaneous order would have further empowered private aristocrats’ claims to and control over military power. Interestingly, the traditional reading of the anti‑neutrality law and the anti‑cowardice laws would have logically made tyranny more likely. Forcing civil conflicts to be resolved quickly would have intensified the spontaneous order, led to quicker consolidations of power, and accelerated a monopolization of military power by only one faction leader.

  • 67 Teegarden (2014, 174).

28Adopting the traditional translation of the anti‑neutrality law, Teegarden argues that it must be inauthentic, because enforcing participation in stasis “would have sanctioned (and indeed potentially facilitated) the overthrow of [Solon’s] constitution”.67 But such an interpretation assumes that the first policy of any tyrant was to reorganize the government. If the polis claimed no authority over who or how someone controlled its military, then the tyrant was not at odds with the polis, but rather a natural monopoly that emerged out of competition—a spontaneous order within a political apparatus, as Hayek might say. Anderson made just such an argument in 2005:

  • 68 Anderson (2005, 210).

[Archaic tyrannies] were not extraordinary, maverick formations that subverted established oligarchies from without, clearing the way for some new kind of politics to emerge in due course. On the contrary, as a form of leadership that evolved within those very oligarchies, turannides were shaped and sustained by the same ruggedly individualistic political culture that animated their host regimes.68

29Like the Wappenmünzen coinage, sixth‑century tyrannies emerged out of a series of rules, regulations, and competing actors. As far as we can tell, the Athenian polis claimed no immediate control over this spontaneous order and instead chose to empower it for the sake of self-preservation and self-enrichment. According to all our primary sources, Peisistratos ruled according to the laws, within an oligopolistic violent polis—just, perhaps, as Solon intended.

  • 69 Recent studies indicate that stasis may have occurred as often as every generation in the Classical (...)

30At its heart, the polis was a negotiation of relationships, some hostile and some compassionate, between individuals with power. It was not destined for some enlightened end or telos, and many lawgivers failed to achieve political stability.69 Our limited evidence impedes any sort of detailed investigation of military organization and operation during the sixth century, and we cannot even reliably assess the accuracy of our fifth- and fourth‑century literary sources for Solon and Peisistratos. But we should not anachronistically suppose that military power operated in a certain way, especially as it does today. As Gabrielsen has shown, some Mediterranean communities opted not to regulate military power and instead let individual community members compete over this power well into the Hellenistic period. Archaic Athenians such as Solon probably operated under similar parameters, opting to empower the institutions that benefited them and leave as is, or alter only slightly, those systems that seemed to be working. Armed with this knowledge, the radical innovations of Classical poleis, and Kleisthenes’ democratic Athens in particular, are all the more impressive and revolutionary.

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Notes

1 All dates are BCE except in reference to modern scholarship. The dates for Cleomenes’ invasion of Athens, c. 510; Kleisthenes’ reforms, c. 508; and the repulsion of the subsequent invasions in c. 506 are all approximations.

2 Ober writes that the “unexpected Athenian victories can best be explained by assuming that Athens was now, for the first time, able to mobilize a national army worthy of its size” (2015, 166).

3 Hansen (2006, 64).

4 Ma (2024, 18).

5 Contra Van Wees (2013, passim; 2018, 104–105). This is admittedly an old argument, but my contribution builds on economic, social, and military theory rather than flawed cultural paradigms or argumenta ex silentio—arguments that Van Wees already and persuasively dismantled in 2013 and 2018.

6 Hayek (2022, 87–89).

7 Valdés Guía (2019).

8 Hereafter abbreviated Ath. Pol.

9 See Gabrielsen (2007 and 2013). Gabrielsen uses the word “state”, which I think creates more problems than it resolves. Following Smith’s work, I prefer the term “polity” or polis—the term used by the ancients themselves. See Smith (2003, 5, 80).

10 See Gabrielsen (2013, 138–147).

11 Gabrielsen (2013, 144).

12 Gabrielsen (2013, 146–147).

13 Gabrielsen (2013, 141–142).

14 Gabrielsen (2013, 142).

15 See Valdés Guía (2019) and below.

16 As I will explain below, this argument is highly nuanced and rooted in a careful reading of our sources. The author of the Ath. Pol., writing sometime in the late fourth century, states that the Athenians did not appoint an archon after Solon’s reforms in the early sixth century due to stasis (τῷ δὲ πέμπτῳ μετὰ τὴν Σόλωνος ἀρχὴν οὐ κατέστησαν ἄρχοντα διὰ τὴν στάσιν; Ath. Pol., 13.1). Scholars have understandably cited this passage to describe the period immediately following Solon’s reforms as an interruption of government, but I propose that we view this period through Gabrielsen’s model of an oligopolistic violent polis. In this light, it is possible that the author of the Ath. Pol., writing some two hundred and fifty years later, misread Solon’s intentionality. Perhaps the competition between strategoi for political privilege—a competition that dominated Athenian politics for several decades—was part of Solon’s plan, rather than an unintentional consequence of Solon’s policies.

17 Fornara (1971, 9).

18 Ober (2007, 84). Van Wees disagrees with this reading and assumes some unnamed Athenian magistrates must have organized a mass levy (see Van Wees, 2018, 127), but I find this interpretation untenable. Herodotus chooses the subjects of his sentences carefully, and the Athenians are clearly acting collectively in this scene (V, 72–73), not as a traditional army with a strategos.

19 See Ober (2004 and 2007).

20 Forsdyke makes a similar argument to explain ostracism and how the demos incorporated the “politics of exile” into their political system: see Forsdyke (2005, 2). Fornara argues that the polemarchos was “deprived of his hegemony” by this new system: see Fornara (1971, 6). I disagree with this reading because it assumes that the polemarchos had a monopoly over violence in the sixth century and characterizes the election of tribal strategoi as a democratic attack on an aristocratic institution. In every other part of the Athenian democracy, the demos used sortition, not elections, to curtail aristocratic power. In other words, I am more sympathetic to interpreting the elections of strategoi as an aristocratic victory amid a largely democratic retrofit of the military.

21 Frost (1984, 293–294). There is an important instance that he overlooked, see below.

22 Pritchard (2012, 193–200).

23 Valdés Guía (2019).

24 Van Wees (2013, 52).

25 This government title existed before Solon’s reforms (Ath. Pol., 3.2) but may have had religious and judicial responsibilities primarily (see Pollux, VIII, 91 and below).

26 Van Wees also references Peisistratus’ and Hippias’ disarming of citizens as evidence that there was a centralized military in the sixth century: see Van Wees (2013, 72). As with his reading of the Kylonian Affair, I think he is misinterpreting our sources. Citizens in possession of weapons do not necessarily indicate the existence of a centralized citizen militia. We are told that Peisistratos seized the assembly’s weapons to preempt an armed uprising after being expelled twice already (Ath. Pol., 15.3–5). It was apparently normal for them to carry weapons to an assembly at that time. When Hippias seized citizens’ arms, it was explicitly as he travelled to the spot where his brother had been assassinated and during a festival in which citizens carried spears and shields by custom (Thucydides, VI, 58). Both Peisistratos and Hippias seized weapons at particular moments and in specific settings because they were afraid for their lives, and in both cases, our sources explain that the citizens carried their arms because it was the custom at that time and in that space.

27 I do not believe that the tyrants were sovereign (contra Hoekstra, 2016) and instead read them as existing within the political apparatus of the polis; see Farrar (1988, 267), Kallet (2003). Lavelle characterizes Peisistratos as “a ‘democratic’ tyrant” and tyranny in Athens more generally as “democratically based” (Lavelle, 2005, 15, 163). Although I do not agree with all his points, Lavelle’s summary of Peisistratos and tyranny in Archaic Athens is commendable.

28 E.g. Wallace (2007, 75–76).

29 E.g. Teegarden (2014).

30 See Sagstetter (2013).

31 The etymology of ἀρχός is famously perplexing, since many ancient authors use this same word to describe the rectum (e.g. Hippocrates, Aphorismi, V, 58).

32 A much later Roman source, Pollux, reports that that the Athenian polemarchos was a head priest who served as the primary litigant for the polis (Pollux, VIII, 91). This official was responsible for suing non‑citizens and resolving disputes over property. He sued non‑citizens who deserted from the military but otherwise had no responsibilities related to the army, warriors, or the military, despite having the tile of “war leader”.

33 I am thinking of the numerous scholars who have outlined the role of military entrepreneurs in early modern Europe, especially within a post‑Tilly framework: see Fynn-Paul, Hart & Vermeesch (2014, 9–10).

34 Kucewicz (2022, 23–24), Van Wees (2018, 118–119). Pollux reports that each naukraria furnished, παρεῖχε, two horses and a ship, from which they were named, ἀφ’ ἧς ἴσως ὠνόμασται. As Billigmeier and Dusing note, there is nothing in Pollux’s passage to indicate when this was true (Billigmeier & Dusing, 1981, 12). We do not know where he learned about this requirement or the nature of his evidence, which is disappointing because he occasionally cites his sources in other parts of his work (e.g. VIII, 103). Van Wees cites Pollux to explain the role of the naukraroi but also states that the responsibilities of the naukraroi were “quickly forgotten once it was abolished” based on the notion that Herodotus did not understand their role (Van Wees, 2013, 52, 55). I find it hard to believe that Pollux, writing in the second century CE, knew better than Herodotus.

35 For the etymology discussion, see Gabrielsen (1994, 24), contra Van Wees (2013, 46–47). Otherwise, see Gabrielsen (1994, 20–24).

36 E.g. the title of basileus, or “king”, within the Athenian democratic system.

37 Figueira (2011, 190 and passim).

38 Figueira (2011, 190). Although Figueira consistently thinks of Athens’ military as a centralized professional system throughout his 2011 piece, he insists that the naukraroi would have needed to recruit friends, clients, mercenaries, and slaves rather than depend on any sort of polis system. In other words, he tries to stress that the system was monopolistic but ultimately describes it as oligopolistic (see Figueira, 2011, 191–193).

39 See Faraguna (2015, 654).

40 As Van Wees claims (2013, 52–54).

41 Faraguna’s (2025) recent piece exploring record-keeping throughout the Greek world, and not just Athens, reiterates this point: Archaic poleis were compiling lists of their constituents and the wealth that they owned. But these lists were primarily created as reference materials rather than living texts that needed to be updated continuously, as would be necessary with conscription lists in the Classical period.

42 This is my primary counterargument to Van Wees’ (2013) thesis: although I am persuaded that the Athenians had a robust system for raising funds and even rewarding military achievement, I do not think that these systems depended on a centralized military.

43 Wallace (2007, 76).

44 For a detailed overview of the Wappenmünzen, see Flament (2007, 9–16).

45 Davis et al. (2020, 7).

46 Davis et al. (2020, 5).

47 Kroll (1981, 30).

48 Davis (2012, 139).

49 The Standards Decree in the 420s or mid‑410s is the earliest evidence of Athenians trying to control or monitor coin usage: see Osborne & Rhodes (2017, no. 155).

50 Rihll (2001, 115).

51 Davis et al. (2020, 4).

52 Ibid.

53 Davis et al. (2020, 4–6).

54 Hayek (2022, 87–88).

55 Hayek (2022, 88–89).

56 Hayek (2022, 89–91).

57 Hayek (2022, 95–96).

58 Hayek (2022, 89–90).

59 Hayek (2022, 92).

60 Such as in Megara (Herodotus, I, 59), Nisaea (ibid.), and the Chersonese (Herodotus, VI, 34–38).

61 See Lloyd, Konijnendijk & Kucewicz (2021, 7), Konijnendijk (2018, 154).

62 Ober (2015, 166).

63 Enslaved combatants fought eleven years later at the battle of Plataea (Herodotus, IX, 28–29), but they were also common in later fifth- and fourth-century conflicts: see Van Wees (2004, 68–71). For a recent commentary on helots as combatants in Herodotus’ work, see Clements (2024).

64 Van ’t Wout (2010). I do not find this reading persuasive but feel that it illustrates the complexities of our evidence for Solonian laws. For my purposes, the content of Solon’s restrictions on who was supposed to participate in staseis is less important than the fact that he attempted to implement some sort of rule in the first place. It is probably significant that this rule penalized Athenians who supported tyrants, rather than would‑be tyrants themselves, who could have legally purchased mercenaries to enforce their tyrannies.

65 Goušchin argues that Solon was staunchly anti‑tyranny and wanted Athenians to fight against would‑be tyrants: see Goušchin (2016). His argument is based on a close reading of Solon’s poetry, in which he hypothetically references the dangers of tyranny metaphorically but not explicitly; a passage in the Ath. Pol.; and passages in Plutarch’s biography. I find Goušchin’s reading more persuasive than Van ’t Wout’s, but, again, both interpretations frame this component of Solon’s reforms as a regulation on citizens who might support tyrants rather than the tyrants themselves. This important distinction bolsters my interpretation of this law as an attempt to empower the existing spontaneous order.

66 Van Wees discusses this passage at length: see Van Wees (2018, 110–120). See also Kucewicz (2022, 24).

67 Teegarden (2014, 174).

68 Anderson (2005, 210).

69 Recent studies indicate that stasis may have occurred as often as every generation in the Classical period, see Mackil (2022).

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Jesse Obert, « Fostering a Spontaneous Military: Deregulated Violence in Archaic Athens »Gaia [En ligne], 28 | 2025, mis en ligne le 10 juillet 2025, consulté le 14 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gaia/5279 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14bde

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