The glory that was Greece

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp, the Athenian general Xenophon wrote a briefing paper designed to help his city negotiate the aftermath of a disastrous war. His proposals mixed supply-side reform with Keynesian stimulus. The regulatory powers of Athenian officials, so Xenophon suggested, should be streamlined and enhanced; simultaneously, the city should invest in increasing its commercial and housing stock. The economy, boosted by these measures, would also benefit from encouraging foreign investment. ‘Imports and exports, sales, rents and customs’: all would then surely flourish.

Traditionally, the reputation of classical Greece among economists has tended to be almost as low as that of the modern Greek finance ministry. ‘So far as we can tell,’ wrote Joseph Schumpeter, ‘rudimentary economic analysis is a minor element — a very minor one —in the inheritance that has been left to us by our cultural ancestors, the Ancient Greeks.’

Nevertheless, it is not only the relative sophistication of Xenophon’s analysis that might give a historian pause. There is also, as Josiah Ober makes manifest in his ground-breaking new book, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, the sheer plenitude of Greek wealth. Even in the grip of financial crisis, most citizens of classical Athens shared an astonishing presumption: that their city would continue to get ever richer. Economic growth, which we in the West have also long taken for granted, is very far from normal. Most societies, in most periods of history, have been dependent on subsistence agriculture. Greece, between its ancient heyday and the present, was no exception. ‘Hellas, in the era of the classical efflorescence, was wealthy when compared to any point in Greek history before the 20th century.