200 YEARS AFTER AUGUST BOECKH’S THE PUBLIC ECONOMY OF ATHENS: PERSPECTIVES OF ECONOMIC HISTORY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Sven Günther / Dorothea Rohde

IHAC, NENU, Changchun / University of Bielefeld

200 years after the publication of the epoch-making work Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (The Public Economy of Athens) by August Boeckh,1Boeckh 1817.an international group of scholars studying Greek economy and finances met at the Zentrum für Interdisziplin?re Forschung (Center for Interdisciplinary Studies) of the University of Bielefeld from 6-8 September 2017, to review and update the still un-replaced systematic reference work by applying new interdisciplinary theories, models and methods to the extant source material on the public economy of Athens, the biggest player in the Greek world of the 5th and 4th century. The papers published in the following are the first result and a step towards a new public economy of Athens that has still to be written.

This is not an easy task. For Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener marked the beginning of a systematic and interdisciplinary analysis of ancient economies and promoted the establishment of Ancient History as an academic field at universities. Its author, August Boeckh was born in Karlsruhe on 24 November 1785 as the youngest of six children.2On August Boeckh’s life and work, see Irmscher 1971; B. Schneider 1985; Warnke 1987; H. Schneider 1989; Nippel 2013.His family was already quite remarkable. His father was an official in the imperial service, his brother minister of Baden in different functions, and his uncle a theologian and author. So, with his family background it was quite evident that Boeckh was educated at a gymnasium, where he learned Greek and Latin.

After school, Boeckh enrolled for theology at the University of Halle, at this time one of the leading German universities. Additionally, he attended the lectures of Friedrich August Wolf, the founder of modern philology. Boeckh was so impressed that he changed his subject to philology soon afterwards. After his dissertation in 1806 and habilitation in 1807 at the University of Heidelberg, he became Privatdozent (private lecturer), then extra-ordinary professor, and two years later ordinary professor at the same university. However, in 1811, he moved to Berlin, where he had been appointed to become professor of Eloquence and Classical Literature. He therefore belonged to the founding fathers of the Humboldt-Universit?t, which had been established only one year before. In 1814, he became member of the K?niglich-Preu?ische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences), where he initiated the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (CIG) one year later - the collection of Greek inscriptions and predecessor of the Latin pendant, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, later founded by Theodor Mommsen. Within ten years, he sifted through all the then available Greek inscriptions. The first edition of the CIG met a barrage of criticism, much of it fully warranted, but the corpus nevertheless marked the beginning of Greek Epigraphy as an academic field.

During his work on the CIG, he published his Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener, with which he turned to the “exact sciences.” In his opinion, philology as a scientific approach included the knowledge of antiquity as a whole, and thus the historical reconstruction of the entire life.3Boeckh’s approach with focus on the economic fundaments of ancient life also meant turning away from a formalistic philological method. This led to the famous conflict with Gottfried Hermann and the dispute over methods between Wortphilologie and Sachphilologie. On this topic, see Lehmann 1964.At the beginning, he intended to give an overview of all the Greek polities, but due to the lack of preliminary studies on the public finances of Athens, and at the suggestion of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, he changed his mind and published only his research on the prices, wages, interests, income and expenditures as well as the administration of Athens.4Cf. Nippel 2013, 47. See also Warnke 1987.His other works, mostly philological studies and epigraphical editions, did not become as influential as this work, which he published at the age of 32. Boeckh died in Berlin half a century later, on 3 August 1867.

Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener was epoch-making at its time. “Epochmaking” was, on the one hand, that Boeckh took leave of an antiquarian approach, which focused not only on the “great” politicians but also on the collection of facts without considering the wider implications and historical contexts. But Boeckh went further. He took a historically relevant question as the starting point of his research that was not focused on political events alone. In doing so, he looked at structures as driving forces in history. Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener is therefore not only a book on economics. The work is also devoted to exploring daily-life pursuits in ancient Greece. In this way, Boeckh set an example and furthered the scientification of Ancient History.

On the other hand, he did not only apply philological methods and approaches to examine the financial and (politico-) economic system of Athens but adopted several other sciences like Epigraphy, Numismatics, Metrology as well as Finance to his studies, and this in an interdisciplinary way. His way of analyzing the different sources in respect of ancient economies was, more than ever, innovative. This new form evolved in the following to the leading idea of the Classical Studies, and of Ancient History in particular. In consequence, Boeckh’s work was translated into English and French in the course of the 19th century and was published in a second and third edition in Germany and England.5Engl. Trans. by Lewis 1828/1842. French translation by Laligant 1828. German editions 1814, 1851, and 1886.

200 years later, a small, discussion-oriented conference updated the interdisciplinary and innovative heritage of Boeckh by bringing together scholars of Ancient History and experts in other fields. Our aim was an intensive exchange between researchers dealing with the ancient world and those from other disciplines. The structure of Boeckh’s work was the starting point, as it remains a valid approach. His main interest was in three topics. He first turned to price setting systems (On the Prices of Commodities, Wages of Labour, Rent of Land and Houses, and Profits of Stock, in Attica), then to expenditures and administrative structure (On the Financial Administration and Expenditure of the Athenian State), and finally to ordinary and extraordinary revenues (On the Ordinary Revenues of the Athenian State and On the Extraordinary Revenues). So in the three sessions, we focused on the formation of prices and mechanisms of price formation, on state expenditures, their administration and control, and on taxes, liturgies and the wealthy elite.

After a public evening lecture by Prof. Dr. Helmuth Schneider (University of Kassel), who placed August Boeckh and his approach to ancient sources in the enthusiasm for Greek antiquities and the political context of the 18th and 19th century, in the first panel on the formation of prices, Alain Bresson (University of Chicago), Armin Eich (University of Wuppertal) and Christophe Flament (University of Namur) put their different methodological approaches to price setting systems up for discussion. The panel brought together quantitative and qualitative methods to mark the monetary framework for a study of Athenian public expenditures and revenues, particularly in respect of the interaction between money supply and the emergence of the state, the interplay between market actors and state intervention, and the integration of private citizens for minting coinage through the extraction of silver from the mines in Laurion.

The second panel emphasized the administrative layout of Athens in the 5th and 4th century BC with special interest in spending structures and practices. Therefore, Sven Günther (IHAC), David Pritchard (University of Queensland) and Christian Koch (University of Speyer) explored the administrative aspects and focused on political, personal and practical factors. Hereby, the question of how and to what extent the democratic public, in form of the people’s assembly and other institutions, really gained control over the finances and their allocation was controversially discussed, particularly in terms of decision-making procedures and public emotions, the extent and freedom of setting key topics for spending, the public discourse of democratic checks and balances, and the actual planning and controlling functions of elites with their expertise and networks.

The third panel was then dedicated to the public revenues, both to the ordinary and extraordinary incomes of Athens. Dorothea Rohde (University of Bielefeld), Wolfgang Franzen (Office for Empirical Research on Social Economics, Cologne) and Josiah Ober (University of Stanford) analyzed the relationship between democratic constitution of Athens, private wealth and a characteristic form of taxation, the liturgies. Of special interest was the remarkable willingness of the wealthy elite to contribute to state expenditures via liturgies, the positive public discourse that evolved around these contributions in the form of honours and reputation, and the lesser degree of inequality, compared to other pre-modern societies, that fostered a sense of unity and contributed to economic growth, based particularly on both reliable institutional structures and psychological factors like stimulating stability in combination with competiveness.

The selection of papers published here were intensively discussed and each individual contribution anonymously reviewed by at least two experts in the field. However, they are not thought to be “consistent” in the sense of representing one approach, model or theory aiming at a new understanding public economy of Athens. Instead, We hope to foster current scholarship with fresh and innovative ideas after the overcoming of the famous and (too) long-lasting substantivism-/formalism- and primitivism-/modernism-debates, respectively. Thus, the new approaches that have paved new ways for discussing ancient economy are our particular reference points, like quantitative analysis and statistics, comparative studies, New Institutional Economics and regulatory frameworks. It is in these different methodologies, especially by connecting material-based, quantitative approaches and qualitative studies with the examination of literary, epigraphic and numismatic sources in respect of relevant research questions, that we see the future of economic studies that have made many steps forward in the last two decades.6For a recent survey, see Günther et al. 2017. Especially for the Greek Economy, see now Harris, Lewis and Woolmer 2016; Bresson 2016. On Athens, see the recent studies of Ober 2015; Pritchard 2015; Rohde 2017/2019.

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Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener. 2 Bde. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung. (Engl. Trans.: id. and Lewis, G. C. (trans.) 1828/1842. The Public Economy of Athens, in Four Books. To Which Is Added, A Dissertation on the Silver-mines of Laurion. 1st ed. London: J. Murray / 2nd ed. London: Parker; French Trans.: id. and Laligant, A. 1828. économie politique des Athéniens. Paris: A. Sautelet)

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“Research Survey: The Ancient Economy - New Studies and Approaches: Introduction (S. Günther); Ancient Greece (S. Günther); Ancient Rome (Including Greco-Roman Egypt) (P. Reinard); Das alte Vorderasien (H. Neumann); Zur ?konomie ?gyptens bis zum Ende des Neuen Reiches (H. K?pp-Junk); The Formation and Features of Ming / Qing Imperial Agro-mercantile Society (Zhao Yifeng).” Journal of Ancient Civilizations 32/1-2: 55-67; 69-81; 83-105; 185-210; 211-228; 229-255.

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