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224 The View from the Customs House
clusion, however, is that the Athenians knew that there was no
member-state, however small, which did not have the machinery
and the ambition to collect at least some monies in this way
by 413 bc. The bulk of their tribute too had derived from
numerous small contributions from tiny states. 65 It is also a
very valuable acquisition that the Athenians felt themselves
capable of calculating approximate figures involved, for some
200 separate communities. It is also apparent that they cannot
have thought that this measure would bring them less revenue
than had the phoros, which suggests high levels of taxable commerce
in the late fifth-century Aegean. 66 It also seems likely to
indicate the relative indifference of traders to burdens of this
kind. Consider two propositions: ‘The Athenians, perceiving
that the levying of tribute was costly and unpopular, resolved
instead to rest their future fortunes on the appropriation of the
monies which were extorted from ailing traders whose livelihoods
were already on the line because of intervention of this
sort’; and ‘the Athenians, looking for a relatively painless and
guaranteed throughput of funds resolved to tax the dynamism
inherent in the circulation of goods on which all ancient states
depended.’ I know which I find more plausible.
The Aristotelian Athenian Constitution makes a famous statement
of the nature of Athenian power: Athens could maintain
(trephesthai—that is feed, sustain) 20,000 people on its fiscal
base. 67 There follows a long list of those maintained at public
expense. The money came from phoroi, naturally; but also from
65 Nixon and Price, ‘The Size’. L. Kallet-Marx, Money, Expense, and
Naval Power in Thucydides’ History 1–5.24 (Berkeley, 1993), 8, also stresses
small contributors, and recognizes the different logic of their relationship with
the imperial power.
66 It is therefore generally agreed that the yield of the empire’s harbour
taxes must be approximately equal to the attested size of the tribute over the
immediately previous years. A simple multiplication sum should give the
historian a datum fit to conjure with: the notional value of all goods moving
in the Athenian arche outside the Piraeus and the other ports of Attica.
67 Ath.Pol. 24. 3, with P. J. Rhodes, Commentary, more cautious than
Pébarthe, ‘Fiscalité’, at 48, with n. 17. What is meant by trephesthai? Not
‘bénéficier’ (Pébarthe, 49). 1 talent sufficed for 20 citizens p.a. at this rate: L.
Foxhall and H. Forbes, ‘Sitometreia: The Role of Grain as a Staple Food in
Classical Antiquity’, Chiron 12 (1982), 41–90. The yield of Piraeus would have
‘maintained’ 720 citizens.