Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 223
century b.c.e. , the 300 wealthiest citizens were required to pay an
annual eisphora. Wealthy Athenians and metics were also required
to subsidize important and costly public programs called liturgies.
Those selected to be gymnasiarchs, for instance, had to bear the cost
of maintaining a public gymnasium, whereas chorêgoi had to pay all
the expenses involved in training the chorus for a tragic or comic
production. The largest group of all, the trierarchs, had the burden
of equipping and maintaining a trireme. No fixed sum of money
was laid down for any of these duties because it was confidently
expected that gymnasiarchs, chorêgoi, and trierarchs would vie with
one another for the reputation of financing the best gymnasium,
the best production or the best fitted-out trireme. It is unclear how
Athenians in this supertax bracket were identified. As a safeguard
against abuse, however, any Athenian who was called upon to perform
a liturgy and who believed that he had been wrongly identified
had the right to issue a challenge to anyone whom he considered
to be wealthier than himself. The person so challenged was then
under an obligation to either undertake the liturgy himself or swap
properties with the person who had challenged him.
Conclusions
With so much surplus wealth in the Athenian economy in the
second half of the fifth century as a result of the empire, we might
expect that the standard of living would have risen. Archaeological
evidence, however, suggests no such thing. As we have seen, the
residential quarters of Athens were extremely modest. Evidently
the attainment of a luxurious standard of living was not seen as
a necessary or even particularly desirable goal, though there was
considerable interest in the antics of the super-rich Alkibiades,
who devoted part of his large fortune to the training of expensive
racehorses (see p. 264). If private luxury had been their goal, the
Athenians would not have spent 2,000 talents on one of the most
ambitious building programs ever conceived. Nor, for that matter,
would they have used the revenue from their silver mines a generation
earlier to build a fleet. In sum, though a few wealthy citizens
became more wealthy, most of the poor tended to remain poor.
There is little evidence for the existence of a middle class and nothing
to indicate that it increased as a result of Athens’s empire. What
Athens’s increased wealth did provide, however, was the means
whereby a substantial proportion of its citizens could combine leisure
with relative frugality.