66 nicholas purcell
of Athens in local power structures of the sixth-century Aegean or in the mythical
kingdom of King Minos, centered on Crete. Later systematizing historiography con-
structed a sequence of thalassocracies as a way of patterning long historical time.
Thucydides made this enquiry the base for notably acute theoretical reflections on the
place of land and sea in the relationship between political and economic domination
(History, 1.1–15).
In fact, the Athenian state of 479–404 bce was highly original. Its central early
structure was the enforcement of contributions from member communities of ships,
men or equipment to participate in the seaborne violence which first justified the
existence of the organization, and later turned inwards to compel adhesion to it. The
maintenance of ships and the harbors on which they depended became a central struc-
ture. A further crucial step was the willingness to convert contributions in kind or
service to cash payments, though this tribute remained strongly associated with the
preservation of sea power. That was eloquently underscored by the short-lived replace-
ment of tribute with a levy on all the harbor dues of the member states. For
Mediterranean history, the significance of the Athenian hegemony is that it coordi-
nated some 200 widely-scattered and mostly rather small eastern Mediterranean and
Black Sea communities into a single structure through the mobilization by sea-based
actions of the resources for continuing and expanding such activity; and that, as
Thucydides perceived, the political and economic domains were intricately inter-
twined so that both opportunity and coercion for rulers and ruled alike were founded
on the interaction of sea power and commercial interdependence.
The Athenian hegemony showed clearly how controlling and managing intrinsi-
cally Mediterranean interdependences could be the base for large political structures.
Once the secret of this kind of empire was out, it became a standard modality of
domination, used effectively by some later city-states, Rhodes being the most impor-
tant case, and by the Hellenistic kingdoms and Rome. The coherence, scale and
durability of the pioneering model were, however, hard to recapture when there were
many potential players.
Power of this kind was structured around the control of seaborne mobility, but it
is significant that it also developed, pari passu, strong connections with the movement
of staple foodstuffs and materials, and with the relocation of people. Athens’ urban
form and size changed dramatically through demographic nucleation within its own
territory, through the systematic importation of un-free labor, and through the vol-
untary in-migration of people pursuing the opportunities of its centrality to maritime
trade and hegemonial power. As the productive regime of its territory Attica changed,
Athens became ever more of a misfit, more dependent on the foodstuffs which could
most easily be imported by sea, and above all on cereals, with the result that the
Athenian state formed particular relationships of a more-or-less aggressive and stable
nature with the principal areas where surplus cereal production had been or could
now most easily be commercialized. Meanwhile, the settlement of Athenians in many
favored locations in the space controlled by Athenian sea power reinforced local con-
trol and exploited opportunities created by the new demands for imported food of the
city which had grown as a result of the establishment of that power. These patterns,
too, were reproduced among the various successors to the Athenian experiment.
The Athenians propagated the impression that they could “rule the sea.” In prac-
tice, given ancient ship technology, and the vagaries of Mediterranean weather, this