three hundred in the fourth, could afford to pay the most demanding
public liturgies, primarily the trierarchy. The enlarged group of twelve
hundred individuals, brought forward by the law of Periander in 357bc
to cover the same naval bills, proved to be unworkable.^56 The payment of
liturgies could and did win the benefactor public recognition, but the
preferred forms of impressive expenditure favoured by the wealthiest
Athenians evolved over the course of these two centuries, which points to
changing perceptions, on the part of the wealthy, as well as the Athenian
population at large, of what constituted valuable or desirable expend-
iture.^57 With the onset of Macedonian political domination of Athens,
the mechanisms of private support for public works changed. These
changes are probably the best indication of the discrete interconnection
between private wealth and public benefits. Very little is known about
liturgies in this period. The office ofagonothetesreplaced voluntary
choregoi, and the main form of private taxation by wealthy citizens
came fromeisphora,based on a property assessment, and, from the
later third century onwards, on a moreflexible type of one-off payment,
which could be raised from citizens and non-citizens, theepidosis.^58
Many of the details of these changing methods of funding public
services from private resources remain opaque; what they do reveal is a
developing set offinancial mechanisms, which indirectly point to differ-
ent perceptions of what could and could not be afforded, as well as a
continuing willingness, on the part of some wealthy individuals, to
support the community. This is a more probing and more particularized
story about Athenian economic affairs when compared with those
approaches, more or less consciously‘substantivist’ in form, which
focus on much broader, longer-term relationships. The broader-brush
analysis has more often sketched a thesis through the prism of land-
owning‘rich’and landless‘poor’. It has rarely picked out the inseparable
link between public and private expenditure.
There are other ways of thinking about rank and fortune that broaden
the scope of ancient Greek ideas about wealth and status. One new
approach has been adopted by Ian Morris, building on recent research
by a large number of scholars, including Nicole Loraux, Michael
(^56) Davies 1981, 15–37; Isokr. 15.145; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3.4 (400 trierarchs per annum);
Dem. 20.8 (one year’s exemption permitted between liturgies, fourth century); Isaios 7.38
(two years’exemption); Dem. 14.16 (Periandros’law).
(^57) Davies 1981, 93–114 (diminution in power ofgene); 101–5 (the progressive dimin-
ution in expenditure on two- and four-horse chariot races, particularly in the fourth century
bc); 114–22 (political ideology and political marriages); 122–31 (military and rhetorical
skills as factors in power).
(^58) Oliver 2007, 196–209; cf. Oliver 2006b on Athenian cavalrymen.
108 Societies and economies