allies. A more concrete abuse of religion was the territorial encroachment on allied territory by the 'goddess Athena' herself, whose precincts
were delimited by a number of surviving boundary-stones. Since this land might then be leased out to individual Athenians, this is really a
subclass of our next category of interference.
Fifth, territorial. Settlements on allied or conquered territory brought obvious and immediate benefits to the lower classes; but recent -work
has rightly insisted that there were ways for the upper classes to profit too, and profit prodigiously. The chief evidence lies in the inscribed
lists of the property of some Athenian aristocrats confiscated and sold as the result of an internal Athenian scandal halfway through the Great
Peloponnesian War. These lists show that wealthy Athenian individuals owned holdings of land in allied territory, sometimes very large and
valuable, in defiance of local rules about land-tenure (most Greek states confined land-tenure to their own nationals). This land-grabbing,
which helps to explain why we hear so few voices raised against the morality of the empire by the representatives of any social class at
Athens, was the major positive benefit which the rich derived from the empire. Their other chief benefit was negative: without a tributary
empire the rich would have had to pay for the fleet themselves, as they had to do in the fourth century - with resultant class tensions absent in
the fifth.
Sixth, social. A law of the year 451 restricted citizenship and thus its benefits - which, as the above discussion shows, were increasingly worth
having as the century 'went on - to persons of citizen descent on both sides. It is surely not fortuitous that the law coincides with the planting
of the first fifth-century settlements in allied territory. Athenian (and Spartan) stinginess with the citizenship was singled out by panegyrists of
Rome as the chief cause of the brevity of their empires. Grants of privilege to isolated communities (Plataea in Boeotia, Euboea, Samos in
404) were made, but they were too late and too few to bridge the psychological gap between rulers and ruled.
Seventh and finally, political interference. The crucially important truth that Athens generally supported democrats against oligarchs was
taken for granted in antiquity, but her occasional support of oligarchs was also noticed. She was not doctrinaire in her support of democratic
factions, so long as the money flowed in. Even on the strategically and politically important island of Samos our two main literary sources
disagree about whether the settlement imposed after the revolt of 440/39 took an oligarchic or a democratic form, and the text of a relevant
inscription can be restored so as to yield either sense.
When Sparta, in 431, responding to pressure from Corinth, agreed to liberate Greece, we are told that the goodwill of the Greek world inclined
to the Spartan side. The tight methods of control enumerated above show that there were indeed grounds for resentment of Athenian power.
Democracy
The connection between the empire and democracy was close, in that Athens usually supported democracies abroad. There was another
connection, this time internal, between the democracy and the empire. It was the revenue from the empire, greatly increased as a result of
Cimon's operations in the early 460s, which made possible the democratic changes at Athens of 462, associated with the names of Ephialtes
and Pericles. These reforms increased the power of the popular assembly (ekklesia). Solon at the beginning, and Cleisthenes at the end, of the
sixth century had left Athens still in many respects an aristocratic state. In particular the introduction of 'appeal to the people', which the
fourth-century thinker Aristotle regarded as one of the most 'democratic' things that Solon did, remained only potentially democratic until the
introduction of jury pay in the 460s meant that large popular juries (dikasteria of hundreds or even thousands) could attend frequently without
loss of income to the jurymen. Other kinds of democratic pay - pay for attendance at the council of 500 members which prepared the
ekklesia's business (the boule), and at the city's festivals - were introduced over the next decades, and to this extent it is undeniable that the
Athenian democracy was paid for by the allies. Attempts have been made to deny this, by arguing that after Athens was defeated in 404 and
her empire brought to an end, fourth-century Athens went on distributing pay (and indeed she introduced a major new category of pay after
404, pay for attending the ekklesia). Therefore (it is said) there was no necessary connection between democratic pay and the empire. The
argument is politically naive: once a vote-catching measure has been introduced - such as a new bank holiday in modern times - it takes a
courageous politician to stand up and urge its abolition, at least in the kind of democracy which reserves to itself the right to sack its leaders
instantly (Athens had nothing like the modern British notion of a five-year parliamentary term).
Democracy at Athens was both more and less democratic than in modern Britain or the United States; more, for the reason just given: the
ekklesia enjoyed more immediate power than a modern electorate, partly because the number of voters was so much smaller in ancient
Athens; and less, for a reason also concerned with the number of voters: whole groups - slaves; women; the subject allies, whose lives were
affected by many of the ekklesia's, decisions - were excluded from the franchise. This left some 40,000 adult males who were eligible to vote.
Of these perhaps as many as 6,000 (which is nearly the maximum seating capacity of the Pnyx, the ekklesia's meeting place, and was the
quorum required for certain kinds of decision) may have attended for important debates.