the following oath:
I will abide by the established democracy ... and the ancestral laws of Cos ... I will also abide by the friendship and alliance with King Ptolemy and the treaties ratified by the people with the allies; I will never set up under any
pretext an oligarchy or a tyranny or any other constitution apart from democracy, and if anyone else establishes such a regime I will not obey, but will prevent him as far as possible ... (Austin, no. 133).
Such measures helped to ensure that actual oligarchies were confined to the fringes of the Greek world. Tyrannies did sometimes arise, but the real danger lay in the informal monopolization of power by the wealthy. The kings
could pose as democrats while being indirectly responsible for the growing power of the rich.
In the Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries a delicate balance had been established between the power of the people and the power of the rich. The rich served the community by paying for religious festivals and
for the maintenance of the fleet, and in return gained great prestige. But the people did not allow individuals to gain too much honour; they turned down the offer made by Pericles and his sons to pay for some building works, in
favour of expenditure from the tribute money. But by the end of the fourth century the balance between the power of rich and poor had shifted in favour of the rich. Cities became dependent on the rich for their very survival.
Wealthy individuals now played a crucial role in mediating between their city and the king, thus gaining power over the city. One rich Athenian, the comic poet Philippides, over a twenty-year period (301-283/2 B.C.) was able to
confer great benefactions on his city. Being at the court of King Lysimachus, he could gain from the king gifts of wheat, money, and other supplies; he buried Athenians who had died in battle, and gained the release of others
who had been taken prisoner. In the past officially appointed civic ambassadors, rather than informal 'friends' of the king, had performed the task of diplomacy; the cities had not needed to depend on their own citizens for
favours. The danger which the cities felt about the new situation is captured by one phrase in the decree honouring Philippides: 'and he has never said or done anything contrary to the democracy'. It might have been otherwise.
The wealthy also now began to deploy their wealth within the city in a more blatant manner, and gained overwhelming prestige. Though in many places the change from the classical system was gradual, as the cities became
accustomed to dependence, in Athens a specific reform was carried out by a tyrant backed by Macedon. The new system, which gave the rich much greater prominence within the city, is well illustrated by Philippides.
When he was appointed agonothete [in charge of the city's competitions, in 284/3 B.C.] he complied with the will of the people voluntarily from his own funds, offered the ancestral sacrifices to the gods on behalf of the people,
gave to all the Athenians (presents) at all the contests and was the first to provide an additional contest for Demeter and Kore [Persephone] as a memorial of the people's liberty, and augmented the other contests and sacrifices on
behalf of the city and for all this he spent much money from his own personal resources and rendered his accounts according to the laws. (Austin, no. 43).
The cities devised a whole series of honours designed to recompense the rich for their services. Thus the Athenians voted Philippides a gold crown and a bronze statue in the theatre and for him and his descendants free public
meals and a seat of honour at all the contests organized by the city. Honours, rather than laws, now formed the framework which defined the relationship of wealthy and city, and honours inevitably left the power with the rich.
This transformation of the relationship between rich and poor is linked to a decline in real democracy, that is, genuine popular control over political life. Popular assemblies continued to meet and to pass decrees, but the power of
magistrates and council over them was greater than in the radical Athenian democracy. Magistracies themselves became the preserve of the rich, in part because of the growing expectation of considerable private expenditure
from them. Aristotle in his Politics had already offered advice to oligarchs on how to control a state which prefigures Hellenistic practice: 'Those who enter into office may also be reasonably expected to offer magnificent
sacrifices and to erect some public building, so that the common people, participating in the feasts and seeing their city embellished with offerings and buildings, may readily tolerate a continuation of this constitution
[oligarchy]' (Politics 6.1321a).
In addition to the de facto restriction of office-holding to the wealthy, the popular courts, which had underpinned the Athenian democracy, also fell into their hands. In early-third-century Ptolemaic Egypt an uproar in council and
assembly was quelled by the magistrates, who 'then voted that the council and the law courts should be recruited from pre-selected men.' Preselection would help to end uproar, that is, popular participation. Local courts were also
circumvented by the use of judges from other cities for particularly sensitive cases, who were all well-to-do. Rome then consolidated the de facto power of the wealthy by instituting technical wealth qualifications for office-
holding. But the assemblies continued to be open to all citizens, and so the constitutions were still 'democracies'. The political cant of the period strikes a curiously modern note. Today too we arc all 'democrats': the western
democracies, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People's Republic of China, and Democratic Kampuchea alike.
The decline in popular power was not, however, a peaceful process. There was always the danger of revolutionary activity. The citizens of one place in Crete were obliged in the third century B.C. to swear an oath of loyalty to
the city, which included the following revealing clause: 'and I will not initiate a redistribution of land or of houses or of dwelling-sites or a cancellation of debts.' The fear of the two revolutionary demands, the redistribution of
land and the cancellation of debts, does not often come to the surface of Hellenistic history. But it helps to explain, for example, an otherwise peculiar clause in a loan contract between Praxicles, an individual from Naxos, and the
city of Arcesine on Amorgos at the turn of the fourth and third centuries: if the city did not repay the money, Praxicles was entitled to exact it by any means he chose from both the public and the private property of the
Arcesineans and those living in Arcesine. Such a clause was the only protection for Praxicles against a legal cancellation of debts by the city.
The tensions between rich and poor were aggravated by the advent of Rome, and there was popular agitation, which the Romans naturally portrayed in the worst possible light. A Roman governor at the end of the second century
B.C. sentenced to death those responsible for the burning and destruction of the town hall and the public records and the drafting of laws contrary to the (oligarchic) constitution given by the Romans to the Achaeans: 'those who
carried out these things were to my mind manifestly laying the foundations of the worst state of affairs and of disorder for all Greeks - for not only are these things in keeping with a state of mutual disaffection and cancellation of
debts, but they are also at odds with the freedom returned in common to all the Greeks and with our policy.' Roman freedom did not include the freedom to re-establish true democracies.
As these 'disturbances' indicate, the Greek city "was far from dead in the Hellenistic period. There is no sign that people in general began to feel lost in the new world or to retreat towards quietism (below, p. 371). The cities,
rather than the Hellenistic kingdoms, continued to provide the basic focus of attachment for their inhabitants and to have much vitality; in illustration of this point, I close by considering two types of civic response to royal power.
First, leagues of cities, which were a feature of mainland Greece in the Hellenistic period. In contrast to the classical leagues dominated by a single city (Athens or Sparta) these new leagues were an attempt by a number of small
cities to group themselves in the face of the threat of royal power. The Achaean League, centred in the northern Peloponnese, is our best example. By the early part of the third century this ancient league had fallen into disarray;
some of the cities had garrisons imposed on them by the Macedonians, others tyrannies. In the 280s and 270s some seven small cities came together to form the new Achaean League, expelling their tyrants and garrisons. Under
the leadership of their great statesman Aratus, the league continued to pursue a single goal, 'the expulsion of the Macedonians from the Peloponnese, the overthrow of tyrannies, and the guarantee for each city of their common,
ancestral freedom'. The institutions of the league - a primary assembly, a council and elected magistrates - formed, in theory, a democratic constitution which enshrined the equality of the member states. The competence of the
league -was limited to foreign policy; it, like the kings, passed a decree recognizing the special diplomatic status requested by Magnesia on the Maeander. There was no intervention in the internal running of the cities. Until