Free The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox

backers of such ventures. As a result, ever more fine luxuries and items of distinction entered into the social circuit. Some of the finest came from localized sources of supply abroad (ivory, flax or silver), while others were devised by craftsmen for the increased buying-power in their city-state’s upper class. New levels of luxury and display were highly divisive. No nobleman could afford to be seen as less magnificent than other noblemen for very long. At weddings or funerals, his family’s splendour was on public view and the more ‘luxurious’ the other nobles became, the more he must strive to keep up with them.
    As faction and social competition intensified, the older ideal of a ‘peer group’ of nobles splintered into violence and disorder. This faction had wider consequences. Lowly citizens still looked to their noblemen for just judgements and wise arbitration, but faction and personal enmities would distort a nobleman’s conduct of public office or his verbal dispensation of justice. To keep up with his peers, he might also impose harsher terms on his local dependants and on those who turned to him for loans or help with a temporary crisis.
    There was also a slight diffusion of riches. Aristocrats could not continue to monopolize the gains from foreign trading or to contain the effects of their own magnificent spending. In turn, they created new rivals to their own pre-eminence. As they spent freely to enhance their prestige, their spending passed down through the social pyramid by the ‘multiplier effect’ familiar to modern economists. Not only did non-nobles also engage in trade: the nobles’ demands enriched owners of skilled slave-craftsmen or the suppliers of precious new ‘luxuries’. As the nobles’ spending diversified, non-noble rich men began to emerge, perhaps a few dozen families at first in each community, and certainly not a commercial ‘middle class’. But if they, too, could prosper by their own skill, why could they not hold a prestigious civic magistracy as well as anyone in the noble caste?
    Sixty years earlier Hesiod had exhorted his local nobles not togive crooked judgements for fear that the god Zeus would send a thunderbolt against the entire community. Homer had described the storms of autumn as the gods’ punishment for violence and crooked rulings in the public meeting-space (
agora
). But now that military tactics were changing, repeated injustices and factional disorder could be met by human means. After a particular outrage, a fellow aristocrat, perhaps a commander in war, could urge the citizenry to take up the new style of ‘hoplite’ arms, eject their most troublesome aristocrats and install himself as their ruler instead. He would stop faction, ‘set things to rights’ and preside over high society’s spiralling competition. Tyrants, therefore, are the first rulers known to have passed laws to limit competitive luxury. The main reason was not that the costs of such luxury would be better diverted to public use for the community’s good. Luxury was divisive in the upper class and a threat, too, to the tyrant’s own pre-eminence.
    ‘Undeserved’ office in the community was also a source of grievance and disruption. There were not many jobs of any distinction in an archaic Greek community but as riches filtered downwards, there were more people who thought themselves competent to hold them. Disappointed candidates, as always, were one source of trouble and excluded but confident ‘new men’ were another. So tyrants opened up high offices in the community and the ruling council to more families, including rich and able non-nobles. They became the arbiters of much social honour and preferment and also, ultimately, of civil judgements. Meanwhile, political elections to magistracies could be quietly fudged into ‘selections’. At home, troublesome rivals had to be killed or exiled, but abroad, tyrants were wary of gratuitous border-wars against other tyrants: