Administration and Bureaucracy in Ancient Greece

  The United States Capitol Building is the center of American Democracy. It is also the center of American bureaucracy; for every elected senator or congressman who makes decisions, there are thirty staffers tasked with preparing, recording, advertising, and implementing those decisions.  The Capitol is a public building. At any one time, there can be three hundred or more tourists wandering around the rotunda, admiring the paintings on the walls and carvings on the ceiling. It’s not as though the rotunda and other publicly accessible areas aren’t also workspaces for senators and representatives; rather, the best route from most congressional offices to the house and senate floors goes directly through the center of the rotunda. It is not uncommon for famous political figures to have to sidestep tourists while walking to important votes – trailed, as always, by three or four assistants.  Some of the ancient Greek spirit of intertwining public administration and public li...

  The above inscription, dated to 241 B.C.E., details one instance of what, according to historian F.W. Wallbank, was a common occurrence among city-states during the Hellenistic period: two city-states settling a dispute by engaging a third party (usually either another city-state or an overseeing Hellenistic king) as an adjudicator. In the inscription presented, the Megarians send 151 men to resolve a conflict in which they have no stake. That is an incredible amount of bureaucracy through which to work in order to solve such a dispute! Why, one asks, would city-states behave in this manner?  The answer is in fact unique to the Hellenistic period of Greek history. According to Wallbank, Hellenistic kings, who ruled over many formerly independent city-states, usually found unexpected military conflicts between their subjects embarrassing; thus, they supported any reconciliation attempts that did not involve military action. The legal bureaucracies in some Hellenistic city-sta...

  The Behistun Inscription, pictured above, provides context for the abnormality of Greek bureaucracy compared to other ancient societies. The Behistun Inscription, carved during the reign of Darius I (522-486 B.C.E.), features kings from each of the various regions of the Achaemenid Empire (over which Darius ruled) standing below Darius, prepared to offer him tributes.  The Behistun Inscription demonstrates both the diversity of Darius’s empire and the expansive nature of the bureaucracy necessary to control such a wide swath of land. Each of the kings is depicted as serving under Darius; this, of course, makes sense, as the Achaemenid Empire was much too large for any one person to rule without delegating some amount of power.  Such a dilemma rarely, if ever, faced Greek leaders at least until the Persian Wars, at which point alliances across the peninsula became necessary and commonplace. Polis bureaucracies affected the daily lives of Greeks to an outsized extent beca...

  This helmet, which was discovered in Crete and was almost certainly military in function, indicates the existence of two different types of bureaucracy.  First, the design of the helmet indicates that it is not one-of-a-kind; the seam running down the middle and pre-drilled holes through which nails have been inserted are telltale signs of a mass-produced product. Mass production indicates bureaucracy; it is more than likely that batches of these helmets were fabricated by multiple workers under the same set of instructions. For a project like this, groups of workers have to be managed, design plans have to be standardized, and materials have to be sourced; there is virtually no chance this helmet was created without the input of a bureaucratic oversight body.  Second, the mass production of helmets only makes economic sense for an army of a certain size – and, more importantly, it is very useful for one to know approximately how many products must be produced before am...

This law describing specifications and procedures for the rebuilding of walls in Piraeus after the battle of Chaeronea is evidence of the incredible specificity of the bureaucratic process in some ancient Greek governing bodies. This is not an architect’s individual plan for the rebuilding of walls; rather, this is a piece of legislation. It is incredibly specific, including stipulations that stones used for construction be “uniform and clean…and right-angled.” To a modern audience, it is moderately surprising that some of these instructions were not delegated to the contractors tasked with actually rebuilding the wall; however, due to the internal disunity of Ancient Greece, areas of administrative power were often small in scale and thus administrators more integrated into general society than politicians and bureaucrats of today.   This law is also notable because of the events that preceded it. The Battle of Chaeronea was incredibly devastating to the losing Athenian allia...

This Greek inscription from the Athenian region of Thorikos is one of the most comprehensive ancient Greek religious calendars in existence. Written in the late 5th century BC, it details the sacrifices to be made by the population for various gods; for example: “for Zeus, at Automenai, a select lamb.” This artifact indicates a distinctly Greek intertwining of bureaucracy and religion. Much like the axones and large tablets on which laws were displayed for public awareness, this inscription’s size indicates that it was written in a manner intended to be read by multitudes.  There is endless evidence of the existence of an ancient Greek religious bureaucracy, often intertwined with the official government of a given region. In his court speech “Against Colon,” Demosthenes addresses the Gods multiple times while standing in front of the Athenian assembly. Many laws, including this 374 BCE tax law from the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Skyros, are addressed not to the people, but to ...

The above is a crude interpretation of Athenian Axones , on which the reforms instituted by Solon in the early 6th century BCE were inscribed for public viewing. Solon’s reforms represented a significant change in the economic and bureaucratic structure of Athens. In particular, Solon’s eradication of the Athenian hektemoroi system and subsequent institution of an income-based social structure led to substantial changes in the administration of economic policy. Under the hektemoroi system, free Athenian farmers paid a 1/6th tax to wealthy landowners. According to classicist Alain Bresson, this system resulted in poorer Athenians owing massive debts to richer citizens (notably, hektemoroi taxes were owed by citizens to citizens as opposed to by citizens to the government) and an increase in poor Athenians becoming enslaved to pay off debts.  In eliminating the hektemoroi system, Solon also eliminated the possibility of debt-induced slavery for Athenian citizens. He also instituted...

This (above, top) is a diagram of the remains found in the Toumba at Lefkandi, a building believed to have been in use during the Greek Dark Ages after the fall of Mycenaean societies. The remains of two people have been discovered: a man, cremated and deposited in a bronze dish, and a gold-adorned woman wearing a necklace of Babylonian origin.  The ornate burials of these two people, and their location in what was a large, central building in Lefkandi, indicates the existence of a “big-man” style bureaucracy; that is, an administration centered around a charismatic leader with allies devoted to (or beholden to) him instead of a government with continuity across leaders. The “big-man” system existed within the redistributive Mycenaean model that preceded the Dark Ages; however, the period of cultural devolvement that eliminated Mycenaean societies and their redistributive economies does not seem to have completely eradicated the somewhat simplistic big-man style of administrative b...

This diagram of the layout of the Minoan/Mycenaean palace at Knossos provides insight into the early inhabitants of Crete’s robust economic bureaucracy: the redistributive economy. In the Knossos redistributive economy, materials were brought to production centers within the palace, where they would be stored and crafted into usable goods before being distributed back to the general population. The palace at Knossos was well-equipped to support a redistributive economy; most of the western wing of the palace is dedicated space for the production of goods. It is also notable that the central component of the palace is not a throne room (which is just to the west of the palace’s center) but rather a common space, which was likely meant for public use.  There is a substantial difference between the palace at Knossos on Crete and mainland Mycenaean palaces of the same era. The palace at Knossos is thought to have had little to no defensive mechanisms, and – thanks to the large central ...

This fragment from about 1400 BCE is one of the earliest examples of record-keeping in mainland Europe . It is believed that the tablet was not intended to be preserved but was incidentally baked in a fire and hardened. It is inscribed with writing in Linear B, a Mycenaean language deciphered by Michael Ventris in the 1950s. One side of the fragment displays a word approximately meaning “prepare to manufacture”; the other side displays a list of men’s names next to numbers. Uncovered Linear B tablets usually contain evidence of Mycenaean bureaucracies: taxation records, lists of names, receipts from economic exchanges, and lists of scheduled religious sacrifices. Classicist Alain Bresson writes: “The tablets written in Linear B are exceptionally valuable, because they give us an idea of these kingdoms’ structure. They show us a sophisticated system of taxation or fees, paid exclusively in kind: bronze, hides, clothing, linen, livestock.” Dr. Michael Cosmopaulus, who works at the Unive...