|
| |
Empire and Environment: Athens and Its Silver Mines
From: Columbia University
| By:
Roger Bagnall |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 With a wealth of classics on ancient Greek civilization, it is easy to forget to ask how that society was actually managed. How did rulers finance their conquests? How were large armies and navies supported? Abandoned silver mines at Laurion in Greece have given archaeologists some answers. Columbia classics professor Roger Bagnall (right) says Greece did not get its wealth through conquest but was able to conquer because it had silver wealth. |
 erhaps at first it's not so noticeable, but eventually one can't help realizing that the ancient writers of Greece and Rome didn't like to talk about ways and means. In describing the creation and growth of empires, they talk about courage, decisiveness, intelligence and luck. These were important, of course, but empires are also made out of money, wheat, water, timber, donkeys and sanitation. Armies are not very courageous if they are starving, and all the courage in the world is little use if the enemy has vastly superior war technology. |
 | |
| Athenian horsemen, from a frieze at the Parthenon. | |
The two writers who tell us most of what we know about the Athenian empire of the fifth century BCE are Herodotus and Thucydides. They were like their contemporaries in their avoidance of discussion of practical matters; only occasionally do they stoop to tell us just how some state managed to arm and field an army or a navy. Thucydides, from whom we learn about the epic struggle of the Athenians against the Spartans, knew perfectly well how it was done; he had been an Athenian general. But his narrative operates on a different level. Herodotus, who tells us about the creation of the Athenian empire in the aftermath of the Persian invasion of 480 BCE, is equally intent on personalities and principles. |
Athens' rise to greatness in politics and its grasp of cultural supremacy (which far outlasted its political dominance) depended as much on the material aspects of power as on moral and intellectual qualities. And those material aspects exacted a price. The story of the Laurion silver mines and their environmental effects tells about a key part of the foundations of Athenian power. Because the ancient authors give us only the most scattered and unspecific of information about silver mining, to look at the subject is to write history against the main themes that the ancient writers tried to impose on it. |
The mines in Attica, the region that Athens unified under its control early in the historic period, were exploited already in the second millennium BCE. Xenophon tells us that mining had gone on from time immemorial. Thanks to archaeology, we know that this distant time was at least as far back as 1500 BCE, when, excavations have revealed, lead oxide is already found in the ruins. The upper veins of the silver mines are much less rich than the lower ones, and until the early fifth century the Athenians knew about only these upper veins. When the richer veins were discovered, in the 480s, they produced a windfall for the Athenian state, and Athens went from being a secondary power to becoming one of the most important states in Greece. |
 | |
| The king of Cyrene overseeing export. | |
It did this by building ships. The authors are contradictory on how many ships were added, but Athens wound up with at least 200 warships, the largest fleet of any Greek city and the decisive factor in the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480. Themistocles gets the credit for persuading the Athenians to use the new revenues for defense spending rather than for entitlement distributions to the citizens. From then on, Athens had an edge in its ability to finance warfare: it could afford to pay for it. |
The silver mines in Attica are located in a district called Laurion, an area about 5 by 10 miles at its widest point. Most of it is hill country, with elevations as high as 1,200 feet. The entire area became an industrial district in classical times, with mines, ore-processing facilities and smelters. |
Although it has been explored extensively over the years, there is still much to be discovered. We know that the intensive work of smelting was concentrated in a few sites, whereas the mines and the ore-crushing facilities were more broadly distributed. |
The Athenian state owned the mineral rights, which were leased out to entrepreneurs on term agreements. Although these leases are not well known, it seems that the mine operators had to pay a fixed rent plus a percentage of revenues over a certain amount. In return, the state may have provided some long-term infrastructure, especially the mineshafts. The mines were operated by slave labor, some of it skilled, some not. The ore extracted from the claustrophobia-inducing underground galleries was crushed in stages until it was reduced to small chips; this process took a large amount of backbreaking labor. Then the chips were washed to remove dross. Greece is mostly a dry country, and the water required for this process was not easy to come by. For this reason, the Athenians recycled the water, letting the dross settle out of it and then discarding the dross. The ore was dried, then smelted. |
The Spartan invasion of Attica early in the Peloponnesian War disrupted mining operations in the years 430-427 BCE. After the Spartans built a fort inside Attica in 413, mining was stopped until the end of the war (404). Thucydides tells us that 20,000 Athenian slaves deserted when they got the chance; no doubt many of these were mine workers and ore processors. Archaeological work has confirmed that the abandonment of the silver works occurred in the late fifth century; it was probably not until the second quarter of the fourth century that operations resumed at their prewar scale. In the late 350s, Xenophon wrote a book called Ways and Means, advocating an increase in mining activity; he argued that the mines were underexploited because of capital underinvestment, and that with another 10,000 slaves there could be a huge increase in production. |
Just how severely the cutoff of mining hurt the Athenian war effort during the Peloponnesian War can be seen from the consequences: silvered bronze coins replaced silver ones, Athens was unable to stop the Spartans from deploying a competitive fleet, and the once-quick rebounds from defeats became slow, agonizing crawls. We can see here one negative side of Athens' reliance on the silver from its mines. Tribute from the empire probably still amounted to much more money than the mines produced, but the marginal effects of losing the reliable, unrestricted mine revenues were harsh. |
Mining and refining had environmental consequences. The Athenians were perfectly well aware of them. In Xenophon's memoir of Socrates, the philosopher says to Glaukon, "I know that you have not gone to the silver mines so as to be able to say why the amount from them now is less than formerly." Glaukon admits that this is true. "The place," says Socrates, "is said to be 'heavy.'" "Heavy" in this context (the Greek word is baru) means unpleasant, distasteful, distressing. Gentlemen of means would avoid such a place, leaving it to managers and slaves. |
The environmental costs were numerous. The dumping alone was considerable: mine tailings, the dross removed from the ore, and the litharge (lead oxide) cast off in smelting. In addition, we must reckon with deforestation, noxious fumes from the smelting, and smoke from the combustion. In modern times, this region has not seen much farming, and there is little evidence that things were any better in antiquity. This wasn't great farmland anyway, but the results of silver production must have finished it off. |
But people lived there all the same, as the theater at Thorikos shows; the excavations there have produced plenty of houses, too. Obviously it was not through ignorance of the unpleasantness of the place that the Athenians occupied it; but did they know how unhealthy their environment was? It is hard to tell. Ancient life expectancy wasn't very high anyway, perhaps about 25 years at birth and only another 25-30 years for those who made it to age 20. Would the degenerative effects produced by the environmental poisoning have been significant in such a population, even if they could be identified as having been caused by the environment? Certainly the Athenians had no sense of long-term environmental damage, much less any concern about it. |
Modern discussions of the ancient world tend to emphasize the many advances the Greeks contributed to civilization. These were indeed impressive, but it must not be forgotten that these advances rested on wealth and on economic development. All wealth comes at a cost to people and environment; it is not free. The Greeks knew this, at least to some degree. But the upper-class gentlemen who wrote the classics of Greek literature considered the details of moneymaking beneath them and outside of their concept of history. |
|
| |
