Les finances des citÃ(c)s grecques aux pÃ(c)riodes classique et hellÃ(c)nistique by Léopold Migeotte

186 PHOENIX significant differences between ancient and modern attitudes to immigrants and displaced people (not least in terms of race), Wandering Greeks admirably serves as an introduction to the ways in which a common human phenomenon was experienced in the world of ancient Greece. University of Alberta Frances Pownall Les finances des cit es grecques aux p eriodes classique et hell enistique. By L eopold Migeotte. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 2014. Pp. 770. This is the MAGNUM OPUS of a distinguished scholar. Sixty-four entries in the bibliography under his own name testify to Migeotte’s lifelong devotion to understanding ancient Greek public finance. As he explains in the introduction, the book draws liberally on these previous publications, providing us with a synthesis and a new assessment. Recognizing that this was a gap frequently lamented by the scholarly world, he has produced the first monograph written on the topic for nearly a century. Its timeliness is uncanny, amidst Greece’s contemporary fiscal crisis and a burgeoning interest in taxation, redistribution, war-finance, and public debt among scholars of the ancient economy and political institutions. Chapter One is conceptual, tackling debates about the distinction between private, public, and sacred property in the Greek city, the sovereignty of the city-state, comparisons with later European city-states, and the “consumer city” model, for which he finds little use. Migeotte also considers the limited body of ancient thought about state finance , principally Xenophon, Aristotle, and ps.-Aristotle (Oikonomika). He is hesitant to apply modern notions of “budgets” and “sovereign debt” or to see economic stimulation as a motive of fiscal policy, yet he is convinced that previous scholars underestimated the sophistication and complexity of Greek institutions, which the cities tried to make as rational and efficient as possible (30–31, 680). Migeotte organizes his material into a coherent structure that takes into account the limits of the source material while providing a synoptic, comparative perspective across different city-states. Chapter Two covers the cities’ financial administration, Chapter Three their financial resources, and Chapter Four their expenses. To his credit Migeotte reserves the best known cases to the end, Athens in Chapter Five and Delos in Chapter Six, which allows him to consider them in detail without projecting their institutions on the other Greek cities. The inevitable downside of his synthetic approach in Chapters Two to Four is that the scattered sources from everywhere else are treated as illustrations of the typical “financial system” of the Greek city (14). With the exception of Chapter Six, which takes a chronological approach to Delos, Migeotte treats the classical and hellenistic evidence together. He does his best to flag the differences between cities and developments over time, but ultimately he is convinced of the basic continuity and homogeneity of Greek institutions, which the organization of the book magnifies (14–15, 679). There is space in this short review to consider only two particular issues, taxation and public debt. Migeotte distinguishes “taxes” from “individual contributions” (229–299). Obviously euergetism and donations to public subscriptions fall into the latter category but liturgies and especially the so-called eisphorai are less clear. The civic eisphorai were irregular levies; when the state needed money the assembly could order one. In Athens BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 187 they were assessed according to a public estimation (timema) of property values. Migeotte denies they were progressive, arguing that an agreed percentage (e.g., 2%) was applied to each estate (518–524). Decisive for Migeotte is that Greek sources never refer to them as telea (278, 519), though the Achaean League granted “tax” exemption (ateleia) to Messenia for eisphorai in the sense of federal taxes (396). The categorical exclusion of eisphorai from direct taxation, however valid and true to the sources, asks us to look at fiscal institutions only through the Greeks’ own ideological lens. A sociological approach might be more helpful here, but Migeotte, as already noted, tends to regard models and comparisons with suspicion (27–29, 679). In his chapter on fiscality, Migeotte addresses the “old doctrine” going back to Boeckh that direct taxation was a mark of tyranny and therefore not commonly imposed on the citizens of independent Greek cities (230, 244

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