Historians since Herodotus and Thucydides have claimed that the year 483 BCE marked a turning point in the history of Athens. For it was then that Themistocles mobilized the revenues from the city's highly productive silver mines to build an enormous war fleet. This income stream is thought to have become the basis of Athenian imperial power, the driving force behind its democracy and the centre of its system of public finance. But in his groundbreaking new book, Hans van Wees argues otherwise. He shows that Themistocles did not transform Athens, but merely expanded a navy-centred system of public finance that had already existed at least a generation before the general's own time, and had important precursors at least a century earlier. The author reconstructs the scattered evidence for all aspects of public finance, in archaic Greece at large and early Athens in particular, to reveal that a complex machinery of public funding and spending was in place as early as the reforms of Solon in 594 BCE. Public finance was in fact a key factor in the rise of the early Athenian state - long before Themistocles, the empire and democracy.

contents
1. A FISCAL HISTORY OF ATHENS: WHY AND HOW?
Public finance and the legend of Themistocles
Public finance and the Athenian state
Public finance and the Athenian economy
2. ATHENS IN CONTEXT: Public finance in archaic Greece
Before Solon: heroic precedents
Beyond Athens: late archaic inscriptions and oral traditions
Outside Greece: the impact of Persian expansion
3. HAM-COLLECTORS AND OTHER financial institutions
Treasurers, Ham-Collectors, Sellers and Receivers
Naukraroi and naukrariai: the evidence
Captains and Captaincies: an interpretation
4. SHIPS, SOLDIERS AND SACRIFICES: Public spending
Ships
Ships' crews and soldiers
Cult, hospitality and other expenses
5. TAXES, TOLLS AND TRIBUTE: Public revenue
The 'contribution' (eisphora) under Solon and the tyrants
The eisphora after Cleisthenes
Hippias' levies and liturgies
Other revenues: trade, silver mines and tribute
6. From oxen to silver to coins: Media of public finance
Measures of weight and volume before Solon
Measures of value before Solon
Pheidon, Solon and after: archaic reforms of measures
Wappen, Gorgons and Owls: coinage in archaic Athens
Coinage, public spending and economic development
7. Conclusion: Public finance and the state in archaic Athens
APPENDIX: Persian naval expansion and the Ionian cities
Bibliography
Index

Hans van Wees is Reader in Ancient History at University College London. He is the author of Status Warriors: War, Violence, and Society in Homer and History, editor of War and Violence in Ancient Greece and joint editor of the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare.