Financing the Athenian Fleet: Public Taxation and Social Relations

3. Appointment

T H R E E Appointment Preselection of Nominees The ascertainment of property owners liable to perform trierarchies must have taken place in the demes (see chapter 2). An important question that now needs to be clarified is whether in the preselection of nominees the authorities were assisted by centrally kept registers. Specifically, did there exist official and currently revised lists of persons liable for the trierarchy? Most often this is answered in the affirmative (e.g., Jones [1957] 85). A recent exponent of this view, Davies (Wealth 24-25), maintains that "lists of trierarchs certainly existed and were continuously kept up to date by the generals. In contrast, no such lists were kept of those liable to agonistic liturgies," a point "demonstrable for the fourth century and which can be safely extrapolated back to the fifth century." Slightly different is the opinion of Rhodes ([1982] 3), who holds that "probably there were lists of men who had served recently, as there were lists of men who had served as hoplites, but . . . there was no complete list of men who were liable"; only "from 357 onwards there was a definite list of men liable for the trierarchy." This question has broader implications for an understanding of the trierarchy, not least because the use of currently updated registers would suggest two things. First, since all persons listed there must have been legally obliged to perform a service, the element of personal choice to undertake trierarchies voluntarily would in practice be nearly nonexistent. Second, trierarchies, especially after 358/7, were discharged by a well-defined, standing group of persons (an occasionally adjusted panel) rather than one assembled afresh every year. What is the evidence for such lists? To have a well-defined corps of warship commanders, modern practices might lead us to assume, is indeed an indispensable feature of an orderly, organized navy; but once more the evidence points to the inapplicability of this assumption to classical Athens. With the exception of Demosthenes 18.105-6, which makes mention of certain registers, no other traces of such documents are found. So far, their existence has been inferred mainly from the stipulation that after 358/7 trierarchies should be performed by a gross total of twelve hundred men (believed to have formed a clearly defined panel); from the surviving fragments of inscriptions listing persons liable to some duty, the so-called diadikasia documents ; and from the sources describing the tasks of the strategoi when appointing trierarchs (e.g., Ath. Pol. 61.1 says that the strategos responsible for the symmories "registers trierarchs"). (i) What are the registers (katalogoi) mentioned at Demosthenes 18.105-6? In these passages Demosthenes discusses his trierarchic law of 340, which ordered that the financial burdens be distributed among individuals in proportion to their wealth (104). A most important consequence of this, he tells us, was that a person who under the previous legislation could manage to be responsible for only one ship as joint contributor (synteles) with fifteen others under the new statute was obligated to be trierarch on two ships.1 To substantiate his point Demosthenes produces not the law texts themselves but the registers (katalogoi) drawn up in accordance with the obsolete law, and the one currently in force. Certainly, these were lists of trierarchs, but not of those liable. To prove his point, Demosthenes had to show the distribution of men to ships under the different laws, which could not possibly appear from a presumed list of those eligible. The only katalogoi able to supply that information were those of trierarchs already appointed to the service and assigned to ships. Indeed, these latter would amply demonstrate what one can now observe indirectly through other documents. A fifth-century list of crews (IG 22.1951) attests that two men were cotrierarchs on one ship. Two naval records confirm the point Demosthenes is trying to make: one, from a year before 340, shows seven persons to have been responsible for the trieres Aglaia Epigenous (IG 22.1622.597-610); another, from a year after Demosthenes' reform, shows that one man, Phrynaios Appointment 69 Athmoneus, served simultaneously as principal trierarch on two ships, and as syntrierarch on a third one, all three sent on a single expedition (1629.91-144). So the katalogoi, at Demosthenes 18.105-6, were probably lists of names, drawn up by the strategoi, of men designated as trierarchs and assigned to...