I

This is a subject of great relevance to the proper understanding of the Greek cities’ economy. So far, however, it has scarcely been given the attention it deserves in modern discussions. There is, too, a curious ambiguity in the Greeks’ attitude to this activity. On the one hand, temple architecture was a public art, and temple building a cultural activity of great importance to Greek society. The patrons of temple building — aristocrats, tyrants, oriental potentates, citizens, or devotees of a Panhellenic cult­ — all were concerned not only for the end product of temple building, but also in the process itself, for the opportunity it gave of showing to the rest of the community, or to the world, that they had taken part in so complex, unusual, and costly an under­ taking.^[1] There was merit in the building of temples, as much as in being able to boast their existence, once built.

On the other hand, the literary sources are almost entirely silent on the subject of architecture, and temple building especially, even as an art, let alone as an important economic or industrial activity. (Aristotle just remarks in passing that the good citizen might include the patronage of temple building among his other public services.)^[2] Most modern studies of the Greek cities’ economy tend either to ignore the activity, or to answer only partially the (really rather obvious) questions, How did they build their temples? and How did they pay for them? The financing of temple building is often disposed of simply by reference to the Periklean building scheme, and Perikles‘ conversion to the Athenians’ use of the Reserve Fund from the tribute­ — a most unusual and arbitrary way of providing for an exceptional undertaking.^[3] Hei­chelheim implies, in his Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Altertums, that the building of temples and fortifications is of far less interest to students of the Greek economy than, for example, the means by which war expenses were covered, or the administration of taxes and state monopolies.^[4] Because temple building was an occasional activity, it is assumed that the project was carried out by entirely unusual methods, and that the whole exercise was so extraordinary as to be quite irrelevant to the cities’ economy proper.

The question, How did they do it? — meaning, where did the building organizers find sufficient skilled labour to do work requiring such high standards? — when dealt with at all from an economic point of view, is answered by reference to the minutiae of selected building records. Michell discovers what he calls a construction industry, a regularly ordered, constantly active business, with standard wages, fixed specializa­tions, and so on.^[5]

Clearly one view or the other must certainly be rejected out of hand. It is the pur­pose of this paper to suggest that both views of temple building, one that it was an unusual proceeding quite beyond the bounds of the day-to-day economy, and the other that it constituted an industrial organization in itself, are distorted and derive from evidence taken quite out of context.

The evidence presents its own problems. I know of less than half-a-dozen literary references to anything as specific as the total cost of a temple, and of even fewer to what one might call the economics of temple building.

• (i) Diodorus remarks on the great expense of bringing stone for building at Engyon in Sicily, from a quarry twelve miles away (iv, 80, 5-6).
• (ii) Xenophon, in the Ways and Means, says that “there exists in Attica a natural abundance of marble, of which beautiful temples, fine altars, and statues befitting the gods are made. Many Greeks and barbarians alike are in need of it,” implying the sale abroad of Athenian marble for building in some quantity (I, 4).
• (iii) Plutarch, in his Life of Perikles 12, 4-6, suggests that one of the reasons for the building scheme was to provide employment for the craftsmen and labourers in Athens, and to permit the circulation of money which would otherwise lie idle, or go only to the fighting forces. He also enumerates the variety of materials, artists, and craftsmen who were engaged on the (It is worth recalling here the opposition’s view that the scheme was entirely extravagant, as well as immoral: Per. 12, 1-2.)
• (iv) Diodorus gives some account of the building activity at Akragas from 480 onwards, and says that a large number of the slaves taken at Himera were engaged in quarrying stone for the temples, and for the mammoth temple of Olympian Zeus in particular (XIII, 82-4).

None of this on its own takes the argument very far. The evidence of the buildings themselves is far more eloquent. They not only stand witness to the intrinsic value of temple building, but also indicate the total cost of the work, in the scale on which materials had to be supplied (often from distant sources), the degree of skill and the size of the labour force required to work the material, and the strain put on the organizing abilities, and the economy, of the community responsible for the project. Archaeological evidence can often be amplified by the surviving building inscriptions, despite the fact that all suffer from severe limitations of one kind or another. Some have only survived in fragments; the style of others is laconic to the point of inarticulateness; all are inconsistent in the type and degree of information they give. No single set of documents, from any one period or any one site, provides final answers to questions such as, how temple building was organized and financed, how the work was allotted and regulated, what were the status and interests of the various groups of men concerned in the work, or how close to the practices of day-to-day industry and trade the processes of temple building were. But one can achieve some sort of answer by amalgamating all the information in the surviving records; for present purposes it is enough to say that the building accounts point to conclusions which are incompatible with the prevailing views taken of the economic significance of temple building.

Claude Mosse, in her study of fourth-century Athens, La Fin de la democratie athenienne, sums up very neatly the reasons why the economics of temple building is often rated so low. She says that “although public buildings stand out as one of the most striking features of classical Greek civilization, they do not appear to have given rise to a specialized industry, concentrated in the hands of a small group, such as are to
be found in the metalwork or mining industries. The explanation is obvious: the construction of public works was not an activity which produced large profits.”^[6] She implies, and in many ways rightly, that temple building, though not entirely uneconomic, stood only half-way over the dividing line between going industrial concerns and the occasional manufacture of costly dedications made at the whim of some wealthy individual.

II

Yet, however rich the patrons of temple building, whether city, sanctuary, or private individual, as far as total costs are concerned the sky was never the limit. To begin with, one may state the obvious, that few places boasted temples the size of the Athenian Parthenon, the Artemision at Ephesos, the Samian Heraion, or the temple of Zeus at Olympia, and only Athens outstripped Akragas with its seven temples built or begun between 480 and the end of the fifth century.^[7] It is also clear that sometimes the design and the quality of the material were compromised by the need for economy; most temples in the Peloponnese were built in limestone, not in marble which would have had to be imported from Attica or the islands. At Bassai in Arcadia, the temple of Apollo was sited high up in the mountains, and local stone was used for the main structure, despite the fact that it was brittle and hard to work; the import of more suitable material would have been unthinkably expensive. Local marble was used for the fifthcentury temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion, instead of bringing Pentelic marble over five times the distance; this stone too was brittle, and the design had to be modified — the number of flutes on the Doric column was reduced from the normal twenty to sixteen wider and shallower flutes.^[8]

But such economic limitations on design occurred less often than one might expect. There are far more instances of builders going far afield for suitable material, apparently regardless of the cost. Corinthian limestone was used at Epidauros (a dozen miles by land and twenty-five by sea), and across the Gulf of Corinth at Delphi; the Epidaurians also imported dark limestone from Argos, and Pentelic marble from Attica, not to mention a variety of expensive woods and ivory for the embellishment of the temple of Asklepios.^[9]

However, the total costs of temples may be said generally to have remained within much the same limits, over a long period of time, throughout the Greek world. It is possible, I think, to calculate what some total costs were, and to extend far more widely and with useful results the methods used by R. S. Stanier in estimating the cost of the Parthenon.^[10] It seems worthwhile to do so, in order to set in perspective the whole question, whether or not temple building was an outright extravagance, involving the expenditure of a great deal of money.

The total cost of only one temple is known for certain, that of Asklepios at Epidauros, built about 370. The building accounts have survived almost complete, and they show that the work cost between 23 and 24 talents.^[11] Although clear evidence for the cost of other temples is lacking, rough estimates can be made, by comparison with the known costs and the known dimensions of the Epidaurian temple. If this method of calculation is applied to the Periklean buildings in Athens, then some interesting totals are revealed. It has to be allowed that stonework on the Parthenon would have cost five times as much as at Epidauros, because Pentelic marble takes five times as long to work as limestone; when this difference is taken into consideration, the cost of the Parthenon works out at about 470 talents^[12] Support for this result comes from the Erechtheion accounts of 408/7: they show that the price for fluting columns of Pentelic marble on the east façade came to 24½ dr. [/ m²]; at Epidauros the cost was a little over 3 dr. [/ m²], which suggests a price for the Parthenon columns of something over 16 dr. [/ m²].^[13] The two Athenian prices are, I think, comparable; the apparent difference of one and half times can be resolved for the most part by the following considerations: the Parthenon columns were far larger than those of the Erechtheion, and were Doric, with 20 shallow flutes per column, whereas the Erechtheion columns were Ionic, with 24 deep flutes on each column, so that the degree of detail and the variations of surface to be worked [/ m²] were far greater in the Erechtheion than in the Parthenon, hence the higher cost of the work on the Erechtheion.

The correlation of but two prices for one job is not enough to prove that calculation by comparison with the Epidaurian figures is foolproof, but it does admit of the possibility that this method can yield meaningful results. On the same calculation, the Propylaia will have cost about 200 talents, the Hephaisteion 50 talents, the temple of Ares in Athens and Poseidon at Sounion 40-50 talents each, and so on. The opposition’s cry that allied money was being squandered on 1000-talent temples was a vicious distortion of the truth, as any member of the building commissions could have pointed out.^[14] It is surely a measure of the success of the smear-campaign against Perikles’ scheme, that so many accounts still repeat the fantastic exaggerations in the sources, some of them by as much as ten times.^[15]

If this estimate is realistic, a total of 2000-2500 talents spent altogether on the Periklean scheme, then it would seem that the Athenians spent about one-fifteenth at most of what the entire Peloponnesian War cost.^[16] Temple building, like war, was a necessary capital expenditure if the Greek city was to live its life fully; but it cost less, and the results were less ephemeral.

The Athenian economy was not typical of most Greek cities’, and the economics of temple building should not be judged on the Athenian evidence alone. It is possible to gain some idea of the totals spent on a building scheme of more modest proportions, but one which, on the other hand, was set going by a proportionately smaller and less affluent society, in the Epidaurian sanctuary of Asklepios between 370 and the mid third century. The inscriptions, together with comparative costing, suggest a total of between 240 and 290 talents — 24 talents for the temple of Asklepios, about 50 talents for the tholos (a circular building with frieze, mouldings, ceiling coffers, and an inner colonnade of Pentelic marble), about 40 talents altogether on six small temples (three of which were most elegant and elaborate in detail), perhaps 25 talents for the Propylaia and the theatre, and lesser sums on numerous smaller buildings. The Epidaurian building commissions spent, during a period of about one hundred years, a little under three-quarters of what Athens’ internal revenues amounted to in a single year.^[17] The point is that temple building was not a widely expensive undertaking in terms of hard cash. It is not necessary to search out vast public resources such as the allied reserve fund, or to assume that the Epidaurian sanctuary’s treasury was full to the brim, when one is considering how temple building was financed. There were many possible sources of funds for temple building; it was not so much that the Athenians had to use allied money in order to produce any temples at all, but that they chose to do so. They had after all embarked on the construction of the older Parthenon, also in Pentelic marble and on much the same scale as the Periklean Parthenon, between 490 and 480, before there was any question of having to hand money from the allies.^[18]

It is probably fair to say that the Athenian internal revenue — 400 talents in good years — was one of the largest in the classical Greek world. It is probably safe also to say that the public revenues represented only a fraction of the real wealth existing in every community.^[19] Private individuals like Kirnon and Kallias, Nikias, Philemonides, and Hipponikos in the fifth century, and Konon, Timotheos, the metalworker and metic banker Pasion, and Diphilos in the fourth, could have subscribed generously towards temple building from their incomes, and probably have financed entire temples from their whole estate, if they had been so inclined.^[20] Pasion, unusually rich but not necessarily unique, could have paid for about one-thirtieth of the entire Periklean scheme with the fortune he left of between 75 and 80 talents; Nikias we know not only dedicated a large bronze palm-tree in the Delian sanctuary, but also presented an estate worth 10,000 dr. which produced a yearly revenue of 7% for the god.^[21]

Most building schemes must have depended to some extent on the devices of epidosis and epangelia, that is, publications of intent to build, with clear indications that contributions were expected from members of the community. A late third-century decree from Tanagra states that a temple of Demeter and Kore was to be built “as quickly as possible”, and that the women of Tanagra were to contribute not more than 5 dr. a head.^[22] The records of contributions to the temple of Apollo at Delphi in the fourth century show that though the largest sum from any one city was just over 7000 dr., most were far smaller, and many less than IOO dr. The Epidaurians gave 1200 dr., at a time when they were already involved in their own building projects. The private contributions to Delphi range between 70 dr. and 1 obol, the latter amount being by no means unusual; the one private contribution at Epidauros that we know of, probably made by one of the wealthiest citizens, was 70 dr. too, which rather suggests that this was the normal upper limit for such donations. Two private contributions even appear in the Athenian accounts for the Parthenon; it is perhaps worth pointing out that this temple could easily have been paid for by yearly graded contributions from all citizens, without imposing a great burden on anyone.^[23]

The pattern of the Greek economy underwent no radical change at any time; it is unlikely that the scale on which people contributed to the costs of temple building altered much either. And what little evidence there is suggests that the total costs of temples remained within the same range, from the sixth to the fourth century at least. The cost of the sixth-century temple at Delphi (quoted by Herodotos at 300 talents) can be brought into close relation with that of the fourth-century Epidaurian temple; the costs of the fourth-century temple can in turn be related to building costs in fifth century Athens.^[24]

III

Temple building could well be considered an uneconomic activity on the grounds that, as Claude Mosse suggests, it did not produce large profits. The Epidaurian building accounts show that two contractors, engaged in supplying stone to the sanctuary, had to pay back at least 50% of their contract prices in fines for delay; other evidence suggests that one of them certainly was a businessman.^[25] The next question is, then, to what extent were temple-building costs determined according to economic market prices? If this question could be answered, we should be able to see far more clearly just where in the scale of economic activities temple building stands. Unfortunately, the evidence for ordinary market-prices is such that we have very little basis for comparison of temple-building costs with prices in the daily commerce of the Greek cities.^[26]

But something is to be gained by comparing costs within the field of temple building itself, and by relating these results to the known characteristics of the ordinary market. The accounts for the Epidaurian temple of Asklepios show that the quarrying and supplying of stone for the cella was divided into three parts — the Corinthian Euterpidas agreed to quarry and transport half of the stone, while Archikles agreed only to quarry the other half, and Lykios to transport it.^[27] The prices for these three contracts were in strict proportion to one another. Yet only a few months earlier Lykios had undertaken, on his own, both to quarry and transport Corinthian stone for the outer colonnade of the temple, at a lower price — 7 dr. [/m³] less, to be precise.^[28]

On what basis had the prices been established? The contracts were let out in public by means of what may be called a “sale”; there was therefore opportunity for discussion of the price. Both parties to the transaction, building commissioners and contractors, may often have been aware of conditions in the ordinary market, and have related them to their bargaining for the building contracts. The reason for the differences in the building costs I have just quoted could be, that Lykios on his own had been beaten down by the Epidaurian building commissioners, whereas his companions in the divided contract were able to force the price up. Or possibly Lykios took up his contract at a time of year favourable to the transport of stone on carts over country roads, and in merchant ships along the rugged coast of Corinthia and Epidauros, while the second job had to be done in the bad season to fit into the building schedule. Be that as it may, it is easy to see that negotiations for temple-building contracts could be influenced by just the same factors as caused fluctuations of anything up to 100% or even more, within a few days, in the open market, such as bad weather, shipwreck, poor harvests, good harvests, the outbreak of war, or peace, the state of temper of the respective bargainers, the economic perspicacity of a man like Kleomenes of Alexandria, and so on. Two consignments of plaster delivered to Delos in the same week if not on the same day differed in price by 25 %; the cost of lead clamps at Epidauros, probably bought direct from the city’s workshops, rose 100% within seven years.^[29]

Many building costs, it would seem, varied from season to season, if not from contract to contract. How then could a building commission budget, with any hope of accuracy (assuming, that is, that this was its aim), for a project that might take anything up to ten or twenty years to complete? And what happened to a contractor who, having fixed his contract price at the beginning of the job, was then faced with a series of rising costs during the time-limit allowed him to complete the job?^[30] If he failed to finish it, he was fined, heavily; he not only gained nothing, but often actually lost on the transaction. How then, one might ask, was any businessman or professional craftsman tempted to take up building contracts at all?

One way out of the difficulty is to realize that it is by no means certain that building contracts went exclusively to men interested primarily in profits and in making a living. When Mnasikles of Epidauros took up the contract to quarry, cart, and set in place stone for the foundation core of the colonnade of the Asklepios temple for 2400 dr., the discussion of the price may have been dominated not by consideration of market prices and labour costs, but by Mnasikles’ wish to undercut the price, to do the job cheap as a form of offering to his city’s sanctuary. Piety may often have kept down the costs of temple building.

It seems that there was another lowering, or levelling, factor at work. Market prices were never steady, and no attempt was made to fix them. Yet the total costs of temples probably remained at about the same level for at least two hundred years. Furthermore, there are certain prices and payments which cannot be called market prices. The architect’s pay at Athens in the late fifth century and again at Epidauros about 370 was 1 dr. a day, a fixed rate; whereas the cost of living fluctuated daily, according to the state of the corn market. The fixed salary recognized a man’s status and skill, it did not necessarily provide him with a living wage. One has only to consider the variations at Eleusis in 327 from one day to another of the so-called “standard” rate of pay established for the ox-teams engaged in carting Pentelic marble column drums, to see that the level of “real” wages was not constant — they shifted an obol or half an obol at a time between 4 dr. and 4 dr. 3½ ob. per day per yoke.^[31]

Charges of 1 talent and ¾ talent, for quarrying and transporting two consignments of Pentelic marble to Epidauros,^[32] must also be understood as conventional prices. If they were market prices they could hardly have come to such round totals (for many more ordinary jobs and commodities were priced to the nearest ½ obol, or even 1/₁₂ obol). To pursue the question of conventional prices a little further: quarrystone was one of the most important materials used in temple building. Yet this commodity sets up various contradictions, in particular that, while it was valuable in the sense that it formed the material base for a cultural activity of great significance, one cannot talk of the commercial exploitation of quarries, not even at Athens and Corinth. Indeed, there are indications that building stone was held in a respect far removed from economic considerations; when the east pediment of the Aiginetan temple of Athena Aphaia was damaged, the sculptures were taken down and set up on the ground opposite the temple, not broken up and used as rubble filling, or powdered for stucco; many of the unworked column drums of the older Parthenon were set into the wall on the north side of the acropolis, not just because they were ready to hand, but surely to serve as memorials of the Persian sack; a Corinthian capital of Pentelic marble intended for the inner colonnade of the tholos at Epidauros was worked badly — instead of being dressed down and re-used, the block was given a decent burial close to the tholos.

To the question, what did quarrystone cost? another adds itself — did quarrystone cost anything? It seems not. Labour and transport costs made up the price. The intrinsic value of the stone itself could only be truly expressed in terms of the structure for which it was intended; in terms of silver, corn, or cattle it was priceless. When Agathokles of Syracuse took stone destined for the temple of Athena to use in his own house, he paid a price for it; but the story of the subsequent fate of Agathokles and his house demonstrates popular opinion as to the true value of the stone — despite his having paid money for it, the result of his misappropriation was destruction by thunderbolt.^[33]

Other aspects of temple building called for techniques quite outside the normal industrial experience of the Greek city, and here too costs are likely to have been fixed according to convention, or entirely arbitrarily. Many of the marble blocks required for the Parthenon and the Propylaia weighed too much for the one-yoke cart normally in use; we know that the column drums taken to Eleusis in 327 could only be shifted by teams of between 19 and 37 pairs of animals, so inefficient was the method of multiplying draught-power in antiquity. The circumstances of heavy transport and the occasions when it came into operation were highly unusual, and the costs of heavy transport were irrational and uneconomic to a degree — the large fines for delay recorded in the Epidaurian accounts were all without exception imposed on transport contractors. Vitruvius says that a certain Paconius bankrupted himself in attempts to bring a large statue base from the quarry to the sanctuary at Ephesos.^[34]

Though the city of Athens may sometimes have been able simply to commandeer the services of drivers and beasts for public works (for a day-wage), the transport contractors at Delphi and Epidauros were dependent not on a constantly available corps of carters and drivers, but on the goodwill and interest of the one-yoke owners (mostly local farmers) who might be prevailed on to offer their services, when they were not engaged in some less troublesome work. And however long the delays, and however large the fine which the contractor had to pay, he was bound to give his yoke-drivers the price they demanded, regardless of his own profit or loss. The Athenian Molossos was fined over 4000 dr. for delay in quarrying and transporting to the Piraeus Pentelic marble for Epidauros; later in the fourth century, also in Attica, we hear of teams numbering between 19 and 37 pairs of beasts for a single load. There seems to have been no attempt to improve multiple harness in order to reduce the number of animals required, and so to cut down the cost; the technical problems presented by certain aspects of temple building were solved by effective but inefficient means; if there was any desire to economize, it does not appear to have brought about any technological development in either temple building or daily life. As far as transport is concerned, whatever the methods used to harness the great gaggles of beasts for heavy transport, one-yoke traffic remained the usual means of land transport in antiquity. There was no economic stimulus towards change in either sphere; heavy transport, an activity basic to temple building, never got over its prime disabilities of difficulty and expense.

IV

The technical and economic problems inherent in temple building remained unchanged from one project to another. Yet, other things being equal, it does not appear that either the difficulty created by certain jobs, or the costliness of the whole exercise, deterred communities from building, if they had a will to do so. Finding the money was not, as I have already argued, a great problem. Lack of money was not the reason for the abandonment of half-built or unfinished buildings; this was not the reason why the Epidaurians only built a temple for Asklepios about 370, although the cult had come to international status two generations before.^[35] The decisive economic factor was, I suggest, not money but skilled labour — a sufficient number of specialists, trained in the traditions of temple architecture to carry out the complexities of a building scheme.

The terms of the building contract rather imply by their strictness that the contractor was very much at the building commission’s mercy-for example, “The contractor shall work all day and every day, … with at least five workmen, … shall use a toothed chisel for such-and-such a process, … shall be fined for bad work”, and so on. Much of this authoritarianism may have been little more than administrative facesaving. For clearly the building commission stood at a grave disadvantage initially, in that if no craftsmen chose to turn up to work on the project, there could be no temple. In most cities temple builders must have been few, or but infrequent visitors. Temple building was an occasional activity, very often unique in the experience of whole generations of men, especially in small places; neither businessmen nor craftsmen could expect to make a living from temples in any one place, except at Athens and Akragas during the fifth century. Xenophon remarks that “in small towns the same craftsman makes chairs and doors and ploughs, and often this same man builds houses; even so he is thankful if he can only find employment enough to support him. It is of course impossible for a man of many trades to be proficient in them all.”^[36] At Delphi and Delos, and most likely at Epidauros too, the local crafts could play only a comparatively small and inferior part in temple building, being concerned with bricklaying, small supplies, metal ware, and rough masonry, for example.

The connexion between the number of skilled men available and the kind of work that could be done was fully realized in antiquity. Xenophon’s Ways and Means, written about 355, offers probably the closest approach to a theoretical solution of the problem; he was concerned about the low rate of production in the silver mines, which of course had a direct and depressing effect on the Athenian economy. He saw that the higher the rate of employment in the mines, the greater would be the amount of silver produced and the profit gained all round. In his mind there could never be any question of over-production in the mines — an unwanted surplus of silver was inconceivable to Xenophon or to anyone else in antiquity — and so it was eminently economic to increase the number of workers in the mines by the simplest means possible, that is, by buying more slaves.

It would not have been feasible to pursue this policy in most other skilled trades, and particularly not in temple building. Certainly, when there was a demand for them, skilled craftsmen were automatically at a premium; the Epidaurians sent round agents to a variety of places — Tegea, Arcadian Stymphalos, Corinth, Megara, Aigina, Troizen, Athens, and Paros too — to search out skilled men for the building scheme. In this way the skilled craftsman was able to find suitable employment; he solved his own problems, of getting regular work and proper exercise for his talents, by moving about from one place to another. The mobility of skilled craftsmen in the ancient world thus offset the perennial shortage of skilled men in any given city; but on the other hand, it meant that (as is the case even today) very often they were not there when you wanted them. The answer could not be to increase the number of temple builders outright by buying up slaves, for since temple building was essentially an occasional activity, those states or individuals who invested in permanent labour forces for building would soon have found themselves maintaining an excess of skilled labour, which would have been even more of an economic embarrassment than the
previous shortage.

Craftsmen moved readily as the demand for their services shifted. There is abundant literary evidence for the movement of sculptors from one end of the Greek world to the other and beyond, during their careers; the building accounts make it clear that at Delphi, Delos, and Epidauros for example, sculptors, masons, painters, joiners, and plasterers congregated from many parts of Greece. But in one period at least, demand well exceeded supply. The period 400-375 is remarkably lacking in all but the most essential building activity — Athens’ Long Walls were rebuilt in the 390’s, but little or nothing was put up in any of the great sanctuaries; the temple of Athena at Tegea was burnt in 394, and remained unrestored until the 350’s; the Epidaurians did not build a full-scale temple for Asklepios until 370, two generations after the god had achieved international recognition.^[37] The only really satisfactory explanation for this widespread building recession is not shortage of money, not war, but a widespread scarcity of skilled labour.

During the fifth century the Athenians had employed a large number of skilled craftsmen in the Periklean building scheme; the city acted not only as a major employer, but as an international labour exchange, a state of affairs stimulating to Athenian industry and useful to other communities (Argos, for example, from the late 420’s onwards), since it was clear to all where skilled labour was to be found if necessary. The Athenian empire had offered hitherto unparalleled security, and freedom of movement within a wide area, encouraging yet further the useful distribution of skilled men.

This happy state of affairs did not last beyond the last years of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians had come to the end of their own building programme; the empire, with the economic safeguards it had offered, was disintegrating, and defeat was at hand. Artists and craftsmen resident in Athens either “froze” with what security they had, or left Athens and mainland Greece while the going was good. Dionysios of Syracuse had work and high wages to offer at just this time, in his armaments programmes, which may well have attracted temple builders as well as metalworkers (for Greek craftsmen were nothing if not versatile); Agesilaos encouraged the development of an armaments industry at Ephesos in 396; Athenian masons very probably worked on the late fifth-century Nereid monument at Xanthos in Lycia.^[38] But there was virtually no monumental activity on the Greek mainland or in the islands.

The revival of building activity in this area coincided with the revival of Athenian influence, and the establishment of new political and commercial contacts under the aegis of the Second Athenian Confederacy. Skilled labour returned to circulation, and so the Epidaurians were at last able to build a full-scale temple for Asklepios; the work was finished in four years and eight months, probably the quickest time possible. Even so, it was not the case that from now on there were large numbers of skilled craftsmen constantly available; the tholos at Epidauros, begun soon after the temple, took over thirty years to complete, and the accounts suggest that the work was delayed because it was still hard to find men sufficiently skilled to follow the specifications of this circular and richly ornamented building. The problems of how many craftsmen and artists one city could usefully support at any one time, and of the extent to which any city could rely on its own labour force for public works, are clearly demonstrated by the situation at Argos in the fifth and fourth centuries. There was a group of metalworkers and sculptors resident in the city during this period, the chief of whom in the fifth century was the elder Polykleitos, sculptor and writer of a work on harmony; in the fourth century we hear, among others, of the younger Polykleitos, sculptor, bronze-worker, and architect. We also know, from the Epidaurian accounts, of another family of stonemasons, who worked on the tholos at Epidauros under its architect, the younger Polykleitos.^[39]

Yet when the Argives undertook public works, they could not rely entirely on their own skilled labour. The Argive Heraion of the 420’s shows signs of Athenian influence, to be attributed to the employment of Athenian craftsmen; the Long Walls, begun in 418, were started with the aid of Athenian masons and carpenters.^[40] In the fourth century, the tholos at Epidauros, which was very much an Argive concern, was very slow in building. The inference is that Argos never supported a labour force adequate for temple building in its entirety.

The distribution of skilled labour was a perennial problem; the presence or absence of craftsmen was decisive for the Greek cities’ building policy. Their value was fully appreciated in antiquity, and many rulers and statesmen saw the advantages of keeping them employed and resident if they could. The question is, were the Greek cities able to impose any effective controls? There is evidence to suggest that they would certainly have been willing to do so, and that they occasionally attempted it.^[41] The Athenian decree in honour of Archelaus of Macedon in 408 also ordained that shipbuilders were to be paid for building ships, for which Archelaus had provided the timber, that the generals were to send the shipwrights off to Macedon to begin work as quickly as possible, and that anyone who refused to go should be brought before the courts.^[42] Skilled craftsmen were useful not only to the economy but to the defence of the state, for they could be employed in the manufacture of arms and fortifications, not to mention shipbuilding. We have, however, no idea how Athenian shipbuilders could have been disciplined, as the Archelaus-decree suggests; conceivably shipbuilding was a directed industry, but there is no clear evidence that craftsmen of any kind had to register with the state, for the purpose of control or direction of labour.^[43] The diplomatic usefulness of skilled labour can be seen in the treaty between Athens and Argos in 418; as a result of the treaty Athenian carpenters and masons went to help build the Argives’ Long Walls (and no doubt a covering note went with them demanding that they be repatriated when the work was done); Boeotian builders helped to restore the Athenians’ Long Walls after the treaty of 395 between Thebes and Athens.^[44] The presence in the community of skilled men, whether physicians, potters, engineers, sculptors, or temple builders, was a matter for congratulation; if they were absent they must be encouraged to come into the city, if they would.

But the Greek craftsman, though he can rarely have been a rich man, was economically independent, in that he was free to choose where and when to offer himself for employment. His loyalty could not be commanded. The patrons of temple building supplied money and motive for the work. The craftsmen alone could ensure the achievement of the patrons’ aims.^[45]