The Hellenistic world saw both expansive military activity as well as evidence for macroeconomic intensification. This book argues a well-developed military labor market signaled an overall economy transitioning towards a market-based paradigm.
Chapter One, “Contextualizing Paid Military Service” lays out the analytic stakes, proposing an intervention into the longstanding debate about the nature of the ancient economy, with battlelines drawn between Finleyite primitivists and New Institutional Economics (NIE)-inspired modernists. Following the framework of Karl Polanyi, Van Regenmortel suggests the existence of a self-regulating labor market is indicative of a dominant market-based economy, ascendant over other traditional forms of reciprocity and redistribution. Therefore, evidence for the existence of a military labor market potentially impacts the broader economic paradigm.
Chapter Two, “The Concept of Wage Labour”, proposes a relatively uncontroversial definition. Wage laborers must be autonomous, selling their labor for finite periods in exchange for remuneration. Not all wage payments necessarily create a labor market; for example Van Regenmortel discounts the jury and assembly pay offered in Classical Athens, arguing that it was set too low and was too unresponsive to market forces. For Hellenistic soldiers to meet the definition of wage-laborers, they must not only be remunerated, but also fundamentally free, volunteers rather than conscripts. She dislikes the term “mercenary,” typically applied to foreign recruits, preferring to lump together both foreign and internally recruited volunteers. This is not necessarily objectionable, although some caution about internal volunteers is that they are more likely to sign up for non-economic reasons, such as peer pressure or personal patriotism.
Chapter Three, “Enlistment and Terms of Service”, considers how soldiers were enrolled, teasing out the differences between conscripts and volunteers. Alexander’s armies contained a mix of Macedonian and subject conscripts, as well as volunteer misthophoroi. Alexander’s death induced an implosion of political legitimacy across his recently conquered domain, effectively transforming all soldiers into de facto volunteers, who swapped their support between successors, and in some instances received negotiated amnesties after deserting or defecting. The consolidation of the Hellenistic kingdoms saw a return to conscript armies, drafted from settlers and subjects, although frequently supplemented by hired contingents. Overall, the chapter somewhat undercuts the main argument of the book. While hired troops were always an aspect of Hellenistic armies, they only predominate during the chaotic decades from 323-272 BCE, with majority conscript armies reasserting themselves as the new political system stabilized. Yet it is doubtful anyone would posit that these five violent decades marked the peak economic efflorescence of the Hellenistic world.
Chapter Four, “Forms of Remuneration and Standards of Living”, focuses on soldiers’ remuneration. The first major category examined––land grants––again somewhat undermines the notion that we are dealing with fluid labor market. Land, even if granted with full possession and without stated military obligations, bonds the recipient to the grantor, and often implies permanent physical relocation. Indeed, granting of land was a key tactic towards transforming discharged volunteers and their descendants into future conscripts. For military pay, Van Regenmortel suggests that kings paid lavishly. But her reconstruction of early Hellenistic pay rates leans too much on IG IV2, 1.68, lines 96-98, where Antigonus One-Eyed and Demetrius Poliorcetes around 302 BCE assessed member-cities of the Hellenic league exorbitant replacement fees if they failed to provide troops: fifty drachmas per day for a cavalryman, twenty drachmas per day for a hoplite, and ten drachmas for a skirmisher. Usually in these sorts of clauses the replacement fee approximates the costs of actually hiring a replacement. But in this context, the leadup to the existential showdown at Ipsos, the Antigonids needed troops far more than they needed cash, and the sky-high replacement fees in the inscription were deliberately designed to force member states to meet their recruitment quotas. Indeed, a basic back of the envelope calculation would suggest the Antigonids could not meet the payroll of the 70,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry army mustered at Ipsos (Plut. Dem. 28.6) if they paid at these lavish rates, as this would cost over half a billion drachmas a year (assuming a 1:1 ratio of hoplites to skirmishers), when Antigonid annual revenues are reported at sixty-six million drachmas (Diod. Sic. 19.56.5). Outside of the extravagant pay for Alexander’s army, evidence for kings’ pay rates generally matches the range of pay-rates offered by poleis, typically between 4-9 obols a day for infantry.[1] Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that the overall package of pay, rations, benefits and occasional land grants left Hellenistic soldiers well remunerated, and provided recruits with economic incentives to enlist. Hellenistic soldiers certainly did far better than Roman legionary conscripts, paid a mere two obols a day, from which the cost of rations, clothing and weapons were deducted (Polyb. 6.39.12).
Chapter Five, “The Military Labour Market”, considers whether a functioning transregional market existed for military labor, with labor mobility and price-setting based on supply and demand. Soldiers were indeed able to advocate for better wages and conditions through collective actions, with extended discussion of the mutiny at Opis. But this mutiny was inherently a political act, notably spearheaded not by volunteer or mercenary troops, but by Alexander’s conscripted Macedonians, who enjoyed special political bond with the king as his ethnic subjects. The collective activism of soldiers was repeatedly on display after Alexander’s death. Van Regenmortel is correct that activism likely brought material rewards, as successors bought off disgruntled troops. But political entanglements muddle her expansive case for the Hellenistic soldier as a homo economicus acting in an open and legible labor market. The Successor-era soldier was also a homo politicus navigating an extended crisis, who to be sure might defect for a hefty bonus, but could also be convinced to follow a leader because he communed with Alexander in his dreams (e.g. Plut. Eum. 13.3, Diod. Sic. 19.90.4).
Chapter Six “Military Wage Labour and the Hellenistic Economies” correlates state-level military expenditure with attested economic performance during the period. It is generally accepted that Hellenistic kings monetized the economies of the former Achaemenid realm, collecting taxes in cash to pay soldiers, monetization made possible by the “liberation” of gargantuan Persian bullion hoards. Of course, the status of the soldiers who received these payments, as conscripts or volunteers in a labor market, is largely irrelevant to this dynamic. The chapter next briefly synthesizes the arguments and evidence for Hellenistic economic growth. But correlation is not necessarily causation, as other factors might contribute to economic growth, for example royally sponsored urbanization (Antioch, Alexandria), or broader integration of the Western Mediterranean under Roman auspices. Overall, the book does not quite convince in its most ambitious assertion: that a military labor market heralded a truly market-based Hellenistic economy. Such a military labor market certainly existed, particularly for communities such as the Galatians or Cretans, who were geographically well positioned to triangulate between various potential employers, with mercenaries (a term I think remains useful, precisely because it hinges upon geographic and political mobility) always providing a significant minority of Hellenistic armies. Mercenary service was often a probationary phase towards immigration and incorporation, part of a journey not towards a neoliberal labor market but rather into negotiated subjecthood against a backdrop of fragmented sovereignties.
Van Regenmortel does not significantly confront the military labor market that had preceded the Hellenistic world. She far too casually asserts that Classical era Athenians hoplites were not paid a wage, but were merely given a subsistence allowance to purchase food, admittedly citing the august authority of Kendrick Pritchett. If correct, this would suggest that Hellenistic soldiers were the first to receive true wages. But Pritchett’s notion that Athenian hoplites were only paid subsistence money is highly controversial:[2] the most common Athenian pay-rate in Thucydides was one drachma a day for hoplites, sailors and mercenaries (Thuc. 3.17.4, 6.31.3, 7.27.2), a common rate which persevered into the Hellenistic era, and which generally far-exceeded the cost of rations. It is true that Athens’ diminished fourth century BCE fiscal apparatus struggled to pay troops abroad. But it seems more conducive for Van Regenmortel’s argument that most soldiers in the Classical period were not maintained by cash-strapped Greek poleis at all, but by the Achaemenid empire. The Persians had the capacity to pay soldiers with coins (including Xenophon and his fellow mercenaries), but generous distribution of provisions in-kind appears as the dominant modality for maintaining and rewarding troops in Persian service (e.g. Polyaenus Strat. 32). The shift towards coin-based payments under Hellenistic kings here would be the decisive economic juncture, with labor mobility enhanced by the capital mobility coinage enabled.
Van Regenmortel closes chronologically in 217 BCE, with a few glances forward. It is somewhat unfair to critique the cutoff for a book, especially one based on a dissertation, which at some point needs to end so that a scholarly career can begin. Conducive to the argument, the time-frame centers the chaotic period of state deformation under the Diadochoi, which made soldiers of fortune out of all. But the price of this endpoint is largely avoiding close engagement with Polybius, as rich a source as any for military affairs, who himself had firsthand experience recruiting and paying both mercenary and citizen troops while hipparch of the Achaean League. Nonetheless, this is a solid and well researched book, with enough material unexamined to provide fodder for a sequel.
Notes
[1] Van Regenmortel further suggests that the 100 drachmas a day (one mina) promised to the followers of the Aetolian mercenary general Scopas (Polyb. 13.2.3) represented pay for common soldiers. But this was certainly a retainer for a small handful of Scopas’ lieutenants. A pay rate of 100 drachmas a day for common soldiers would mean that the 6400 man army later recruited by Scopas (Livy 31.43) would cost 230 million drachmas a year, many times in excess of the highest reported annual revenues of the Ptolemies, some 88.8 million drachmas (Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, 11.5). For the meager but relatively consistent evidence of royal pay rates, see Michael Taylor, Soldiers and Silver: Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), 144–168.
[2] Stephan O’Connor, “Some Observations of Pay for Athenian Military Forces at Potidea (432-430/29 B.C.) and in Sicily (415–413 B.C.)”. Arctos 50 (2016): 107–124.