Period I (314–290 B.C. ):
Uncertainty and Adjustment

The removal of Delos from the Athenian orbit and the creation of the Island League seem to have spelled disruption for certain segments of the local economy, which needed years to recover and adjust. Athenian citizens had played an important role in the economy of the temple as renters of the sacred estates and houses, and perhaps (as I have suggested) as suppliers of the island's demand for olive oil. Once the Athenians were gone, locals competed vigorously for the estates. The competition to invest in landed property brought Apollo unexpected gains, but also unwelcome risks. Defaults climbed; renters' property did not always suffice to cover the losses. The situation must have provoked considerable debate among the Delian elites, who both profited from the business and, as temple administrators, felt responsible for protecting the god's patrimony. By 301 or 300 B.C. , a compromise had been worked out and embodied in the hiera syngraphe. Henceforth estate rentals would be tightly controlled, and defaulters treated severely; a series of defaults and confiscations of property showed how serious these regulations were. Because the new regulations effectively debarred potential renters who could not find guarantors or whose personal wealth could not weather a default or a few bad crops, only the highest levels of Delian society—and a handful of Kykladic islanders who had connections among the Delian landholding elites—had any hope of renting the estates. The immediate results were a drastic decline in rents in

290 B.C. and a tendency for estates to remain in the same hands or the same families for years afterward.

The response of estate rents to this change depended radically on the products the estates produced. Group I estates, which required the heaviest investment from the renter because of their lack of vines, suffered the severest reduction in rents. Those estates that had vines, and therefore demanded a more modest commitment of funds up front from renters, weathered the transition better; the estates of Group IIA, which may predominantly have been vineyards, underwent only a very moderate decline. Presumably the predictable demand for wine coupled with low initial investment continued to make these properties an attractive investment.

Olive oil also showed a continuous, steady decline in prices from the late fourth century down to ca. 270 B.C. I have suggested that a dependence in the fourth-century amphiktyonic period on Athens for oil may have given way after 314 to imports from Rhodos, and that the desire to have local sources encouraged plantings on Delos and neighboring islands, which resulted finally in substantial, reliable local supplies and a steady, low price. The facts fit this view well, especially in view of the correlation between the great siege of Rhodos (305–304 B.C. ) and extraordinarily high oil prices in 304 B.C. This interpretation also accounts in a satisfying way for the change in numbers of Rhodian amphorae recovered on Delos (always assuming that some of those amphorae contained oil). In contrast, the traditional view, which attributes high prices to the new demand of the Greek East for home products, looks much less appealing, especially because of its difficulty in explaining the low oil prices of the last months of 304 B.C.

Other sectors of the economy displayed little change. To the extent that pig and firewood prices can be traced, they do not seem to show levels much different from those common twenty or thirty years later. The exceptions, like the high pig prices of 302 B.C. , were linked to military operations in the islands. Citizens of Kykladic islands worked on Delos as contractors and laborers, imported goods, rented property, and borrowed money. Apollo lent funds (and rued it) to members of the Island League and to some few small neighbors just outside the Kykladic orbit,^[3] but Delian economic influence faded away at the boundaries of the Kyklades.

This reconstruction implies some interesting things about the Delian economy in these years. For one, rents for the agricultural estates display an ambiguous tie with local agricultural prices. We have seen that rents for Group I estates, and to a lesser extent Groups IIB and IIC, correlated well

in later periods with barley and olive oil prices. Although the data are too exiguous to permit analysis for this period, it is an apparently reasonable supposition that the high oil prices of this first period encouraged renters to offer the high rent bids to which (I have argued) social considerations impelled them too. Yet none of the estates had olives, and neither did renters plant them. The failure of renters to do so is unsurprising: olives need seven to twenty years to produce their first crop, whereas rental periods in 314–300 B.C. were never longer than five years. Moreover, the great collapse in estate rents in 290 B.C. had no connection with oil prices, which underwent no comparable radical, discontinuous change. This shows quite clearly the operation of extra-economic forces, or at least forces that did not affect oil prices. It can be argued that the instability of this sector of the economy resulted from a partial decoupling of estate rent levels from their normal indicators among agricultural commodities.

The Delian evidence also casts new doubt on long-standing claims about generally high prices in the Greek world in the late fourth century. The facts that prices of individual goods did not move together and that rents for estates rose at least partly independently of prices and of each other undermine any attempt to attribute these "high prices" uniformly to inflation brought on by the influx of eastern wealth or other such causes. Moreover, many of the "data" from other parts of the Greek world are equally suspect. The evidence from Athens, collected long ago by William Ferguson and Rostovtzeff, does not hold up under close examination. "Prices" quoted by Theophrastos (Char. 3.3, 23.5, 8) have no claim to represent market prices, and the enormous dowries attested by New Comedy have been deflated by M. I. Finley's careful study of the Athenian horoi.^[4] This whole subject requires reexamination.

These first few decades of Delian independence also saw the evolution of the Kyklades into an economic unit focused on Delos. While the archipelago certainly always formed something of a region, during the fourth century many of the islands enjoyed important relations with the outside world independent of their links to Delos. The western islands in particular cultivated relations with western neighbors, including the cities of Euboia and Athens. Especially before 350 B.C. , Athens played an important role, running the second Athenian sea league, to which most Kykladic states belonged, and controlling the temple of Delian Apollo. Sometimes allies

like the Andrians participated in this Athenian control, and individual citizens of other Kykladic states also sometimes benefited from it. The establishment of the Nesiotic League in 314 B.C. , however, entailed a marked reorientation of the Kyklades toward their center at Delos and away from the outside world. The political and military relations of the islands with their hegemones —first Antigonos Monophthalmos and Demetrios, then the Ptolemies—were mediated through the structures of the league and through the royal officials, such as the nesiarkhoi, the oikonomoi, and Philokles, king of the Sidonians, put in charge of it. The league knit the islands into a unit in a way that had not been seen before. Furthermore, the removal of Athens from the central Aegean seems to have opened economic opportunities for the islanders on Delos. The result was the creation of an economic region for which Delos became the natural exchange center through a combination of geographic centrality, religious magnetism, and housing the apparatus of the Nesiotic League.^[5]