Aeneas the Tactician

The investigation of technical aspects of Greek writings on siege matters may sometimes prove to be a very useful means to reconstruct their text. In paragraph 32 of his Poliorketika ("On Siegecraft") Aeneas Tacticus depicts the countermeasures to be taken against a direct assault on the city wall. The manuscript tradition, represented only by the Codex Laurentianus LV-4, preserves the word χείλη ('battlements'), but certain mechanical characteristics of the mentioned siege machines (like the battering ram) suggest that in this passage one must read τείχη ('wall') instead, a correction already proposed by I. Casaubon in his editio princeps.

At the end of the Peloponnesian war all the belligerents were exhausted. Athens had to destroy its fleet and give away its overseas settlements. Public treasury and all the economic resources, described by Pericles and Aristophanes, were used up and the citizenry was on the verge of a breakdown. A whole generation started to question the relationship between polis, imperialism, prosperity and peace. This post war mood brought to a new and more balanced definition of the connection between society and economy, peace and freedom, and provoked an intensification with the changes in the finance and budgetary policy context. The result of this reform was the merismos. This new government spending rested on the idea that the polis should be still led by whole its citizens, but advised by specialized experts. Isocrates, Xenophon and Eubulus were ones of the most representatives of this new social and economic policy. The project of new financial reform covered the following programmes: establishment of a welfare state, partition of duties, structured management of public bodies and treasuries to specialists, annual organisation of the budgetary policy, the co-ordination of foreign policy. This ambitious programme invited the traditional polis to re-think the old concepts like autarchy, blood ties and virtue as only requisites to success, wealth as prelude to social and political chaos. In a period of strong social tensions, pistis become the necessary start point. Athens needed the trust of its citizenry, metics, foreigns and other cities. Citizens needed to trust each other’s again and a guide to help them to understand the new reform and recognize it as a natural evolution, instead of a radical change. Isocrates and Xenophon, just to mention two of the main characters of this period, were able to explain this new need of an efficient management. With their pragmatic approach to policy and its economic results, they became the natural publicists of this new vision. The first one with his dream of a revival of material prosperity and freedom without a recourse to innovation, but with a return to the ancestral democratic constitution; Xenophon, who should have had sympathy for Eubulus’ programme, with his realism, pragmatic models and characters. Both of them with the praise of moderation and the blame of hoarding and opulence. Eubulus gave an old dress to new customs and even if he had been a great reformer, his work was so perfectly blend with previous democratic traditions, that it is really hard for us to call him an innovator, feeling more comfortable with the word nomothetes. After all, Athenians needed a new objective, new and good laws, a new balance. In this work we will try to present and analyse the main elements of this promote, pragmatic and theoretical, designed to find a link between past and present and to bring back trust in the midst of the citizenry, and the new ethics of wealth, where the “too much” it was not given by the amount but by its mode of use.