Quick questions on Society, culture and economy in the Greek world 404 BC to the death of Philip II: HSC Ancient History

The fourth-century economy, best documented for Athens, shows real commercial sophistication operating within a still agrarian world.

Plato (c. 429-347 BC), pupil of the Socrates executed by the restored democracy in 399 BC, founded the Academy around 387 BC, a lasting institution of philosophical enquiry. His pupil Aristotle (384-322 BC) later founded his own school, the Lyceum, around 335 BC (just after the period's close), and produced systematic works across logic, ethics, biology and politics; his Politics and the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Athenaion Politeia) are major sources for how Greeks analysed their own states.

Isocrates (436-338 BC) opened an influential school of rhetoric around 393 BC, training public men through model speeches and pamphlets. The age also produced the great Attic orators whose speeches survive as our richest evidence for law, politics and daily life: Lysias, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Aeschines and Hyperides. Their forensic (law-court) and political speeches are indispensable, and slanted, sources.

History-writing matured as a prose genre. Xenophon's Hellenica continued the narrative of Greek affairs; his Anabasis, Poroi and other works range across memoir, economics and biography. Later fourth-century historians such as Ephorus and Theopompus (whose works survive only in fragments and in later writers like Diodorus Siculus) extended the reach of the genre.

Attica could not feed itself, so Athens depended on imported grain, much of it shipped from the Black Sea (Pontic) region, especially the Bosporan kingdom, through the narrow Hellespont. This dependence was strategic as well as economic: control of the straits was a war aim, and Athenian law tightly regulated the trade, forbidding residents to ship grain anywhere but Athens and barring maritime loans on non-Athenian grain cargoes. Athens also honoured foreign rulers, such as the Bosporan king Leucon, who guaranteed shipments.

The state silver mines at Laurion in southern Attica, worked largely by slave labour, remained a crucial source of bullion for coinage and revenue. It is exactly these levers, silver, metics, trade and harbour dues, that Xenophon marshals in the Poroi (Ways and Means, c. 355 BC), arguing that Athens could restore its finances through peace and commerce rather than war and empire.

Markers expect the decline-versus-resilience debate (Ober, Hornblower) and the economy debate (Finley versus Cohen; Parke and Trundle on mercenaries) used as argument.