This article discusses the fortune of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s famous article ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, and reassesses its basic thesis that the Athenian Empire was popular among the lower classes of the allied cities in the light of recent developments in the field. After surveying the article’s immediate and more recent reception, and discussing its relation with The Origins of the Peloponnesian War and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, it isolates four key new trends in Greek history that, while going against some of Ste. Croix’s basic convictions, end up reinforcing his overall case. These are: a renewed attention to the mass and elite dichotomy, with recent work interpreting Greek oligarchy as a fundamentally reactive and anti-demotic regime; the recognition of the continued relevance of Persian meddling in the later fifth-century; a sea-change in Attic epigraphy which has led to the post-dating of several ‘imperial’ decrees; the new recognition of the dynamism of the Greek economy, and of the economic function of the Athenian Empire itself. Finally, the article addresses the paradigm of class struggle and stresses how democracy and economic dynamism, to which the Athenian Empire contributed, fostered the growth of slave markets and worsened the exploitation of ‘marginal’ regions as slave suppliers.

本文讨论杰弗里·德·斯特的财富。克罗伊的著名文章“雅典帝国的特征”，并根据该领域的最新发展重新评估了其基本论点，即雅典帝国在同盟城市的下层阶级中很受欢迎。在调查了这篇文章的直接和最近的反响，并讨论了它与《伯罗奔尼撒战争的起源》和《古希腊世界的阶级斗争》的关系之后，它分离出了希腊历史上的四个关键新趋势，这些趋势虽然与圣保罗的一些观点背道而驰。克罗伊的基本信念最终强化了他的整体观点。这些是：重新关注大众和精英的二分法，最近的研究将希腊寡头政治解释为一种根本上反应性和反民主的政权；认识到五世纪后期波斯干预的持续相关性；雅典金石学的巨大变化导致几项“帝国”法令的日期被推迟；对希腊经济的活力以及雅典帝国本身的经济功能的新认识。最后，文章讨论了阶级斗争的范式，并强调了雅典帝国所贡献的民主和经济活力如何促进了奴隶市场的增长，并加剧了对作为奴隶供应商的“边缘”地区的剥削。