Forests of Empire: Timber Production and the Athenian Conquest of Eion

Join us on Friday, January 30th at 2:30pm for a talk by our Hellenisms Past & Present, Local & Global, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. John Daukas!

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present the 2025/26 Hellenisms Past & Present, Local & Global, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr.John Daukas!

Join us January 30th at 2:30pm in person at the Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby, Room 7200, or online (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87960016612), for his talk “ Forests of Empire: Timber Production and the Athenian Conquest of Eion”.

This talk will be moderated by Dr. Sabrina Higgins, Director of the SNF Centre at SFU.

Attendance is free. The event is open to the public and will be recorded.

This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

ABSTRACT

Just a few years after the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, Athenians attacked and seized Eion. A small Greek city-state in the Northern Aegean, its connections to Persia were peripheral, and its conquest has sparked scholarly debate as a result. This talk offers one perspective on Eion's conquest, contextualizing it in the Mediterranean timber trade by elucidating its perceived role in Athens' political economy. Seizing and colonizing Eion gave Athenians access to timber resources which allowed them to cheaply satisfy critical military and domestic needs, paving the way for Athens' rise as an imperial power. I will first discuss the importance of timber suitable for building and maintaining Athens' state-of-the-art navy, a topic long noted by scholars. I will then contribute to scholarship by discussing timber's role in construction more broadly as well as timber's role as a source of energy at Athens. Finally, I will touch on the important role that specialized labor played in Eion's capture. By connecting these aspects together, I hope to better contextualize Eion's seizure in what I am calling the "Arboreal Economy.

BIOGRAPHY

John Daukas is an ancient historian whose work broadly centers on imperialism, the ancient economy, and questions of identity in the ancient Mediterranean. His current research focuses on ancient Greek imperialism through the lenses of the ancient economy, especially trade, wealth distribution, and access to resources, and the construction and maintenance of ethnic, political, and interstate communities. His book project, Plotting Empire: The Klerouchy and the Development of Imperialism in the Greek World, traces the development of the klerouchy, an Athenian colonial institution by which the state parceled out plots of new territory to its citizens, and the klerouchy’s role in the development of the notion of imperialism in the Greek world from the Archaic period (early 6th century BCE) into the Hellenistic period (ca. 3rd century BCE). Building on his interests in Numismatics, the study of money and currency, his second project will examine the long history of the war indemnity, or the act of imposing war-related debt on defeated states, in the development of imperialism and its place within the larger histories of finance, debt, and diplomatic relations between Mediterranean states.