How Can the Athenian Empire Survive

I was thinking about this. What reforms would Athens have to enact to make their empire survive. For it to survive in the long run it would have to be more palatable to its members, rather than simply treating them as subjects under an Athenian yoke. How can this be accomplished?
 
It'd be hard to achieve. So long as the Athenian establishment is producing Alcibiades' and Cleons- proud warmongers and ultra-hawks- it will be prone to over-extending itself against Sparta, Italian coalitions and/or the Achaemenids. It was never that stable to begin with- it resembled Carthage far more than it resembled Rome, and could in fact be broken eventually with too much war.

It never reached the heights that Rome did before becoming an empire, and its tributary-city system prevented the political rise of governors that you saw in Rome, which largely utilized direct rule once it overcame Carthage and the other Italian city states.
 
It'd be hard to achieve. So long as the Athenian establishment is producing Alcibiades' and Cleons- proud warmongers and ultra-hawks- it will be prone to over-extending itself against Sparta, Italian coalitions and/or the Achaemenids. It was never that stable to begin with- it resembled Carthage far more than it resembled Rome, and could in fact be broken eventually with too much war.

It never reached the heights that Rome did before becoming an empire, and its tributary-city system prevented the political rise of governors that you saw in Rome, which largely utilized direct rule once it overcame Carthage and the other Italian city states.
Any ideas for what reforms it might need/be willing to introduce?
 
I honestly can't tell you- you'd need a situation analogous to Rome, wherein Athens defeats the other cities early and decisively while also avoiding Persian suzerainty. Rome was lucky in that aspect- it conquered the other cities and managed to defeat its various enemies over the course of centuries, thankfully far away from the Persians and later the Diadochi. Brennus is nowhere near as frightening as the full might of Iran and Aniran.

Athens is neither- it is telling that it was a simple monarchy, rather than a Republic, that ended up conquering the East. Athens would, in its period of ascendance, not only fend off various Sparta-and-the-Fuck-Athens-Society attacks but also client-state dissent and the Achaemenids at the height of their power. Rome never faced a power as theoretically superior to it as the Achaemenids- Carthage and Epirus were equals, whereas Athens was theoretically miniscule next to Persia.

Internally, the system of government was less sophisticated than that of Republican Rome; the finer workings of a Senate and the class system had not yet been worked out. You'd also need a more directed foreign policy, rather than, for example, having Alcibiades kip off to Sicily whilst fighting the Spartan coalition. You'd also need to retain people like Themistocles, who, like Alcibiades, eventually alienated enough of Athens' fractious society to flee and become a very effective satrap in Asia Minor.

Perhaps if you crippled Sparta with a Helot revolt at the right time- and got the Achaemenids to go attack Nubia or India or something- Athens could manage to suborn enough cities to establish a true hegemony over most of Hellas. This would leave the fringe kingdoms- and Sicily- largely out of grasp. It would then need to win something like the Social Wars against these cities- it would need not only a big navy but also an effective land force for those cities inaccessible by land.

And this is forgetting x-factors like plague, which damn near ripped apart Athenian society down to the roots OTL.
 
According to the main (admittedly biased) historical source we have on the topic, the above was the whole and sole point of the Athenian hegemony.
I know, but Athens was capable of making less oppressive domination methods-the Athenian confederacy in the 380s being evidence of that.
 
I know, but Athens was capable of making less oppressive domination methods-the Athenian confederacy in the 380s being evidence of that.

True, but that was in a completely different context and, presumably, after an exceptionally deep process of collective soul-searching involving a civil war, a couple external wars, some of the most important trials in all recorded history, and a whole lot of incredibly good theatre plays. Incidentally, this founded most Western philosophy and rhetoric (and a good chunk of theatre) as a byproduct. Said process had been critically triggered by the utter collapse of the previous iteration of the Empire.
Still, the new alliance collapsed in "Social War" after a little more than a generation.
 
That's what I was referring to as "totally different context". However, Athens was clearly dominant.

Well yes, but I imagine the hegemony wasn't quite as obvious (no Cleon calling to exterminate rebellious clients, no propping up the Corcyrean Revolution)...
 
Well yes, but I imagine the hegemony wasn't quite as obvious (no Cleon calling to exterminate rebellious clients, no propping up the Corcyrean Revolution)...

Not that level of obvious, as far as I know. Which, by the way, is quite blatant.
I mean, it is true that our main source is quite on the "Freedom for the Greeks" side (read, the "Freedom for the Greek elites to tyrannize and oppress whatever the hell they want in their polis without outside interference") as opposed to the "Freedom for the People" side (read, the "Freedom for the Athenian people to loot and oppress at leisure other poleis without outside interference") of which we have no propaganda... erm, I meant, historiographical production. But even with a biased source, the average degree of not-giving-a-fuck we have attested in the Athenian public opinion is impressive.
 
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