Broadsheet

Ro Khanna is one of the House’s most sophisticated members. He’s also a progressive Democrat representing Silicon Valley, which is … interesting in today’s political and economic environment. We talked about that, wealth concentration, AI and much more. Transcript follows.

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA)

(recorded 2/19/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Very special guest this time. I’m privileged to have gotten Congressman Ro Khanna, you could say the representative for Cupertino who is a progressive Democrat, and right in the middle of a lot of important issues. Welcome. It’s great that you could take time out from your schedule to do this.

Ro Khanna: Thank you. It’s an honor to be on. I’ve been reading you since I was an undergraduate economics major at Chicago and, well, economics at Chicago seemed like math class. I appreciated that you could explain those ideas simply in ways ordinary people can understand.

Krugman: Well. Thank you. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get right in. Let’s just turn to background. So you’re representing, in a way, the heart of both the cutting edge of technology and also, these days, the cutting edge or bleeding edge of a lot of things that are happening and not all of them good in U.S. politics. What’s it currently like to be a progressive Democrat representing Silicon Valley?

Khanna: It’s hard. My district and the surrounding area has a market cap of about $18 trillion dollars. Five companies worth over $1 trillion dollars. Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, Tesla. Almost one third of the stock market’s value is there. And yet there’s a lot of inequality, even in the district. You have people in East San Jose who are rent burdened, don’t have affordable housing, people without child care, who can’t afford childcare costs, or health care. And I have advocated for higher taxes on billionaires. That hasn’t gone over well. I have said that we need progressive capitalism, and there’s push back on some of that.

Krugman: Yeah. I want to get to tax proposals further on in this discussion, but, you’re trying to represent all the people in the district and not everybody is a billionaire tech bro. I mean, I lived there in the mid 90s for a couple of years and it was not uniformly prosperous even then and that still must be true.

Khanna: That’s one of the big misconceptions. There are a lot of billionaires and millionaires in and around my district, but there are a lot of other people who can’t afford rent, who are working class and even middle class and there are a lot more of them then there are tech billionaires. In fact, I lost one of my races for congress in 2014 to Mike Honda. And he said, “I knew I had you beat when you came out with all these tech leader endorsements and I had all the PTA leaders and there are a lot more PTA leaders than tech leaders.”

Krugman: Okay. Yeah. This is true. I mean, we still have a democracy for the time being. Even in greater San Jose, that’s what matters. So that’s great. And I guess even within the tech industry, at least from outside reports, there’s a big difference between the people at the top and a lot of the working stiff engineers who tend to be at least socially quite progressive, I believe.

Khanna: Absolutely. The reality is a lot of the engineers at some of these companies are uncomfortable with the massive inequality, with some of the algorithmic addictions that social media is causing, with the concern about AI and job loss and how that’s gonna affect working class Americans. So, there is a sense that some of these folks who clearly believed they were doing good are now more conflicted. They may stay at the tech companies because they’re supporting their families and they believe in the work, but they think that the Valley has become more ruthless from the times of Hewlett Packard or whathaveyou. There was more concern about local communities.

And one thing that’s interesting is how many of the tech leaders don’t know much about the local community. They don’t know the Silicon Valley Community Service Center research, or Second Harvest Food Bank. In the 70s, 80s, 90s, the tech leaders were very much part of the community. Now they’re global and are not as involved in the day to day of the community.

Krugman: That’s an interesting point. I didn’t think about that much. I mean, it’s a little bit like, you know, I live in New York, and often I’m not quite sure why super rich people even bother to live there. Because if you’re going to be driven around in a in a car with tinted windows, you might as well be in Abu Dhabi, right? If you’re not really part of the community. So, yeah. That’s really interesting. But you say that it wasn’t always that way. So it’s part of the way that things have changed.

Khanna: No, it wasn’t that way. There was more of a historical awareness about how much Silicon Valley had benefitted from public investment. There was an understanding that there’s been massive investments by Darpa, NSF. ImageNet, that was part of what led to the creation of AI, was funded by NSF (National Science Foundation). The digital project that led to Google was funded by the government. And I think that this next generation, what they call the PayPal mafia, doesn’t really understand or chooses to ignore a lot of that public investment and is more disconnected from the post-World War Two era, in comparison to Andy Grove or Bill Hewitt or David Packard.

Krugman: Okay. Just for listeners, PayPal Mafia. I know what you mean, but probably a lot of people don’t.

Khanna: Well, these are some of the early folks who funded Paypal. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reed Hoffman was part of it, David Sacks. And a lot of them have extraordinary influence in Silicon Valley and in our politics. And they often come from a more libertarian perspective, a perspective that they know best. I mean, I was in a meeting this morning where one of the people said, well, “why do we even need a government? You know, let’s just allow the innovators to allocate capital.”

And they, you know, some of them have said in a different age “we would be conquerors, and we are the folks who best understand how to keep America ahead.” And so from their point of view, wealth concentration isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They fundamentally believe they are better allocators of that capital than the democratic public and that they are entitled in some ways, based on their genius or their work ethic to lead.

Krugman: Gosh, I didn’t know that people were still talking like that. I thought that libertarian gloss had worn down a bit, but I guess people still talk like that, and you’re much closer to that industry than I am.

Khanna: I don’t know if you’ve ever read Ayn Rand. I read it in high school, but, if you read Fountainhead, there’s a character, Peter Keating who is kind of seen as a bumbling bureaucrat. And a lot of times when people are insulting me, they’ll say, “oh, he’s a Peter Keating character. He’s not a builder. He’s not a founder. He’s not adding value. He’s just one of those paper pushers that is talking about what a just society looks like.” This is not all of Silicon Valley, but it’s definitely a group of people who have disproportionate power in our country.

And I think it’s important to understand their worldview, because a lot of times people feel it’s just transactional. They’re doing this because they want deregulation on AI or they want deregulation in crypto. And in some sense, I wish it was just transactional. But it goes very much to a deeper worldview, of what they think is the right way to govern society. The type that Andrew Mellon had in the 1920s when he was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, and he basically said, “The problem in the country is that there’s not enough working people. But there’s a group of people who are lazy and elites are the ones who should be involved in decision making.” And you see a replay of that in some of the folks in Silicon Valley.

Krugman: Yeah, that’s the classic, “liquidate the farmers, liquidate the workers.” But according to Herbert Hoover, that’s what Mellon told him. So, yeah. And by the way, for my sins I did read Ayn Rand in college, although I thought it was funny. My friends and I used to ironically quote passages from Atlas Shrugged to each other. It shows I probably wasn’t in the right spirit.

What you’re saying actually is in some ways, people like Thiel or Musk are idealists. They just have a view of the world, which is quite something. It’s not simple greed. Not to say the greed isn’t there, but it’s part of it.

Khanna: In some ways it’s more dangerous than greed, because it fundamentally assumes a superiority in making governing decisions. I don’t think they’ll tell you they’re necessarily better human beings, but they would say that they’re more capable of adding value to society. And it’s important to understand this mindset because they view themselves as builders and creators.

The other insult that they hurl my way is in some ways I’m a taker. I’m not building things. And this has gotten a great reception with the Trump administration. I mean, he’s surrounded himself with many of these folks.

Krugman: Okay. I want to talk about policy and policy adjacent issues. So you mentioned that there have been several big things that people thought were great and now there’s some conflicted views. And you and I talked, I think probably two years ago, something less than that. But we met up in New York and talked about, among other things, crypto. And I’ve been a huge crypto skeptic, and everybody knows that. But you were more hopeful. Where are you right now in terms of crypto and crypto regulation?

Khanna: Well, I’m certainly dismayed by what Trump has done with it. The meme coins, the World Liberty issue. I don’t know if you follow all of that.

Krugman: For sure.

Khanna: Well, unfortunately, you know, UAE basically facilitated a purchase with Trump’s own World Liberty stablecoin. And, then there was someone who accepted that money, who was pardoned because he’s accepting Trump’s stablecoin. The bottom line is that there’s quite a lot of evidence that you had someone from UAE, and a person who sought a pardon, basically, enrich the Trump family, to influence policy. And that, is a huge concern, something that we’ve called to investigate on the China committee.

More broadly, I believe that there’s got to be regulations on the speculation. And we can have the conversation about whether there’s a use case in terms of the efficient transfers of money overseas. People say that it reduces transaction costs. You obviously said you just disagree with that or don’t think it has unique value, but that’s something that people still maintain, that it has a use case of lowering transaction costs.

Krugman: Yeah. For what it’s worth, I hear better things about transactions with stablecoins than Bitcoin which is still incredibly difficult to use for anything real. Stablecoins are better, but they pose a bunch of other risks. You’ve been involved, at least somewhat with the attempts to bring stablecoins into the regulatory framework.

Khanna: Yes. And to have capital requirements for them. I mean, we obviously want to make sure that there’s capital requirements for those stablecoins and that you don’t have a run on stablecoin. Certainly you don’t want algorithmic stablecoins where they don’t have the deposits to back it up.

Krugman: Okay. Yeah. This could get way too involved to talk about this but it’s fascinating stuff. However, the radical developments are coming too fast to keep up. And I want to get to AI in a bit, but let’s talk about social media which, as you mentioned, some of the people in Silicon Valley, maybe not the people at the very top, but others are somewhat disturbed by. I should be more up on that than I am. But have you been at all trying to do something about social media? You know, a lot of people are worried about social media interactions. Now we’re worried about chatbots. But it’s kind of a starting entry point.

Khanna: Yeah. One, we need to repeal some of the section 230 immunity, especially for the amplification of violent content, of content that is edging people to commit violence or illegal activity. And if we did that, if we had that kind of change, you may see less of the algorithms that are getting the most sensational, outrageous, content that’s been created because of these platforms having blanket immunity.

Krugman: For listeners, section 230 is basically saying, “Hey, Meta or YouTube, they’re just platforms, and they bear no responsibility for what appears on them because people are just using them. They’re just a utility.” And of course, there’s lots of reasons to think that’s not a fair characterization. And particularly the algorithms. People may not quite know. Can you explain about the algorithm and why that’s a problem?

Khanna: Well, basically these engineers at these companies figure out based on people’s data what content they should send to those people, what content they should push on to their feeds. It’s like when you open up X or you open up Facebook, it’s not chronological. There’s a deliberate choice about what you’re getting. And, that is not neutral. A phone doesn’t direct some conversations to you. It’s just an actual neutral entity where two people talk. But these social media companies actually are making determinations.

Now, some of those determinations you would want. You know, search makes determinations. It’s not to say that every algorithm is inherently problematic, but what I believe is when you have algorithms that are pushing content that is either harmful for minors and kids or that is amplifying violence, or is amplifying blatant falsity with disregard of the truth, there should be some liability. And right now, these platforms have no liability.

Krugman: Yeah. I think a lot of us don’t pay enough attention to YouTube which is surprisingly powerful. I’m a heavy consumer of YouTube, but I have two rules. One is no politics ever, because that pollutes my algorithm. The other is no cute animals, which also pollutes my algorithm. So, yeah.

So this is a big deal, although it’s already been overtaken in the public imagination and the political sphere by AI. So, not that anybody really knows, but do you have a view about how big a deal AI is going to be economically? And then we can go on to policy for it.

Khanna: It seems like it’s going to be a big deal. I mean, obviously you have huge capital expenditure right now on data centers that is having an impact on the stock market and on growth numbers. There is genuine concern about the impact on young workers. In fact I think there was some paper from Stanford which showed that for young kids between 22 and 25, there’s 16% more unemployment if they were in jobs that could be affected by AI such as customer support and technology jobs and software jobs being the examples. So I think there’s a real concern about particularly entry level jobs and automation.

And then there are, of course, positives as well, in terms of the impact on finding cures to rare disease and cancer and developing energy sources in terms of making batteries more efficient. So, it seems to me transformative. And what matters is, how we deal with it. And I often say I’m neither an AI accelerationist nor am I an AI doomer, but I’m an AI democrat, meaning we should have democratic accountability for how we develop AI.

Krugman: Yeah. But you probably worry a little bit because you’re probably more sophisticated technically than 430 members of Congress. And you do wonder a little bit about who’s going to be doing this democratic accountability. But I guess that’s why, in principle, we have a government which hires experts.

But, what kinds of regulations would you be seeking on it? I mean, it’s still in its very early days, but what would you be looking to regulate?

Khanna: Well, first I would look at jobs. And I’d be curious of your thoughts on this. I mean, look, when you had the Industrial Revolution, from what I’ve read, that for 60 years you had Britain build enormous wealth, but you had massive inequality. And the working class wages didn’t go up. You didn’t have worker productivity increase. You had a lot of elimination of jobs. So my view is that we should err on the side of keeping human beings in the loop.

I believe that means, for example, we should have drivers on self-driving trucks for certainly a number of years to make sure that we don’t have mass displacement. We should, figure out how we steer AI to augment human workers as opposed to displacing them.

Looking at the tax code, which currently, incentivizes depreciation of hiring robots or digital tools versus hiring workers, I believe we need a big federal sort of program to hire young people, either in their communities doing childcare or elder care or teaching or building the community in infrastructure projects or coming in to the federal government for a few years to do science or biotech so that they can get experience if entry level jobs are being challenged.

But, you know, I think we need to really think about the jobs issue and the adoption issue of AI.

Krugman: That’s interesting. Those are actually very strong proposals. I mean, you’re not giving us legislative language here, but that’s not to say that we’re actually going to intervene to try and limit job displacement and provide maybe something like a job guarantee. That’s a very forward looking proposal. I mean, you’d have a hell of a time getting it enacted but that’s an impressive concept. That’s bolder than I was expecting. That’s a big deal.

Khanna: Well, you remember when we had elevator operators. We had them for a long time. I mean, I guess the question is: if efficiency is the sole metric, at all cost, in my view that comes at a cost to social cohesion. And it’s not like the private sector is perfectly efficient. And I just think that we want to adopt AI, but we want to adopt it in a way that doesn’t have mass displacement of jobs. And that gives workers some say in how they’re participating and has federal intervention in places where we can create some of these jobs.

Krugman: Okay. Yeah. I haven’t made any use of it myself, but when I talk to people who have, I think in some way, people like me look at ChatGPT and all of that and say, “oh, you know, this is producing garbage and it’s hallucinating.” But people who do stuff like coding are extremely impressed with what Claude and other programs can do. And this is a big deal.

Khanna: Right. But let me ask you one question, because John Maynard Keynes wrote that famous article about how we’d all be working 15 hour workweeks. He turned out to be wrong, at least up to now. But do you think AI is different than that? Or do you think we should have a humility about our ability to predict what would happen to the future of work?

Krugman: I mean, the interesting thing is, the rise in productivity that happened in sort of the 60 years after Keynes wrote “Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren,” I think it was called, it was imagining a world where abundance, due to technological progress, would mean that people would no longer feel the need to work and greed would disappear because people had enough. And the actual progress, the development of productivity and technology was more or less in line with what he imagined.

But in fact, the real striking thing is more or less during my childhood, working hours stopped declining. We used to move to shorter and shorter workweeks and we sort of plateaued at 35 hours a week. And people have not taken out more leisure time, and people have not stopped being greedy because they have enough. And so in some ways, the problem was his view on human nature.

Khanna: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Krugman: What I would say you’re worried about, from an economist’s jargon point of view, is you’re worried that this technology is strongly capital biased.

Khanna: Right.

Krugman: Which is what we think happened during the Industrial Revolution. That for the first 60 or so years, it was strongly, “We’re going to build factories to have a reduced incentive to hire workers,” and that translated into falling or stagnant real wages. And that that could happen again.

Khanna: Exactly. And also, how do we get workers to have some share in this? What are people going to do to have good jobs? And then secondly, if you have AI increasing productivity, then how do we make sure workers either have a shorter workweek or have some share in the profits? And it’s not just going to the shareholders and the capital class.

Krugman: Wow. I mean, people like me tend to say, “oh, you know, we’ve heard these warnings before. Kurt Vonnegut predicted it in 1950 when he wrote Player Piano but it didn’t happen.” But if you go further back in history, it has happened. It might be that too much complacency is a real danger now. And, just to say, how much are you worried about the sort of existential threats? I think we’re already past when Skynet was supposed to kill everybody, but the idea that we’re really maybe creating monsters at some level. Are you paying any attention to that or do you just think that that’s a bit ridiculous?

Khanna: I think it’s a concern. I think the most immediate concern that I hear from people is, “What does this mean for my job? What does it mean for my kids? What does it mean for their economic prospects? Should they go to trade school? Should they go to college?” But it doesn’t strike me as farfetched to say that we should have a federal regulatory agency for AI, just like we have for nuclear technology or aviation safety. And we have something in the Commerce Department that under the Biden administration was becoming pretty robust. And then Trump came in there and he changed the name, actually, from “AI Safety” to basically “AI Innovation.” And he has not pursued this idea that there should be some third party verification for models. That there should be some safety checks.

I don’t know what the danger level is, but it seems to me prudent and reasonable that we would want some federal agency with third party verification to check on that.

Krugman: If I were to make a defense of the Trump administration, which is not something I’m in the habit of doing, but, I would say that, well, you know, we are in a competitive race with China on this. Are you concerned that America is going to fall behind if we get in the way of any of this?

Khanna: Well, first of all, we don’t want to model ourselves on China. I was just in China and one of the things that struck me is they have 18% youth unemployment. So, if we are totally indifferent to the social consequences, then perhaps look at China. But I don’t think that’s how we want our society in the United States.

The second point is that there are places where we should be the guarding our advantage, like our compute power, which will help separate us from China. We probably need to look at more open source models. I mean, the reason that, some of their Qwen and other AI is being adopted is because of open source. But I don’t think the answer to what’s leading the AI race is that we need to have massive displacement of American jobs or American workers, or we don’t need safety standards. I think there are other factors that can allow us to lead the AI race: compute power, or thinking about the right balance with open source, and making sure we have talent here.

You know, one third of the talent of AI is in China. I wouldn’t just have blanket restrictions on immigration. Those things seem to be more important in how we win the AI race. And it seems to me awfully convenient that people use the AI race to justify giving workers less or skirting regulations. And that’s been the age old argument from any debate. “We don’t need environmental standards. We don’t need labor standards. We’re going to lose.” It just seems to be repeating some of the same old arguments.

Krugman: Yeah. Technology changes, but the arguments don’t change much over the decades. I’ve been around for a while, but...

How is the mood about the state of Silicon Valley, the economic state? I mean, there’s a constant drumbeat of, “California is too expensive or too liberal” and it’s all going to move someplace. What are you hearing now? I mean, there was kind of a story about everything was going to move to Austin which sort of isn’t happening, but still.

Khanna: We have 37 times, I think, the venture capital as Austin. And you have Stanford, Berkeley, you have Santa Clara State, San Jose State, UCSF. You have Apple, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, Tesla still mostly there. So much of the talent. I’m not complacent about Silicon Valley, but this idea that it’s all moving is just factually untrue.

You may have some billionaires who have moved out. But the big challenge in California is the housing costs. It’s the challenge for being working or middle class. We have one of the highest poverty rates when you factor in cost of living. And my concern in my district, at least, and for the state of California is, if you’re working class, if you’re middle class, how are you going to make it? Much more so then, are we going to lose the Silicon Valley economy.

Krugman: Okay. Maybe just pivot to that for a second. I mean, California’s taken some steps on housing, but, what would you be doing? Because it is crazy. I mean, San Francisco is, I guess, the worst. Or, the greater Bay Area is the worst in terms of housing. And it is a huge problem for, well, for everything, even for the technology cluster. What would you be doing that is not currently being done in terms of policy?

Khanna: We should build more housing. I think it starts with that. And we should be renovating more housing that exists for residential use, and we can have a federal government provide grants for cities that would actually have zoning reform, to build more. Elizabeth Warren had a proposal basically, to that end. It’s unfortunate we didn’t get into President Biden’s Build Back Better, but I think there should be a federal incentive. State incentives to build more. And we can talk about other issues.

But I personally am for some rent stabilization and I’d be curious. I know many economists disagree, but my view is, if you have a distorted market, which is that we don’t have enough supply, then you basically have landlords having an unfair advantage in a distorted market. And so we can be encouraging new building while still making sure that there is some rent cap on the disproportionate power landlords have because of the artificial constraints on building.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s tricky stuff. I mean, this is all very live for the Mamdani administration in New York City, with Mamdani saying, Let’s build more housing, but also let’s stabilize rents on some of the legacy stock. Which is not crazy, but, how do you pull that off? But it’s really interesting.

And you were basically for the federal government exerting discreet leverage through funding and so on to push for YIMBY, “Yes In My Back Yard,” policies at the local level.

Khanna: Yes. And I know it’s not a huge issue in the macro statistics, but this idea of private equity buying up single family homes, that also should not be subsidized. My understanding is we intentionally allowed that after the Great Recession because the property values had declined and we were fine with it. But it certainly seems no longer to be necessary and is aggravating in certain places where you have large institutional investors buying up single family homes.

Krugman: Yeah. It’s hard to make the numbers on that look really big, but, I mean, it’s not nothing. And it’s interesting. Have you read the sections on housing policy in Project 2025?

Khanna: A while back. I haven’t read it recently.

Krugman: It’s interesting. They’re all free market everything. No regulation except: we’re going to defend the rights of local communities to prevent housing construction. It’s really very odd that they’re all for deregulation and free money except NIMBYism is legitimized.

Khanna: I did not see that. That is so much opposed to what we need to do and frankly, opposed to some of the things that happened in Austin or Houston or places that did do housing building correctly.

Krugman: On the one hand, California has this reputation, largely because of housing, that’s it’s really unaffordable for middle class, working class people. And on the other hand, you have these enormous fortunes. And I want to get specifically to the California wealth tax proposal in a minute, but you’ve been paying a lot of attention to the issue of extreme wealth concentration. What would you say in general we should be doing about it?

Khanna: Here is, I think, what people find frustrating. In many developing countries, you often have a choice between economic growth and economic development; between making sure people have some equal stake, and making sure that the country is developing. Here we’re producing extraordinary wealth. We don’t have that dilemma that so many developing nations do, but we simply have not, as a matter of society, of values, chosen to make sure people have basic education and basic health care, and a decent option for housing to make it in our society. And I believe that our social contract is broken.

People look at this extraordinary wealth generation and they say, “Where is my stake? In fact, I could go work for one of these companies, these magnificent companies like Amazon as a warehouse worker or in delivery, and my life is not as great as even when someone was in manufacturing. And yet the companies are making trillions of dollars. So where is my stake in it?”

And in that context, I have said we need to have higher taxes on billionaires and multimillionaires so that we can fund the expansion of basically health care and education and childcare for every person. Now, I fundamentally believe that would also ultimately lead to more economic growth, because we’re investing in education and health care.

One paper I still remember from my undergraduate days was Gary Becker writing about paper and technology. And he said, in a technology age, the two biggest investments you can make are in a society’s education and society’s health. So, you know, I would argue it’s smart policy, but at the very least, it is something needed for social cohesion.

Krugman: Yeah. I talked with John Gruber recently about how much helping children is a highly effective and cheap policy. I mean, helping the elderly is also important. But children are cheap, and it takes so little to transform their lives in a way that benefits all of us. We’re not doing that. But what would you recommend as a general strategy to kind of limit or curb extreme wealth?

Khanna: Well, it’s broader than a wealth tax, though I support a wealth tax. But in preparation for this conversation, I actually read your interview with Professor Zucman who has been involved in this. And I think your point that a 1 or 2% wealth tax at a federal level isn’t going to curb billionaire influence on democracy was pretty accurate.

I mean, there are two discrete issues. One is, how do we get revenue to pay for preschool and childcare and expanding health care, which in my view, things like a wealth tax, or step up in basis on an estate tax, or tax and stock buybacks can do. Then there’s a broader issue, which is: you’ve got multi-billionaires putting in hundreds of millions of dollars to get people elected president, and then going and serving in the administration, buying up media, which they want to steer, threatening any member of Congress they disagree with on an issue, saying, “okay, we’ll just start a superPAC.” And how do we deal with the concentration of wealth’s alliance with power in a way that is distorting the voice of citizens in our democracy? And that’s a much deeper question.

I think it means we need to be looking at abolishing super PACs, even under Citizens United. Like, why is it that someone can only contribute $7,000 to me, which is constitutional even under Citizens United, but they can go and write $1 million check to the super PACs? Larry Lessig has been working on initiatives to say you should be able to limit the contributions to super PACs.

We need to have strong antitrust enforcement. We need to, empower citizen contributions to match the billionaires. We need to hopefully see more citizen movement candidates. But I think that’s a much deeper issue and a harder issue to solve then how do we fund a robust social safety net so that people get the chances I did in life, which is to go to a good public school and have basic health care and get loans to go get educated.

Krugman: Yeah, I can’t help mentioning when we were talking about the universities that help support Silicon Valley, that aside from Stanford, they were all public universities. Berkeley, San Jose... It’s amazing how much that libertarian paradise was built by publicly funded universities. And it’s not like Stanford is a standalone private institution without federal contracts either. So yeah, it’s quite something.

So this proposal, which I know you have been speaking favorably about, for a California, one time wealth levy. You want to talk about that and where you stand?

Khanna: Well, the reason I supported it was that 200,000 health care workers are going to lose their jobs in home care, in elder care, in nursing and nurses aides because of the cuts in Medicaid. 2 million Californians will lose their health care based on these cuts to health care services. And so there has to be some way of making up the revenue.

Now, I suppose many other states will just say, okay, that was Trump’s fault, and California could say that. But we have a lot of wealth generation. And I talked to Professor Zucman and Professor Saez and they said, “Look, billionaire wealth has grown 158% over the last three years. So having a one time tax to deal with health care is a reasonable proposal.”

There are parts of it I would have written differently. I don’t think you should be taxing voting shares. And, you know, there are parts of it that could have been better crafted because some of that has led to legitimate criticism. But overall, if the choice is between people losing health care and a one time tax on billionaires, I’m for the one time tax on billionaires.

Krugman: Ok, a lot of people would say you’re a radical leftist, but I don’t think it is. That’s actually no more radical left than the US during the Eisenhower years.

But anyway, yeah. It’s quite something. Just what do you think’s going to happen? I guess that wealth tax proposal first has to get put on the ballot, and it’s a bit of a longshot, isn’t it?

Khanna: It has to get put on the ballot, and that I think is hard. And then it would have enormous money against it if it is on the ballot. But in polls, I mean, I think 80, 85% of Democrats support it. The vast majority of independents support it. And even a third of Republicans support it.

There’s a question coming for the Democratic Party, which is, we have two ways to go, post this Trump moment. One is to say, look, we’re just not going to do his incredibly, damaging things. We’re not going to have a world of blanket tariffs used for retaliation. We’re not going to have ICE agents out there shooting American citizens and conducting raids without people’s due process. We’re not going to dismantle agencies without Congress. We’re not going to just reward our friends and punish enemies. But we’re not going to really make structural change. And I think that would be a big mistake.

My view is that we have to tackle the fundamental economic divides, the frustration people have had—both because of place based inequality, where they’re in towns where they don’t have good paying jobs and prosperity and, the rising cost of childcare and health care—and try for an agenda that is going to have economic transformation where people feel a stake in the American dream and economic independence.

And I believe that the younger generation of Democrats, are pushing for that kind of economic transformation that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were probably the most visible spokespeople for.

Krugman: Okay. And I have to say, Elizabeth Warren is wonderful. Bernie Sanders is impressive. But it’s good to see somebody who isn’t quite their age taking the lead. So I’m glad to hear you in that position.

Okay. I’ve been, you know, tracking some of the news coverage. You have complained that you’re always ready to talk about AI and policy, and people want to talk about Epstein. Do you have anything to say about Epstein? Obviously, you’ve seen more than people like me can, but just any comments?

Khanna: It’s the age old story, that extreme wealth can corrupt. Put aside the people who actually went to the island or the ranch and abused these young girls or who watched as his people were abused. What saddens me is how many people felt that being part of this club, being part of this group I called the Epstein class, was sort of socially affirming. In fact, one of the former prince’s girlfriends said, “if you weren’t mentioned in the Epstein files, you were a loser.” Like you weren’t part of the IN club. And how they began to believe that the rules didn’t apply to them.

In some of these cases, it’s a story of human frailty. I don’t come at it on a moral sanctimonious note other than to say that when you have extreme wealth or privilege disconnected from rooted community, it doesn’t just harm people who are left out in that community. It may actually be corrupting for the people with that kind of extreme wealth. And the hope is that [the whole scandal] would move us towards a politics that sees the benefit of everyone in the country having a stake in the economic success, which we haven’t had.

Krugman: I have to say that I’ve been shocked, but somehow not surprised at some of the people who I either know slightly or who had orbits intersecting with mine, seeing their names appear. Because I do understand what you’re saying about the feeling that you’ve made it and you’re in this circle, and I can see how that worked, even though it’s horrifying. But it’s quite something.

Anything else that you’d like to bring up before we close this?

Khanna: I’ll ask you a final question. What is your view of the prospects, post-Trump, assuming that Democrats do succeed in getting back the House, the Senate, and have a chance at the presidency. As a student of American history, is there a possibility of doing economically transformative things, in the direction Biden was, though we weren’t able to get the votes? I mean, FDR and Lyndon Johnson obviously were the two very consequential presidents. But do you think that there could be that kind of a moment again for the country, or do you think it’s going to be very difficult?

Krugman: I mean, the economics say yes. One of the greatest discoveries of my life, in an old paper coauthored by Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate and one of my favorite Nobel laureates. It said that the middle class society that I grew up in didn’t evolve. It was created basically over the course of a few years by FDR. And so we know that that can be done. It lasted for 30 or 40 years. But the political conditions to make that happen now? I don’t know. I mean, I guess we don’t preemptively surrender. We hope for it.

But wow. I think you and I are on the same wavelength here, which is that we do need some fundamental changes. It’s not enough to just get this one guy out of the White House, though that’s dearly to be desired. But it’s about how the conditions that brought him there will not go away unless we have a really big change in how we run this country.

Khanna: I couldn’t agree more.

Krugman: Well, thank you so much for talking. And what a moment this is. I’m glad I’m not in congress but I have to say, if we come out the other end of this, people like you will be a large part of the reason. Thank you so much.

Khanna: Thank you. I appreciate it.

This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP Senate poll, coming out of quite a few requests to discuss how mercenaries functioned in antiquity. In order to keep the scope here manageable and within my expertise, I am going to confine myself to mercenaries in the Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31) Mediterranean, but we’ll have more than enough to talk about within that framework.

Mercenary soldiers make frequent appearances in our sources for these periods and as a result also are often prominent in modern representations of warfare in the ancient Mediterranean, showing up, for instance, as a standard feature of strategy games (Rome: Total War; Imperator, etc.) set in the period. That said, while our sources often note the presence of mercenaries, the actual mechanics – who serves, how are they recruited, how are they paid and so on – are often more obscure (though not entirely so!). So that is what we are going to focus on here, not an exhaustive list of every known mercenary outfit in antiquity (you can consult the short bibliography below for that) but rather an outline of the subject with a focus on mechanics.

I do want to note there are two things I couldn’t fit in here. The first was a complete discussion of the Carthaginian army and the different soldiers who served in it. We’re going to do that, but not here and not right away (this year, though, I think). The second is that I do not really get into here how specific mercenary troops fought – Tarantine cavalry tactics, Cretan archery, thureophoroi and so on. We’ve discussed some of that, actually, in our treatment of Hellenistic armies, but the rest of it will have to wait for another day. In my defense, this post is already 7,600 words long.

But first, as always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; members at the Patres et Matres Conscripti level get to vote on the topics for post-series like this one! If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

(Further Reading Note: For a very long time, the standard references on this topic were H.W. Parke, Greek Mercenary Soldiers from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Ipsus (1933) and G.T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935). These days, Parke has largely been replaced as a reference by M. Trundle, Greek Mercenaries: from the late archaic period to Alexander (2004), while Griffith remains the standard reference for mercenary service in the Hellenistic period. For a somewhat broader but still Mediterranean focus, S. Yalichev, Mercenaries of the Ancient World (1997) offers a lot of coverage. Note also S. English, Mercenaries in the Classical World to the Death of Alexander (2012), which is one of those examples of a quite solid book languishing as a Pen & Sword title; I’d say Trundle is to be preferred to English, but the latter is by no means bad – I detected no great or terrible errors in it and it may be easier to get a hold of.)

Defining Mercenaries

However before we can even dive into outlining mercenary service in antiquity, we need to clarify exactly who we mean when we discuss mercenaries. One of the challenges in discussing mercenaries is that some of our sources – most notably Polybius – are deliberately slippery with their use of terms. As a result, it is often very easy to end up in a situation where a translation (faithfully translated!) describes a given set of soldiers as ‘mercenaries’ who are not, by modern definitions, mercenaries at all! Indeed, much of the notion of ‘mercenary armies’ evaporates when we actually investigate the conditions under which many of these so-called ‘mercenaries’ were recruited.

The primarily culprit here is a Greek word, μισθοφόρος (misthophoros), which is often translated as ‘mercenary’ and indeed had that meaning in antiquity, but our sources – again, particularly Polybius – play fast and loose with the broad meaning of the term and the narrow meaning. The narrow meaning of misthophoros is that of a mercenary soldier – a soldier serving purely for pay with no real attachment to the state they fight for – but the broad meaning is its literal one: ‘wage-bearing’ (a μισθός being a wage, distinct from σίτος or σιτώνιον, both literally “bread [money/supply]” and thus ‘basic maintenance’ – μισθός is pay in excess of basic maintenance).¹ So while a misthophoros could be a foreign mercenary serving for pay – that misthos – they could equally be a domestic soldier who, for whatever reason, was paid a wage.

When we think of mercenaries, we generally think of foreign soldiers fighting for a country for the sake of money, rather than any commitment to the cause. Greek authors can easily make this clear by describing soldiers as ξενικός, (xenikos, ‘foreign’), but they often don’t or blur these categories. The issue is that, of course many soldiers who are not mercenaries might still be paid a wage in excess of basic maintenance.

And that brings us to Polybius, the worst offender in the ‘fudging the definition of mercenaries’ category. Polybius is famously the source for the claim that Carthage’s armies were both “foreign” (xenikos) and “mercenary” (misthophoros).² Generations of readers and scholars have carelessly accepted that description but it is fundamentally a deception. This isn’t the place to fully describe the Carthaginian military system (I discuss this more in my book project!) but the backbone of Carthaginian armies were infantry drawn from Carthage’s North African territories. Polybius is happy to describe these fellows as misthophoroi and let his readership follow his lead into assuming the narrow (‘mercenary’) definition, which is wrong, rather than the broad definition (‘wage-bearing’) where he is accurate.

Polybius rarely lies to your face, but he absolutely bends words and facts to make his arguments seem more plausible. In particular, Polybius is looking to set up a contrast between what he views as the inferiority of Carthage’s ‘mercenary’ armies as compared to the martial excellence and moral purity of Rome’s armies of citizen soldiers. So he wants to emphasize the mercenary nature of Carthage’s armies and minimize the same about Rome.

But here’s how those North African troops were organized. Carthage had expanded its control over many communities in North Africa and evidently alongside the taxes they had to pay to Carthage, part of subordination was that they were liable for conscription. When Carthaginian generals raised armies, after enrolling any Carthaginian citizen volunteers, they would head out into Carthage’s African subject communities and conscript troops (ἐπιλέγειν, ‘to pick out’) from these communities.³ These conscripts were then evidently paid a wage for their service and seem to have functioned something like semi-professional forces, often serving on quite long campaigns. These are not mercenaries by our definition! They are not foreign, but rather subject communities being conscripted from within the territory that Carthage controlled – not very different from how Rome raised the forces of the socii (the main difference being Rome made the socii communities pay their soldiers; Carthage taxes its subjects and then pays the soldiers out of those taxes).

Likewise, we know that early on in Carthaginian history, the Carthaginians recruited Iberian soldiers – men from the Mediterranean coast of Spain – as mercenaries for their armies.⁴ Fair enough. But by the Second Punic War (218-201), Carthage – or more correctly the Barcids – control the Iberian homelands in Spain. The Barcids – Hamilcar, his son-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair and biological son Hannibal – have moved in with an army, defeated the locals and set themselves up essentially as ‘warlords of warlords’ in a non-state military hierarchy. So when Hannibal and his brother Hasdrubal (different Hasdrubal) raise absolutely massive numbers of Iberians to fight for them, these aren’t mercenaries either, but the native military forces of what are essentially Hannibal’s vassal warlords (what the Romans term reguli, ‘petty kings’). At this point, these Iberians are forces again internal to Carthage’s empire.

Meanwhile Hannibal’s Gauls are also mostly not mercenaries but rather they understand their polities to be allies of Carthage in a joint war against Rome which Hannibal is leading, something made clear in the treaty Carthage makes with Philip V of Macedon, which specifies these allied forces.⁵ Under that framework relatively few of Carthage’s soldiers in the Second Punic War are actually mercenaries! Instead, Carthage’s army is a patchwork of subject-community conscripts, local allies, vassal levies and troops raised by individual generals through personal relationships – a system that is more akin to the Roman army than any other force in the Mediterranean.

But saying that does nothing for Polybius’ arguments either about Roman martial virtue or his glorification of the Roman citizen-soldier ideal (which one rather gets the impression he thinks the Greeks back home ought to adopt), so he – without ever quite lying – lets the reader believe Carthage’s armies are mostly mercenaries and this is why they are less effective in the field (Polyb. 6.52). It’s a definitional fudge to heighten the contrast.

It isn’t even the only time Polybius plays this trick! In his description of the Ptolemaic army at the Battle of Raphia, Polybius (5.65.6) groups together the cavalry ‘from Greece’ (actual mercenaries from Greece hired by the Ptolemies) with the ‘mercenary [misthophoroi] cavalry’ in a single unit, making it sound like this is a single unit of mercenary cavalry from Greece and elsewhere. But in fact the misthophoroi hippeis, ‘wage-bearing cavalry’ are a well-attested unit of Greek-speaking military settlers in Egypt serving as cavalry.⁶ Polybius’ narrative is one in which the moribund Ptolemaic army is whipped into shape but a set of mercenary Greek commanders (Polyb. 5.63.8-14), a fresh infusion of Greek martial spirit into the army and this fudge lets him make it seem that while the ‘native’ (Macedonian) Ptolemaic cavalry on the left was wholly defeated it, the battle was won by the – he will let the reader understand incorrectly, mostly mercenary – cavalry on the right, when in fact much of the cavalry on the right is also ‘native’ Greek-speaking cavalry from Egypt.

Dispositions at the Battle of Raphia; my interpretation of the Ptolemaic troops follows Johstono, *op. cit*.

In practice, Ptolemaic victory at Raphia seems to depend a lot more on the fact that, having at last incorporated native Egyptians into the phalanx, the Ptolemies arrive on the field with almost twice as many heavy infantry phalangites as the Seleucids, forcing Antiochus III to try to oppose the Egyptian phalanx with much lighter forces, to his misfortune.

The result of all of this is we need to be quite careful about how we define ‘mercenaries’ in ancient armies, since our sources are very slippery with their terms, sometimes willing to term any soldiers paid a wage beyond basic maintenance – even if native to the state they fight for – mercenaries. In particular, when we say mercenaries, we mean soldiers recruited from outside a given state, serving for pay. That is to say, these are not domestically recruited professional soldiers (like the legions in the Roman imperial period) or domestically recruited non-citizen auxiliaries (like the imperial Roman auxilia or Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army) or allied forces fighting in an army because their own state is a party to the conflict (like Hannibal’s Gauls or Eumenes II’s Pergamon troops at Magnesia) or vassal levies present because their own polity is subordinated to the main party in the war (like the Roman socii or Hannibal’s Iberians). All of those soldiers are notionally fighting for the state to which they belong. We want soldiers fighting purely for money, for a state to which they do not belong.

That said, there were absolutely mercenaries by this definition in service in the ancient Mediterranean, so lets talk about them!

Early Mercenaries

Our evidence for mercenaries in broader ancient Mediterranean world prior to the Classical period is quite thin, but certainly suggests – as we’d expect – that the profession is an old one, perhaps as old as the state itself. We have evidence, for instance, of foreigners on the standing royal guard of Sargon of Akkad (r. 2334-2279), including a unit of Amorites (a foreign people), which would seem to suggest the hiring of mercenaries even at this early point.⁷ We can’t be certain why Sargon resorted to foreign soldiers, but it may well have been the same reason that many kings through history maintained foreign, mercenary bodguards: a guard of foreign mercenaries would lack any political connections, making them notionally entirely reliant on the king for their status and thus more loyal. Likewise we have some evidence from the Old Kingdom onward of Nubians in Egyptian military service who were probably mercenaries and even a tomb inscription commemorating an Egyptian Harkhuf who brought back – among other goods – mercenaries for the Egyptian King Merenre Nemtyemsaf I (r. c. 2300) from his trade expeditions into Nubia, an early mercenary-recruiter.⁸

Greeks seem to have served as mercenaries across the Eastern Mediterranean from an early point as well – we have evidence for Ionian Greeks, seemingly on mercenary service, in Babylon and for Greeks in Egyptian mercenary service by the seventh century.⁹ We often cannot see these early mercenaries very well – their terms of service, methods of recruitment and so on are obscured to us by the limited evidence – but they serve as a useful reminder that mercenary service was not invented in the Classical period (480-323) when it becomes increasingly visible to us.

That said, I want to focus on how ancient mercenaries might function in the Classical (480-323) and Hellenistic (323-31) periods because this is where my expertise is best.

Recruiting Mercenaries

The first thing that is worth stressing here is that we shouldn’t think of the ancient Mediterranean world in either the Classical or Hellenistic periods as having something like a single linked ‘mercenary market’ that all states had access to. Instead, mercenary recruitment was generally highly localized, with each state having access to different regional ‘pools’ of manpower they could hire. This limitation is somewhat obscured by the tendency both in our sources and in modern scholarship to focus on Greek mercenaries, which can be somewhat deceptive simply because the Aegean ‘mercenary market’ was the one that almost every central or eastern Mediterranean state had some access to. But this is just a complicated way of saying that the states which had contact with Greece (and thus are of concern to our Greek sources) had contact with Greece (and were thus able to contract mercenaries there).

There is a tendency in the popular imagination to image mercenaries functioning as an entirely separate ‘pool’ of manpower from ‘regular armies.’ That is how they function in most strategy games, for instance. But in practice, of course, the supply of men in any of these societies able to equip themselves to fight – something that demanded either a degree of wealth or social standing – was always limited. A ruler recruiting mercenaries was thus reaching into the ‘manpower pool’ of other polities, sometimes in similar ways to how those polities would themselves have recruited their residents. So the question here is essentially how does a leader gain access to the military manpower supply of a foreign polity?

In practice there were two main methods. The first and easiest was through diplomacy: a ruler might, because they already had an existing diplomatic relationship with another power, be able to negotiate access to the military population (however composed socially and economically) that their friendly neighbor controlled. For most of the Classical period in particular, friendship with Sparta acted as the key that unlocked access to Greek mercenaries from the Peloponnese – with various Mediterranean powers being relatively eager to hire Greek mercenaries presumably because the Greek style of heavy infantry combat had proved quite effective during the Greco-Persian Wars (492-478).

Thus for instance in 380, when both Egypt (under the Pharoah Hakor (r. 392-379)) – having revolted from Persian control in 404 – and the Persians were seeking Greek mercenaries, they both courted Athens for access to them: the Egyptians reached out to the Athenian general Chabrias to command a force for them and the Persians responded by sending envoys encouraging the Athenians to recall Chabrias and instead send the general Iphicrates to put together a force for them (Diod. Sic. 15.29.1-4). Likewise, when the Egyptian king – Egypt having revolted from Persian control in 404 – Nectanebo I (r. 379-360) wanted to raise a force of Greek mercenaries in c. 361 he did so directly through one of the Spartan kings, Agesilaus II (Xen. Ages. 2.28-31). This was hardly only a game for non-Greeks: Dionysius I, Tyrant of Syracuse (r. 406-367) used his friendly relationship with Sparta to enlist substantial numbers of mercenaries from the Greek mainland to supplement his Sicilian-Greek army (Diod. Sic. 14.44.2).

The above, of course, is hardly an exhaustive list. That said, as you might imagine, it is often really tricky to separate this kind of mercenary recruitment – where the mercenaries are sometimes coming under the leadership of a ‘mercenary captain’ who is also a political leader in another state – from allied or vassal forces. I keep saying we need to discuss the Carthaginian army another time (we will, I promise), but Carthage recruits this way all the time, with Carthaginian generals maintaining friendly relationships with Numidian princes or Iberian warlords who they can then call upon for soldiers – the line between a mercenary force, an allied force or a vassal force gets extraordinarily blurry in these sort of situations. You have some clear examples of mercenaries drawn up this way – the 4,000 Celtiberians raised by Hasdrubal Gisco, for instance are clearly external mercenaries (Polyb. 1.67.7), the Celtiberian Meseta being outside of Carthage’s political control – but other examples, like the 2,000 Numidians Hamilcar Barca gets in exchange for a pledge to marry his daughter to the Numidian prince Naravas seem to be more allies-and-vassals than mercenaries (Polyb. 1.78.1-9).

Those lines can even blur over time: early on Carthage is sending ambassadors to Spain to negotiate for mercenaries using trade goods (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6, 13.80.2) in what is clearly the sort of mercenaries-recruited-through-diplomacy relationship, which appears to be how Carthage recruits Iberians at least through 241 (Polyb. 1.66-7). But then of course the Barcids go and conquer the place and so post-237 the Iberians we see in Carthage’s army – probably the largest single manpower source in the Second Punic War (218-201) – are not external mercenaries but rather internal vassal levies, raised by local warlords who have been subjugated by the Barcids.

Again, I promise we’ll talk about Carthage’s military machine in detail. Later.

For leaders who could not take the expedient of recruiting mercenaries directly through the state apparatus like this, the alternate method was to recruit mercenaries through the dispatch of a ‘mercenary captain,’ though I should be clear that ‘mercenary captain’ was not generally a specialized career – these tended to be exactly the same sort of men who might hold high office (like that of general) in a Greek polis or be major elites with retinues in a non-state polity. Often these particular men might be politically on the outs, in exile, or in similar conditions – which would put them in the court of a foreign leader who might trust them and want the use of their talents – but of course they retained the kind of experience, influence and connections to put out the call for fighting men in a given region or within a given polity.

The classic example of this sort of recruitment, rendered unusually visible to us by Xenophon’s report of it, was the recruitment of the 10,000 by Cyrus the Younger for his attempt on the throne of Persia in 401. Cyrus recruited his mercenary force in a number of separate detachments to conceal his preparations for civil war. His own territory – he was satrap in Asia Minor – included the poleis of Ionia, where he recruited domestically (Xen. Anab. 1.1.6), but to supplement this Cyrus used his connections to employ a number of prominent Greeks as mercenary recruiters and captains. He sends Clearchus, a Spartan exile into Greece with a large sum of money to recruit troops (feigning that they were for a war in Thrace, Xen. Anab. 1.1.9) in the Chersonese (but probably drawing primarily Peloponnesians). To Thessaly, he sent Aristippus, a Thessalian in political difficulties to recruit there (Xen. Anab. 1.1.10); to Boeotia a Boeotian named Proxenus and in Achaea two Achaeans named Symphalian and Socrates (Xen. Anab. 1.1.11). Again, what we’re told about these fellows implies they were all men of local political significance, who had become friends (read: political allies) of Cyrus and so by giving them access to his money Cyrus could use them to access the manpower pool of Greece.

The system of recruitment doesn’t really change all that much for mercenary recruitment outside of Greece or later in the Hellenistic period.¹⁰ As Griffith notes, for the major Hellenistic powers, access to Greek manpower was an important strategic consideration and so the relations of these Macedonian dynasts with friendly Greek cities often included promises to allow free transit for mercenary recruiters (ξενόλογοι) in their territory and to bar the same from the king’s enemies. Equally, we regularly see the appearance of men who – although we do not get the detail Xenophon gives us for the early leaders of the 10,000 – appear to be the same sort of mercenary recruiters discussed above. Thus for instance we get the roster of mercenary captains involved in preparing the Ptolemaic army for Raphia: Echecrates from Thessaly, Phoxidas of Melita, Eurylochus the Magnesian, Socrates the Boeotian and Cnopias of Allaria (Polyb. 5.63.11-12). In 203, Ptolemy V’s court dispatches an Aetolian mercenary captain, Scopas, to his native country in an effort to recruit more Greeks (Polyb. 15.25.16).

Sources of Mercenaries

Given those two primary means of getting access to sources of men willing to fight for pay – either using diplomatic channels to gain access or employing a local notable who already has access – it is now not hard to see why each state or leader is going to have access to different ‘pools’ of mercenaries, based on who is in their court available and sufficiently trustworthy to be tasked to do mercenary recruiting or on what diplomatic arrangements they have. On the latter point, while in some cases these diplomatic arrangements are essentially between states and basically treaty arrangements, you will note above in many cases they are fundamentally personal in nature: not just ‘is your state friendly with Sparta’ but ‘do you, personally, have a relationship with, or a way to contact a key leader like Agesilaus II personally to have him broker the arrangement.

That said in the Hellenistic Mediterranean there are so very ‘standard’ sources of mercenaries we see show up frequently in a lot of armies. The most obvious and persistent one is Greeks, particularly Greeks from the Aegean – that is, mainland Greece, the Aegean Islands and Ionia. Alexander the Great’s conquests and the states that his empire fragmented into meant that effectively every major Eastern Mediterranean power was Greek-speaking with substantial cultural and personal ties in Greece. Because these kingdoms relied substantially on a ruling class made up to at least some degree (primarily made up in the case of the two largest, Ptolemic Egypt and the Seleucid Kingdom) by Greek military settlers meant that they had a rapacious demand for these fellows. But at the same time, for states whose capitals (Alexandria, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris and the Syrian tetrapolis (which included Seleucia Pieria and Antioch)) were new, large Greek-speaking urban foundations with a river of royal money flowing through them, it meant that any Hellenistic ruler had an ample supply of the sort of fellows who could be sent with a bunch of cash (or promises of cash) to Greece to put out the call to enlist men.

Indeed, if you were such a fellow from Greece – a politically important exile or an experienced military commander on the outs – the obvious place to go was one of the Hellenistic capitals, whose kings could pay you lavishly for your abilities and connections.

Via Livius.org, the probably misnamed Funerary stele of Salmamodes, more correctly the stele of Salmas, son of Moles (c. 2nd cent. BC). He names himself (as the inscription has been reconstructed) as from Adada, a Pisidian town in Anatolia, so while his epitaph is in Greek, he is not culturally Greek (Pisidia is Hellenizing, but not Hellenic, in this period). Yet he is dressed as a standard, recognizable kind of mercenary soldier in this period, the *thureophoros thorakites*, who evidently died in Seleucid service in Sidon in the Levant.

The odd result of this persistent demand for Greek mercenaries was the very brief emergence of a fixed ‘clearing house’ of sorts for Greek mercenaries in the fourth century: Taenarum (modern Cape Matapan, on the very southern tip of the Peloponnese). I find that interested students of antiquity often assume, encountering Taenarum in this function, that it must have been one of many such ‘mercenary marketplaces’ but in fact it really does seem to be the only spot quite like it. It was hardly the only place to recruit mercenaries, but it is the only place where it seems like large numbers of prospective mercenaries simply hung out, waiting to be recruited. It seems to have filled this role from at least the 320s onward (see Diod. Sic. 17.108.7, 17.111.1). That said, Taenarum itself seems to have faded in importance and we get no references to it continuing as a mercenary rallying point in the third century, nor does any other place take up its role. Instead, the recruitment of Greeks largely continues along the lines above: through diplomacy or recruiting captains.

A notable sub-component of Greek mercenaries were units of ‘Cretan’ or ‘Neo-Cretan’ troops. These seem invariably to be archer mercenaries, although it is not always clear if ‘Creten’ here signifies them being from Crete or trained to fight in the Cretan manner. Nevertheless such soldiers show up with regularity in the armies of Alexander, the Antigonids, the Ptolmies, the Seleucids and the states of Greece proper, inter alia. This is one thing that is tricky in assessing mercenary units: they’re almost always described with an ethnic marker, but it is sometimes unclear if this indicates where the men are from, or how they fight or both.

The nature of polis armies clearly has something to do with why the Greek world seems to produce mercenaries, perhaps rather more than we might expect. These states, after all, maintain citizen militia forces with both heavy infantry hoplites (much in demand) and lighter infantry troops (peltasts in the Classical period, thureophoroi in the Hellenistic). Since these fellows all self-equip, that means in peacetime there is no shortage of men with the necessary equipment and experience to fill these battlefield roles who might – either out of a desire for adventure or the need for the money – be tempted into mercenary service. The turmoil of polis politics must also have often thrown off these men when they found themselves on the wrong side of a political restructuring in their community – and of course it will also have produced no shortage of exiled or politically unpopular generals and captains to organize them.

We shouldn’t overstate their numbers: Greece was not awash with tens of thousands of mercenaries. It is striking that when Cyrus the Younger essentially attempts to recruit everyone he can in 401, he ends up with 10,000 of them. For the Battle of Raphia (217), when Antiochus III, the Seleucid King, and Ptolemy IV (of Egypt) essentially both try to recruit everyone they can get their hands on, the Seleucids have 5,000 Greek mercenaries and another 1,000 Cretans and the Ptolemies have around 8,000 Greek mercenaries and another 1,000-3,000 Cretans and Neo-Cretans (some number of whom may be settlers) for a total of something like maybe 3,000 or so Cretans and 13,000 Greek mercenaries available. So we might say something to the effect that after 404¹¹ or so, there were around 10,000 to 15,000 or so mercenaries available to be had in the Greek world. Obviously not a small number, but also not a number so large that one could predicate an entire major army on them (but plenty for a small polis to figure they could get away with a mostly mercenary army and spare the rich citizens the annoyance of hoplite service, as some seem to have done).

Another key source of mercenaries were non-state or early/weak-state peoples caught in the orbit of these large kingdoms. We’ve talked about how ‘tribal’ polities – which sometimes consolidated into weak kingdoms (e.g. Odrysian Thrace) – recruit internally through the networks of individual powerful aristocrats (with their retinues). That volatile mixture means these societies have a bunch of local notables who could potentially raise a significant amount of military force for a private agenda, whose power and influence is in part based on their ability to demonstrate martial valor. At the same time, those men also have sons, the ‘youths’ in our sources who also have a social need to demonstrate military virtue and who might get more than a bit ‘antsy’ if there is no conflict at present in which to do so.

Meanwhile neighboring states have access to cash (that is, actual coined money) and prestige goods that these non-state/weak-state societies – with less economic specialization – often do not produce. Those prestige goods are quite valuable for aristocrats (and their sons) in the non-state societies because they can use them to demonstrate their own wealth and connections or as valuable gifts to retainers. The potential for a state to leverage that to recruit these aristocrats – with their retinues – as mercenaries are fairly obvious and through this interaction mercenaries from these societies become a standard feature of Mediterranean armies in the Hellenistic period.

Carthage, of course, has the most notable reputation for this kind of recruitment, recruiting substantial numbers of Iberians and Gauls this way, before Barcid expansion in Spain and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy fundamentally change those relationships into a non-mercenary character (Diod. Sic. 13.44, 13.80; Polyb. 1.17.4, 1.67.7). As an aside because this fits nowhere else, Carthage also seems to have been able to access at least some sources of Greek mercenaries, but one gets the sense these were never a major part of their manpower pool.

Via Livius.org, another funerary stele from Sidon, this of a Dioscurides, evidently a *thureophoros* and – like Salmas above, a Pisidian in Seleucid service.

The three major Hellenistic powers utilized these sources as well, with the most consistent non-state/weak-state mercenary draws being Gauls and Thracians. The Seleucids also regularly employed Gallic mercenaries, but whereas Carthage’s Gauls were drawn from what today would by southern France and northern Italy, the Seleucid supply came from the Galatians, a Gallic people who had migrated from the lower Danube through Greece (quite violently) before settling in central Anatolia; some 3,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry of this sort are part of the Seleucid array at Magnesia. The Ptolemies, able in the third century to project substantial naval power of the Eastern Mediterranean, also employed smaller numbers of Gallic and Thracian mercenaries, which show up at the only Ptolemaic order of battle we have, the one for Raphia. The Antigonids, controlling the Macedonian heartland – which is next to Thrace and Gallic peoples in the Danube River Basin – also employed substantial numbers of these as mercenaries. Perseus (r. 179-168) when he brought his whole army together for review, had 2,000 Gauls and 3,000 ‘free’ Thracians (along with 2,000 allied Thracians from the Odrysian Kingdom) in his army, alongside 3,000 Cretan mercenaries and around 1,000 Greeces from various places.¹²

Map made and kindly supplied by Michael Taylor from “A Commander Will Put an End to his Insolence: the Battle of Magnesia, 190BC” in *The Seleucids at War: Recruitment, Organization and Battles* (2024), eds. Altay Coşkun and Benhamin E. Scolnic.
**You can see the Galatian infantry on either side of the phalanx and the Galatian cavalry on the left**.

Other sources of mercenaries appear only briefly in our sources rather than showing up consistently. The Seleucid King Demetrios I recruited Jewish mercenaries (I. Macc. 10.36). The Seleucids also employed a substantial number of troops from areas around the edges of their empire – Dahae, Thallians, Carians, Cilicians – who might be mercenaries but in many cases might equally by subjects or vassals (Livy 37.40). The Mamertines, who will end up starting the First Punic War were a body of Campanian mercenaries who were hired by Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse (r. 317 – 289) and afterwords set themselves up as the rulers of Messina in Sicily.

That said, Italy is notable by how it doesn’t throw off large numbers of mercenaries (neither does Carthaginian North Africa, once we cut through Polybius’ fudging). The Carthaginians employ some mercenaries (but again, fewer than generally supposed), but they do not seem to allow anyone else to really hire from their own recruiting pools, while the Romans largely do not employ any meaningful number of mercenaries and also appear to keep their military resources locked up. The fact that the Roman Republic is essentially a non-actor in the mercenary market – neither a supplier nor a consumer – is remarkably striking, though it makes a degree of sense when you remember that the Roman military-economic machine generated soldiers in tremendous quantity (with their equipment) but relatively little hard cash. Why pay for the one thing you have in abundance? The more curious question is why no one else tries (or succeeds?) to hire Romans. In any case, Rome and Carthage both seem notably not to generate the sort of ‘floating supply’ of mercenary military men that Greece does.

Terms of Service

We can conclude very briefly with a sense of how mercenaries might serve and be paid.

For the most part, when we hear about mercenaries, they are being raised for specific campaigns, but every so often we get hints of standing bodies of mercenary troops as well. I’ve already mentioned mercenary royal guards, but we also see mercenaries serving as effectively garrison forces for states they did not want to keep their citizen-militia or military-settler population (raised for major campaigns) ‘in rotation’ in peacetime. The Ptolemies seem to have maintained substantial garrisons this way – we’re told in preparation for the Battle of Raphia that the advisors of Ptolemy IV put together a force of some eight thousand mercenaries which seem to mostly have been drawn from garrison duty, particularly in Ptolemaic overseas holdings (Polyb. 5.65.4). Interestingly, we also see the Greek poleis, still fighting their smaller wars in the shadows of Hellenistic giants, sometimes raising small standing units of paid citizen soldiers and they sometimes employed mercenaries (Athens quite frequently), but the impression, sometimes given in the older scholarship that the Hellenistic period was an age of Greek warfare-by-condottieri is overblown: citizen soldiers remained the mainstay of polis forces.¹³

Mercenaries seem generally to have served in defined units under the captains who recruited them. In our sources, these units generally show up with ethnic signifiers, which often indicate both where mercenaries were from and also how they fought. Mercenaries were expected to provide their own equipment for a specific style of fighting, which naturally restricted who could be a mercenary. If you wanted to be a hoplite mercenary, you needed to have hoplite equipment! However this meant mercenary forces could be a way for a state to ‘buy’ a kind of warfare it could not produce effectively itself, with the most obvious example – but hardly the only one- being the Persian appetite for Greek heavy infantry.

The precise terms of payment varied and were often negotiated and sometimes renegotiated as campaigns wore on. Unfortunately, we cannot see the payment terms of basically any non-Greek mercenaries clearly, so we’re largely in the dark about how Iberian, Thracian, Gallic, etc. mercenaries were paid. Diodorus’ indication that Carthaginian mercenary recruiters went to Spain μετὰ πολλῶν χρημάτων, “with lots of stuff” is frustrating in its vagueness, since χρήματα could equally be trade goods or actual coined money (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6). What is, I think, fairly clear is that Carthage is not – pace Hoyos – paying their mercenaries nearly as much or in the same way as the Hellenistic states of the East, if for no other reason than their budget probably could not support it.¹⁴

By contrast, we can see the arrangements for the pay of Greek mercenaries fairly well. Compensation, while subject to negotiation generally came in two components: what we might term ‘maintenance’ (σίτος, ‘bread [money]’ in the Classical period, σιτώνιον or σιταρχία sometimes in Hellenistic sources, with the same meaning), essentially an allowance for the soldier to survive, and the actual wages for labor (μισθός, ‘wages’ or ὀψώνιον, ”relish [money] ‘salary,’ literally ‘relish money,’ from ὄψον, ‘relish, delicacies, sauces’ – anything used to go with bread to make a tasty meal – making ὀψώνιον wonderfully evocative phrase, essentially ‘pay for the nicer things in life’).

Via Wikipedia, the Nile Mosiac of Palestrina, showing in this portion a group of late Hellenistic soldiers, some of whom are doubtless mercenaries. A **necessary caution** when using this mosaic: the original mosaic is likely a c. 100 BC copy of a c. 165 BC original, **however** the mosaic was moved in the 1600s (AD) and repeatedly repaired and/or reconstructed, so you want to be **very careful** making any strong judgements about military equipment from the mosaic as it survives, because you may just be focusing on what a 17th century restorer ***thought*** might go into a blank spot.

Naturally, the maintenance pay had to be handled at least a little bit in advance and had to be doled out to any kind of soldier in installments as their service progressed. Any kind of wage payment in our sources is almost always expressed as a daily sum, but mercenaries probably did not receive their σιτώνιον on a daily basis but probably in larger pay periods. These expenses could, of course, be handled in two ways: mercenaries might receive an allowance with which to buy rations from local markets (in cash this is the narrow meaning of σιτώνιον) or, of course, they might be issued rations and other basic supplies, which goes by the term σιτομετρία (literally ‘measured bread’ but really ‘rations’).

By contrast Greek and Macedonian soldiers expected wages – the μισθός – to be paid in cash, specifically in silver.¹⁵ Whereas maintenance pay came in advance (albeit sometimes in installments), μισθός came at the end – either of a pay-period or a campaign. The ideal way to handle wage expenses was to keep them ‘on the books:’ soldiers were issued their maintenance pay at regular intervals but merely had their actual wages credited to their account – the idea being that soldiers would then be ‘cashed out’ at the end of the campaign. That freed the army (and the soldiers) from the requirements to carry huge amounts of minted silver coinage with them wherever they went…but of course also gave the employer all sorts of cheeky opportunities to withhold or delay payment. Generals might often promise to find the money for wages from the loot and spoils of a successful campaign (e.g. the Spartan Teleutias, Xen. Hell. 5.1.14-18); this worked fantastically well if you fought for Alexander the Great and perhaps less so if you fought for basically anyone else.

We can see the obvious catch that system creates in the start of Carthage’s Mercenary War (241-237; Polyb. 1.66-72). Under the terms of the peace at the end of the First Punic War (264-241), Carthage had withdrawn its army from Sicily and brought it back to North Africa, but Carthage was financially exhausted by the war and caught in a bind: the campaign being over, it now had to settle the arrears of the men’s pay. Those arrears were considerable – this had been a really long war – and Carthage simply didn’t have the money. The Carthaginians initially are able to kick the can down the road by scraping together money for the maintenance pay – they can scrape together the σιτώνιον – but absent the ability to pay the arrears of μισθός, the army – both mercenaries and also regular North African soldiers (who made up the bulk of the force, but were paid a wage as well) – mutinied and then backed a revolt of Carthage’s subject communities in North Africa, which was eventually put down by Hamilcar Barca.¹⁶

For a mercenary employer who found himself unable to pay out the silver demanded by his mercenaries, the normal result was either mutiny or the mercenary unit melting away. However for larger states, there was an alternative to pay in something other than silver the soldiers would accept and here the obvious candidate was land. This certainly seems to be a significant part of what is happening with Hellenistic military settlements: Greek and Macedonian soldiers, serving in East (where Macedonian dynasts have land and peasants in abundance) are being paid at the end of their service in part by lavish plots of land (often large enough to live as rentier elites, rather than as farmers!) presumably in lieu of hard cash the king might not be prepared to spend. And as an added bonus the land both sustains the former-mercenary-now-settler’s household in perpetuity and at the same time renders him (and his descendants) liable for future military service. That said, such settlements could run into problems: recall that many of Alexander the Great’s less-than-fully-willing military settlers revolted when he died, seeking to just go home (Diod. Sic. 18.7.1).

We have a few examples of attested pay rates, invariably for Greek or Macedonian soldiers. While maintenance was often handled in kind, the standard rate of μισθός for military service is almost invariably a drachma (=six obols) a day, which as we’ve noted before was a good wage – a bit above typical – for a day’s work. The evidence for maintenance pay as a money-amount is exceedingly tricky (epigraphic and papyrus evidence that often comes with interpretive problems) but 2-3 obols per day seems to be the ‘cash value’ of a mercenary’s maintenance, making a Greek or Macedonian mercenary’s ‘gross pay’ around 8 or 9 obols per day. That was also, coincidentally, seems to be about what the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms – competing for the scarce supply of ethnically Greek and Macedonian manpower – seem to have paid their domestic Greek and Macedonian (but not native) soldiers (once you adjust for the lighter Ptolemaic currency standard). By contrast, the Antigonids and Romans, conscripting their own peasants, seem to have paid them 4 and 2 obols (=3 Roman asses) per day, respectively.

If you are wondering why the Seleucids and Ptolemies are ‘overpaying’ so badly for their military manpower…questions answered in my book project! Which I promise will, at some point, actually come out! Doubtless it will arrive at roughly the same time your mercenary pay arrears are cashed out.

No one is getting rich on a drachma a day (plus maintenance), but on the flipside a mercenary serving on a campaign or garrison deployment already had their expenses covered and might get to the end with some loot and – once they were ‘cashed out’ – a chunky pile of very spendable silver. For substantially unmonetized¹⁷ non-state peoples, this might be one of the few ways to get a chunk of cash, which in turn could be a significant status marker and provide economic and social opportunities otherwise unavailable at home. Assuming your employer actually paid your wages, this was not a bad economic bargain.

The rise of Rome brought a slow but steady end to this system, because the Romans largely didn’t use it and in any case steadily extinguished all of the other states that did. While it is common to see the armies of the Late Roman Republic or early Imperial period also termed ‘mercenary armies,’ that is really a misnomer. The armies of the Late Roman Republic were still mostly citizen-soldier armies, while the army Augustus and Tiberius created was a long-service professional standing army recruited from citizens and subjects of Rome, not a mercenary force. It is striking that the braggart mercenary soldier – a staple stock character of Hellenistic comedy – appears in Roman comedy in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (set in Ephesus in the Greek world), written in the late third century BC as the Romans are beginning to expand beyond Italy in a two-century run of conquest that will render the braggart mercenary himself a thing of the past.

Bonus Amount	Wagering Requirement	Total Playthrough Required	Estimated Withdrawable Amount	Completion Difficulty
$25	5x	$125	$10-15	Easy
$25	20x	$500	$5-10	Moderate
$50	30x	$1500	$10-20	Difficult
$100	50x	$5000	$20-40	Very Difficult

This is still a religious country

Prototyping with Claude Artifacts

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

1.

2.

3.

4.

Defining Mercenaries

Early Mercenaries

Recruiting Mercenaries

Sources of Mercenaries

Terms of Service

Comments

Related Stories

The failures of the 2010s progressive economic program

When work is uncertain, abundance becomes more important

Comments

Focus On What You Can Control

Limit Your Exposure

Manage Your Thoughts

Self-Care

Get Out There

Seek People Who Bring You Light

Make Space for Yourself

No Deposit Bonus Fundamentals

Types of No Deposit Bonuses Available

Wagering Requirements and Withdrawal Restrictions

Calculating Realistic Withdrawal Amounts

Game Restrictions and Eligibility Rules

Strategic Game Selection for Bonus Maximization

Bonus Validity Periods and Strategic Timing

Hidden Terms and Common Surprises

Elite Favorites Dominate the Odds

Mid-Tier Contenders Lag Behind

Bluebloods Among the Long Shots

Bettors Pile On Favorites, Eye Long-Shot Payouts

Implications for Competitive Balance

Who Really Has a Shot?

Progress Conference 2026

Comments

Related Stories

Friday, April 21, 2023

Comments

Related Stories

# PEN & PAPER | DRAWING MACHINE 101

# ROXY RISO & VIRTUOUS CIRCLES

# BOOKS

# THE END

Downloads

February 17, 2026

References & Resources

You may also be interested in:

Discover More from NASA Earth Science

Subscribe to Earth Observatory Newsletters

Earth Observatory Image of the Day

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).