Industries, Crafts, and Trade

Mining was the most important industrial activity in Greece. Iron ore could be found locally and smelted for tools and weapons. Precious metals, gold and silver, were used by the state for large-scale enterprises such as paying mercenaries and, particularly from the late sixth century onwards, for coins to oil transactions of everyday commercial life. The silver mines in Attica are the best known as they

Underpinned the success of Athens as a naval and political power. The ancient remains have been carefully surveyed. Around 2,000 shafts have been located around Laurium, some over 120 metres in depth with many kilometres of tunnels. Records from the fourth century show that 200 Athenians were then involved in taking out concessions. They could borrow the substantial amounts of money required (at 12 per cent interest in one recorded case) and then approach a slave-owner for the lease of labour. The historian Xenophon mentions one contractor with a thousand slaves available for hire, but they were often used so harshly by their hirers that their life expectancy was short. The most arduous task was crushing the silver ore, washing, and separating it—the remains of the ancient washeries have been found. In an arid region the required water was stored from winter rainfall in cisterns.

Even richer than the Athenian mines were those of Chalcidice and the Rhodope massif in the northern Aegean. In addition to silver, they held the only Greek-controlled source of gold. While the total Athenian production in a year has been calculated at 65 talents, individual mines within this area are said to have produced 1,000 talents worth of precious metal each year at the height of production in the fourth century. These mines later fell under the control of Macedonia, which is one reason why this remote kingdom on the north of the Greek world became so powerful in the fourth century under the energetic leadership of Philip II. (See Chapter 18.) Over Greece as a whole, extensive excavations together with the burning of woodland for smelting had a major impact on local environments. Parts of Cyprus have never recovered the forests destroyed in ancient times to provide wood for smelting copper.

Manufacturing was widespread in the Greek world. Most of it was local, drawing on raw materials such as wool, iron ore, and clay and processing them for immediate sale. One study found 170 different occupations being followed in Athens. Everything was done on a small scale and technology was virtually unknown. The largest workshop recorded in Athens made shields and employed 320 workers. Of two workshops owned by the father of the orator Demosthenes, one employed thirty slaves making knives, the other twenty joiners making beds. There were probably no more than 200 workers in the Athenian potters’ quarter, the Ceramicus, at one time. The Greeks had no tradition of applying their scientific understanding to creating more efficient ways of production. Even coins were made in an unsophisticated way with each one stamped individually. Weaving was always done in the home.

By the sixth century trade routes were busy. The trick was to find routes where new goods could be loaded as the original ones were sold (as in the Uluburun cargo of so many centuries earlier) but the patterns of trade and the quantities of goods transported have proved difficult to measure. The evidence from shipwrecks, unlike that from later periods, is still limited. All traces of the probable staples, slaves, grain, livestock, timber, have disappeared, but it is clear that commerce was based on small-scale free enterprise, with individuals taking responsibility for raising and managing their own voyages. Athens was certainly a boom town in the middle of the fifth century while Byzantium (at the mouth of the Black Sea), Rhodes, and Corinth were important centres of exchange. By the fourth century there is more

Evidence of loans being made, with Athens offering some legal protection to investors. The city had long insisted on goods being assessed against official measures and even attempted to impose standard weights and measures across her empire.

The single largest commodity in the Mediterranean was grain shipped from those areas that had a consistent surplus, the Black Sea, Egypt, and Italy, to those that could not depend on one. As demand and deforestation spread, the search for timber became a major factor in economic strategy. So Athens probed the coasts of the northern Aegean (her colony at Amphipolis sheltered under heavily wooded mountains) while the rich resources of Sicily provided a motivation for the expedition there in 415. The Spartans, eager to build their own navy against Athens, were promised access to the forests of Phrygia by the Persians.

Metal ores were also important, and in some cases their sources can now be pinpointed. Silver for the first Athenian coinage, for example, came from Thrace, not the Laurium mines in Athens. The trade in pottery, or rather high-quality ceramics, is now well plotted. After the grain ships were unloaded, they were filled with ceramics. (The word ‘ceramic’ derives from the Greek keramos, ‘pottery, hence Kera-meikos, Ceramicus, the potters’ quarter of Athens.) So large quantities of black-glaze pottery from Athens were sold in Thasos in the northern Aegean. Different markets had different tastes. One late sixth-century group of Athenian potters, the so-called Perizoma group, produced designs specifically aimed at Etruscan markets. They put loincloths on athletes in deference to Italian sensitivities about nudity and transformed conventional pictures of Athenian symposia into Etruscan funerary scenes. In Spain and southern France black-glazed ware from Athens was especially popular. A distinctive vessel, the kernos, a pottery base with attachments for votive offerings, was produced for the north African market. Meanwhile datable amphorae of wine from the island of Chios show that the major markets shifted from the western Mediterranean in the sixth century to the eastern in the fifth with the Athenians developing a particular taste for Chian wine.

So there was much economic opportunism with both producers and shippers adapting to new demands. The Athenian comic poet Hermippus recorded some of the many goods that were coming into Athens in the late fifth century. There was sil-phium from Cyrene, mackerel and other fish from the Hellespont, sail cloth and papyrus ropes from Egypt, and ivory from Libya. Then there were the fruits: raisins and dried figs from Rhodes, pears and fine apples from Euboea, hazelnuts and almonds from the Gulf of Pagasai in the northern Aegean, and dates from Phoenicia. Carthage provided blankets and embroidered cushions. This is a world of sophisticated tastes. (See further Leopold Migeotte, The Economy of the Greek Cities: From the Archaic Period to the Early Roman Empire (trans. Jane Lloyd), Berkeley and London, 2009.)