Archaic Greece is often imagined as a world of subsistence farmers struggling to survive, ruled by a small landed elite whose “aristocratic” values abhor sordid profitmaking. Hesiod’s peasants and Homer’s heroes are the respective models. This simple and static picture of archaic Greece has featured heavily in the long debate about the differences between ancient and modern economies. For “primitivists,” the fundamental characteristic of ancient economic life is that the vast majority of people were farmers who aimed for no more than subsistence and self-sufficiency, whose families themselves consumed what they produced, and engaged in as little exchange as possible. For “modernists,” by contrast, ancient farmers produced a large proportion of their crops for the market, and accordingly relied heavily on trade. For a primitivizing school of thought called “substantivism,” most kinds of exchange in the ancient world were not profit-oriented but took the form of reciprocity or redistribution, in which the guiding principle was generosity. For modernizing “formalists,” however, most kinds of exchange were as much motivated by profit in antiquity as they are in the modern world, and equally subject to the laws of supply and demand. Scholarship is similarly divided on the economic roles of the ancient city and the ancient state.1
It will be argued here that from the very beginning the archaic economy was far more complex than the usual picture suggests, and that its further development into something still more complex, and in some but certainly not all ways more “modern,” was a central phenomenon of the period. In particular, we shall see that intense and escalating competition for wealth characterized economic life throughout and was a driving force behind many of major historical developments and crises of the age.
A Companion to Archaic Greece Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-631-23045-8
World History
