This survey of methodologies and models for studying economic history in ancient Greece has been necessary because of the problems in dealing with the ancient evidence: there is no ancient Greek author offering a survey of economic history, just as there is no similar comprehensive ancient Greek study of religion.
The best ancient survey of economic history is the short treatise falsely attributed to Aristotle, the Oikonomika, which was written c. 320/10. From the mid-fourth century, Xenophon’s Poroi and Oikonomikos offer insights respectively into a case-study for improving state revenues and guidelines to a rich Athenian for the ideal organization of one’s estate-based household. Economics do, however, underpin much of what ancient authors understand in contemporary politics and history. So Thucydides recognized the importance of economic or financial power in his history of the Athenian Empire but not sufficiently to give full financial details (Kallet-Marx 1993; Kallet 2001).
The problem is always how to interpret the evidence that has survived. Athens in the second half of the fifth and fourth centuries, for example, provides rich epigraph-ical evidence much of which contains important information on economic activities - leases of land, sales of property, inscriptions detailing the financial status of property (the horoi), inventories listing contents in temple treasuries. But epigraphical evidence survives only through various filters. First, stones must survive and be discovered. Second, one has to ask why an inscription was written up. Third, one has to consider the authority behind the writing up of the inscription. However, inscriptions do provide information often absent from similar general surveys of the Greek economy.
In addition to epigraphy, archaeology offers important evidence. Archaeological excavation reveals not only buildings, their plan, construction and history, but also artefacts: fine ceramics and coarse ware, in particular amphoras, now offer new possibilities of uncovering economic histories not contained in written sources (Law-all 1998). Non-intrusive archaeology has also offered much for the economic historian. Archaeological survey has, since the 1970s, revealed much about the rural history ofthe Greek countryside in Sicily, mainland Greece, Greek islands, the northern Black Sea and some parts of Asia Minor (Alcock et al. 1994; Alcock & Cherry 2004). Survey allows the historian to observe over long periods of time the changing nature of rural activity, usually identifying ‘sites of all sizes, types, and periods’ (Jameson et al. 1994: 220). Often the lack of more targeted excavations in the course of surveys denies the historian tighter chronological evidence, but the accumulation of ceramic evidence does allow at least a broad picture of rural activity to be presented.
What follows draws heavily on that epigraphical and archaeological evidence because this material is often treated lightly by cultural economists, as Finley’s own Ancient economy epitomizes. The rest of this chapter is divided into five interconnected sections. The first three, working up from the widest base on which ancient society was built, deal with in turn (section 3) the agricultural foundations of Greek economies (territory and land; labour; wealth and the farm); (section 4) the manufacturers and non-agricultural labour; and (section 5) traders and commerce. There follow two sections that suggest how these features fit into the institutional and political frameworks of Greek polities by considering (section 6) the economies and institutions of the polis and finally (section 7) the realities of economic power.
World History
