Although the economy was not a subject that the ancient Greeks considered as a separate entity, it is wrong to assume that the ancient Greeks ignored economic realities or that economies did not matter in politics and Greek polities. In the fifth century financial strength and the management of finances became an essential occupation of Athens as it became an imperial power. Economic activities are either directly or indirectly linked with the main issues that should concern a politician: sources of revenue (prosodoi), war and peace, protection of the territory, importation and exportation, and legislation (Aristotle Rhetoric 1.4 1359b-60a; Bresson 2000: 119-29). Economic concerns were deeply rooted in many areas of life in a manner similar to the pervasiveness of religion.
However, there are differences. Greek poleis did not operate a fiscal policy that one sees typically in a modern state: national debt, balance of payments, trade deficits (at least in the modern sense) are anachronisms that do not apply directly to ancient Greece. There was a time when historians argued how ‘modern’ or ‘primitive’ the ancient economy was. That debate was modified when Moses Finley (21999), embracing the cultural and economic anthropology of Hasebroek and Polanyi in the search for ‘different concepts and different models, appropriate to the ancient economy, not (or not necessarily) to ours’ (Finley 21999: 27), set the ancient economy within the cultural context and values of ancient society and argued therefore that the economy was not comprehensible unless it was seen within that context. This has been called a ‘substantivist’ approach (elsewhere ‘neo-primitivist’, Bresson 2000: 244). To some extent Finley’s own position was a product of his view that there was insufficient evidence to attribute to the ancient economy precise descriptions and quantitative analyses of economic mechanism (Finley 21999: 22-34). This view was predicated on the idea that an economy should be defined as ‘an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets’ (Finley 21999: 22), an idea that remained fundamental in the second edition of The ancient economy (Finley 21999: 177-8).
Finley concluded that the Greek economy was not very developed - the state was not interested in the economy per se; for individuals, status was an important factor in decision-making rather than economic profit.
The corollary of Finley’s position has been the ‘formalist’ position. This emphasizes the independence of economic activity from other areas of life in ancient Greece. Although it is dangerous to draw too many direct parallels between ancient and modern economies, it is important to recognize economic behaviour. A degree of rationality and logic defines some economic behaviour in ancient Greece (Christesen
2003) and even if the economy is not as developed or sophisticated as later economies, there are elements of the ancient economy that resemble those of more recent historical cultures.
The polarity of the ‘substantivist’ and ‘formalist’ positions can be best illustrated in the different approaches to and conclusions drawn from a common body of evidence. In fourth-century Athens, oratorical evidence provides for the most part the information on which two scholars, Millett (1990; 1991) and Cohen (1992), published studies of lending and borrowing. Millett argued that lending and borrowing in Athens was not a widespread activity and that although there is evidence for it, such activities were marginal and of little relevance to the economy at large. Cohen considered that the same small amount of evidence for lending money by Athenians and non-Athenians alike was significant: money-lending was a source of considerable wealth for these early financiers or bankers as Cohen calls them, some of whom were honoured by the Athenian state.
Millett emphasizes the social relations between the known examples of lenders and borrowers, in which lending for profit was not well regarded. Cohen prefers to see the lending of money as an essentially economic (rather than socio-culturally motivated) activity and recognizes that money was lent to finance commercial operations that were of real importance to the economies of polities. The evidence is confined largely to the fourth century and to Athens where, according to Cohen, the first ‘private banks’ appeared (Cohen 1992: 22). ‘Public banks’ are not found before the Hellenistic period (Cohen 1992: 42 n. 2), although in Athens there was an institution that made payments from public funds (Stroud 1998: 18 with n. 10). The difference in approach adopted by these two academics typifies the separation between what we might call a ‘cultural’ view and a ‘realities’ view. Millett’s emphasis on the sociocultural relations between lenders and borrowers is not a mirage, but at the same time the economic importance of the lenders (albeit small in number) must not be underestimated. It should be remembered that a small elite organized in private partnerships had dominated banking in nineteenth-century Europe (Ferguson 2001: 121).
Although recent academic research into the economies of ancient Greece has moved on from Finley’s analysis, no monograph has replaced Finley’s description of what is in effect an anthropological approach to the economy of the ancient Greeks. New presentations of the complexities of the ancient economy have displaced Finley (cf. Davies 1998; Cartledge 1998). Commercial operations and economic behaviour can be seen as economic activities in their own right rather than as actions embedded only in social behaviour. The economy is now presented as more complex, diverse and dynamic, so that we can speak of economies, not of a single economy (Cartledge 1998; Archibald et al. 2001).
The differing approaches to understanding these complexities - what I will call the ‘cultural’ and ‘realist’ approaches - respectively build on and diverge from the Finleyan traditions. The ‘cultural’ approach is post-Finleyan in that it draws heavily on anthropological methodologies and sees economics in terms of cultural activity (e. g., von Reden 1995; 2002). This view understands that ‘realities’ are, if not illusory, then difficult to discern in the ‘text’, the evidence from which one must try to draw conclusions about the economy. The other approach, more rooted in what one might call ‘realities’, emphasizes the dynamics of economic interactions or the range of activities that are implied by both simple and complex financial and commercial transactions (Davies 1998). The former cultural approach is postmodern in that it lays much more emphasis on ideology and the interpretation of ‘text’. The latter, the realities approach, is positively heuristic and lays greater emphasis on the dynamics and economic realities that lie behind the processes that evidence either preserves or implies. The ‘cultural economists’ believe that evidence supports a ‘construction’ of economic analyses because evidence as text reflects mentalities before realities. This approach offers important insights into Greek society’s cultural values but tends to suppress an overtly economy-for-economy’s-sake approach. The ‘realist’ approach acknowledges but does not privilege the cultural context of economic behaviour and prefers to lay greater emphasis on the financial motivations and institutional structures rather than cultural modalities of economic activities. It is the second approach that provides the intellectual framework for this survey of‘economic realities’. This chapter therefore considers the economy of classical Greece in terms of its plural ‘economies, with rules and regulations and even a measure of predictability’ (Finley 21999: 23).
The progress since Finley has been made largely by returning to and embracing the literary, epigraphical and archaeological evidence in new ways. However, the diversity of evidence and different approaches to its treatment has tended to result in the avoidance of all-embracing models of how the economies of ancient Greece worked (on this problem, see Bresson 2000: 261). One attempt to outline the wider economic structures sees a complex matrix of operations (Davies 1998: 249). According to this view, Athens provides a possibly unique model (Descat 1989) of the complexity and dynamics of interaction that involved institutions and individuals within a polity and saw interactions extending beyond the confines of the polity to individuals, communities and polities. These interactions can be traced by different economic activities: making, moving and selling goods or products, the infrastructure that the labour and underlying activities of such operations require, and the values and cultural relationships within which these operations must be perceived. Such an approach appreciates cultural context but gives much greater emphasis to the raw economic drivers of price, profit and power.
Athens offers rich evidence, particularly epigraphical material, for the diverse economies found in a Greek polis. It must be remembered, however, that although this chapter focuses on Athens, not all polities in the Greek world displayed the same levels of complexity and sophistication in their behaviour. At the foundation of all Greek economies is agriculture, the key to understanding most aspects of economic behaviour. The range in size and difference in complexity of other Greek communities or poleis must not be overlooked. For example, at Athens the importation and sale of grain and grain-related produce will have involved numerous officials: the agoranomoi (market-place officers), sitophylakes (grain market supervisors), metrono-moi (measures and weights officials) and epimeletai tou emporiou (inspectors of the commercial centre), and several other officials. In a smaller city such roles may have involved far fewer officials, typically the agoranomos (see below, section 6: Polis Economies and Institutions).
World History
