Initially Greek commerce depended on private shipowners who served as
their own captains, raising whatever capital they could for individual voya-
ges. By thefifth centuryBCEthey were renting space on their ships to pro-
fessional traders. The trading system that was in evidence by the time the
Greeks entered their Classical Age was different from earlier luxury-based
systems, or even from the Phoenicians, who were essentially middlemen
dealing in large-scale commodities such as metals rather than mass consum-
ables. Greek trade reached down the social scale in the production, exchange,
and consumption of staple goods such as grain, wine, and olive oil within a
mass market context.
Given their soil, topography, and climate, the Greeks could grow olives
and grapes much more efficiently than grain, and a modest quantity of oil or
wine could return a substantial amount of grain from places such as Egypt,
the Black Sea, and Sicily. Such an exchange in bulk goods needed to be
transported over water rather than land, again ideally suited for people in the
Aegean region. Often it was cheaper for Athens, for example, which impor-
ted about two-thirds of the grain it consumed, to buy bulk quantities of
grain from Egypt than from parts of Greece less than 100 miles away if that
grain had to be brought overland. The Athenians went so far as to legislate
which crops could be exported and imported. Athens itself produced the
highest quality olive oil, but the best wine came from Ionia, lying across the
Aegean on the west coast of Anatolia and nearby islands. The Greeks mixed
their wine with water and often added ingredients such as honey, herbs,
nuts, lime, and even ashes and goat milk. The quality of Greek wines varied
tremendously from excellent vintages to vile swill made palatable only when
blended with another strongflavor.
The men that bought and sold these products, the merchants of Athens
and similar cities, were often resident foreigners, both Greeks from other city
states and non-Greeks. Referred to as “metics,” they were frequently
encouraged to come to a particular city and allowed to make as much money
as they could even though they were relegated to the lower ranks of society
and were discriminated against in various ways as, for example, by not being
allowed to become citizens or own land. Nevertheless, some metics did very
well since in red-hot markets the demand for imported products generally
outran the supply, and if a merchant could obtain a desirable product, or
even a large quantity of a common product, he could generally sell it for a
hefty profit. In large part they were responsible for the great leap into the
forefront of international commerce made by the Greeks.
Metics were also involved in the system of banking that developed in
Greece since one of the occupations they practiced was that of money-
changer. These individuals sat at tables near where ships docked, at city
gates, and in the marketplace and took in foreign money, weighed and
appraised it, and changed it into local currency for a small fee. At some time
they also began to make loans to traders and to broker partnerships for larger
72 Of purple men and oil merchants