The Ancient Greek Economy. Markets, Households and City-States

THE LEGAL FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC GROwTH 121

customary to register pieces of land and slaves sold on white boards, and they

wrote on tablets of box-wood smeared with white clay the names of the prop-

erties and the slaves and those who purchased them so that if anyone wished,

he could safely make a charge when he saw the white board.’ This gives the

impression that the practice of keeping records of sales was widespread.

A famous fragment of Theophrastus shows that different communities in

Classical Greece took differing approaches to the issue of publicizing and

registering sales of land.^31 At Athens there existed the practice of providing

advance written notification of a sale, and the buyer might pay a tax of 1 per-

cent (hekatoste) as a kind of registration fee. As Theophrastus says,

Some say that there should be advance written notification with a mag-

istrate no fewer than sixty days before as at Athens and that the buyer

should deposit one percent of the price so that whoever wishes to may

raise a protest and lodge an objection and so that it may be clear by virtue

of the payment who is the legal purchaser.

Any buyer who wished to have secure title would want to make sure that

there were no outstanding claims on the land or others who contested the

seller’s ownership. For this reason the seller would publicize the sale sixty days

beforehand to give others a chance to come forward and lodge an objection.

If there were no rival claims, the buyer had some assurance that his title to his

purchase would be secure. This would reduce transaction costs for the buyer,

who would not have to collect information about the seller’s title. Recent

research in law and economics has noted that one of the greatest obstacles

to market-exchange is the problem of asymmetrical information where one

party has knowledge that the other lacks.^32 If buyers do not have the assurance

that the seller has good title to the land he is offering, the buyer will be less

inclined to purchase, or will insist on a lower price to compensate for the risk

he incurs. This procedure served to correct the imbalance of information and

thereby to facilitate market-exchange.

To provide documentation, the poletai kept records of these payments, which

provided the name of the seller, the name of the buyer and a brief description

of the property.^33 The properties are called chorion, ‘a catch-all term meaning

“estate,” “landed property,” of any kind but not necessarily, agricultural land’ or

eschatia, which was ‘outlying’ property, that is, near the sea or near a frontier. As

Lambert notes, ‘there is the connotation that the land was, at best, marginally

cultivable.’^34 The name of the deme in which the property was found is also

recorded but with no further details. These records are clearly not similar to

modern property registers, which are organized by place with each property

given a set of coordinates on a grid. These are records of a tax paid for a sale

and serve as accounts for magistrates, the poletai, who had to report on public

revenues at the end of their term of office. But by recording that the payment