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

THE LEGAL FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC GROwTH 125

necessary information to protect their title. The purpose of the written records

of sales may not have been so much to prove the title of owners but to record

the name of the seller so that he could not evade his legal duty to warrant the

sale for the buyer. This duty of the seller was widely recognized throughout the

Greek world; Athens was not unusual in this regard.^52

Because the transaction costs were low, it was easy for those who were less

wealthy to protect their rights to the property they owned. This in turn made

it possible for all owners of land, no matter what their economic position, to

obtain credit. The evidence for this comes from the horoi placed on land that

had been pledged as security for a loan or other obligation. The horoi are flat

slabs of stone, which often give the name of the creditor and the amount of

the obligation.^53 Their purpose was to warn third parties that there was a lien

on the property and thereby to protect the rights of creditors. In the collection

of horoi made by Finley and supplemented by Millett in 1985, there were 135

concerned with loans on real security. There are two kinds of expression used

to indicate real security.^54 The median value of the loans using the hypotheke

terminology is 750 drachmas, and that for the prasis epi lysei terminology is

1,100 dr.^55 For both groups the median is therefore around 1,000 dr. These

are relatively low figures: we should keep in mind that those in the liturgical

class, which was probably about 1,200 members of the citizen population in

the fourth century, had at least three talents and probably more.^56 Probably

over three-quarters of the male citizens in Attica owned property. There are

also sixteen loans for 500 dr. or less. This reveals that even those with a small

amount of land could still obtain access to credit. There is no need to think that

the horoi are evidence of a crisis in the fourth century; the existence of large

amounts of debt is only a problem when the debtors cannot repay their loans

and default ensues. But there is no evidence in our literary sources for any such

crisis in the fourth century. And any serious problems would have led to a lack

of confidence, which would have resulted in a lack of credit.^57 On the contrary,

the horoi indicate that there was no such crisis of confidence and withdrawal

of credit: the horoi start to appear in the early fourth century BCE and con-

tinue into the third century, indicating that credit remained widely available.^58

This would appear to confirm de Soto’s insight that the existence of property

records that provide secure title to all owners makes it easier for those who are

less wealthy to obtain credit. What is also striking is that approximately half of

the creditors do not come from the districts in which the secured properties

are found (see Appendix II).^59 This confirms the observation made about the

hekatostai records: the existence of a formal property system helped to unite

Attica into a single market for credit.

This development could not of course have taken place unless there were

legal mechanisms in place to protect the rights of creditors. First, there were

private actions to recover debts and to enforce other kinds of contracts.^60 What