278 PETER VAN ALfEN
the joys of shopping: there was, in Athens especially, a delightful variety of
things to be owned or consumed, and the agora was a place where one might
spend the day sampling, desiring, and buying.^5 This bounty of imported exot-
ica and other goods in their agora certainly gave the Athenians a general sense
of wealth, well-being, and importance.^6 In a verbal exchange between the
Sausage Seller and a slave in Aristophanes’ Knights, for example, the slave links
seaborne commerce, and its attendant imported commodities and taxes, with
the Athenians’ happiness and health. Pointing to the cargo ships and empo-
ria in the Athenian-controlled Aegean, he asks the Sausage Seller: ‘How can
you deny that you’re happy/well/flourishing?’ The verb eudaimonein encap-
sulates all of these meanings.^7 A market diminished, on the other hand, or
more systematically emptied of its imports, was demoralizing and depressing,
as Aristophanes’ Acharnians illustrates.
Looking back to a time before such bounty, the Greeks had a general sense
that a substantial amount of economic expansion, hand in hand with a greater
variety and volume of available commodities, had occurred in certain cities
and perhaps the entire Aegean over the course of the late sixth and early fifth
centuries. In his Archaeology, Thucydides (1.13) recounts how Greek poleis in
general grew wealthier throughout the Archaic period primarily by means
of seaborne commerce. Alexis (FGrH 539 F 2; apud Ath. 12.540d) more spe-
cifically notes that the late sixth century tyrant Polycrates enriched Samos
by importing goods from many other (Aegean) cities; Clearchos (apud Ath.
12.540e) remarks that he literally filled (eneplese) Hellas with all kinds of foods.
Aristophanes also uses the ‘filling’ metaphor (Eq. 813–15): Themistocles found
Athens half-empty, filled her all the way up, and ‘he added new seafood dishes
to her menu while taking away none of the old’ (trans. Henderson). With
new things filling Athens and Greece came a sense of general prosperity, the
memory of which Diodorus Siculus recorded centuries later (12.1.3-4): ‘every
city of Hellas enjoyed such an abundant prosperity (euporia) that all men were
filled with wonder at the complete reversal of their fortune. From this time
over the next fifty years (ca. 480–430) Greece made great advances in prosper-
ity (eudaimonia).’ Diodorus’ accuracy we might question, but he nevertheless
echoes the general clamor of a late Archaic and Classical Greece that was doing
generally quite well indeed, especially in terms of imports.
This is not the place to delve into the economic expansion of the Archaic
and Classical Greek world, the concurrent monetization of many of its econ-
omies, or the rise of markets.^8 Instead, I would like to focus on the goods that
filled the agoras in these prosperous times, and the excited responses to this
brimming bounty. It is my contention that the type of austerity invoked by
any normative notion of autarkeia may have been a fine topic for dinnertime
conversation, but few would gladly (re)turn to such a meager existence in real-
ity, especially when reclining on Carthaginian couch-covers and nibbling off a