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

AEGEAN-LEVANTINE TRADE, 600–300 BCE 287

Levantine-Aegean trade appears minimal.^10 Nevertheless, we should note that

any role of the state in exchange must play into a definition of ‘commod-

ity’ since the structure of exchange can be altered by various degrees of state

involvement through the (ab)use of a state’s economic and military power to

acquire goods. In such cases, ‘commodity’ may not be the right term for items

like Macedonian timber baulks acquired by imperial Athens, which might fall

somewhere in the spectrum between, for example, commodity and gift, or

commodity and booty.^11

With a workable understanding of commodities per se, we next consider their

analytic categories. Here we are faced with two types of problems. The first is

how best to enumerate commodities, as I have done in Table 12.2, in order to

develop a sense of the scope of the trade, and the second concerns the nature of

the trade from the angle of consumption and social registers, particularly who is

buying what and for what reason. The social biography of things described by

Appadurai and Kopytoff is concerned, rather than with classes or types of objects,

with single objects primarily, an analytical category that is not well suited to our

discussion here. For many of the items in my list, like spices, fuller’s earths, and

grain, it makes little sense to speak of single objects since a single grain or gran-

ule is entirely fungible. While this is less the case with some manufactured items,

like coins and some ceramics, still there is a degree of fungibility with coins, for

example, that is not present with unique statues, painted vases, silver plate, or

tapestries. This spectrum of fungibility, if we can speak of such, complicates how

we categorize and enumerate commodities. In general, those items that stand at

both ends of the spectrum, the most and least fungible, are the easiest to enumer-

ate: a measure of barley, for example, or a worked silver krater. Those that inhabit

the middle portions of the spectrum pose greater problems. Wine, for example,

is in some situations fungible – cheap table wine is cheap table wine no matter

the brand – but wine is still extensively differentiated by place of origin, age, and

color. We can, as I have done in Table 12.2, list wine as a single class of commod-

ity, but with the understanding that there may be dozens of underlying types of

wine, each of which could be considered a single commodity in its own right.

In Table 12.2 therefore lists 125 items, some of which are singular, like antimony,

some of which represent classes, like wine; if we include the differentiated types

within the classes in our count, the minimum number of singular commodities

appearing in Levantine-Aegean trade is roughly 200.

Finally, we all too frequently speak of commodities as either luxuries or sta-

ples. This binary system of categorizing commodities goes back at least to the

time of Plato, if not earlier. As the philosopher notes, necessities (anagkaia) are

those goods that sate the necessary appetites/desires (anagkaioi epithymiai, Resp.

558 D), such as hunger and the desire for warmth. Unnecessary appetites or

spendthrift desires (analôtikai, Resp. 559 C), which Plato includes in his unflat-

tering characterization of the democratic man (dêmokratikos, Resp. 559 D), are