288 PETER VAN ALfEN
those which seek varieties of food and unnecessary things, like orientalia, and
in the end are harmful to the body and soul (Resp. 559 B-C). Plato’s sneering
moralizing on ‘unnecessary things’ persists to this day; ‘consumerism,’ which
many would define as the thoughtless pursuit of gratifying acquisitive appe-
tites, carries few positive connotations. In his Laws, Plato specifically marks two
groups of commodities as unnecessary, frankincense and other foreign spices,
and marine purple and other non-indigenous dyes; these goods are strictly
forbidden to be imported into his ideal city (847 C). To be sure, all these items
appear on my list.
This approach to luxuries and staples permeates most discussions of com-
modities in trade, including those concerning Levantine-Aegean trade, which
has been branded by Miller ( 1997 : 65) among others, a trade in luxury goods.
However, this simple binary of luxury and staple has its flaws; as has long been
recognized the relationship between the two is far more complex and fluid
than some, like Plato, might admit.^12 Appadurai (1986b: 38) has lucidly sug-
gested another way to define the categories:I propose that we regard luxury goods not so much in contrast to neces-
sities (a contrast filled with problems), but as goods whose primary use is
rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs. The necessity to
which they respond is fundamentally political. Better still, since most lux-
ury goods are used (though in special ways and at special cost), it might
make more sense to regard luxury as a special “register” of consump-
tion ... than regard [it] as a special class of thing.He goes on to list the five identifying signs of this ‘register’ which include
restriction to elites, complexity of acquisition, the signaling of complex social
messages, and specialized knowledge of proper consumption. The usefulness
of this model is that the focus is shifted to the (social) consumption of a
commodity rather than its presumed inherent production or exchange value.
This allows for greater fluidity in commodity typologies since it is not the
commodity itself that determines its status, but rather the specific geographic,
temporal, and social context in which it is consumed. Although not explicitly
stated by Appadurai, the concept of registers of consumption also implies not
just the binary types, luxuries and staples, but a multiplicity of registers, how-
ever we choose to call them, as, for example, the awkward ‘semi-luxury.’ This,
as we shall see, is important for determining who was buying what and for
what reason. We now can turn to my list.The Commodities
As noted, in Table 12.2 the column ‘Date’ gives the earliest era when the
commodity appears in our evidence in Levantine-Aegean trade. Given the