292 PETER VAN ALfEN
of the sixth century, which then carried through to the fifth and fourth cen-
turies as well. While the reasons for this growth are highly complex, as Morris,
Bresson, and Harris have demonstrated, the rise and expansion of markets
and new monetary instruments, like coinage, were among its manifestations.^32
It is not hard to imagine that whatever networks and connections already
existed across the Mediterranean and beyond were subsequently broadened
and expanded at this time, extending their reach and thereby the channels
through which goods flowed.^33 At one far western end of these networks, for
example, the mid-sixth century ruler of Tartessus, Arganthonius, gave money
to the Phocaeans, his trading partners, to help build city walls around their
Ionian home thousands of kilometers away (Hdt. 1.163); at another far end, the
amount of Athenian silver flowing into the south Arabian kingdoms of Saba
and Qataban as payment for frankincense and other spices fueled a massive
series of imitative owl coinages there beginning around the end of the fifth
century and gaining momentum in the fourth.^34 With or without a character
like Polycrates, tyrant and bon vivant of Samos, to spur things on as noted ear-
lier, markets in the Aegean, and elsewhere, were filling with more and more
things, offering greater variety and choices. The number of ‘new’ commodities
in my list would seem to confirm this.
As economies expanded and markets filled, there appeared, arguably for
the first time in western history, that peculiar, discerning individual – the
consumer – who, with money in pocket, struggled to balance good sense
and recklessness in a sea of beckoning products. Davidson ( 1997 ) and Foxhall
(1998a; 2005 ) have already charted for us the consuming passions and heartfelt
desires of the Archaic and Classical consumer, rightly drawing our attention to
the nexus of ancient emotions and commodities. As they have deftly shown,
the consumption of things, novelties especially – trinkets, clothes, food, what
have you – elicited powerful, delighted responses, an act that the fourth cen-
tury philosopher Aristoxenus (fr. 50 Wehlri) recognized as one of life’s greatest
pleasures: ‘Since novelty has a mighty power to make pleasure seem greater, it
is not to be ignored ... for this reason many kinds of food have been invented,
many kinds of cakes, many kinds of incense and perfume, many kinds of gar-
ments and rugs, of cups too, and other utensils; for all these things do, in fact,
contribute a certain pleasure.’ These are pleasures that Aristophanes and other
playwrights detailed as well. But we should not think that the delights of
commodity consumption were restricted to just the elites, especially toward
the end of the fifth century. By the time that coinage had become common-
place, markets established most everywhere, a concomitant ‘democratization’
of commodity access had also taken root.
Two passages in particular, both purportedly composed within a short period
at the height of fifth-century Athenian imperialism and economic power, have
attracted attention in this regard.^35 In Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ Funeral