20 EDwaRD M. HaRRIs aND DavID M. LEwIs
bibulous Athenian required for his own needs, and which must have been a
market-oriented enterprise (cf. Tzochev, Chapter 10 in this volume).
Yet households of such wealth represent only the upper crust of Athenian
society; the Attic Stelai cannot shed light on the households of average citizens.
Can we really assume that in a city such as Athens the demand that enabled
the existence of the large permanent agora in the city center was driven largely
by the elite? As Ober has recently observed in relation to economic growth,
‘the “motor” of consumption powered by a tiny elite is relatively feeble. It is
only with the emergence of a substantial and stable “middling” class of persons
living well above the level of subsistence, and therefore willing and able to
purchase goods unnecessary for their mere survival, that societal consumption
becomes a strong driver of economic growth.’^98 Mutatis mutandis, the same
observation can be applied to markets. It is simply impossible to reconcile the
evidence for the size, permanence and diversity of Athens’ central agora with
the notion that the demand for its products was for the most part limited to
the liturgical elite. Demand must have been far more widespread. If we wish
to understand the size and prevalence of markets in the ancient Greek world,
we need to begin by looking at the economic arrangements of households.
Recent work supports the notion that many more Athenian households
were involved in market exchange than was once thought. In a recent study,
Kron has brought comparative cliometric methods to bear on the issue of
economic inequality at Athens, placing it in proper historical perspective. He
has shown that far greater extremes of economic inequality existed in societies
such as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Great Britain. We are unlikely
to be describing the economic resources of the average Athenian household
accurately if we assume a priori that a ‘poor’ Athenian was as hard-up as a
Victorian coal miner or mill worker.^99 And in an analysis of wages and subsis-
tence costs Scheidel has shown that average wages for a craftsman in Classical
Athens were several times subsistence costs, meaning that even relatively mod-
est Athenian households were not merely concerned with surviving hand-to-
mouth.^100 We also must remember that in Athens, poor households were not
subject to some of the tax burdens that modern states impose: there was no
income or council tax, nor were commodity prices driven up by the many
taxes (such as value added tax) that modern states impose.
What sort of products and commodities would an average Athenian house-
hold aim to acquire from the marketplace? In an appendix to this volume
Lewis has collected the evidence for commodities available in Attica from Old
Comedy. A number of caveats and provisos must be addressed in the use of this
catalogue (discussed at greater length in the appendix), but a quick glance con-
veys the sheer variety of goods potentially available in the Athenian agora. With
this list at hand we may begin to address the degree to which average house-
holds interacted with markets. That is not to say that the method outlined here