364 GEOffREY KRON
increased four times in the second half of the 16th century, [and] 1,000 house-
holds sampled in seventeenth-century Bologna had 10 or more pictures.’^80
While eighteenth and even nineteenth century England offers a very poor
model (except by way of contrast) for Classical Greek economy and society,
seventeenth century Holland and Renaissance Venice or Florence,^81 despite
being decidedly less democratic, do suggest a model for the robust demand for
consumer goods that Athens’ large and prosperous middle class generated. The
spaciousness and luxury of Greek housing opened up a very large demand for
home decoration, furnishings, furniture, and house wares. Although best pre-
served in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and late antique contexts in North Africa
and the Near East, Walter-Karydi and Graham have argued that wall-painting
and fine pebble and glass mosaics began to decorate private houses already in
late fifth century BCE Athens^82 and gradually became more and more com-
mon in ordinary Greek and eventually Roman households, a development
which will have generated considerable income and employment for plaster-
ers, painters, and mosaicists.
Greek middle class demand, and ready maritime markets among non-Greek
but rapidly Hellenizing peoples throughout the Mediterranean encouraged
intense competition and innovation among workshops throughout the Greek
world. Modern stylistic analysis has corroborated and supplemented our lit-
erary evidence for important regional schools, much as one would expect
from the evidence we have already noted of strong trade throughout the
Athenian empire. While Athens arguably enjoyed the greatest and most per-
sistent influence, many other regions, most notably Argos, Laconia, Corinth,
Arcadia, Aegina, Sicyon, Egypt, Rhodes, Pergamum, Syracuse, Tarentum, and
Macedonia were able to build up a pan-Hellenic reputation and win impor-
tant markets beyond their own region, at some point.^83 Nor should we neglect
the importance and stylistic influence of imports of non-Greek manufactured
goods, particularly Phoenician and Punic imports in the Orientalizing period,^84
and Etruscan metalwork and bucchero through the Archaic and Classical period,
but also Achaemenid luxury goods, particularly silverware and textiles.^85
The wealth which successful artists and craftsmen could achieve is well
attested by Stewart’s studies of the social status of Classical and Hellenistic
sculptors, such as Praxiteles and his son Cephisodotus, trierarchs several times
over, and, like quite a few other sculptors, members of Athens’ liturgical class.^86
But humbler arts could also be nearly as lucrative, as Aristotle suggests,^87 and
as the success of several potters shows, such as Andocides and Euphronius,
who set up expensive dedications on the acropolis,^88 or Bacchius, honored by
Ephesus with citizenship and an honorary decree.^89
A recent study of the economic lives of painters in the Italian Renaissance,
as well as the Florentine catasto tax records, and documents from artisans’ guilds,
amply demonstrate how much money skilled craftsmen stood to make from