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

INTRODUCTION 23

farmer Dicaeopolis does not live in a closed, autarkic farmstead. He clearly has

the resources to engage in market exchange, and almost salivates at the oppor-

tunity to acquire a whole grocery list of imported treats (Ar. Ach. 874–90; cf.

760–1).^115 Another of Aristophanes’ farmers describes how he sold some of

his grapes for cash and was aiming to use the money to buy flour (Ar. Eccl.

817–822), and in Pax 563 a farmer talks about returning to the fields after buy-

ing some tarichos to eat there. Evidently, Attic farmers were far from isolated

from the world of markets.^116

Let us move away from this rather crude distinction between ‘poor’ and

‘elite’ households. In Athens citizens of the hoplite census would have been

able to own at least a few slaves, and will also have been the purchasers of

arms and armour. Few could have boasted the beautiful armour and trap-

pings of a Lamachus or an Alcibiades (Ar. Ach. 1095–141; Plut. Alc. 16; cf. Xen.

Mem. 3.10.9), but at the very least a hoplite needed a spear and a shield.^117 The

demand for arms and armour kept a variety of craftsmen in business:  spear

makers, sword makers, bowyers, helmet makers, corselet makers and crest mak-

ers;^118 and it facilitated the existence of Athens’ largest workshops:  we hear

of one workshop producing shields that may have had more than a hundred

slave craftsmen (Lys. 12.19), and the complement of slaves in Pasion’s shield

workshop has been estimated at sixty to seventy (Davies 1971 :  433–4; Dem.

36.11). Other smaller enterprises produced high-quality, bespoke armour for

the wealthy (Xen. Mem. 3.10.9–15).

What this evidence shows is that Athenian society cannot be accurately

characterized in terms of a super-wealthy elite which utilised the market for

luxury purchases, sitting atop an undifferentiated mass of subsistence farmers

for whom the market was of marginal importance.^119 That simply does not fit

our evidence. Most households produced at least a modest surplus that could

be used to acquire a variety of commodities; most of these commodities were

not bought from friends or neighbours, but were bought from markets; and

even country dwellers, though not as dependent on markets as inhabitants of

the city, were hardly isolated from market transactions. Athenian markets were

not just stocked with highly expensive luxuries, but also with a wide variety

of affordable products (cf. Van Alfen, Chapter 12 in this volume) and, pace von

Reden, demand was clearly high and regular enough to keep the agora stocked

with a cornucopia of goods throughout the year.

Several essays in this volume treat the intersection between the domestic

economy and markets. We have noted the role of production for the market in

elite farming in Attica, something that epigraphic evidence allows us to ana-

lyze in detail. Evi Margaritis in Chapter 8 uses the evidence of palaeobotany to

reconstruct the farming regime of two large elite farms in Hellenistic north-

ern Greece. Her contribution combines this evidence with that of the exca-

vated farmhouses, including their storage facilities, to construct a picture of