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

CLASSICAL GREEK TRADE 365

the robust demand for art generated by a prosperous society, with a tolera-

bly broad middle class. Naturally Michelangelo (who left fl. 22,000), Raphael,

Bernini, and Ghiberti made large fortunes,^90 like those generated by Pheidias

(Pl. Meno 91d) or Lysippus, but humbler craftsmen like the enterprising stone-

mason Piero d’Andrea could also get rich.^91 A number of artists chose to diver-

sify into retailing the work of others as well, and some, like the Venetian Marco

Boschini, a minor talent himself, set himself up as a connoisseur, wrote a book

extolling Venetian art, took prospective buyers on gondola tours of the city’s

great artistic landmarks, and boasted of the money to be made in art by those

able to buy well, claiming that Tintorettos commissioned for 50 ducats were

now selling for 50,000.^92

The best-documented, but hardly the most important, Greek craft export

is one of the cheapest and most fragile: fine pottery. It offers important proxy

evidence for the geographical reach of many much more expensive manu-

factured goods produced by Greek craftsmen.^93 Expanding the markets once

captured by Corinthian fine pottery, Attic black-figure and red-figure ware,

like Etruscan bucchero,^94 was relatively inexpensive yet attractive pottery, ideally

crafted for a broad and expanding market of prosperous peasant farmers and

middle class urban craftsmen and shopkeepers.

The Attic stelai and commercial graffiti clearly prove, as Vickers and Gill

have argued in depth, that fine Attic pottery remained very inexpensive and

was well within the means of virtually all Greek households and many Italic,

Etruscan, and Near Eastern ones.^95 Although Beazley’s superb art-historical

scholarship may seem disproportionate to the value of the pottery analyzed,

it is helpful in establishing individual workshops and tracing their diffusion, as

in the case of the Niobid painter, for example, whose work has been found

at Spina,^96 Bologna,^97 Capua,^98 Vulci,^99 Tarquinia,^100 S.  Russia,^101 Nola,^102

Camiros,^103 Kimissala,^104 Athens, Vari,^105 Camarina,^106 and Monte Sannace.^107

While the economic impact of the industry should not be over-estimated, it

was likely to have been far from negligible, for Athens at least. The Staffordshire

potteries ranked fifth in their share of English manufactured exports to North

America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,^108 behind textiles,

hardware, cutlery, and iron and steel, since, as Josiah Wedgewood said ‘our

home consumption is very trifling in comparison to what is sent abroad.’^109

We can get some impression of the reach of Athenian products by exam-

ining the database of findspots of Attic black- and red-figure pottery, which

Sir John Beazley’s detailed study helps us compile.^110 This data is, of course,

extremely selective, based almost entirely on complete pots of museum qual-

ity, and excluding many fragmentary and poorly executed works. Its scope

would increase exponentially were one to attempt to survey even the exca-

vated and published archaeological material, to say nothing of the millions of

sherds which were presumably spread with manure and compost all over the