24 EDwaRD M. HaRRIs aND DavID M. LEwIs
how these market-oriented farms functioned, specializing in the production of
wine and olive oil, respectively. Barbara Tsakirgis in Chapter 7 focuses upon a
different aspect of the domestic economy: textile production. She surveys the
evidence for loom weights in households across the Greek world, and shows
that in many instances, households produced a surplus of textiles that enabled a
little extra cash to be generated by selling them in the market, cash that could
be spent on purchasing some of the many items noted earlier. Her contribu-
tion provides a detailed study of one of the many ways in which households
interfaced with the commercial economy of Greek city-states.
The Athenians did not make a formal distinction between the household
and the workshop.^120 In his contribution on workshops in Classical Athens,
Peter Acton uses the tools of modern microeconomics to explain why certain
kinds of craft workshop in Athens attained a reasonable size and why others
did not. He shows that the size of economic units was not limited by views
about self-sufficiency and political freedom: the small size of most economic
units was shaped by economic factors (not social factors), which meant that
there was little possibility of achieving economies of scale for production in
the ancient economy.The Effect of Household Demand on the
Specialization of LabourThe fact that all Athenian households exerted at least some demand for mar-
ket products makes our Athenian evidence for the specialization of labour
comprehensible. Here we must make a distinction between horizontal and
vertical specialization. By horizontal specialization we mean the number of
different individual occupations devoted to the production of different indi-
vidual commodities or performance of specialized services: thus, shoemakers
made shoes, helmet makers made helmets, and so on. By vertical specialization
we mean the number of individual roles required in the production of a single
commodity.^121 High levels of demand for goods that could not be produced at
home facilitated the existence of a surprisingly large number of occupations
devoted to the production and retail of commodities, as well as various ser-
vices. Edward Harris ( 2002 ) presented evidence for some 170 separate occupa-
tions in Classical Athens, most of them in the craft and retail sectors.^122 It goes
without saying that these individuals would not have been able to specialize in
the production and retail of specific commodities without high enough levels
of demand for their products. We can now add further occupations to the list,
bringing the current total to more than 200.^123
As Harris ( 2002 ) has shown, the Athenian economy was marked by rela-
tively extensive horizontal specialization but relatively little vertical speciali-
zation. In other words, few products in Athens required the collaboration of a