58 ALAIN BRESSON (TRANSLATED By EDwARD M. HARRIS)
by the Athenians would have been so easy to evade that it would have been
impossible for the decree of Pericles to have the implications that we nor-
mally attribute to it. He thought that a prohibition during peacetime affecting
exports and imports was alien to the mindset of the ancient Greeks.
On the contrary, we have seen that the arguments of Plato and even more
those of Aristotle, as well as numerous decrees granting to a given community
or to a given individual the privilege of εἰσαγωγή and ἐξαγωγή, clearly show
that the control of foreign trade was part and parcel with the sovereignty of
the city. This was not “free trade” which was the rule in practice, but, at least
potentially, regulated trade, as is revealed by the decrees giving privileges in
commercial matters similar to those held by citizens.
But above all, several passages from the Acharnians undeniably show that
it was possible to regulate imported products according to their origin. It is
certainly their Megarian origin that the sycophants report in respect to objects
as different as small woollen cloaks (a specialty of Megara), cucumbers, hares,
piglets, garlic cloves, and salt.^72 Smuggled in, these products were also seized
and sold at auction. Naturally Aristophanes finds a great deal of humor in
this: Does a Megarian cucumber differ from an Attic cucumber? How can
one tell the difference? Nevertheless, there were good practical ways of deter-
mining the origin of imported products.^73 Naturally, at the time when the
Acharnians was performed (425), these were all products from enemy terri-
tory, which were prohibited in Attica, Boeotian eels as well as Megarian pork.
But the fact that Aristophanes explicit mentions Pericles’ decree excluding
the Megarians and its consequences (the Megarians were soon starving)
shows clearly that the exclusion of the Megarians implied ipso facto a ban on
Megarian products.
Implicit in the decree of exclusion, which according to Thucydides affected
persons (let us not forget that we do not have the actual text of the decree),
we must see a clause banning commodities, the objects of trade. Here we can
return to the statement of the Old Oligarch: with the Megarians we have an
undeniable example of a desperate search for an export market on the part of
a smaller city, which cannot aspire to a major role in political power and makes
its living day by day from the amount of produce it could export.
A document from Miletus, this time from the Hellenistic period, provides
an example of a city searching for an export market and illustrates Aristotle’s
statement, which, as we recall, referred to requests to other states that a state
needed to make in order to gain an export market. The text is a decree from
the city of Miletus for a benefactor, Eirenias, the son of Eirenias^74 :Ἀντιόχου καὶ παραστησάμενος αὐτὴν εἰς τὸ λαβεῖν παρὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ
βασιλέως Ἀντιόχου ἀτέλειαν τῶι δήμωι πάντων τῶν ἐκ τῆς Μιλησίας εἰσ-
αγομένων γενημάτων εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν, ὥστε διὰ τῆς γεγενημένης
συγχωρήσεως ἔνδοξον μὲν τὴν δωρεὰν εἰς ἅπαντα τὸν χρόνον γεγονέναι,