ARISTOTLE AND FOREIGN TRADE 61
obtaining ateleia for their products in the Seleucid kingdom in the second
century BCE).How can one therefore deny that the cities – or at least a number of cities
that looked to the sea and were open to trade – were inevitably interested in
foreign trade and not only for the import of foodstuffs? Trophe was certainly a
necessary concern, but this topic could not by itself have sufficed as a policy
when it came to foreign commerce. In fact, to be able to import, it was also
necessary to export and to find ways of doing so. The cities also had to search
for trading partners who were capable of either supplying the goods they
needed or receiving those the city could supply: this was obvious for Aristotle.
This observation certainly poses in turn a series of problems, in particular
about the relationship between measures taken by the state and the actual
activity of merchants. Suffice it to state here that the cities, as states, could not
afford to ignore foreign trade.
Author’s Note
This paper was first published in 1987 and then reprinted in La cité marchande
in 2000. Apart from minimal bibliographical additions, it is this text that is here
translated into English (and for this I owe special thanks to Edward Harris).
The mid-1980s was a period when the ‘New Orthodoxy’ was triumphant.
Although deliberately focused on one topic only, namely the way in which
ancient Greek cities conducted their external economic relations, the article
aimed at challenging this orthodoxy on several crucial points. In that sense it
represents a starting point for the research on the ancient economy that I then
developed over the next three decades.
NOTES
1 On this subject, see the overview in Andreau and Étienne 1984 : 55–83. This article is
intended to cover primarily scholarship in French, but includes works in other languages.
The abundant notes that one will find in this article make it unnecessary to provide full
documentation for this well-known debate.
2 Finley 1973.
3 Austin and Vidal-Naquet 1977 , translated from the French edition of Austin and
Vidal-Naquet 1972.
4 Hopkins 1983 : xi. W. E. Thompson 1982 , one of the few scholars to whom we alluded, sug-
gests calling the theories developed by M.I. Finley ‘minimalism.’ The title of his essay, ‘The
Athenian Entrepreneur,’ could serve as the title of an entire research program.
5 Curiously enough, the summary of the main tenets of the New Orthodoxy given by
K. Hopkins (Andreau and Étienne 1984 : 63 give a convenient summary) omits many other
theses of Finley’s important theory, such as, for example, his view about the role of the state
toward the economy. Finley presents his ideas about economic analysis in Aristotle in his
‘Aristotle and Economic Analysis’ in Finley 1984 : 263–90, with the bibliography and notes
at 291–2, but the topic of foreign commerce is not discussed. On the topic of money, see
Picard 1980 : 267–76.