problem already has roots back in the remote past, in a revisionist
argument criticizing Eratosthenes and Apollodorus for what Strabo
took to be unjustified slurs by them on the geographical knowledge of
Homer and the early Greek poets. The geographer refers to people who
still know nothing about food storage or shopping, exchanging one
commodity for another (Geogr. 7.3.7 (C300)). As it happens, the context
is apposite, since Strabo places this critique in the midst of a discussion
about knowledge of the Black Sea region, and of antique ideas about
Thracians, Mysians, Getae, and peoples beyond them—Scythians, and
the rather vague‘Hippemolgoi’,‘Galaktophagoi’, and‘Abioi’(Hom.Il.
13.5–6).^38
Weber’s identification of‘early capitalism’reflects his recognition of
some developed forms of money transactions. Finley did not discuss the
role of money in ancient economies and regarded markets as highly
limited in scope:‘The typical“peasant market”was a place where
peasants (and no doubt village craftsmen) met from a radius offive or
six miles in order tofill gaps in necessities by exchange with each other;
there were only a few things that a peasant could not produce himself—a
metal ploughshare for example—when everything went well. The paucity
of coinfinds in genuinely rural areas is no accident’.^39 This echoes, in
some respects, Plato’s rather tongue-in-cheek description of an ideal
society, in which life’s simplicities are to the fore, with citizens walking
about barefoot in summer, dining and drinking in garlands, eating
home-produced food off leaves (Resp.372a–c). Even Plato had to con-
cede that a respectable society needed properly made agricultural tools,
and a rational organization of buying and selling, if his philosophically
inclined citizens were not to waste a lot of time hanging about (Resp.
370b–371c). His conclusion was that respectable societies needed spe-
cialists and needed to organize specialist activities in ways that would be
socially useful (Resp. 2. 369b–370e). Xenophon reflects a more analytical
response than his former academic associate, remarking on the profound
economists and historians alike. Harris 1989 [2006] on the legal mechanisms behind
commercial exchanges in Athens. Veblen’sreflections on markets are worth repeating:
‘The course of market events took its passionless way without traceable relation or defer-
ence to any man’s convenience and without traceable guidance towards an ulterior end.
Man’s part in the pecuniary world was to respond with alacrity to the situation, and so
adapt his vendible effects to the shifting demand as to realize something in the outcome.’
(1919, 141 [Preconceptions of Economic Science II,first published 1899]).
(^38) Baladié (1989, 187–95) provides a nuanced framework of the ancient debates about
Black Sea geography ad loc. 7.3.2–3, citing Poseidonios (FGrH87 F104 = Edelstein-Kidd fr.
277a = Theiler F45) on the European origins of the Mysians and their vegetarian lifestyle.
(^39) Finley 1985 [1999], 107.
Societies and economies 99