a complex valuation, which appears to exceed any benefittobegained
by the government from thefigure that would be obtained. This
reflection on contemporary material assets by aFinancial Timesjour-
nalist highlights an important aspect of historical perspectives on
economies that most economists tend to ignore. For the economic
journalist, the idea of putting a monetary value on Stonehenge or
HMS Victory is evidently absurd, partly because accountants do not
seem to know how to go about valuing this type of asset. For the
historian, the long-term social value of monuments, the built environ-
ment, and cultural products, constitute a familiar set of elements in the
economic landscape, albeit not as assets that would automatically attract
a price tag.
Self defenceIn recognizing that contemporary societies do not include everything
that has economic significance within the discourse of budgets andfiscal
accounting, we have an important lesson for historical economies. States
and communities have a variety of assets, which include natural
resources (both those exploited and those available for potential exploit-
ation) and manufactured or constructed resources, such as transporta-
tion systems and the built environment. They also have resources of
manpower and womanpower, as well as intangible assets, which in
contemporary terms include licences, patents, trademarks, copyright,
and other forms of intellectual, commercial, and technical expertise. In
classical antiquity many of these assets (though not the more developed
abstract mechanisms of exploitation) existed but were quite differently
organized. States were, for the most part, equivalent to local or small
regional units. In a world without policing mechanisms and inter-
national codes, the inhabitants had to be able to defend themselves.
Most states could not defend territories spanning a distance beyond
what could be reached by infantrymen in a day’s march. If this is taken
asc.30 km, then the territory of ancient Attica just aboutfits the model at
c.2,400 km^2 , with only a tiny number of independent city states
exceeding this: Syracuse, Sparta, Pantikapaion in Crimea, and Cyrene
in North Africa are the known examples.^6 There was no‘average’sized(^6) Hansen inInventory, 70 – 3 for an analytical summary of the territories of classical
poleis; Syracuse is estimated atc.12,000 km^2 ; Sparta atc.8,400 km^2 (before 371bc);
Pantikapaion at over 3,000 km^2 ; on Athens, Oliver 2007, 74–110, esp. 74–100, 109–10,
for a recent re-evaluation.
Herdsmen with golden leaves—narratives and spaces 41