286 PETER VAN ALfEN
economic parlance implies particular types of undifferentiated things that are
completely alienable, often fungible, and generally exchangeable between pri-
vate parties within a market. Here the existential purpose, and indeed def-
inition of ‘commodity’ is compressed into that market-based moment of
exchange. In the seminal volume, The Social Life of Things, both Appadurai
(1986b) and Kopytoff ( 1986 ) drew attention to the limitations of this perspec-
tive, underscoring the complexities of the process of commodification and
the transitory nature of the commodity state. Delineating trajectories from
production to consumption, both scholars illustrated how a single object has
the potential to pass through multiple modes of exchange, and thereby be
diverted into multiple, but sequential states, including, for example, that of
gift, commodity, and heirloom. As a corollary, some items are rarely or never
commodified: we abhor the commodification of persons or body parts; other
cultures have been less put off by this. The commodity state is then socially
and culturally contingent and is expressed primarily through a limited range of
modes of exchange. Thus in opposition to contemporary economic parlance,
Appadurai and Kopytoff propose that ‘commodity’ is not a static ontological
category, nor an undifferentiated mass, but rather a process, generally centered
around a single item. While recognizing the importance of these observations,
and the dynamism of commodity pathways and diversions, for our purposes
here, we must freeze all the items in my list into something like the current
economic understanding of the commodity state, assuming that most, if not
all the items under consideration followed similar ‘biographical’ pathways and
were produced or processed primarily for monetary exchange in the emporia
and agoras. These assumptions are necessary because of the continued impor-
tance of gift and other forms of exchange in the Persian period, and our
inability to differentiate between items appearing in long-distance trade that
may have been shifted about more as gifts than as commodities. These assump-
tions also necessarily elide the additional complexities of the development of
markets and monetization, particularly in the sixth century, and the impact
that these developing structures of exchange have on our approach to defining
these items as commodities.
Furthermore, by focusing exclusively on private market exchange, I also
avoid the problem of the state as an economic actor and agent in the move-
ment of goods. As the Old Oligarch reminds us (2.7), there were a number of
items in Athens, for example, those related to the construction of triremes –
timber and pitch especially – that could be of strategic importance to a state
and thus attract public attention in ensuring continuous supplies, and even
curtailing supplies to competitors. Because none of the items in my list were
of such strategic or political importance, as, for example, Macedonian timber
or Black Sea grain, to warrant special attention to ensure their continuous sup-
ply to Athens or other poleis, an active role of Aegean states in Persian period