The Ancient Greek Economy. Markets, Households and City-States

CLASSICAL GREEK TRADE 367

shipwrecks can document the trade in raw glass^124 and ingots of refined or

scrap metal,^125 as well as stone, particularly the fine Parian, Pentelic, Hymettian,

and Proconnesian marbles, which represented one of Greece’s most remark-

able natural resources.^126

We will concentrate primarily here on the trade in manufactured items,

however. The workmanship and versatility of Greek craftsmen would be more

evident had we a larger sample of their marble and bronze statuary, jewelry, and

silverware. Greek silver and gold plate, described in great detail in the proces-

sion of Ptolemy Philadelphus^127 or in the treasury accounts of many temples,^128

almost never survives, and then almost exclusively in barbarian graves, or the

occasional fortuitous hoards, such as the Rogozen treasure from Thrace.^129

Some idea of the importance of raw, coined, and worked silver for Greek

trade,^130 and the amount of plate in circulation in the Classical and Hellenistic

world,^131 now almost entirely lost to us, can be gathered when one recalls that

Alexander the Great captured as much as 2,200 metric tons of precious met-

als from the Persian monarch, and the Romans looted 550 tons of silver from

their campaigns against the Macedonians and Aetolians, including innumera-

ble gold and silver vessels, despite leaving many of the major sanctuaries largely

intact.^132 When contemplating just how much plate has been melted down

over the centuries, it is worth reflecting that the 108 silver and silver-gilt phia-

lai uncovered in a single hoard from a modern garden in Rogozen was more

than twice the total number of such vessels preserved in the world’s museums

at the time.^133 Excavations in Thrace, the North Pontic region, Macedonia, and

among the Italic populations of Magna Graecia provide us with a dispropor-

tionate amount of evidence for Greek production of art objects in precious

metals.^134

In addition to furniture, vessels, tools, statuary, and the like, we must also

factor in fine jewelry, rarely buried in Greek graves, but much more com-

mon among Hellenized Southern Italians, in Thrace and the Black sea region,

Cyprus, Egypt, the Levant, and increasingly uncovered in recent excavations

and northern Greece and Macedonia.^135 One of the most remarkable testa-

ments to the workmanship of Greek jewelers is the exquisite gold pectoral,

normally dated sometime between 400 and 350 BCE, from the Tolstaja Mogila

Kurgan in the Ukraine,^136 but hundreds of more modest items have been exca-

vated,^137 many showing how closely attuned Greek craftsmen had become to

producing artworks for barbarian clients, even reflecting their lifestyles, myths,

and adapting traditional subject matter in the finest Greek style.^138

The existence of an organized trade in silverware can be documented by

a few fortuitous finds of commercial graffiti on silver or other vessels, as on

an inscribed cup from Dalboki in Thrace, now in the Ashmolean Museum.^139

Moreover, a large hoard of fifth and fourth century BCE bronze ware from

a river shipwreck near Peschanoe in the Dnieper Basin, gives a rare glimpse