CLASSICAL GREEK TRADE 373
16 Lane 1966 : 157, note 11.
17 Assuming a price of wheat at Athens of 5.5 drachmas, which is typical for the late fifth and
early fourth centuries BCE, and noting from Zannini 1999 : 473–502 that in the late 1580s
a staro or 35.2 litres of wheat sold for 7.4 lire, and remembering that one ducat is 6.2 lire, a
ducat should have the purchasing power of 3.09 drachmas.
18 See Thuc. 7.28.4; Blamire 2001 : 114, note 106.
19 See Hansen 2006b.
20 Our population estimate, based largely on fourth-century evidence, will be somewhat
inflated for this immediate postwar period, since Athens had had little time to recover from
the casualties of the Peloponnesian war, and, perhaps more importantly, a significant seg-
ment of the non-citizen population will presumably have fled, at least temporarily, from the
effects of war and economic crisis, and the thirty tyrants’ disastrous and brutal repression,
much of it directed at metics.
21 See IG XI(2) 161A, line 26, cited by Vélissaropoulos 1980 : 208 and note 20.
22 Polyb. 30.31.12. For scholarly discussion, see Gabrielsen 1999: 202–9; Berthold 2009 : 208
and note 35. Both Gabrielsen and Berthold are right to emphasize that the sudden drop
in Rhodian commerce had less to do with the attractions of the tax-free status of Delos
as a (probably temporary) loss of confidence in Rhodes, related as much to fear of further
Roman sanctions, and even the possibility of hostilities, given that the Romans were drag-
ging their feet on making a treaty.
23 Beloch 1886 : 226–7.
24 For conversion of drachmas using wheat equivalents we note Pritchett and Pippin
1956: 196–8 for typical wheat prices of 5.5 dr. per medimnos, and Lang and Crosby 1964 : 44,
which gives the medimnos as 52.416 L. One drachma therefore buys 9.53 L of wheat. Note
that the purchasing power of the Florentine florin in 1427 can be calculated as 146.4 L of
wheat, using Goldthwaite 1980 : xv; 429, 436, 439. The purchasing power of the Venetian
ducat, equivalent to 29.49 L of wheat in the 1580s, can be calculated using data from Sohm
2010 : 205, 210.
25 See Daunton 2007 : 200–2 with further references.
26 See Mitchell and Deane 1962 : 450–1 (External trade B. 1772–1804).
27 See Mitchell and Deane 1962 : 287–8 (Overseas Trade 4).
28 For a detailed recent survey of the ancient evidence and modern controversies, albeit one
which is unduly skeptical of the likelihood of significant imports from the Black Sea in the
fifth century BCE, see Braund 2007.
29 Dem. 20.31–32. Some modern scholars have speculated that Athenian grain imports may
have reached as much as 2.275 million medimnoi, but this ignores the domestic production
of wheat and the role of wine, olive oil and other foodstuffs in the diet.
30 De Vries 1974 : 172 points out that in 1649 total Dutch grain imports were 112,901 lasts or
approximately 225,802 tons. Grigg 1980 : 149, table 21 yields a population of the Netherlands
as a whole of 1.8 to 1.9 million in 1650.
31 In 1680, Dutch grain imports were 64,535 lasts or 129,072 tons, or 67.9 kg per capita: De
Vries 1974 : 86, table 3.1.
32 For English wheat imports, see Mitchell and Deane 1962 : 97 ff. table 10, and for the relevant
population figures, see Mitchell and Deane 1962 : 9–14.
33 De Vries 1974 ; De Vries and van der Woude 1997 : 414–19.
34 See Saprykin 1994.
35 See Kron 2002 ; 2008a; 2012 for discussion and bibliography.
36 Van der Mersch 1994 ; Brun 2004.
37 See Harlaftis 1996 : 11, Figure 1.3; 47, Table 2.5. For the even more restricted farming and
trade regime in the Venetian and Ottoman periods, see Davis and Davies 2007.
38 For the capacities of Greek and Roman merchant ships, see Wallinga 1964 ; Casson
1971 : 186–200; Pomey and Tchernia 1978 ; Vélissaropoulos 1980 : 61–5; Turfa and Steinmayer
1999 ; Tchernia 2011 ; Boetto 2008 : 120–1; Wilson 2011 : 213–17.