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APPENDIX
COMMODITIES IN CLASSICAL ATHENS:
THE EVIDENCE OF OLD COMEDY
David M. Lewis
The following collection gathers together the evidence of Old Comedy to give a
sense of the wide variety of goods that were available in Classical Athens, and partic-
ularly in the agora. It groups them by category; references to comic fragments follow
Kassel-Austin’s Poetae Comici Graeci. I have aimed at being comprehensive, and not just
limiting ourselves to references where it is clear that market exchange is mentioned.
When a commodity is mentioned in Old Comedy, I have added it to our list, for it
shows the comic poets’ awareness of the material stuff of everyday life. Yet if we com-
pare these groups of commodities with the attested occupations in Attica, it is clear
that many if not most of these items were subject to market exchange – that is, they
could either be bought in the marketplace or from specialised craftsmen and retailers,
even if they were also subject to other forms of resource allocation (e.g. gift or autar-
kic consumption, for that matter). I have thus sought to match each category of goods
with the individual occupations devoted to their production and retail.
Several methodological considerations are worth bearing in mind. First, the list is
limited in its extent: we have not included the evidence of Middle or New Comedy,
nor of other literary texts or inscriptions (we also omit the evidence of the comic
adespota). A comprehensive list would include all literary evidence and synthesise this
with archaeological and iconographic data. Our appendix is intended merely as a pre-
liminary sample to convey some notion of the sheer variety of goods available in the
Athenian economy and should be seen as a minimal list. Secondly, the English trans-
lation of many Greek terms in the following catalogue is not always secure; I have
generally followed the definitions given in LSJ^9. Thirdly, the broad headings used here
are for convenience of organisation and should not be seen as hard-and-fast groupings.
Some items may have existed in various forms. For example, many vessels of a certain
type could be made of clay but also of metals; other items were made of composite