Markets and the Ancient Greek Economy

ShoEconomics explores the likely market size in Classical Athens for the sale and consumption of footwear. This micro-economic approach combines the data from fourth century inscriptions at Eleusis, other sources for the shoe-market in the Greek city, and a hypothetical reconstruction of market size and shoe production in Classical Athens based on a Feri estimate. This small-scale approach to quantification complements the broader presentations of state-level operations (e.g. Ober 2008; Pritchard 2015).

Athenaeus 11.784c, preserved only in a much later summary, describes the creation of a new amphora (κέραμος) by the sculptor Lysippus for Cassander’s new city, Cassandreia (316/315 BC). This passage is often interpreted as a deliberate effort to market, as in to improve sales of, Mendaian wine.

While in the recent literature much attention has been devoted to middlemen in the Roman world (see Verboven 2007 and 2008, Andreau 2012 and the contributions in Wilson and Flohr 2015), this has not yet been the case on the Greek side. Yet middlemen played a fundamental role in market operations in ancient Greece. The paradox is all the more striking since, on the archaeological side, much attention has been recently devoted to buildings for sales and storage in the Greek world (see the contributions in Chankowski and Karvonis 2012).

Two strands of the old orthodox view of the ancient economy – as set out in Finley (1973) – have inhibited a proper understanding of the role of markets in ancient farming. First, according to Finley, the vast majority of people were subsistence farmers bound by an ethic of self-sufficiency: if they produced a surplus, they either stored it against lean times to come, or used it in short-range exchange with their neighbours. Second, transport by land was prohibitively expensive, meaning that the marketing of agricultural produce was neither practical nor profitable.

In his essay “The economy as an instituted process” Polanyi (1957) observed that one of the key requirements for the development of market relations was the transition from economic relations based on status to those based on contract: “It is now possible to say that status or Gemeindschaft dominate where the economy is embedded in non-economic institutions; contractus or Gesellschaft is characteristic of the existence of a motivationally distinct economy in society.” Polanyi’s emphasis on the importance of contracts in market-relations was not original;