ABSTRACT
If you open the second edition of Moses Finley’s The ancient economy, and look in the index for his view on the economies of the Hellenistic world to which Rostovtzeff devoted so much energy and learning, you are referred to page 183. There you read the following:
In that context something should be said about the criticism that I have ignored the Hellenistic world, even that I have done so ‘because itdoes notfitthe concepts so neatly’.[31]. The term ‘Hellenistic’ was invented by the great German historian J.G. Droysen in the 1830s to define the period in Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 and the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. It has been accepted almost universally, and yet for the study of the ancienteconomy itis seriously misleading because in those three hundred years there were two basically distinct ‘Greek’ societies in existence.[32] On the one hand, the old Greek world, including the ‘western’ Greeks, underwent no changes in the economy that require special consideration despite all the political and cultural changes that undoubtedly did occur.[33] On the other hand, in the newly incorporated eastern regions – much of Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia – the fundamental social and economic system was not changed by the Macedonian conquerors, or by the Greek migrants who followed behind them, or by the Romans later on, as I have already indicated. There was therefore no ‘Hellenistic economy’; from the outset there were two, an ancient sector and an Oriental sector.2
