ABSTRACT
With his essay’s title Paul Cartledge makes clear at the outset that he sees Greek slavery and its economic role in the context of the political and social values of the Greek world, its ideology or ‘mentalities’. In the debate between primitivism and modernism (renamed and to some extent redefined to the former’s evident advantage, as substantivism and formalism) the question has been where to place classical Greece, in particular classical Athens (the chief subject of what follows), between those societies where actions are determined primarily by communal values and those in which rational calculation of material interest prevails (corresponding roughly to the rather artificial polarity of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft; Aristotle had no doubt that most people choose kerdos over timê: Pol. 1318b17-18). Increasingly challenges to the more primitivist position associated with Moses Finley have been raised.1 It may not be so much a matter of shifting our estimate of the character of the ancient economy so many degrees away from Finley as it is of recognizing the simultaneous operation of several different systems in different spheres of life. Formulations, such as those by Paul and Laura Bohannan (1968) for their account of the economy of the Tiv of West Africa may prove useful for other societies as well.2 Exchange among the Tiv occurred in three main spheres: subsistence, status and marriage, using different means and rules which were not interchangeable. A market, strictly speaking, operated only in the first sphere. The differences between the spheres of land and trade in Athens had been noted by Finley (1985c: 77). Following the changing relationship between spheres over time may be a more useful undertaking than attempting to categorize the development of the society as a whole. Both here and elsewhere Cartledge argues for a multiplicity of economies among the hundreds of Greek communities and within any one (Cartledge 1998; cf. Davies 1998, Cahill in press: chapter 6). As for Athenian slavery, it did not exist in a single sphere but functioned variously in different contexts.
