ABSTRACT
The shortage of agricultural commodities and raw materials perforce gave Greek trade an ever increasing importance. It was absolutely necessary to collect products on the distant markets on which they abounded, and to distribute them among the cities with a growing population in which they were lacking. Plato himself, the declared enemy of trade, well defined the social usefulness of the trader when he called him the agent who ensures the regular and measured distribution of the wealth produced by nature without measure or regularity. Aristotle recognized equally that it is impossible for a country to remain in isolation, without selling or buying, importing or exporting. It is true that the theorists understood the legitimacy of exchanges in their own way. They would have been glad to bring back the days in which each sold the surplus of his production direct, and transactions were confined to natural products. But the people, especially in the democratic cities, was ignorant of doctrines which it would have regarded as crazy. Life laughed at systems. Trade assumed a grand development in Athens and the Peirseeus.
