ABSTRACT
Standard textbooks on economics define their subject as the study of the organization of production and the exchange of goods and services. Recent work on the ancient Greek economy has however tended to concentrate exclusively on exchange. For instance, Paul Millett’s Lending and Borrowing examines the role of lending, Edward Cohen’s Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective looks primarily at credit, maritime loans, and banking, Alain Bresson’s La cité marchande focuses mostly on trade between poleis and Sitta von Reden’s book, as the title indicates, studies only Exchange in Ancient Greece. And Morris (1994a) in his rather selective ‘survey’ of recent work has nothing to say about production.1 This emphasis on credit and exchange has left us with an incomplete view of the economy by neglecting the organization of production and its influence on the nature of the economy. There have been several good studies of agriculture and food-production – one thinks of the fine works of Hanson (1995) and Amouretti (1986) – but there has been less work on the nonagricultural sector. Another trend in recent work is the tendency to analyse different modes of exchange solely in relation to social and political factors. Millett attempts to explain lending in terms of the ethic of reciprocity implicit in philia (friendship), and von Reden analyses exchange in relation to the development of the polis. This approach was inspired by the work of Hasebroek and Finley, who stressed the importance of social and political factors in the allocation of resources in the ancient world.
