The Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Greek Economy
Edited by Sitta von Redenl
ISBN: 978-1108404846
Cambridge University Press (2022) - £29.99
The study of the ancient Greek economy occupies an unusual place in modern scholarship. The Greeks, for example, did not record data which are central to modern economics. Indeed, there is a general lack of evidence that can be utilized for the study of the ancient Greek economy, with most of what we have, particularly for the Classical period, coming from Athens, which could easily lead scholars to make generalizing Athenocentric conclusions about the entirety of the Greek world. The Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Greek Economy, edited by Sitta von Reden, seeks to address these issues, offering, according to the back cover, a “comprehensive introduction to the ancient Greek economy”.
The book is certainly comprehensive, with 27 chapters, each by a specialist in ancient economics or related fields, coveringtopic. As von Reden notes in the introduction, the study of the ancient Greek economy is a “contested field, both in terms of its nature and the methodologies applied to its research” (p. 3). As such, the many contributors to this volume fall along different points of the academic spectrum, offering differing views to the study of the ancient Greek economy. Moreover, in most cases, my concerns about a lack of evidence and Athenocentrism were allayed, and several chapters directly confront the lack of evidence. Emily Mackill, for example, when discussing the evidence for economic growth, writes “the limited nature of our evidence dictates a necessarily scattershot approach” (p. 363), which is inherently unreliable, only providing snapshots, both geographically and temporally, for the nature of the ancient Greek economy. To account for this lack of evidence, the contributors adopted different methodologies and models to extrapolate potential trends, but, as von Reden notes, these methodologies “are by no means uncontroversial” (p. 10). This admitted limitation helps remind the reader that any conclusions reached are hardly definitive, and often hypothetical. As for the trap of Athenocentrism, there is a considerable effort in most chapters to incorporate evidence from beyond Athens, which Daniel Jew calls “unrepresentative and exceptional” (p. 204). The chapters offering different regional perspectives were particularly illuminating, especially Zosia H. Archibald's chapter ‘Northern Greece and the Black Sea’, being full of small, interesting details, such as the practice of along the Hellespont selling fishing rights to competing associations.
