Recent decades have witnessed a watershed in works published on the ancient Greek economy and in advances in our knowledge of the subject. Yet, this concise book makes a valuable contribution. The main reason for this: E.’s work lies at the intersection of economic, social and political history, bringing together political theory, political sociology, strategy and international relations theory; by doing so, it provides an explanatory model not just of why the ancient Athenian economy was neither primitive nor embedded but also for the institutions that led Athens beyond its agrarian roots to dynamic growth.
E. makes his standpoint clear from the beginning: it is through the lens of an economic historian, using economic analysis concepts and focusing mainly on institutional theory, that the economic facts of ancient Athens will be interpreted. Certainly, E. goes beyond M. Finley’s ‘orthodoxy’, established in the middle decades of the twentieth century, of a primitive Athenian economy, according to which the Greeks, when making decisions in economic matters, were bound by criteria, such as politics, family etc. Additionally, E. ventures deeper than the substantivists vs formalists debate, i.e. the opposition between those advocating that all economic activity in ancient Greece was resulting from and was embedded in other spheres of activity, especially politics and religion, and did not function as an independent process of social action and the supporters of the view that the basic behavioural rules of modern economics applied in classical antiquity, i.e. utility maximisation and pursuit of self-interest.
Instead, the research design is clearly mapped out: on the one hand E. expands on earlier scholarship, most notably D.C. North (Structure and Change in Economic History [1981]), for linking growth to institutions, B. Manville and J. Ober (A Company of Citizens [2003]) and J. Ober (Democracy and Knowledge. Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens [2008]), for linking economic success to social networking and dissemination of ideas and knowledge that was taking place in the Athenian Agora and the polis, and A. Bresson (The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States [2016]), for the positive evaluation of the economic capacity of ancient Greece. On the other hand E. employs a methodology delineated in New Institutional Economics (NIE) interpretative tools and concepts: this approach measures economic performance by linking growth to institutions that limit uncertainty and reduce transaction costs.
It is true that the NIE approach is a well-trodden path. Over the last two decades the NIE methodological approach has inspired not only economists, notably T. Amemiya (Economy and Economics in Ancient Greece [2007]) and C.H. Lyttkens (Economic Analysis of Institutional Change in Ancient Greece: Politics, Taxation and Rational Behaviour [2013]), but also political scientists and classicists such as J.G. Manning (The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome [2018]), J.G. Manning and I. Morris ([edd.], The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models [2005]), A. Bresson (‘Capitalism and the Ancient Greek Economy’, in: L. Neal, J.G. Williamson [edd.], The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848, Vol. 1 [2014]), J. Ober (‘Wealthy Hellas’, TAPA 140 [2010]; The Greeks and the Rational. The Discovery of Practical Reason [2022]), E. Mackil (Creating a Common Polity: Religion, Economy, and Politics in the Making of the Greek Koinon [2013]); D.M. Lewis (‘Behavioural Economics and Economic Behaviour in Classical Athens’, in: M. Canevaro, A. Erskine, B. Grey, J. Ober [edd.], Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science [2018]), B. O’Halloran (The Political Economy of Classical Athens: A Naval Perspective [2019]); F. Carugati (Creating a Constitution: Law, Democracy, and Growth in Ancient Athens [2019]). E. successfully mediates among these three spheres: economists, social scientists and Classicists, who all dismiss the claim that the Athenian elite impeded financial growth and rightly emphasise that the efficiency of institutions, the reduction of transaction costs and rational decision-making are to be taken into account in explaining the financial growth of classical Greece.
The book places a focus on the intertemporal characteristics of the ancient Greek economy: the written contract described by Plato in The Laws, the incident of cargo ship insurance narrated by Demosthenes, the legal securing of lenders against a breach of loan repayment terms are superb case studies for fleshing out the timeless aspects of Athenian economic institutions. E. profits from such an approach to disconnect from specific ideological and methodological dogmas. Along these lines E. categorically states that the Athenian economy was not a capitalist one and consciously seeks to avoid historical anachronism.
References and analogies to early modern and contemporary cases are chosen carefully and help enhance the understanding of classical Athens’ successful economic performance. They demonstrate that its economy can serve as an interpretative model for understanding modern-day economic realities. The carefully chosen parallels add a touch of modernism, deepen the argument and enrich the perspective. So, to illuminate the high degree of dissemination of ideas across the Athenian Agora, E. draws on the diffusion of technical knowledge in Silicon Valley and on the Boston Route 128 corridor in the 1990s. J.M. Keynes’s model and F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, in E.’s book, develop a new perspective for analysing Athens’ expansive programme.
I will focus the final part of my assessment of E.’s book on the issue of bronze coinage. While Athenian economy and society are described as innovative, there is a dark spot: the Athenians were notoriously reluctant to issue bronze coinage. Part of the success and impressive growth rates of the Athenian economy can be attributed to the hard currency that the Athenian tetradrachm represented. Silver fractions supported the entire denominational system of Athens. The coins illustrated in Chapter 7 should be correctly described as silver (and not bronze). The proposal made by the poet and rhetor Dionysios in the middle of the fifth century to issue bronzes was dismissed, and he himself was nicknamed pejoratively ‘ho chalkous’. In the 430s bronze coinage of the island of Salamis began, and it circulated widely in Attica during the fourth century bce. The subaerate (silver-plated coins) issued in 406/5 bce were struck in place of silver in a time of financial crisis, and there is evidence that the Athenians had decreed this by vote. These coins were scornfully commented on by Aristophanes as ‘cunning bronzes’. In the late 360s, during the siege of Olynthus and under pressure from a shortage of funds, the general Timotheus issued bronze pieces intended for transactions between the soldiers and the accompanying market. Both these last episodes of bronze striking were ad-hoc answers to pressing needs. In addition to Salamis, another case of bronze coinage appeared within the confines of Attica bearing the legend ΕΛΕΥΣΙ probably for the market of the Eleusinian mysteries. Along with the ‘Salamis bronze coinage’, these two bronze coinages prove that the merits of fiat money were acknowledged in the meantime. Finally, in the mid-330s Athens issued bronze in the city’s name for the first time, and this first issue is among the most prolific Athens ever produced. The introduction of bronze coinage should be seen against the backdrop of Lycurgus’ efficient economic policy to raise revenue and, at the same time, to spend it on public works, the two poles of an expansionary fiscal programme that proved beneficial for the Athenians and led to the economy’s impressive rise. Rightfully, E. views coinage through the lens of NIE as an institution and links its origins to transaction cost reduction in trade and other economic transactions. There can be little doubt that the Athenian fiduciary coinage was one of the additional key factors that triggered state-sponsored economic growth.
The book is equally appealing to beginners and specialists, as it is a useful handbook that synthesises decades of scholarly research and, at the same time, contributes fruitfully to the ongoing scholarly debate on the economy of classical Greece. While positioning itself at the intersection of Classics, political science and economics, when coming to the twentieth-century controversy on ancient economy, the book stakes out a nuanced middle position: Athens was neither a proto-capitalist market economy nor a simple household-subsistence society, but something distinctly its own, shaped by participatory democracy, maritime power, efficient institutions, rational choice-making and civic intranets.
