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Reviewed by:
  • The Economy of the Greek Cities from the Archaic Period to the Early Roman Empire
  • Nino Luraghi
The Economy of the Greek Cities from the Archaic Period to the Early Roman Empire. By Léopold Migeotte (trans. Janet Lloyd) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009) 200 pp. $50.00 cloth $19.95 paper

With their uncompromising insistence on the lack of adequate quantitative data for the ancient economy, the works of Finley have been instrumental in dissuading nearly an entire generation of scholars from devoting much attention to Greek economy.1 As a result, Greek historians have mostly lost touch with the development of economic history during the last twenty years or so, and only recently have some scholars started working to fill this gap. The book under review is not really part of such an enterprise. Written in a clear and accessible way, Migeotte’s book is a concise, highly competent, and traditional survey of the main aspects of the Greek economy, from production to trade and taxation, devoting a good deal of attention to how the Greeks conceptualized what we call their economy.

Apart from brief references to the debates between primitivists and modernists and to the controversy surrounding the origins of coinage, the book generally eschews scholarly controversies, preferring to focus on ancient evidence, abundantly referenced. A minimal selection of ancient sources in translation is appended to each chapter. The chapters that comprise the core of the book—those dealing with agriculture, crafts, and trade—are synchronic on the whole; diachronic developments are addressed within each chapter. Migeotte tends to stress continuity over discontinuity. Instead of portraying the archaic economy, the classical economy, and the Hellenistic economy as distinct systems, as most other scholars do, he describes the economic world of the polis in broad, uniform terms. He returns to the problem of development over time in the conclusion, but he is skeptical that the concept of economic growth has any application to the Greek economy.

The book’s main strength lies in its clarity of structure and exposition and in its masterful control of the evidence. Readers unfamiliar with the economic world of the Greek polis will find it a reliable introduction. [End Page 633] In some ways, however, the book is less user-friendly than it could have been. It has no guide to further reading, only a fairly long list of titles that functions as a bibliography. Since the book has no footnotes and its references to modern scholarship are often allusive, it can offer little help to non-specialists who are interested in locating more detailed treatments of its various themes or in gaining more information about the few ancient texts that it presents without any introduction or explanation. These are serious drawbacks that should have been avoided in a book intended primarily for general readers.

Nino Luraghi
Princeton University

Footnotes

1. See, especially, Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (London, 1972).

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