The Beggar and the Clod: The Mythic Notion of Property in Ancient Greece

This paper calls attention to the need to think about Greek property based on the evidence available. While scholars note the absence of relevant legal or economic sources, I argue that certain mythic texts reveal important aspects of the ideology of property and, specifically, that property relations tended to be understood in terms of exchange relations. Being an owner meant engaging in certain kinds of exchange, and abstaining from other kinds of exchange. The myths that I consider here reveal this notion by suggesting that property is destabilized when property owners conduct exchange in the wrong way.