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Money and the Market 113 The classical agora of Athens, as traced by its public buildings, seems first to have developed in the course of the sixth century, either simultaneously with the first Athenian coins or shortly thereafter.6 It may well have been the result of city planning: although the impressive buildings were later constructions , the agora from the beginning seems to have been laid out over the same general area and with the same general plan that later defined it.7 The place in which Athenians had previously congregated was hardly remembered by the Athenians and has not been securely identified to this day.8 The agora grew up in the Kerameikos, the potters’ quarter, and excavations have found evidence of potters’ waste from as far back as 1000 B .C.E ., but there are no other signs of commercial or industrial activity before the growth of the agora itself.9 By the middle of the sixth century, the activity of potters and painters seems to have increased almost tenfold,10 and as the sixth century progressed, the agora seems to have become a true commercial center, without ever losing its position as the chief gathering place for citizens.11 By the middle of the fourth century, one could buy there figs, marshals of the court, grape bunches, turnips, pears, apples, witnesses , roses, medlars, haggis, honeycombs, chickpeas, lawsuits, beestings , curds, myrtle, allotment machines, blue cloth, lambs, water clocks, laws, indictments.12 Not everything that went on in the agora was an innovation. We must distinguish between crafts and trade. Long before the sixth century, the production of pottery was in the hands of professional craftsmen. The pres6 . Schaps, “Monetization of the Marketplace.” Miller (224 n. 4) doubts that the agora has any connection at all with the Peisistratids; he thinks it is earlier, a product of the early sixth century. 7. Von Steuben, 33–37. 8. Thompson and Wycherley, 19. For the archaic agora, the most impassioned advocate was Oikonomides. Miller (214) brings strong and perhaps conclusive arguments for locating it on the north slope of the Acropolis, as suggested earlier by Robertson (157–68). 9. Thompson and Wycherley, 170–71. 10. See Webster, Potter and Patron, 1–3. 11. Aristotle disliked this and thought that there should be a second agora, untainted by commercialism. He recommended “what is called a free market, as is the custom of Thessaly” (Arist. Pol. VII 12.4–6 [1331a 30–b 4]). 12. Eubulus, PCG fr. 74, quoted in Athenaeus XIV 640b–c. Eubulus is musing on the location of the law courts and all the public buildings in the agora near the market stalls. It has been suggested that two characters are speaking here, with one delivering the “straight” lines (“figs . . . grape bunches, turnips, pears, apples . . .”) while the other interpolates (“marshals of the court . . . witnesses . . . lawsuits . . .”): see PCG, ad loc. 114 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece ence of a blacksmith among the gods suggests, as we should have presumed on our own, that ironwork, too, was a specialized profession. The same conclusion might be drawn from Achilles’ boast that the dependents of the man who won his iron shot “will not go into town, but rather this [the shot] will supply him.”13 It need not, perhaps, be the case that these crafts were the only means of support for those who practiced them; it is possible that potters and blacksmiths were merely peasants who had a special skill, and whatever profits they derived may have been a matter of gravy rather than bread and butter. The straightforward understanding of Achilles’ words, however, seems to point in the other direction: that the usual procedure for a peasant who was “in need of iron” was to go into town, where he would find the blacksmith in a particular place.14 Hesiod, indeed, knows the smithy and warns against wasting too much time there.15 Iron forging is a particularly difficult craft to move, requiring as it does heavy equipment (anvil, bellows, and a heavy hammer), and it would not be surprising if blacksmiths were among the first to ply their trade in a fixed place, where their customers sought them out, although Achilles’ boast also suggests that if the iron were available, forging itself might be done with local talent.16 The existence of a potters’ quarter before the agora suggests that pottery, too, was an urban craft, whose practitioners could live in town without having to tend...

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