The Economy of the Greek Cities: From the Archaic Period to the Early Roman Empire

4. Trade

four Trade 117 Over the centuries trade made great progress within cities and, above all, between them. Of course development was neither regular nor uniform, and it took place alongside the expansion of agriculture and craft industries. But it was the development of what was truly commerce, effected by the use of money, that fueled change and most clearly distinguished between some cities and others. It is not possible to estimate the volume of trade in the Greek economy. The number of professional traders was certainly far lower than that of people engaged in agriculture. Peasants, however, and craftsmen in particular, acted as salesmen for their own products, so that, in one way or another, trade involved many people. Trading transactions left their mark upon many literary, epigraphical, and archaeological sources, in a very uneven fashion, of course, depending on sectors and regions, but sometimes in such a way as to shed light on the details of certain activities. So much will become clear from the diversity of the problems tackled below, even if they are presented in a general fashion. A study of them raises a number of fundamental questions that have been at the heart of numerous debates. TRADING CONDITIONS Constraints Throughout antiquity, the development of trade was to a certain extent restricted by such impediments as the multiplicity of frontiers, the risks of warfare, piracy, banditry, and plunder (pp. 24–27 and 36–37), and also by the efforts to achieve self-suf- ficiency persistent in the agriculture and craft-industry sectors. (See above, pp. 85–86 and 93–95.) Besides, trade always has depended upon demand, just like the products of craftsmen. In the ancient Greek world, information took time to circulate, especially over great distances, and was in general a matter of personal contacts. Finally, despite all the progress achieved over the centuries, the slow pace of transport always handicapped the movement of both people and merchandise and added greatly to the costs of commercial transactions. Overland transport, using beasts of burden or wagons, was generally limited to local trading over short distances, to transfer agricultural products from the fields to the granaries and cellars and from there to the marketplaces, for example, or to convey craft products, blocks of stone from quarries or wood felled in the forests, to local towns or ports. Beasts of burden and wagons could cover little more than fifteen or twenty kilometers a day. Many roads were no more than tracks, hard to negotiate in bad weather but viable (and more appropriate) for beasts of burden. For carts, some networks of paved roads existed, with 118 / Trade relay posts along the way, at least in the more developed regions and those that made the most of the efforts of the Persian kings and the Hellenistic sovereigns. To these the Romans later added long, solidly constructed roads. Of course, their purpose was initially strategic (they were used for the conveyance of correspondence and the movements of troops, magistrates, and diplomats), but they also facilitated trade. Since they were much used and were patrolled, they offered more security against banditry. Few rivers were navigable, but merchants took to the sea whenever they could. Transport ships, which the Greeks described as round, to distinguish them from their narrow triremes, navigated mostly with sails. They were thus dependent on the winds, which were often capricious. From spring to autumn, navigation was relatively safe, despite the violence of the winds from the north that blew in the Aegean during the summer. In winter it was interrupted or slowed by the shortness of daylight, bad weather, squalls, and storms. Certain currents and reefs had to be avoided. But as generation after generation gathered more experience, routes became familiar, described in many works (known as periploi) and sometimes indicated on maps and books of seaports. Travel by sea was usually undertaken by daylight, when one could see or calculate one’s position , but sometimes ships sailed at night and steered by the stars. Rather than sail over open water, ancient navigators preferred coasting, with ships putting in at a series of ports where merchandise was bought and sold on a daily basis. The larger ports were equipped with depots that stored goods from many different places, which could be redistributed from there. The capacity of transport vessels varied, but over the centuries it increased. To judge by the wrecks that have been found, in...