I will endeavor to give you, in the briefest outline, a picture of the present state of research into the economic history of antiquity. As you may (by now) be aware, this is not a subject as far removed from topical interest as it would have appeared even a short time ago. Whether this fact should be credited more to our rapidly advancing knowledge of antiquity or rather to our even more rapidly changing appreciation of “price curbs” is a matter that, in fairness, should be left to the headlines of the newspapers.
Let me choose the following as the starting point for my report. Eighty-five years ago, Rodbertus-Jagetzow, the Prussian Junker socialist from whom Karl Marx learnt so much, published a series of essays on taxation in the Roman Empire. It is still the most suitable peg on which to hang a discussion of the economic problems of antiquity. For the clash of opinions to which that essaya gave rise introduced a long-drawn effort to see antiquity in its true character, undistorted by preconceptions that had made the high points of antiquity appear almost as a replica of the modern world. Eventually this seemingly simple and obvious requirement of critical thinking – not to interpret the past in terms of the present – involved no less than a revolution in our institutional concepts.
Accordingly I will firstly deal with the so-called oikos controversy – in which Carl Bücher on the one hand, Eduard Meyer on the other were prominent. What was the result of this prolonged clash of views, which Rostovtzeff still regarded as a live issue in 1941? Secondly, I will try to formulate the new and even broader issues, which are replacing the dissolving ones and range far back before the time of Greece and Rome, to the irrigational empires of the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia. Thirdly, I will endeavor to evaluate the overall results of recent research for an understanding of the past and, if possible, for a firmer grasp of the problems of the present.b
In fairness to the modernizers, it must be conceded that, on the fact of the oikos – the strictly self-sufficient household – both Rodbertus and Bücher were wrong, or at least they were guilty of crass exaggeration. The ancients, Rodbertus wrote, had no taxation system of the modern kind, because antiquity did not know different types of revenue such as are formed in markets differentiated into land, labor, and capital markets. Domestic and plantation slavery formed the foundation of a large, completely self-sufficient household, which he called the oikos. Land and labor power (the slave) were property of the owner, and raw materials were produced and productively consumed within the precincts of the household. This was the birth of the oikos theorem. Thirty years later Bücher took up the point of the allegedly self-sufficient oikos and generalized from it to the primitive character of the whole economic life of antiquity, which he likened more to that of savage society than to that of the modern world.
Now, as I indicated, the households of Roman plantation slavery were not self-sufficient; they carried on, as a rule, some kind of trade or other. Similarly mistaken was Bücher's picture of pre-literate communities. His primeval savage, allegedly engaged in a “lone search for food,” was a mere construction, which ignored all of the more recent finding of primitive economics.
This is, however, hardly to the point. In spite of inaccuracies, Rodbertus' oikos theorem implied a significant warning not to assume that economic activity and market activity were coterminous. And Bücher's call to consult social anthropology as a guide to classical antiquity has proved exceedingly fruitful. Though neither Rodbertus nor Bücher realized fully the implications of their position, it was their initiative that eventually led, in Max Weber's work, to a radical reformulation of the problem of capitalism in antiquity, and may lead us eventually to the solution of some of the riddles of Babylonian economy.
This brings us to the subject matter of the controversy. As early as 1893, Carl Bücher rejected the modernizing views implicit in the presentations of those great historians – Niebuhr, Grote, and Mommsen. With regard to political history, these scholars had taken a long step in the right direction, but they failed to do justice to the economic realities of antiquity. They broke with an age-long tradition of legendary historiography and at last presented Greek and Roman history as the story, not of gods or half-gods, but of human beings like ourselves, using terms of everyday life. But, inevitably, their own everyday surroundings were (as ours are) very different from those of ancient Rome – including in the description of our surroundings, factory town, stock exchange, colonial expansion, class struggles of employers and employees, conflict of capitalist and socialist ideologies. No wonder that the figure of Pasion the banker made them feel at home in fourth-century Athens and that Brutus' usurious loans (advanced to colonial governments) or the speculative boom worked up by equestrian corporation promoters reminded them of Law and the “Bubble,”c just as they still remind us of closer events. Similarly, the rise to power of a merchant and trader class at Athens and Rome, the revolt of plebeians, and other allegedly socialist and communist movements – all this appeared familiar in their eyes (as it still largely appears to us) and gave a modern tinge to ancient life.
This fin de siècle portrait of antiquity was in hopeless contradiction to Rodbertus' marketless and exchangeless oikos of slave barracks, and even more so to Bücher's primitivism, which tended to strip the ancient Mediterranean of its alluring modernity and to reduce it to the level of an African kraal, as Julius Beloch complained. While Eduard Meyer, in 1895, still reveled in the description of the teeming trade and commerce of the ancients, Bücher, starting from Babylonian banks and manufactures, insisted that at no time before the establishment of the modern western state was there anything in existence that deserved as much as the name of a national economy – the German Volkswirtschaft – in other words a complex territorial economy of any considerable extent.
This, indeed, was a head-on collision. The clash between modernizers and primitivists seemed at first to involve the whole realm of facts, as well as that of interpretation. True, on close analysis it emerged that it was more on the interpretation of the facts than on the facts themselves that they disagreed. But it was a long time before this was recognized, and an even longer time before the obstacles to some clarification were removed. This last step, I should perhaps say, has not yet been generally taken, and it will be one of my objects tonight to show how it can be successfully undertaken. Indeed, unless we are able to avoid inappropriate modernization with regard to ancient Greece and Rome, it appears hopeless to expect any real understanding of the much more remote problems of Babylonia, Sumer, Akkad, or Assyria.
Now, as to the facts of the controversy. Naturally, discussion at first centered around the numerical dimension of economic life, primarily in ancient Greece. What was the actual range and volume of Greek trade? How much of it consisted in manufactured articles produced for export? On what scale were Athenian factories run? How many slaves, how many free wage earners did they employ? What was the state of affairs with regard to credit, freight, and insurance facilities? What were the activities and business methods of an Athenian banking house? What was the state of commercial law? How intensive was the trade carried on between founding state and colony? What ideas underlay monetary policy and currency reform? What were the trade policies of Athens, and to what extent were her wars trade wars? How influential was the trading and commercial interest in shaping domestic and foreign policy? What was the precise socioeconomic content of the Solonian and Cleisthenian revolutions? And so on.
Much detailed knowledge was gained, yet the total result of the research was singularly inclusive. Roughly, the more was known about the facts, the more drastically were modernizing exaggerations reduced with regard to the scale of manufactures, the level of trading organization, the refinements of banking, the scope of private business enterprise, and so on. Eventually not only the facts, but also their interpretations were deflated. The enormous colonizing activity of the Greeks in the eighth and seventh centuries turned out not to have been inspired by trade interests, as Meyer and Beloch taught. The tyrants of the seventh and sixth centuries had not been plutocratic – super-employers, as Professor Ure argued. The stasis that rent Athens during the sixth century did not primarily arise from urban manufacturing sources, as Glotz and Toutain, Ferguson and Rostovtzeff held. The Solonian reforms and, for that matter, the Cleisthenian revolution were not gained by the pressure of a rising urban middle class allied to a nascent proletariat, as Pöhlmann believed. The foreign policy of Attica was not shaped to any noticeable extent by trade interests, as was almost generally thought by historians. Indeed, Attica through the whole course of her history continued to impose a flat 2 percent import and export duty on all wares, thus providing conclusive evidence of the absence of any industrial protectionism whatsoever. Incidentally, Rome did the same, and she made it 5 percent.
Yet, on the other hand, some hard facts made it impossible to accept the primitivists' victory and to grant them the trophy. There was the fact of Minoan world trade in the Mediterranean down to the middle of the second millennium; and, after a gap of a few centuries, that of Phoenician world trade, which some time about the eighth century was gradually replaced by Greek trade from the Azovian Lake to the Atlantic and from the Danube to the Nile. Also there was the equally undeniable fact of Athenian banking facilities, which were destined to exert a deep and lasting influence on the forms of economic life under Hellenism. There was thus certain proof not only of the existence of world trade, but also of Greek initiative in providing it with financial facilities. And could it be reasonably doubted that the world trade and banking of the seventh and fourth centuries, respectively, had been preceded by less advanced forms of trade and credit, thus attacking primitivism at its very foundation?
All in all, the outcome was disconcerting. While ancient society – its colonies, its wars, its classes – appeared anything but “modern,” trade and the use of money undeniably existed on a scale comparable to the beginnings of modern times.
The explanation was fairly simple. Both primitivists and their opponents failed to realize that to contrast “modernity” with “primitivism” in relation to human society meant to contrast the presence or absence not of trade or money, but of the market mechanism.
What makes a society “modern” in our eyes is nothing but the pervasive influence of market institutions – a supply–demand–price mechanism – on the total culture, and especially on the economic life of a community. Market institutions are inseparable from definite motivations and situations, techniques and culture traits of a marketing character. The distinctively modern traits of contemporary life such as speculation and advertisement, cut-throat competition and business lobbies are precisely the features that are connected with the effects and accessories of the market system. Thus the term “modern,” when applied to economic life, is not as vague and superficial as it might appear; it comprises a variety of traits that have their common root in the market organization of society.
This is, of course, wholly in accordance with what we should expect. For, in the last resort, the modern organization of production is a market organization; modern social classes are classes formed through incomes determined in specific markets; the modern social struggle is a struggle between economic classes – that is, groups the status of which is defined in market terms and the conflicts of which are conflicts about those terms. All this was, of course, implicit in Bücher's reference to the self-sufficient oikos, since absence of exchange and markets was precisely the criterion that Rodbertus had claimed for his oikos. Yet neither Rodbertus nor Bücher made their conclusion explicit – that, in arguing for the primitive character of ancient society, they argued for the absence of a market system and a market system only. Consequently they made the mistake of lumping trade, money and markets together under the total heading of exchange institutions, thus precluding all profitable institutional analysis. Instead of distinguishing trade – that is, the acquisition of goods from a distance – and the non-exchange uses of money, on the one hand, from markets on the other, they fused them in an institutional trinity. Consequently, where there was division of labor, there were trade, money, and markets. Incidentally, this semantic weakness made it almost impossible to ascertain the facts, especially the crucial presence or absence of organized markets, since it led to the delusion that, where money was met, trade could be assumed, and where trade was met, markets could be assumed.
Actually these assumptions were hangovers from modern conditions, reinforced by traditional concepts of exchange economics. It is remarkable that, in spite of their intellectual courage and methodological radicalism, Rodbertus and Bücher missed the decisive formulation that alone could ensure clarification. They failed to isolate the market as the source of modernity, and consequently failed to contrast market institutions with trade and money, which are relatively independent of the market mechanism. The trinity of trade–money–market is indeed a distinctive feature of our modern market system, where all trade is carried through markets, in other words by way of a supply–demand–price mechanism. With us, trade is carried through markets; and, with us, insofar as it is used in trade, money does function as a means of exchange. But in the ancient world the opposite was true. Trade was not carried primarily through markets, and money did not necessarily functions as a means of exchange.
Since clarity on this point is crucial for the understanding of antiquity, and indeed to a large extent of all economic history short of the last few centuries, I should like to add this. Trade may take – and largely took in the past – nonmarket forms such as gift trade, expeditionary trade, ceremonial trade, chartered trade, and other forms that are more a matter for the collectivity than for the individual as such. Similarly, the most widely spread uses of money objects, in other words of quantifiable objects, were those of (1) means of payment and (2) standard of value, the two functions not being necessarily performed by the same kind of object. Use of money (3) as a means of exchange is exceptional outside of institutionalized markets, which, as I said, should themselves be regarded as a specific development, the presence of which should not be taken for granted merely on account of the presence of trade or of the presence of non-exchange uses of money. In principle, therefore, an absence of markets is compatible with a relatively high degree of trading activities and various non-exchange uses of money, such as means of payment or standard of value. In brief, trade and money on the one hand, markets on the other, must be sharply distinguished.
In these terms the factual results of the oikos controversy no longer appear contradictory. There is no evidence that the world trade of the ancient Mediterranean or the banking that accompanied that trade was carried through a supply–demand–price mechanism. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that ancient Greek society and economic life do not strike us as “modern.”
At this point it will be noted that the very terms world trade and banking are singularly misleading. Not as if they were not appropriate – since there was banking, and the ends of the known world were involved in trade – but on account of the evolutionist fallacy, which goes with our modernizing perspectives. World trade in antiquity was not the culmination (as with us), but rather the starting point of foreign trade, and probably the only form of trade in neolithic times, just as ancient colonization has been shown to start, as a rule, with the colony that was farthest away, not with the nearest one – the intervening sites being occupied later on. Eduard Meyer gave, a long time ago, a list of analogies from the history of explorations, starting with those of pharaonic Egypt; circumnavigators of Africa, Vasco da Gama and Columbus in more modern times. In fairness to Columbus, he should not be blamed for never having reached his aim, the Indies, being unexpectedly held up halfway. Obviously, had he known before, he would have thought America much too close to his home port to be worthwhile.
With regard to banking, again, we tend to think of it as an advanced form of dealing with money and credit. Actually coins could not be used at all during that period – the fourth century bc – without the manual (and menial) occupation of testing and changing, which made the trapezoid. But not even Pasion the freedman ever got beyond safe keeping of deposits, payment on direct order to definite persons present on the spot, pawnbroking, and loans on noncommercial security. The crucial point, of course, is – again – that the economic life of antiquity was not worked through markets and therefore did not produce the credit instruments that are the raw material of modern banking. Roman banking was rather on a lower than on a higher level than Greek, and Ptolemaic banking developed in the direction of transactions in “kind” and not in money. Banking is therefore as misleading a criterion of “modernity” as world trade, when judging of the economy of the ancients. Here again, as in the trinity trade–money–markets, it was the modernizing remnant in the primitivists' own thinking, with its rigid evolutionism, that permitted modernizers to adduce ancient world trade and ancient banking as alleged proofs of the “modern” character of the ancient world.
We may conclude by saying that the debate started by Rodbertus and Buecher has – broadly – led to a vindication of their essential position, though only with the help of institutional insights that were still hidden from them. At the same time, it should be added, they entirely overlooked the fact that the highly significant beginnings of a market system in civilized society actually started during the later part of classical antiquity, approximately from the fourth century onwards. True, this market system developed within a primitive framework of a warrior-type society that fatally limited its capacity of expansion.
This takes us to the second part of this address, to the broader issues that seem to be taking the place of the controversy on “modernism.”
These results are, of course, in complete harmony with Max Weber's diagnosis of the sociological character of the Greek and Roman poleis as settlements of partially detribalized populations, the leading strata of which never ceased to be organized as a warriors' gild, and the democratization of which involved therefore the inclusion of all strata of the population, primarily the peasantry, in such a gild. Essentially itd was a predatory community, a group organized for war and conquest, raid and piracy, forcible colonization, naval power, exaction of tribute, exploitation of subjects, barbarian or otherwise. Both aristocratic leadership and equalitarian claims to the maintenance of citizens by the community formed part of that tribal heritage. We possess a document of the highest authority, which gives realistic details of the manner in which such a group can be organized for common maintenance through a common effort at domination. Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, the manuscript of which was recovered in 1891, gives an account of the procedure: after the victory over the Persians, he says – the date is 479 bc – the aristocracy was in high repute on account of its services at Salamis. Aristeides and Themistocles were leaders of the people and directors of policy. Aristeides founded the Delian League, of which Athens was the chief beneficiary. This was in 478 bc. Aristotle continues:e
After this, seeing the state growing in confidence and much wealth accumulated, he – Aristeides – advised the people to lay hold of the leadership of the league and to quit the country districts and settle in the city. He pointed out to them that all would be able to gain a living there, some by service in the army, others in the garrisons, others by taking part in public affairs; and in this way they would secure the leadership. This advice was taken, and when the people had assumed the supreme control they proceeded to treat their allies in a more imperious fashion, with the exception of the Chians, Lesbians and Samians. These they maintained to protect their empire, leaving their constitutions untouched, and allowing them to retain whatever dominion they then possessed. They also secured an ample maintenance for the mass of the population in the way which Aristeides had pointed out to them. Out of the proceeds of the tributes and the taxes and contribution of the allies, more than 20,000 persons were maintained [the total number of citizens of Attica is estimated at less than 50,000]. There were 6,000 jurymen, 1,600 bowmen, 1,200 knights, 500 members of the Council, 500 guards of the dockyards, besides 50 guards in the city. There were some 700 magistrates at home, and some 700 abroad. Further, when they subsequently went to war, there were in addition 2,500 heavily armed troops, 20 guards' ships [representing another 4,000 men], and other ships which collected the tributes, with crews amounting to 2,000 men selected by lot; and besides these there were the persons maintained at the Prytaneion, and orphans, and gaolers, since all these were supported by the state. This is how the population earned its livelihood.
A few decades later, the value of citizenship had reached a record height. Under Pericles, no one who could not boast of all his grandparents – male and female – having been born Athenian citizens could maintain his citizenship (and this in a minute city-state, the aristocracy of which was wont to intermarry with the princes and rulers of all Hellas). The genteel poverty that went with such a state of affairs is given away by the following passage from Plutarch's Cimon – Cimon was the son of Miltiades and himself a famous Athenian general, who was a most popular conservative leader in Pericles' time. Plutarch writes:
And since he [Cimon] was already wealthy, Cimon lavished the revenues from his campaign, which he was thought to have won with honor from the enemy, to his still greater honor, on his fellow-citizens. He took away the fences from his fields, that strangers and needy citizens might have in their power to take fearlessly of the fruits of the land; and every day he gave a dinner at his house – simple, it is true, but sufficient for many, to which any poor man who wished came in, and so received a maintenance which cost him no effort and left him free to devote himself solely to public affairs. (Plutarch, Cimon, 10)
Not exchange, but reciprocity and redistribution were the forms of integration that originally dominated the economic life of Attica. True, the reciprocity elements were greatly weakened with the loosening of the clan tie in the eighth/seventh century (with its blood feud, family rights in landed estate, inalienable property). Gift trade and the other, highly developed, gift and countergift systems common in the times of the epics were now fading out. But the redistributive forms of tribal life did not disappear in the same manner as reciprocating ones. The polis took over much of the redistributive inheritance of the tribe. The distribution of land (klēroi), of booty, of a lucky strike in the Laurion mines – similarly, of the gold mined on the isle of Syphnos; the claim to maintenance or to corn distribution in an emergency; the claim to participation in public displays or to payment for the performance of citizens' duties – all this is a very real tribute to the strength of the redistributive factor in classical communities. The basic economic organization of the polis was redistribution of the proceeds of common activity, share in booty and tribute, share in conquered land and in colonial ventures, in the advantages to be gained from third-party trade.
I wished to remind you of all this through reflection of Aristotle. Yet scholars of rank – such as, for example, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff – refused as much as to consider Aristotle's account of the organization of Athens, which he regarded as a skit on Aristeides and mob rule. I think that the time has come when authentic evidence should be given its due and even the most venerable grounds of prejudice should be discounted when they are contrary to plain fact.
And yet, with the fourth century bc, we part company with the primitivists. The great contribution of the Greeks to the economic life of antiquity consisted in the development of the market habit and private trading, although the relationship of the warriors' gild of Athens to the new world trade remained more parasitic than positively participant. The polis – and this is a dominating fact in the sociology of antiquity – had not only a free constitution but also a city market. The two together made the polis way of life. I'll go first to the market. The new development of the city market cannot be dated with any precision, but it is fair to assume that Solonan Attica was already familiar with the market, but that it was only after the fall of the tyrannyf (560 bc) that it fully developed.
One of the chief factors, I believe, was the rise, rule, and fall of tyranny itself. In support of this it might be said that the tyranny episode was almost as characteristic of the polis as the acceptance of the market habit itself.
It was, we believe, at this point that the market habit gained great public importance. The old primitive methods of organizing labor with the help of treasure and its political influence on tribal chieftains and manorial lords – these archaic methods of aspirants to tyranny – were no longer practicable. The public utility employers – and there were many – now had to procure their provisions from the agora, with their pay. In one field we have proof of this development: that of the army. In the second half of the Peloponnesian War, and even more definitely under Agesilaos in Asia Minor, the provisioning of the army is done from markets that the general has “provided,” “stocked,” “prepared” on his prospective route. The Greek soldier buys his own food and keeps himself on his own pay.
Only if no market is available is the commanding general expected to provide in some other way for supplies (through raiding parties or requisitioning, or through the provision of camp markets frequented by sutlers). This use of markets on the part of armies seems significant and indicative of the manner in which the whole question of feeding the personnel of the public services was henceforth met, namely the market way.
But, while the agora became part and parcel of the polis way of life, the rapidly developing private trade in foreign parts was never absorbed into the polis, at least not so far as Athens was concerned. (The earlier story of Corinth and the later one of Rhodes carry different features. Not these poleis – these two just as little as Sparta – not they but Athens became the prototype of the polis, which in its contrast with the oriental countryside, the chōra, became the nuclear problem of Hellenism.) For the warrior gild never gave in. Of the two types of traders known to men's early history, Athens knew only one. The man who belongs to the community, the merchant by status, the damkar of Sumeria and Babylonia, had not developed in early Athens, and in post-Peisistratidian Athens there was no room for him any more. The other type of merchant is the person who doesn't “belong”: the foreigner and stranger, the member of a trading people such as the Phoenicians or the Beduin (they are rare), or maybe a detached person, a DP, of which the world was full, the floating population of the time, someone who settled as a ger in Palestine, as a metic in Greece. This trader could gain honor and status by following his despised occupation. Mediterranean trade became Greek when it ceased to be Phoenician, but “Greek” in this sense did not mean Athenian or Spartan: it did not mean that itj had become a civic occupation, an acceptable profession for a politēs.
From the intimately civic and internalized position of the agora on the one hand and the utterly external relationship of the polis to foreign trade on the other, the essential structure of the polis can be deduced. Athens never became the home of proud merchant burgesses, and the hundred of agorai that came to birth in imitation of the one in Athens never penetrated an inch into the chōra. The politico-sociological framework of the agora precluded that. It was an organization of citizens. The polis never overcame this constitutional limitation. If eventually the market system of the Hellenistic world failed and the Roman Empire, in its sudden expansion, could not adapt that system so as to cope with the tasks of integrating a world empire, this was in the last resort due to that limitation. (Something faintly analogous might have already happened once before, to take up an idea of Heichelheim's: neolithic markets, which definitely existed, did not continue to develop in the irrigational empires of the bronze age city-states, or certainly not at anything like a rate comparable to that of the growth of economic activity in this amazing outburst of civilizing forces.)
Here lies the new, decisive problem of ancient history. The recognition that not Babylonia but Greece was the birthplace of market methods shifts the problem of market and nonmarket forms of integration of economic activities in more than one way. These nonmarket methods are based on reciprocity and redistribution – together we will briefly call them planning. The relation of market elements and economic planning appears in a new light. Our ability to give an adequate description of the economies of Babylonia will be the test. Not so much Egypt is in the foreground as Mesopotamia; for it was in Mesopotamia that the eclipse of the market took place while economic activity increased enormously – an activity that included trade and the use of money, as well as – widely – business transactions. It is here that the new conceptual tools will be tested. To keep to the instance of money: How is money as a standard of value possible, and also as a means of payment, while in the absence of markets it is hardly used in the domestic economy as a means of exchange? These and similar questions require an answer…
In early Babylonia, that is, under the first Babylonian dynasty, silver functioned as a standard of value, while in the decisive sector of the economy the temple accounts were carried in the units of the means of payment, which was barley. Barley was, in effect, the only means of payment with regard to taxes, rent, wages, and so on.
What did the equations mean, by which the laws proclaimed definite amounts of goods to be equal to one shekel of silver? What was the purpose of the striking stability of the equation level over long periods of time? And what was the purpose of formal stability in those cases – not rare – when the actual standard of measurement was altered in order to keep the equation stable? (Incidentally, what was the operational device used to achieve this without disrupting the metrological system?)k
Such and similar questions will need more knowledge than we possess as yet for a satisfactory answer. But so much may be already said without prejudging the limits of our ignorance: the traditional picture of a world gradually moving toward the consummation of a market economy is inadequate for a grasp of the past. Market elements have been with us again and again, and, when a sudden expansion of the territory to be integrated made the market organization fail, nonmarket elements came to the fore. The study of the manner in which market and nonmarket elements are jig-sawed in the various periods of history is of the greatest interest and importance – importance also for the present and the immediate future, in which roughly similar problems are again set to us. The study of ancient history may prove to be one of the most urgently needed toolboxes for the conceptual mastery of the problems of everyday life.