WHATEVER, may be the dates of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hesiodic poems, these works all depict one same society, whose economic organization is marked by special features of its own. It is not easy to indicate the beginning of the period in which this society lived or to determine the circumstances in which it succeeded the society of the Ægean age, but it is at least certain that it is earlier than either the settlement of the Dorians in the Peloponnese or the expansion of the Greeks over the Mediterranean. Achæans still occupy the valleys of the Eurotas, Pamisos, and Alpheios, the mountains of Arcadia, the plains of Elis, and the peninsulas of Argolis. Crete, Rhodes, and some islands of the southern Ægean—Nisyros, Carpathos, Cos—have come into the Hellenic domain,1 but the peoples dwelling in Thrace and on the western coasts of Asia Minor are included in the Iliad among the allies of the Trojans.2 In the Odyssey, Alcinoos tells Odysseus that Eubœa is the furthest of the lands known to the Phæacians.3 It is true that Hesiod, in his Works and Days, relates that his father, after vainly seeking his fortune at Cyme in Æolis, took ship and settled in the small Bœotian town of Ascra.4 Even if we admit that the so-called Æolian colonization had by that time reached the coast of Asia Minor, we know that, according to Greek tradition, that settlement was earlier than the great movement of the Ionians.5 As for the countries of the West, Trinacria, that is Sicily, was still unknown to Greek mariners, and they regarded Italy as the abode of divine beings like Circe. Homeric and Hesiodic society, then, had for its geographical setting Greece Proper, and for its chronological setting the period extending from the end of the Ægean age to the great migrations by land and sea which gave the Hellenic world its final shape, constitution, and extent.
In the economic life of this society, the growing of the fruits of the soil held a very important place. Every greal estate includes cornfields and vineyards. Corn and vines are frequently mentioned as the chief kind of agricultural wealth. The corn grown is wheat, barley, and millet. No banquet is compiece without wine, and no religious ceremony without a libation of wine. In his description of the shield of Achilles, the poet of the Iliad represents the harvest and the vintage, as typical of the work of the fields.
" And he made thereon a rich domain " (of a king). " There were reapers mowing, with sharp sickles in their hands, and along the swathes the sheaves fell thickly to the ground....
" And he made a vineyard, full of grapes, fair and golden. There were black bunches hanging, and it was set all over with vine-poles.... And merry lads and maidens bore the honey-sweet fruit in plaited baskets."1
On leaving Ithaca for Pylos and Sparta, Telemachos takes as provisions for the voyage twelve jars of wine and twenty measures of the purest flour in well-sewn skins.2 On the shield of Heracles, as on that of Achilles, harvesters and wine-gatherers personify rural life.3 In the Works and Days, the growing of corn and wine takes the first place.
Orchards and gardens are rich in fruit and vegetables. The olive, pear, apple, fig, and orange are the trees mentioned most often. They abound on the estates of Alcinoos and Odysseus.
With agriculture, stock-breeding is one of the chief sources of wealth. Bulls, oxen, cows, and heifers, rams, ewes, and lambs, goats and kids, horses, mares, foals, and mules, hogs and sows, fill stables and byres or gambol in meadows, at the bottom of fertile valleys, on the slopes of untilled hills, and even in the undergrowth of forests. Some furnish man with their flesh for food and their hides or wool for clothing; others give him their milk as well; others lend him their strength, to draw chariots and carry loads. Swarms of bees produce honey and wax for him. Of poultry, only geese are mentioned.
Between or around the fields and pastures stretch vast forests. They contain oaks, pines, firs, poplars, alders, and beeches, and sometimes also laurels, cedars, and cypresses. Along the watercourses, willows and osier-beds appear.
There game is plentiful, and hunting is one of the chief pleasures of men. They hunt deer (stags, roes, fawns), wildgoat, boar, and hare. They also come upon wolves and bears, and even lions. In the air, thev try to hit thrushes and doves.
Fishing is done with the net or with the hook.
The technical methods of agriculture and stock-breeding were already fairly developed, and an equipment existed, still very simple, but adequate.
To meet the exhaustion of the soil, it was allowed to lie fallow every other year, each piece of land being divided into two breaks, one of which rested while the other was sown.1
Corn-growing required two ploughings, and perhaps three, the third being done after the sowing, to bury the seed. The furrows were cut straight, with a plough made all of wood, usually drawn by two oxen, or sometimes two mules, which the ploughman urged on with a goad. After the ploughing which followed the sowing, the ground was gone over with the mattock, to cover any seed which the plough might have left on the surface. The bigger clods were broken up with a beetle.1
The harvesters used the sickle. When mown, the ears were collected in sheaves, and these were carried away on carts, probably like that described by Hesiod, a sort of waggon consisting of wide, low body on two wheels. The corn was threshed on a round threshing-floor, well exposed to the wind. Oxen and mules went round the floor, trampling on the sheaves. The straw was lifted frequently, that no ear might escape the treading of the beasts. Beating was also done with the flail. When the grain was collected it was put in jars, and then shut up in the barn.2 Flour was ground either with a pestle and mortar or with a quern, and was stored in skin bags.
Vine-growers sometimes—if not always—trained the branches on props, so that the grapes did not lie on the ground, but hung from the shoots at some height. The chief operations of vine-growing were the pruning, the second dressing, and the vintage. The grapes were gathered in baskets, and then left exposed to the air for fifteen days, first ten days in the sun and then five in the shade. Then came the treading and the vatting. From the vat the wine was poured into jars, where it was kept.3
Fruit-growing and vegetable-gardening were practised in an equally intelligent fashion. In the orchards, the soil at the foot of the trees was turned up. Irrigation provided the gardens with the water which they needed. The use of manure seems to have been known.
Livestock was raised chiefly on natural prairies and uncultivated land, and beasts were also led into the forests. It is not impossible that artificial meadows existed, kept green and fertile by irrigation. These doubtless provided fodder and bedding, which were stored in the barns as soon as the harvest was in.4 During the good weather the flocks and herds remained out-of-doors, but when winter came they were taken to the byres, which were an indispensable appendage of the farms in a society in which livestock was one of the chief forms of wealth. On the estate of Odysseus, there were twelve pigsties round the house of Eumæos.1 The farms possessed dairies for milk and cheese. The author of the Odyssey stocks the cave of Polyphemos with all the material needed—pots, pails, tubs of whey, and crates laden with cheeses.2
The axe, the saw, and the wedge served for dealing with the trees of the forest. The hunter's weapons were the boar-spear and the long spear. Game, furred or feathered, was also taken in the net, and hounds were used for starting hares and attacking boars and other savage beasts.
Who supplied the labour for all these operations? There is no doubt that the owners of estates, large and small, worked their land themselves when necessary, or were at least able to guide a plough and handle spade, sickle, and scythe. Old Laërtes works in his garden and tends the trees of his orchard. Odysseus challenges the suitor Eurymachos as follows:
" If we should vie, which of us could do the more work in the grass, in the spring season, when the days are long, I should have my well-curved sickle and you would have the like, and we should mow without eating till the dusk, so long as there was any grass. And if we had oxen to drive, big, fair, and well-fed, equal in age and strength and of the same size, and a field of the same size and kind to plough, you would see whether I could drive a straight furrow!"3
When Odysseus utters this challenge he is, no doubt, disguised as a beggar; but would he utter it if he were not really able to stand the test as a reaper and as a ploughman? In any case, Eurymachos, to whom the challenge is addressed, is a landowner. In the Works and Days, the poet is speaking to the owner of a small farm, who toils in person on his fields, among his vines, and in his barn and byre.
But the work of the master alone was not sufficient for the exploitation of the soil. Many men were needed on the big estates. Some of these, at least, were slaves, men and women (
). But there were also agricultural labourers of free condition, thetes, who were taken on for special work—harvest, vintage, olive-picking—or for stated periods, short or long. Hesiod advises his brother Perses to engage a thes to look after his barn when the harvest has been ingathered.1
As a rule, the beasts were entrusted to the keeping of slaves. Might one not, however, infer from the story of Polyphemos that the owner of a herd or flock sometimes led it to the pasture himself? True, it may be objected that Polyphemos is not a typical member of Greek society, but surely the poet has invested the imaginary world of the Cyclopes with habits taken from the society in which he himself lived.
What was the true character of rural landed property, and how was it organized? The answer to these two questions would be very simple if it was enough to look for it in the Homeric poems and Hesiod. But—and here lies the great disadvantage of rash hypotheses—we have first to clear the ground of certain theories which complicate the problem which we have to settle. On the ground that " collective ownership of the soil is the natural form of ownership among primitive peoples,"2 many scholars, especially jurists, have endeavoured to prove that the Homeric Greeks, while acquainted with individual ownership of land, also practised the collective ownership of arable lana, alnl even that this latter was the normal, common form of ownership among them. It appears to me that this reasoning contains a serious error of method and a no less serious error of fact.
First, for the error of method. Because in some primitive peoples ownership of the soil has been collective, that is no reason why the same system should have existed uniformly in all primitive peoples. Those who make this conclusion forget that the character of land-ownership cannot be independent of the nature of the soil, nor of the climate. It is stated, for example, that the organization of agrarian property in the Russia of the nineteenth century can and should help us to determine the svstem upon which such property was organized among the Greeks of Homeric and Hesiodic times. Or, again, we are confronted, for the same purpose, with the evidence which Tacitus gives us about ownership among the Germans. This is making very light of the essential differences which exist between regions like the vast plains of Russia and Northern Germany and the peninsulas and islands of Greece. There you have boundless open spaces, here, small compartments; there, an unending plain without any natural limit, here, territories bounded by mountains or the sea; there, a continental climate of hard winters and sometimes torrid summers, here, a maritime climate of temperate heat and cold. It seems to me impossible that the system of ownership should not reflect these contrasts in physical conditions. In any case, a method which would, in such a matter, draw conclusions from one country to another is in my opinion thoroughly dangerous. As Monsieur P. Guiraud has said with his usual vigour and clarity: "It is useless to say that this " (the system of collective ownership among primitive peoples) " is a general law of mankind. A law is true only if it agrees with the facts, and with the facts the last word must lie."1
Then there is the error of fact. The Greek people, as painted in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, was not a primitive people. We cannot accept the opinion which Esmein expresses in these terms: " The customs to be observed in the Iliad and in the Odyssey have the clear-cut character of primitive customs."2 The discoveries which have been made, since the day when those lines were written, in Argolis, in Crete, in Bœotia, in the Troad, and in the islands of the Ægean have proved that Homeric society was anything but a primitive society. " From the mixture of Cretan and Hellenic elements the Mycenæan civilization was formed. It carried on the Cretan civilization, but it must have been less brilliant, because the whole of Greece was still upset by the invasion and by incessant wars."3 Whatever the Achæans may have done and suffered in the course of their taking possession of the land of Greece, neither in manners nor in organization, social, economic, or political, do they look in the least like primitive men.
The result of this twofold error is that, to justify it, the texts have been simply tortured. M. Guiraud has no difficulty in demonstrating this in the first chapters of his Propriété fonciére en Grèce. After setting forth and refuting the arguments used to establish the existence of agrarian communism among the earliest Greeks, he concludes: " One needs to have a singularly biassed mind, to attach the least value to them. There is not, in the whole of ancient literature, a single passage which, sanely interpreted, confirms such an assertion."1
If we adhere to Homer and Hesiod, we find that all ownership is private, so far as arable land is concerned. The estates of Alcinoos, of Odysseus, of Perses, are private properties; nowhere is there any mention of cultivated land owned collectively. Here are two passages, from which Esmein tries to argue the existence of collective ownership. On the shield of Achilles, the divine smith has represented a vast piece of fallow which many workers are ploughing. When the ploughs come to the ends of the furrows, a person, whom the poet calls 
gives every ploughman a cup of wine, and then work starts again.2 It is a falsification of the meaning of the lines to regard this ground as " land of the community divided into equal portions allotted to individuals to work."3 Elsewhere the poet likens the Greeks and Trojans, facing each other from either side of a rampart, to two men who, measure in hand, on a piece of common land, dispute every inch in order that their two portions may be equal.4 Here we have a perfect picture of collective property, says Esmein.5 One must really be the slave of a preconceived idea, to interpret the scene in this way. On the contrary, it seems to me that the attitude of the two neighbours bears witness to the existence of private property, and to the stubbornness with which each fought for his own portion.
Moreover, the first care of a man founding a city is to divide up at least part of the land among his comrades. Nausithoos, we read in the Odyssey, settled the Phæacians in the island of Scheria; there he founded a city, built houses, consecrated temples to the immortal gods, and proceeded to distribute the land.6 " At the birth of most cities, the initial act which we find is a distribution of the land among the citizens. The public authority did not thereby create the concept of property, which was much earlier than the State, but it created proprietors."1
Whatever may have been claimed to the contrary, the stories of Meleager in Ætolia and of Bellerophon in Lycia do not, any more than the speech of Achilles to Æneias, tell against the existence of private property. Here it is a matter of lands promised or given to individuals by cities in special circumstances. There is no justification for supposing that these lands had previously been assigned to individuals, and that therefore the State was still the true owner of them, since it conceded them to others. It is much simpler to conclude that cities possessed common land, part of which they could make over as gifts. There is no contradiction between the existence of such land and that of private property. These are two forms of ownership which can quite well be found side by side.
But was this private ownership, which I consider to have been the usual manner in which arable land was held, individual ownership or family ownership? Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey gives definite information on the point. Alcinoos and Odysseus own big estates. When Odysseus is away, it is Telemachos who sees that his father's land is worked properly and endeavours to defend it against the greed of the suitors. But there is no indication to enlighten us as to the true meaning of that right of ownership. Does the property belong to Odysseus and to Telemachos as individuals, or are father and son merely the successive representatives of the family, the genos? The Homeric poems are silent on this point. Hesiod, on the other hand, is quite clear. Speaking to his brother Perses, he reminds him that the landed property left by their father, the kleros, had been divided between them, that the division gave rise to a lawsuit, and that Perses, to obtain the better portion and to win the case, bribed the judges.2 Here, then, we certainly have individual, not family, ownership. Each of the two sons, on the father's death, becomes or should become the possessor of part of the property (kleros), which was previously one single estate.
The very definite indications given in this passage of Hesiod allow one to ascribe a historical meaning to two passages in the Iliad and Odyssey. In the Iliad, Poseidon says that the universe was divided between the three sons of Cronos and Rhea, Zeus receiving the dominion of the sky, Poseidon that of the waters, and Hades that of the under-world.1 In the Odyssey, Odysseus tells Eumæos that he is the bastard son of a wealthy Cretan, whose goods were divided up after his death, and that he himself inherited only a house and a very small portion.2 In both cases the portions were assigned by lot.
It is true that there is much evidence to show that inheritances were not thus divided always and everywhere.3 We must conclude that inheritances were or might be transmitted undivided in practice, but that there was no law that they must be. There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that in Homeric and Hesiodic society there was not only private, but individual, property.
So far, we have chiefly considered the ownership of arable land. Was it the same with pasture? Here again one must beware of general and absolute statements. M. Guiraud has observed that in describing most of the estates mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey the poet speaks of plough-land, orchards, and vineyards, but not of meadows or grazings. He notes, however, that the pasture-land on which the countless herds of Odysseus graze is the hero's own property, " for his slaves have built fine byres of unhewn stone on it, surrounded with a thorn hedge."4 The author of the Works and Days advises his brother Perses to get the fodder and bedding into the barn as soon as the harvest is in.5 The bedding may consist of the straw of the ingathered corn, but the fodder must of necessity come from meadows entirely owned by Perses or rented by him as an individual. A private individual could not supply himself with fodder from common land. It may, on the other hand, be allowed that the mountain-sides and the undergrowth of the forest, where flocks and herds were taken to graze, had not been divided among the members of the community, and that all had the right to use them.
So the system of landed property, in the society portrayed in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, is far from being uniform. We find private ownership and individual ownership, without being able to say that there was no family and collective ownership at all. The reality was more complex than the theories constructed by modern erudition lead one to suppose. The facts to be found in the texts bring out that complexity. There is no use in trying to twist these facts to make them suit preconceived ideas.
By the side of agriculture, stock-breeding, hunting, and fishing, industry had a big place in the economic life of Homeric society—not, indeed, industry on a large scale, as organized in the modern world, but industry in the general sense of the word, that is, the transformation of various raw materials into things intended to satisfy men's needs or luxurious tastes.
The raw materials known and used by the Greeks of this period were building-materials (stone and marble), metals (copper, tin, iron, silver, and gold), textiles (flax and wool), wood, hides, and clay. We are given no details about stone and marble quarries or metal-mines, nor do we know whether the Greeks grew their own flax. Wool and hides were supplied by the beasts which they reared and the game which they loved to hunt, and they found plenty of wood in the forests which covered their country.
The palaces described in the Iliad and Odyssey, those of Priam, Odysseus, Nestor, Menelaos, and Alcinoos, bear witness that huge buildings existed, lavishly adorned with metal ornaments. The building-industry was prosperous. Dikes and bridges were also built, to say nothing of private dwellings, provided with barns and byres, like those which Eumæos caused to be erected.
Metal-working already reigned supreme. The common and precious metals were worked by smiths, armourers, and goldsmiths with a lavishness, a technical skill, and a decorative sense which astonish one. It is enough to mention the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, the belt of Heracles in the Odyssey, the shield of the same hero in Hesiod, the arms of Agamemnon in the Iliad, and the many vases, bowls, tripods, and craters of bronze, silver, or gold, which are mentioned, to show the place taken by the metal crafts at the time. The smiths worked, as today, with bellows, anvils, hammers, and tongs. The goldsmiths did chasing and hammer-work, set stones, did gilding and silvering, and combined amber and ivory with gold.
The textile industry consisted in the spinning and weaving of flax and wool and the manufacture of clothes, embroideries, and carpets.
Hides, tanned and dressed, served as cloaks for the men. Fixed together in several layers, they were used to make shields. Shoes were made of leather.
The wood industry was highly developed. The logs were brought from the forest by teams of mules, and cut up into thick beams and planks, which were used for heavy timberwork and joinery. The rule and the compass were used in building boats and making furniture. Farm-gear, such as pestles, mortars, beetles, and ploughs, was made of wood.
The potters used the wheel for making common jars and vases.
The organization of all this industrial labour took two forms. There were household crafts and specialized crafts. Weaving, cooperage, leather-work, and wood-work were done at home. In every family, the women, free and slave, span, wove, made clothes, and did embroidery and tapestry. Eumæos cut his leather himself and made his own shoes. Odysseus was a marvellously skilful carpenter and joiner; he made his bed out of the trunk of an olive-tree and with his own hands built the boat which was to take him away from Calypso.
In metal-working, and doubtless also in building and pottery, labour was specialized. In addition to the divine smith Hephæstos, the Iliad mentions a celebrated armourer named Tychios, and in the Odyssey the craftsman Laërces is bidden to gild the horns of the heifer sacrificed by Nestor in honour of Athene. The poet of the Works and Days mentions the builder (
) and the potter (
) in a list of various trades.
But, active and skilled as this industry already was, it only seems to have worked for local and immediate needs. Nowhere do we find the slightest trace of any production organized for commercial purposes. The articles manufactured do not appear to be used for exchanges between the Greeks themselves or with foreigners.
This does not mean that trade was unknown in the society of the day, but for the Greeks it consisted essentially in importation. Its field of action was fairly small; its development was restricted by the methods of exchange.
Within Greece itself, between one district and another, between one city and another, trade relations grew up. When Pallas Athene appears for the first time before the eyes of Telemachos, she presents herself in the form of Mentes, chief of the Taphians. " I am going," she says, " with a ship and a large crew to another land, to Temese; I am taking iron there, to exchange for bronze."1 Among the questions which Nestor asks Telemachos when he arrives at Pylos, we find, " What interest, what business bring you?"2 Hesiod advises Perses, if he wants to do a little coast-trade, not to be too ambitious, and to load his boat with only part of his harvest.3 Trade of this kind could only be between districts very close to one another. Indeed, in respect of the agricultural and industrial products of Greek lands we may take it that at this time every separate district in Greece was almost self-sufficing.
But Greece did resort to foreign goods, or rather it was not indifferent to the foodstuffs, the raw or precious materials, and the manufactured articles which foreign mariners brought to its doors. The Greeks liked the wines of Thrace. We read in the Iliad and Odyssey of purple veils of Sidon, and of goldsmith's work from Phoœicia—vases, tripods, silver baskets. Copper, tin, amber, and ivory must have come from abroad. The Greeks also bought foreign slaves. Eumæos tells Odysseus that there had been a Phœnician slave-girl in his father's palace, and a Sicilian bondwoman serves in the house of Laërtes.
In payment for these purchases the Greeks seem to have chiefly given cattle. Among the prizes which Achilles proposes for the funeral games in honour of Patroclos are a tripod valued at twelve oxen and a slave-girl valued at four oxen. Laërtes paid twenty oxen for Eurycleia. When the author of the Odyssey speaks of the purchases made by the Phœnicians in return for their sales, one must doubtless understand the cattle given to them in exchange for the metals or precious articles which they have brought. From this point of view, one can just speak of Greek exports, but they were much rather a payment in kind, mere barter.
The countries with which Homeric and Hesiodic Greece thus entertained commercial relations, direct or indirect, were chiefly grouped round the Eastern Mediterranean; so far as one can judge from the poems, they were Thrace, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt. From where did the amber come? Two hypotheses are possible. Amber existed nowhere except on the coasts of the Baltic, and it was apparently brought by land either to the north coast of the Euxine or to the top of the Adriatic, where it was picked up by Phœnician vessels which conveyed it to Greece. Ivory might comc from Central Africa, through Egypt, or else from India, over Iran and Western Asia, and the Phœnicians received it in their own cities or went to the Nile Delta for it, as the case might be. Did tin, at this early date, come from the Cassiterides? The Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic were still almost unknown waters to the Greeks, but the Phœnicians may have found their way there.
From all the pieces of information contained in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems one gathers that the Greeks practised coastal navigation, but did not go far from their own shores. Long sea-voyages were quite exceptional; there was Menelaos, who, on the way back from Troy, went to Cyprus, Phœnicia, and Egypt, and there was Odysseus, tossed by storms over the Western Mediterranean and drawn on to the dark land of the Cimmerians by his desire to speak with the dead. In any case, these two voyages are really quite as legendary as that of the Argonauts, which took in Colchis, the Pillars of Heracles, and Libya. They cannot supply us with serious evidence on the extent of Greek commerce in those distant days. The purveyors of the Hellenes at that time were the Phœnicians, at once merchants and pirates, sea-traffickers who had taken the place of the Ægeans in the Eastern Mediterranean as they would themselves one day be supplanted by the Greeks. Hardly has Odysseus set foot on Ithaca when he tells Pallas Athene, not recognizing her, that Phœnicians have brought him from a Cretan port to his own country.
Whatever the character and extent of this trade may really have been, what gives it its special aspect is the absence of any money in the transactions of which it consisted. We have already seen passages in which the value of a slave or a tripod is expressed by a certain number of oxen, and we have seen the lines in the Odyssey in which the supposed Mentes declares that he is going to Temese to barter iron for bronze. Purchase and sale are nothing but exchanges in kind, in which the two principal elements of the operation are, on the part of the Greek buyers, livestock and metals, not minted, but raw, and not only precious, but base metals. Livestock and metals are their chief form of wealth. When Eumæos would give a catalogue of the wealth of Odysseus, he enumerates twelve great herds of oxen, twelve great flocks of sheep, and as many pigs and goats, which his master owns on the mainland, and eleven great herds of goats and hundreds of hogs and swine on Ithaca.1 What are the gifts which Iphidamas promises to his young wife? A hundred oxen, a thousand goats, and a thousand lambs.2 The poems contain very many instances of wealth reckoned in flocks and herds. Metals, too, have an important place in primitive fortunes. In the story which Odysseus tells Eumseos of his imaginary adventures, he passes himself off as a Cretan who has travelled far, and has been cast up by a storm on the coast of the Thesprotians, where he has had news of Odysseus.
" The King of the Thesprotians," he says, " told me that he had treated him kindly, and as a guest. He showed me all the possessions which Odysseus had amassed, bronze and gold and wrought iron. Any other would have had enough for ten generations, so much wealth was there, laid up in the halls of the King."3
At Ithaca itself, the real treasures of Odysseus consisted of stuffs, clothing, bronze, gold, and wrought iron.4
The prizes which Achilles proposes for the funeral games of Patroclos are vases, tripods, beautiful slave-girls, mares or mules, bronze, gold, and iron. The details which the poet gives about this last metal are very interesting. For the disk-throwing, the prize offered to the winner is the disk itself, a mass of unwrought iron, and Achilles adds:
" Even if he have many rich lands, this piece of iron will be enough for his needs for five whole years. His shepherds and ploughmen will not need to go to town for lack of iron; it will be there."
No less curious is the prize for the pigeon-shooting.
" And he gave dark iron as the prize for the bowmen, and set down ten two-bladed axes and ten half-axes."1
Prehistorians have supposed that the deposits of bronze axes, so frequent in the Bronze Age, were, at least in some cases, treasures hidden in the ground; the passage in the Iliad seems to confirm the supposition, bringing the custom down into the Iron Age.
But, while the metals, precious, like gold and silver, or useful, like bronze and iron, constituted at least a part of wealth, coining was completely unknown. When " talents of gold " are mentioned, weighed ingots are meant. One of the prizes for the running in the funeral games of Patroclos is a half-talent of gold.2 To bring Achilles back to fight, Agamemnon offers him, in addition to tripods, precious vases, and horses, ten talents of gold.3 Here the talent is a unit of weight, not a monetary denomination. Already, however, the part played by the metals in trade and in private wealth marks, as it were, the transition from the age of barter pure and simple to that of coinage.
In the society depicted in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the works of Hesiod, economic activity is mainly agricultural and pastoral. Wealth comes almost solely from the cultivation of arable land, cornfields, vineyards, orchards, and gardens, and the exploitation of pastures. It is by sacks bulging with flour, jars full of wine, and head of cattle that the wealth of chiefs and great men is reckoned. That opulence is displayed in vast dwellings, sumptuously furnished and decorated.
Industry serves only to supply necessities and luxuries. It is not an independent form of human labour; it does not aim at the rational exploitation of the many and various raw materials which nature has to offer man. The industries connected with food, clothing, wood, hides are still purely domestic in character. In every household, flour, wine, and oil are made, beasts are slaughtered for the table, materials, fine or coarse, are spun and woven for clothes, carpets, hangings, and embroideries, and leather and wood are adapted to various purposes. Only the metal and pottery industries appear to be specialized, doubtless on account of the material equipment and premises which they require. Also, one should observe that most of the metals—gold, silver, copper, tin—are very probably imported from abroad, and so are many artistic objects—precious vases, jewels. etc.
Trade is very little developed. The Achæans do no real exportation. A few exchanges take place between district and district, between city and city, within Greece itself. The Phœnicians, the pedlars of the sea, land in harbours and on beaches, and there sell the products of their own industries, or foodstuffs, raw materials, and manufactured goods which they have fetched from all the shores of the Mediterranean and the distant lands of the East. All this trade is done entirely by barter. Money is unknown. Tripods or slave-girls are given in exchange for cattle, iron for bronze.
Neither industry nor trade is a source of profit to the Greeks. The society of the period lives chiefly by farming. It is obstinately sedentary. Only serious, abnormal causes determine men to travel. Every man's life is bounded by a very close horizon. Navigation is still unadventurous and infrequent. But the day is not far off when, driven by urgent necessity, Greece will come out of herself. Then her economic life will be transformed and will rise to its full development.
1 Il., ii, 645 ff.
2 Ibid., 816 ff.
3 vi, 321 ff.
4 625 ff.
5 XXX, i, p. 145.
1 xviii. 550 ff.
2 Od., ii, 353 ff.
3 Hesiod, Shield of Heracles, 286 ff.
1 XLV, p. 471.
1 Ibid., pp. 475 ff.
2 Ibid., p. 480.
3 Ibid., pp. 481, 485 ff.
4 Hesiod, Works and Days, 514.
1 Od., xiv, 18 ff.
2 ix, 218 ff.
3 Od., xviii, 366 ff.
1 Works and Days, 594.
2 A. Esmein, in XVI, 1890, p. 822.
1 XLV, pp. 1 ff.
2 Esmein, loc. cit.
3 XLVII, English p. 74.
1 XLV, pp.21 ff.
2 Il., xviii, 541 ff.
3 Esmein, art. cit., p. 834.
4 Il., xii, 421 ff.
5 Art. cit., p. 833.
6 vi, 7 ff.
1 XLV, p. 34.
2 Works and Days, 37 ff.
1 XV, 187 ff.
2 xiv, 208 ff.
3 XLV, pp. 55 ff.
4 Ibid., p. 68.
5 606.
1 Od., i, 182 ff.
2 Od., iii, 72.
3 Works and Days, 618 ff.
1 Od., xiv, 100 ff.
2 I1., xi, 244 ff.
3 Od., xiv, 321 ff.
4 Od., xxi, 10,
1 Il., xxiii, 830 ff., 850 ff.
2 Il., xxiii, 751.
3 II., ix. 122.