Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Rhamnous, photo: E. Harris

UK Friends’ lecture

Professor Edward Harris (Durham University), “A New Approach to the Attic Countryside: Markets in the Demes”

Abstract: In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (33-36), Dikaiopolis expresses his nostalgia for the good old days in the Attic countryside when no one ever used the word ‘buy’ and the land produced everything he needed. This passage has been used by several scholars as evidence that the market played only a peripheral role in the lives of Greek farmers. This assumption has also led scholars like Möller and Osborne to assert that there is no evidence for markets outside Athens, the Piraeus and Laurion. This paper will draw on recent work in the Attic countryside to study several rural markets neglected by these scholars and to show how local roads and harbours linked these markets to farmsteads and to places outside Attica. There is epigraphic evidence for markets at Besa, Deceleia, Erchia, and Sounion. In a recent study Kakvogianni and Anetakis have examined the archaeological evidence for markets at Myrrhinous, Steiria and Thorikos, and Salliora-Oikonomakou collects the evidence for a market at Pasalimani north of Sounion. Preliminary excavations have revealed a market at Halai Aixonides. Inscriptions discovered at Rhamnous indicate the presence of an agora and workshops, and excavations have uncovered several possible locations. Aeschines also mentions an agora on Salamis. All this evidence show that Attic farmers did not pursue a strategy of self-sufficiency.

Bio: Edward Harris is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at Durham University. He has published extensively about the political and legal institutions and economy of Ancient Greece.

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