The most important commodities in Classical
Athens came from farming and fishing.
But as the city expanded, a whole host of other
professions came to the fore, and depending on how important
they were to the polis, developed their own forms
of organisation. As with farming, there was no exchange of surplus produce: as a
rule an order was placed for a specific number of items and
anything left over was on offer to the slaves.
The main businesses were the pottery workshops, bronze foundries and tanneries.
Businesses (with the exception of the Lavrion mines) were in the hands of private
individuals, mainly metics, and the work force came from all social groups.
|
|
|
For public buildings and other public works, a large number of
labourers was engaged, with a variety of skills. The state
required those in charge of a job to submit a detailed
report on its progress, and from these reports we can get some
idea of how work was organised. The work was broken
down into smaller tasks and those in charge parcelled out the
tasks to individual builders or carpenters, whether Athenians or metics.
These individuals then completed the job, working side by side with their slaves.
The procedure followed in the case of private construction would have been much the same.
|
The bulk of commodities produced - above all, olive oil and
wine - was taken up by the export trade. Oil and wine were
transported in jars (which boosted jar production). But there
were other important exports too, such as painted
pottery and metalwork.
Everything was produced manually, which
provided an enormous number of jobs. Yet production
continued to be undervalued in relation to
agriculture. The reason is not hard to find; the Athenian economy
was chiefly based on farming. Farming implies farmland,
and nobody except a citizen could own land. Athenian citizens
working as craftsmen came from the economically less
powerful classes, and were those who profited most directly
from the Athenian boom. What a citizen did for a living might not
matter very much to the city as a whole, but it was crucial to
his social status; the Athenians used the contemptuous adjective
'banausic' to describe the craftsmen.
|
|
|
| introduction |
oikos |
polis |
|
Classical
period |
Note: |
Click on the icons for enlargements and explanations.
Underlined links lead to related texts; those not underlined ones are an explanatory glossary.
|
|