Economic Growth in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Douglass North [1981, p. 3] famously defined task of economic history [as being] to explain the structure and performance of economies through time. By this criterion, scholarship on ancient Greek economic history is a strange creature: it is all structure and no performance. But there is an obvious reason for this. The literary texts that survive from ancient Greece the epics of Homer, tragedies of Euripides, forensic speeches of Demosthenes, and military histories of Herodotus and Thucydides hardly lend themselves to measuring economic performance. There are only scattered data on wages and hardly any long series of prices. Moses Finley, who did more to elucidate Greek economic sociology than anyone else in the twentieth century, largely ignored performance (neither growth nor performance even appear in the index of his classic work The Ancient Economy (FlNLEY [1973]), while his former student Paul MiLLETT [2001, p. 35] went further still, concluding that the scope for sustained growth in the centuries BC was elusive or non-existent. In this paper I make a very different argument. This essay is merely a first sketch, but I suggest that by framing the question differently and drawing on archaeological evidence as well as literary, we can in fact document economic growth (both aggregate and per capita) across the first millennium BC. I focus in particular on the period c. 800-300 BC, covering the archaic and classical periods of Greek history (see Table 1 and section 2 below). The problem with this argument is that the archaeological record was generated in complex ways, and its relationship to ancient economic activity is often obscure. But that said, I argue that per capita consumption around 300 BC must have been