Ancient Greece Economics

The word "economy" is Greek, but to the Greeks it meant something like "rules of a household".

8th-century Greece depended clearly on farming. It had an aristocracy based on ownership of large estates and special claims to military service. The bulk of the population of the Greek and Hellenistic world was rural. . A life on the land, farming to produce only so much as was needed for consumption and leaving enough leisure time for active participation in the public life of the polis, was the social ideal.

Production and exchange were to be undertaken only for personal need, to help out friends, or to benefit the community as a whole. Such activities were not to be undertaken simply to make a profit and certainly not to obtain capital for future investment and economic growth.The agricultural base of Mediterranean society must be kept in mind even though the leading political and cultural activities occurred in cities. Rural peoples preserved distinctive rituals and beliefs.

Also the Greek sailors found a lot of different ways to make their living from sailing. Some of them were fishermen, and ate some fish and sold some in markets. Other Greeks were traders, who bought things at one port and sold them at another port, and made some profit for themselves along the way. Other Greeks were soldiers for their city-state, who conquered other cities and forced them to pay tribute. Many Greek sailors worked as mercenaries, hiring out themselves and their ships to fight for other countries like Egypt.

The importance of trade in basic goods dictated extensive concern with commercial arrangements, despite the ambiguous status of merchants themselves. Private merchants operated most of the ships that carried foodstuffs and other goods. But Greek governments supervised the grain trade, providing not only transportation facilities but also storage depots to try to minimize the chance of famines. Other kinds of trade were vital also.Luxury products from
the shops of urban artists and craftworkers played a vital role in the life-style of the upper classes, and some commodities, such as tools and pots, were sold more widely. The Greeks made important advances in shipbuilding and navigation, which were vital for their trading economy.

Seeing extensive trade and use of money in Greece from the fifth century B.C. onward, the modernists extrapolated the existence of a market economy in Classical Greece. On the other hand, seeing traditional Greek social and political values that disdained the productive, impersonal, and industrial nature of modern market economies, the primitivists downplayed the existence of extensive trade and the use of money in the economy.

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