INTRODUCTION

‘Wealth consists in abundance of coined money, ownership of land and properties, and further of movable goods, cattle, and slaves remarkable for their number, size, and beauty, provided they are all secure (ἀσϕαƛῆ), free, and useful.’ Thus Aristotle enumerates the material goods that could make a person wealthy – cash, land, movable goods, cattle and slaves – and at the same time insists that the conditions of possession themselves would determine whether or not possession would yield wealth. The first condition, security (ἀσϕαƛϵία), he defines as ‘having acquired a thing in such places and such conditions that the use of it is in our own hands’. This he follows up with a functional definition of ownership: ‘a possession is one's own (οἰκϵῖα) when it is entirely up to him whether to alienate it or not, and by alienation I mean both gift and sale’. In this passage (Rhet. 1361a15–25), Aristotle implicitly recognises two components to what we call a property right: the right to use and the right to alienate, whether by gift or sale. These rights remain at the core of our understanding of a property right. The laws and practices of the alienation and use of property have been widely studied for the ancient Greek world, whereas the condition of security has been for the most part taken for granted. In this chapter I outline the legal and economic perspectives on property security in theory and in historical practice (section 2), before turning to an examination of the forms of property insecurity in classical Greece (sections 3–5) and a consideration of the economic as well as the political implications of my findings (section 6). I suggest that these limits point towards a distinctive property regime that reflects the priorities and interests of Greek states rather than a commitment to protecting absolute, perfect ownership as a means of promoting individual economic interests and aggregate economic growth. By focusing on the issue of property security I hope both to draw attention to the political and social importance of property in the Greek world, and to suggest that while the economic growth of the period was certainly a function of many complex and interrelated variables, property security was not prominent among them.