INTRODUCTION

In 1983 Paul Cartledge wrote a brief article reaffirming Johannes Hasebroek's basic insights into the place of trade and traders in the world of archaic Greece. Like Hasebroek, Cartledge assumed that, in order to talk sensibly about archaic trade or traders, one had to locate them in a sound socio-economic context. He defended Hasebroek's framework – an overwhelmingly agrarian economy and society, with a ruling class drawing its wealth and prestige from landowning, not commerce, so that the dominance of market relationships or commercial aristocracies were fantasies of those who improperly modernized a world with quite low levels of commercial and manufacturing activity. Cartledge's piece capped a three decade-long effort by substantivist-minded ancient historians, led in Britain by M. I. Finley and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, to convince their colleagues that this alternate way of looking at Greco-Roman economic activity captured more of the ancient reality.

Were other ancient historians persuaded? Consider recent estimates of archaic market activity. James Redfield speaks of the period 750–700 b.c. as “a time when traders were beginning to transform society …” and concludes that “by the middle of the sixth century this reconstruction was more or less complete…” And Robin Osborne recently wrote, “In this paper I argue that the archaic world was a world of interdependent markets.”