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A real estate ‘market’ in Classical Greece? The example of town housing1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Lisa Nevett
Lisa Nevett
Affiliation:
Department of Classical Studies, The Open University
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Abstract

In the past it has often been assumed that, although rental of real estate in Classical Greece was relatively common, sales of such property were not. This article challenges that assumption by looking in detail at a small group of inscriptions from Olynthos in the Chalkidiki, which date to the first half of the fourth century and record transactions involving houses in the city. By analysing these documents in conjunction with their archaeological contexts, it becomes evident that there was a systematic set of criteria by which such properties were valued, and that a premium was placed upon larger houses and those located close to the agora, at the centre of the social and political life of the city. This adds a new dimension to the emerging picture of the increasing use of the house as a symbol of personal prestige during the fourth century. The limited evidence available from Athens and the Attic deme centres suggests that Attic town houses had a comparable range of values and that a similar shared concept of value may therefore have been operating. It thus seems that in the case of town houses, at least, sufficient properties were changing hands for potential purchasers to have a shared concept of their value, and this may indicate that families moved between different areas of a settlement, or between different settlements.

Type
Articles
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 95 , November 2000 , pp. 329 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 2000

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References

2 See e.g., Foxhall, L., ‘Household, gender and property in Classical Athens’ CQ, n.s. 39 (1989), 22–44, at p. 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strauss, B., ‘Oikos/polis: towards a theory of Athenian paternal ideology 450–399 BC’, in Aspects of Athenian Democracy (Classica et Mediaevalia Dissertationes, ii; Copenhagen, 1990), 101–27Google Scholar, at 104; id., Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1993). 34.

3 Finley, M. I., Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London, 1981), 71Google Scholar.

4 Lambert, S. D., Rationes Centesimarum: Sales of Public Land in Lykourgan Athens (Amsterdam, 1997), 231Google Scholar.

5 Ibid. 232 n. 67.

6 From other parts of the Chalkidiki and the surrounding area, Hatzopoulos, M. B., Actes de rente de la Chalcidique centrale (Μελετήματα, 6; Athens 1988Google Scholar), and id.Actes de vente d'Amphipolis (Μελετήματα 14; Athens 1991Google Scholar); Hennig, D., ‘Kaufverträge über Häuser und Ländereien aus der Chalkidike und Amphipolis’. Chiron, 17 (1987), 143–69Google Scholar; from Attica, Fine 1951 and Finley 1985; similar details are also given in a single archival inscription from Tcnos, see Étienne, R., Ténons ii: Ténos et les Cyclades du milieu du IVe siècle au. J.-C. au milieu du IIIe siède ap. J.-C. (Paris, 1990), 51–84Google Scholar. These documents are discussed below. Comparable information from a western Greek city at a significantly later period is given in a set of documents from Camarina: see Manganaro, G., ‘Case e terra a Kamarina e Morgantina nel III–II sec. a.C.’, PP 44 (1989), 189–216Google Scholar.

7 The excavator, D. M. Robinson, published the inscriptions in a series of articles on epigraphic finds from the site, listed above (n. 1). Additional information about the find spots of some of the documents is also given in the relevant volumes of the final publication of the site (Robinson, D. M., Excavations at Olynthus i–xiv, [Baltimore, 1928–1952])Google Scholar, as part of the more general discussion of individual houses. I have not reproduced the texts here since I have not had the opportunity to inspect the stones or squeezes, and I have not proposed any new readings. For recent re-evaluation of the inscriptions, including some new readings, see Hatzopoulos 1988 (n. 6) and Hennig (n. 6). The sources and discussion for each inscription are summarized in Appendix 1 below, grouped according to type of find spot, and the individual inscriptions are referred to in the text of this paper using the numbers assigned there.

8 Appendix, 1, nos. 3, and 8.

9 Hatzopoulos (n. 6), 62–4, and Harris, E. M., ‘When is a sale not a sale? The riddle of Athenian terminology for real security revisited’, CQ n.s. 38 (1988), 351–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Appendix, nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14; in some cases the heading is missing, but the preposition is preserved.

11 This is in keeping with the use of the word ὠνή in literary texts and is the usual interpretation of these documents (see Hatzopoulos 1988 (n. 6, 153), 62). Hennig contends that, taken together, the Olynthos inscriptions attest too wide a variety of prices for these documents to constitute outright sales and infers that all of the documents must therefore represent loans. Nevertheless, as argued below, such variation can be explained by looking at the broader geographical, economic and social contexts of the documents (Cahill, N. D., ‘Olynthus: social and spatial planning in a Greek city’ Ph.D. diss., Berkeley [Ann Arbor, 1991], 370–83Google Scholar, is also of my opinion).

12 Appendix, no. 5, which uses the expression καθίεται.

13 These inscriptions were published by Robinson alongside the documents relating to property transactions (the relevant articles are listed in n. 1). They comprise three peace treaties dating to the first half of the 4th c. (Robinson 1938, 44–7; id. 1943, 103–24) and a handful of stelai ranging in date from the 6th–4th c. together with a number of stelai and other fragments from a range of dates down to the late Roman period. Examples from the 4th c. predominate, although this is not surprising given the major expansion in the city's population at that time and the small scale of settlement in the area during other periods.

14 Such a connection has traditionally been assumed: see, for example, Robinson 1928, 22g; Robinson 1931, 49; Robinson 1934, 120; Cahill (n. 11), 377.

15 Appendix, 4.

16 These are Appendix 12 and 15, which are both from areas where only limited excavation was undertaken. The exact find spot of 13 cannot be determined from published evidence.

17 e.g., in connection with I: Robinson 1934, 129.

18 Wolff, H. J., review of Fine 1951, and Finlcy (1985; 1ST edn. 1953), Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 70.2 (1953), 411–25, at p. 417Google Scholar, n. 7.

19 Fine 1951, 42.

20 Ibid., 45–6.

21 Ibid., 42; Finley 1985, 15–16.

22 Fine 1951, 42.

23 Appendix, 3.

24 Nevett, L. C., House and Society in the Ancient Greek World (Cambridge, 1999), 68–74Google Scholar.

25 Fine 1951, 46–7; Finley 1985, 19–21; Miller, S., ‘Mortgage horoi from the Athenian Agora’, Hesp. 41 (1972), 274–81, at pp. 276–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 This applies to 15, which seems to have been inscribed on both sides.

27 The inscriptions dated to within this eight year period are Appendix 2, 4, 7, 13, 14, and 15 which come from only two different years. A further four are dated to a single further year, for which there is no parallel amongst the documents from elsewhere in the Chalkidiki. The information for all of the Chalkidean inscriptions is set out by Hatzopoulos 1988 (n. 6), 72–7 and 80. It does not, however, seem wise to attempt to go along with Hatzopoulos in associating each priest with a specific year on the basis of internal evidence alone.

28 Robinson 1946, 73–4; Hennig (n. 6), 149 53; Cahill (n. 11), 379.

29 Andreyev, V., ‘Some aspects of agrarian conditions in Attica in the fifth to third centuries BC’, Eirene, 12 (1974), 5–46, at 16–18Google Scholar; contra Lewis, D. M., ‘The Athenian rationes centesimarum’, in Finley, M. I. (ed.), Problèmes de la terre en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1973), 187–212, at 194Google Scholar.

30 Finley 1985, 61.

31 Robinson, D. M. and Graham, J. W., Excavations at Olynthus. viii: The Hellenic House (Baltimore, 1938), 98Google Scholar.

32 Robinson 1934, 131.

33 Lazaridis, D., Ἕπιϒραϕὴ ἐξ Ἀμϕιπόλεωϛ᾽, in Γέραϛ Ἀντωνίου Κεραμοπούλλου (Athens, 1953), 159–69, at 159–60Google Scholar; id., ‘Trois nouveaux contrats de ventc à Amphipolis’, BCH 85 (1961), 426–34, at pp. 429–30.

34 For example Fine 1951, nos. 1, 5, 9, 12, 15, and 17.

35 Hatzopoulos 1988 (n. 6), 31–3. Some rural lease agreements also give specific mention to different parts of what may have been a single property, see Osborne, R., ‘Buildings and residence on the land in Classical and Hellenístíc Greece: the contribution of epigraphy’, BSA 80 (1985), 119–28, at 121–2Google Scholar.

36 Kent, J. H., ‘The temple; estates of Delos, Rheneia and Mykonos’, Hesp. 17 (1948), 243–338, at 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thucydides' account (ii. 14) of the abandonment of the Attic countryside during the Peloponnesian war, with residents taking woodwork from buildings, also supports this view.

37 The available evidence suggests that additional factors, including the amount of decoration in an individual house and the numbers of finds of various types, seem not to have been associated with variation in the value of the property. Nevertheless the evidence is not conclusive, since the group of houses with associated inscriptions includes only a small number which are recorded as having been decorated, and the inventories of finds may be incomplete for various reasons (see Nevett (n. 24) 57 61).

38 See Cahill (n. II), 209 11; Nevett (n. 24), 56.

39 Cahill (n. 11), 380 3.

40 Compare the social role played by the Agora at Athens: von Reden, S., Exchange in Ancient Greece (London, 1995). 106–8Google Scholar; Millett, P., ‘Encounters in the Agora’, in Cartledge, P., Millett, P. and von Reden, S. (eds) Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1998), 203–28, at 211–28Google Scholar.

41 On increase in house size, see Nevett (n. 24), passim; on the use of decoration, see Walter-Karydi, E., Die Nobilitierung des Wohnhauses (Konstanz, 1994Google Scholar), passim.

42 Robinson (n. 23), 60.

43 Both the epigraphic and the literary evidence from Athens and Attica are discussed in detail by Pritchett, W. K., ‘The Attic Stelai: Part II’, Hesp, 25 (1956), 178–328 at 270–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is supplemented by the texts published by Fine 1951. The number of town houses these sources yield is relatively small since many of the prices are for land, as well as or rather than housing, or else refer to rural property or to property whose location cannot be established.

44 Davies, J. K., Wealth and the Power of Wealth in Classical Athens (New York, 1981). 49Google Scholar.

45 Compare Ibid. 50.

46 This inscription seems to belong to the late 4th or early 3rd c.: Étiennc (n. 6). 43. It is interesting to note that the eleven values it provides for town houses cover a narrower range than those attested in Attica and Chalkidiki, although the mean is only slightly below that of the latter. It is difficult to evaluate the significance of this in view of the difference in date between the Tenos inscription and the evidence from the other Two areas, uncertainties over the relative value of the currency, and also because the processes leading to the recording of these particular transactions at Tenos are unknown and may have been selective.

47 Finley 1985, 61, cited above.

48 The evidence for the organization of space in houses excavated from a variety of settlements is summarized in Nevett (n. 24), chs 5 and 6.

49 For example Fine 1951, no. 26.

50 Osborne, R., ‘The potential mobility of human populations’. OJA 10.2 (1991), 231–52, at pp. 239–46Google Scholar.

51 Robinson 1934, 129–30; Ibid. 131–2; id. 1938, 55–6. A further document published by Wilhelm (Wilhelm, A., ‘Inschrift aus der Chalkidiki’’, Neue Beiträge zur Inschriftenkunde, 1 (1911) 42–4Google Scholar) is cited by Hatzopoulos 1988 (n. 6), 24 n. 1, and Cahill (n. II), 452 as coming from Olynthos, although this is not stated in the original publication and Hatzopoulos appears to suggest elsewhere that the inscription is from Arnaia (Laringovi) (Hatzopoulos 1988 (n. 6), 15 n. 4).