In this revised version of his doctoral dissertation L. engages with the still on-going Substantivist versus Formalist debates over the nature(s) of the ancient (Greek) economy, formulated in this case as the clash between notions of (economic) rationality, grounded in methodological individualism, versus notions of Annales school mentalité emphasising the particularism and seeming irrationality of distant cultures and actors. L. identifies profit and wealth maximisation as a quantifiable and verifiable mode of analysis to demonstrate that ancient Greeks generally behaved in economically rational ways. The book's focus is the art of making money, the author's translation of chrêmastikê (p. 15), namely ‘the methods [the ancient Athenians] employed in the quest for profit; their strategies for accumulating wealth; the process whereby they made decisions in business and estate management; and their motivation for choosing among the economic options at their disposal’ (p. 2).
In the introduction L. maps the apparent exclusivity of rationality versus mentalité in recent and earlier debates, a point he returns to in the conclusion (Chapter 5: ‘Maximization in the Ancient Greek Economy’) where he suggests combining the two approaches, having demonstrated ‘how rationality and irrationality were interconnected and fed into each other’ (p. 225) in ancient economic decision-making. Following the introductory overview, L. moves on in Chapter 1, ‘Hunger in their Souls: Profit and Wealth Maximization in Athenian Thought’, to survey the textual evidence, primarily Plato and Aristotle, illustrating how deeply engrained the drive for pleiston kerdos (‘greatest profit’, Arist. Pol. 1.9.8–9, 1257b) had become, at least by the fourth century bce. The three chapters that follow detail how this drive functioned at ground level. Chapter 2, ‘Making Money in the Oikos: Strategies for Diversification and Profit’, traces the attempts by a number of individuals known from Athenian law speeches, including Arizelos and Demosthenes the Elder, to test different investments and sources of income, not necessarily as a means of avoiding risk, but rather to generate the greatest returns. Chapter 3, ‘Moneymaking Strategies on Specialized Estates’, expands the scope to consider how some of the wealthiest Athenians, like Nicias, Kallias and Pasion, who were involved in large-scale manufacturing, mining and banking, managed their operations and factories to ensure high profits. In Chapter 4, ‘Profit, Trust, and Deception in Ancient Greek Maritime Trade’, the scope is further expanded to study how such tactics were employed in the context of international trade and how ‘circles of trust’ (p. 138), informal, personalised networks of traders, served to enhance profits further by minimising the risks associated with information disparities across time and distance, as well as the inevitable bad actors and limited state protection from them.
L.'s collection and interpretation of the textual evidence (nearly all of it literary with little epigraphical) for money-making and profit-maximising in the oikos, in specialised estates and in maritime trade is a welcome and useful contribution. Even so, there are a number of issues that are barely touched on in the book, if at all, some of which directly pertain to his arguments, and some of which would have been worth exploring further. In the latter category is the question of how this profit-maximising behaviour by the many individuals discussed in the chapters would continue to scale up into profit-maximising at formal institutional or state-wide levels. L. hints at the problem in a few places, notably in a discussion of various authors’ laments (e.g. those of Solon, Theognis and Plato) of individual selfishness leading to bad political and social outcomes, like oligarchic governments (pp. 196–200). If, as L. argues, a significant proportion of individual Athenians were constantly looking to make a buck, as it were, how then would this individual behaviour aggregate into collective behaviour, particularly in a democratic political context like that in Athens? Might we expect the Athenians as the authoritative demos to make internally or externally oriented policy decisions that would seek to maximise revenues for their collective body at a potential cost to individuals? Externally, the trajectory of the rise and fall of the Athenian Empire may offer some insight into such policy-making, particularly where state profit and wealth-maximising became seemingly pathological and self-destructive. Internally, policies for the collective good would quickly bump into the rampant individual strategy of tax and liturgy avoidance (p. 92). Any analysis at institutional or state level would need to explore the tensions between, on the one hand, reasonable levels of state-wide revenue seeking in the form of leases, taxation and liturgies, mostly meant to keep the state apparatus functioning, and, on the other hand, the rapacious policies that went far beyond all that clearly intended to gloriously enrich the Athenians as a collective body (perhaps as an expression of mentalité?). L., nonetheless, keeps his focus mostly fixed on individual actors, so avoids some of the larger problems associated with collective behaviour, which he briefly alludes to (p. 11), aside from those concerning the small informal networks of traders discussed in Chapter 4.
More immediate to his arguments is the problem of money. L. leaves the term undefined, and notably absent from the index; and he plays loose with the translations of key Greek words like chrêma/ta (p. 15). As his source material are primarily classical-period texts dating to the fourth century bce, the world he interprets is one that was apparently fully comfortable with and committed to the idea of money in the form of coinage serving as a means of exchange, store of wealth and unit of account. But if coinage was the primary form of money, as indicated throughout by L. (pp. 18, 41, 230), key problems with money(making) remain unexplored.
While he offers a good deal of discussion about Attic mining and leases (Chapter 3), and the money that could be made (and lost) from silver mining, there is no discussion about how this extracted silver was monetised, i.e. turned into the famed Athenian owl coinage that presumably provided the foundation for the Athenians’ chrêmastikê. The mechanisms for this monetisation are little understood, whether, for example, the Athenians embraced free-minting (allowing silver miners to bring their uncoined silver to the mint to have it coined for a fee) or did not, in which case the silver coined was primarily acquired as lease payments or taxes or was purchased. In either case, the overall coin (money) supply could be greatly affected, and thus potentially the ability of individual Athenians to maximise their profits and wealth. If the art of making money in Athens was ultimately dependent upon making owls, would the Athenians have collectively wised up to that connection to enact policies, like free-minting, in the hopes of providing adequate liquidity for their individual chrêmastikê? Or would the production of coinage (money) remain at best an occasional occurrence for, say, ad hoc military needs? If the coin (money) supply was not adequate to meet their needs, as probably happened at the end of the Peloponnesian War and for some time into the fourth century, how would the profit-maximising Athenians have adapted or changed their individual and collective behaviour?
The focus on (primarily) the fourth century and money as coinage also begs the question of how the Athenians arrived at the point of finessing their money-making, whether filling legers or coffers. L. argues (pp. 18, 41, 230) that the development of coinage was a factor in driving the manifestation, or at least the full efflorescence of the profit-maximising behaviours he describes. This could be true, but uncoined (silver) money had a long history in the Mediterranean region before coinage. L. offers only a few glimpses into the Archaic period, inviting the usual moralising voices of Hesiod (p. 47) and of Solon and Theognis (p. 197) to have their say, but there is still room to explore how the seemingly pre-existing condition of individual lust for profit and wealth might have, conversely, fuelled the developments of coinage and markets from the seventh century bce onwards.
Granted all these are problems that are more peripheral to L.'s central thrust of proving the largely theoretical point that many Athenians and Greeks were behaving little differently than homo oeconomicus (p. 222), and in this task L. has done a fine job.
