The “Ancient Economy” and Its Countryside

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Notes

NOTES

1. We often reported about this state of the art in this journal. See, for example, Hans Derks, “The ‘Ancient Economy’: The Problem and the Fraud,” The European Legacy 7.5 (2002): 701–35. See also http://www.hderks.dds.nl. Recently, John Davies demonstrated an anti-Finley (anti-Max Weber) approach in Zofia Archibald, John Davies, Vincent Gabrielsen and G. Oliver, eds, Hellenistic Economies (London: Routledge, 2001).

2. Winfried Schmitz, Nachbarschaft und Dorfgemeinschaft im archaischen und klassischen Griechenland (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004; KLIO Beihefte, NF Bnd. 7). In 1999 Schmitz published an article with the same title in Historische Zeitschrift 269 (1999): 561–99, against which I protested for scientific and political reasons. Lothar Gall, the editor, rejected my criticism on the grounds of linguistic imperfections. In Schmitz's 2004 publication his 1999 article was not even mentioned! For the Anglo-Saxon peoples mentioned see note 1.

3. Schmitz spends a large part of his voluminous study to prove the similarity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German peasant customs from Upper Austria with norms, values and situations in the Boeotia of Hesiod (see also note 8).

4. In Stad en Land, Markt en Oikos [(Amsterdam, 1986), 175–86], I provide a detailed ecological analysis of Attica based on literary sources, to determine the carrying capacity, animal culture, etc. This analysis is refined in my De Koe van Troje (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), 144–99. For a comparable analysis at the local level—of Megara Hyblaia's territory—see Franco De Angelis's chapter in The Archaeology of Greek Colonisation, ed. Gocha Tsetskhladze and Franco De Angelis (Oxford: Oxford University School of Archaeology, 2004), 91–100.

5. See Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975) about the “widespread prevalence of household self-sufficiency” (138) and about the absence of any calculating individuals (110, 115 ff.).

6. Rodney Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (London: Routledge, 1993), 48 ff.

7. Rodney Castleden, Mycenaeans (London: Routledge, 2005), 108.

8. See Hans Derks, “Medieval Origins of Trade and Commerce in West Europe,” The European Legacy 9 (2004): 239–47.

9. Moses Finley tried to support his ideas about self-sufficiency time and again with Trimalchio's jokes, Oblomov's family-analysis and judgements about the Roman elite that it “finally responded by retiring to their estates into a condition of maximum self-sufficiency” (The Ancient Economy, 161 and passim). See his talk about Trimalchio's “economic self-sufficiency” (50).