The most important commodities in Classical Athens came from farming and fishing. But as the city expanded, a whole host of other professions came to the fore, and depending on how important they were to the polis, developed their own forms of organisation. As with farming, there was no exchange of surplus produce: as a rule an order was placed for a specific number of items and anything left over was on offer to the slaves.
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The main businesses were the pottery workshops, bronze foundries and tanneries. Businesses (with the exception of the Lavrion mines) were in the hands of private individuals, mainly metics, and the work force came from all social groups. |
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For public buildings and other public works, a large number of labourers was engaged, with a variety of skills. The state required those in charge of a job to submit a detailed report on its progress, and from these reports we can get some idea of how work was organised. The work was broken down into smaller tasks and those in charge parcelled out the tasks to individual builders or carpenters, whether Athenians or metics. These individuals then completed the job, working side by side with their slaves. The procedure followed in the case of private construction would have been much the same. |
The bulk of commodities produced - above all, olive oil and wine - was taken up by the export trade. Oil and wine were transported in jars (which boosted jar production). But there were other important exports too, such as painted pottery and metalwork.
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Everything was produced manually, which provided an enormous number of jobs. Yet production continued to be undervalued in relation to agriculture. The reason is not hard to find; the Athenian economy was chiefly based on farming. Farming implies farmland, and nobody except a citizen could own land. Athenian citizens working as craftsmen came from the economically less powerful classes, and were those who profited most directly from the Athenian boom. What a citizen did for a living might not matter very much to the city as a whole, but it was crucial to his social status; the Athenians used the contemptuous adjective 'banausic' to describe the craftsmen. |
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