The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is pleased to invite you to the lecture “Markets in the Demes, a New Approach to the Attic Countryside”.
Guest speakers: Edward Harris, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History (Durham University) and Sylvian Fachard is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Lausanne and Director of the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece
Abstract
In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (33-36), Dikaiopolis expresses his nostalgia for the good old days in the Attic countryside when no one ever used the word ‘buy’ and the land produced everything he needed. This passage has been used by Finley (1999: 107) and Gallant (1991: 100-101) as evidence that the market played only a peripheral role in the lives of Greek farmers. This assumption has also led scholars like Möller (2007: 371) and Osborne (1987: 108) that there is no evidence for markets outside Athens, the Piraeus and Laurion. This paper will draw on recent work in the Attic countryside to study several rural markets neglected by these scholars and to show how local roads linked these markets to farmsteads. Attic farmers were not peasants living at subsistence level but produced a surplus for market and were linked with communities outside Attica through numerous ports outside the Piraeus.
Edward Harris, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History (Durham University), has published extensively on Athenian political history and institutions, the law of Ancient Greece, and the economy of ancient Greece. He has published Democracy and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press 2006) and The Rule of Law in Action in Democratic Athens(Oxford University Press 2013) and translated Demosthenes Speeches 20-22 and Demosthenes Speeches 23-26 (University of Texas). With David Lewis and Mark Woolmer, he has co-editedThe Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States(Cambridge University Press 2016) with Edmund Stewart and David Lewis, Skilled Labour and Professionalism in Ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge University Press 2020), and with Sylvian Fachard The Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World (Cambridge University Press 2021). He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and NEH Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Sylvian Fachard is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Lausanne and Director of the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece. He previously taught at the universities of Geneva, Brown and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where he held the position of A.W. Mellon Professor (2017-2020). A specialist in the fortifications and territories of Greek city-states, he has directed excavations and surveys in Eretria, Amarynthos, Argos, and Attica. His knowledge of the sites, monuments, museums, and topography of Greece is extensive. Members of the American School have enjoyed his tours around Eretria—a site on which he is a leading expert who has published multiple studies and co-authored volumes—since 2004.