Finley noted silences in ancient sources. Socrates may stop to converse with the shoemaker Simon on the edge of the marketplace. Lamp-merchants, turners, leather-dressers, and cobblers crowd the chorus of a play by Aristophanes. Yet the world of business was rarely a literary preoccupation. If philosophers mention commerce, it is to urge focus on the more important things in life. Texts on trade were rare. Xenophon wrote Oeconomicus on the management of private affairs and Vectigalia on public finance, but in classical Athens discussion of economic exchange was confined largely to court records and wills.

In Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens, Peter Acton takes issue with this portrait of limited ancient commerce. His period is the Athens of 500–300 bce, his topic the organisation of manufacturing, his evidence arrayed with care. Acton argues that the ancients did not need the language of Alfred Marshall to understand the operation of economics. Athenian business behaviour is more intelligible in modern terms than Finley allowed.

Analysis starts with the surprising scale of the Athenian economy. More than 50,000 households lived among metalworking and pottery furnaces, looms, workshops for carpenters and sculptors, carts, markets, sellers of fine cloth and oils. The city produced vast numbers of vases and luxury items. Athens required more than a million new coins every year, produced by a gang of public slaves.

With poor soil, Attica could not sustain sufficient agriculture for a large urban population. Trade was essential. Athens manufactured numerous specialist goods, which it exported in return for grain, wines, and produce. Athenians may not have shared the concept of competitive advantage, suggests Acton, but they were enthusiastic participants in a diverse and lively market economy. Tens of thousands of industrial slaves, and perhaps a quarter of Athenian citizens were involved in manufacturing. Every scale of enterprise can be identified, from single-person workshops to large public factories producing the distinctive Greek warship, the trireme.

Likewise, there were numerous models of ownership. Single craftsmen attached a working space to the family home, while women weaved and spun to produce extra income for the household. Larger concerns were often organised around the apophora system, with a foreman slave managing a factory for an owner in return for a fixed regular payment. Skilled slaves could produce a significant profit and, in time, buy their freedom and perhaps the factory as well.

Court records and deeds suggest extensive trade in industrial slaves, who cost 300 to 400 drachmae each. Owners borrowed to expand their enterprises, and showed a keen awareness of risk. International trade could be the most lucrative investment, but misadventure made this perilous. There is evidence of business partnerships, mortgages, and legal accountability for debts. Despite many legal impediments, women participated in economic life as investors, managers, cobblers, potters, painters, and marketers.

In sum, Acton identifies the basis of a market economy. Property rights were protected by law, with enforceable business agreements (for important matters, contract conditions were carved in stone). Capital could be accumulated, credit sought, enterprises bought and sold. The presence of slaves changed the economics of some industries but could not prevent labour shortages; numerous migrant guest workers, the metic, were required to keep Athenian industries working. Manufacturing, concludes Acton, provided ‘a path to riches for citizens and slaves, employment for thousands of citizens and metics, and opportunities for extra income for many others.

With the broader economic framework established, Poiesis turns to the structure of individual industries. Here Acton applies standard microeconomics, framed as a competitive advantage approach. Under what circumstances did owners create larger enterprises? Acton explores this through detailed industry studies of pottery, metals and armour, textiles clothing and footwear, woodworking, construction and monumental sculpture, food, drink, and cosmetics. There are excursions into state-owned enterprises such as silver mines, naval shipbuilding, and the production of coins.

The findings describe Athenian industry shaped by scale, investment costs, and markets. Where technology and skills were widely shared, and competition ubiquitous as in textile or pottery production, there was little incentive to consolidate. Such industries remained fragmented and small scale. Textile would be woven at home or purchased from other families. Shoemakers were sole traders, with small working spaces. Cosmetics were sold by single traders, though production often involved larger trading companies able to source exotic ingredients and fund their purchase.

When an industry required significant infrastructure and highly specialised skills, such as the manufacture of musical instruments or monumental sculpture, factories become viable. Three distinct industry segments emerged in metalworking – large fixed workshops making standard objects such as knives, individual craftsmen for bespoke items such as armour, and local smiths for repairs and simple objects.

Lenormant Trireme Relief discovered at the Acropolis in 1852, Acropolis Museum (photograph by Marsyas via Wikimedia Commons)

A few industries became large indeed. One shield workshop employed sixty slaves. The production of triremes to fight the Peloponnesian War probably required a workforce of 400 people to build and repair the fleet, with a further 2,500 people working upstream in allied industries. Large teams of skilled craftsmen were engaged for projects such as the five major temples built in Athens between 450 and 420 bce.

Acton’s clear and engaging exposition invites the reader to walk through ancient workshops and factories. We see familiar artefacts in a new light – fashionable textiles presented on a statue of Athena, modish male clothes modelled by Demosthenes. Poiesis does not labour the point that Finley dismissed the relevance of contemporary economics without testing first their applicability. Ancient Athens may not have celebrated supply and demand in literature, Acton suggests, but the logic was clearly understood.

Poiesis demonstrates the possibilities of interdisciplinary research (poiesis means ‘to make’ and is also the root of ‘poetry’). Acton combines excellent historical scholarship with expertise as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (he once provided advice to me and my colleagues on organisational models for a business school). Poiesis began as a doctoral thesis and now offers a substantive and original contribution to classical scholarship. It sets out testable propositions and acknowledges the limits of available evidence. The conclusions are cautious, constrained to those industries for which reasonable information is available.

Yet through the scholarship comes a clear message: the past is no foreign country, with inexplicable practices. Social science, notably microeconomics, can provide robust insight when applied to classical Greece. The logic of competitive advantage correlates closely with archaeology on the size and organisation of Athenian homes and workshops. People in the city made rational choices about their economic interests. Athens may be strange and familiar in equal measure, but business follows similar laws the world over.