chapter twenty-one
ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND ECONOMIC FACT IN THE WORKS OF XENOPHON
Thomas J. Figueira
It is my intention in this chapter to use Xenophon to explore our appre- ciation of classical Greek economic phenomena. The title of the original conference paper noted an emphasis on the Poroi or Ways and Means, but it proves impossible to investigate Greek economic conditions in practical iso- lation, as though illustrated by any single Xenophontic work. I shall employ as an initial point of departure another study of mine entitled ‘Xenophon and the Spartan Economy’, which was presented at a conference in Lyon in 2006,1 and will appear in a written version in due course.2 Naturally, throughout my discussion both of the data on Spartan subsistence that were provided by Xenophon and of Xenophon’s appreciation of this material, the counter-example, or, perhaps, the counter-image, of Athens had to be continually present. Hence, Spartan economic conditions and the Spartan Constitution perforce led back to the Poroi and to the Oeconomicus as well. As a means of approaching here some more general issues concerning eco- nomic phenomena in Xenophon, a useful line of ingress is provided by the works of Moses Finley, the most eminent historian of economies of classical antiquity during the later twentieth century.
Introduction
The opening section of my earlier paper was wryly entitled ‘Xenophon the Economist’, although, as I hastened to observe, Xenophon and his fth- and fourth-century contemporaries did not demonstrably possess the concept of an economy.3 I de ned this ‘economy’ as transcending ancient oikono- mia or ‘household management’: it conveyed ‘an awareness of a productive
1 Xénophon et Sparte: Colloque international. L’École Normale Supérieure, Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon, July 2006. 2 Figueira (forthcoming). 3 In general, see Luccioni 1947: 69–107; Mossé 1975; Pomeroy 1994: 41–67. 666 thomas j. figueira apparatus, comprising a resource base and material assets and subsuming certain processes for conducting transactions between individuals’. For my purposes, mere comprehension of economic conditions and practical intel- ligence about how one’s livelihood was to be managed or achieved was not enough to demonstrate control of the concept of ‘economy’. We were look- ing for ‘an intellectually separable sphere of human interaction that could be described in detail’, possibly even measured. I placed emphasis here on the presence of an understanding by contemporaries of ‘autonomy’ in the polis economy, where the con guration of subsistence-related activities is perceived to change organically under the impact of many separate deci- sions. While not quite a recognition of the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith, I would still require some comprehension on the part of an ancient observer of a social space, separable both from governmental enactment, for exam- ple, an Attic ps¯ephisma, and from the sort of decisions about the household on the micro-economic level that appear in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Even there, Xenophon does not transcend individual insights on opportunistic behaviour to achieve full consciousness of this ‘autonomy’ in its emergent diferentiation from other social processes, and does not consolidate an understanding of the way in which individual decisions about subsistence thereby became interwoven. It will also help to consider the phenomenon of self-equilibrium. The economically minded observer senses economic conditions evolving under the efect of many individual agents and in uenced by self-equilibrating forces, so that the aggregate impact of decisions fashions an adaptive frame- work for the subsistence of the inhabitants of an entire polis. That frame- work would be envisaged as continuously interacting both with the political structure and with the purposive decision-making of individuals. Yet, even when we suspect that the concept of the ‘economy’ has not emerged, we need, nevertheless, to look for the seeds of such awareness, indicia that are sensitive to autonomy and self-equilibrium.4 Under the aforesaid terms, I have deliberately set a high standard for ‘economic’ understanding because I anticipate that any ne-grained portrayal of Xenophon’s appreciation of classical economic phenomena will be subject to a charge of modernism; it will arouse all the customary objections about the formal versus the sub- stantivist approaches.5 I shall use the work of Moses Finley—my distinguished predecessor and fellow victim at Rutgers—as a lens to focus our discussion. Finley has dom-
4 See below, especially on Xen. Cyr. 8.2.5–6; Oec. 20.27–29; Por. 4.3–6. 5 See Figueira 1984.