UC Berkeley

Although Greek and Roman economic history has received an expansion of interest in recent decades, particularly buoyed by New Institutional Economics (NIE), the archaic period (c. 700-450 BCE) has been largely left out of this process. This is an unfortunate state of affairs, because the study of the archaic period offers valuable insights into why the Greek polis behaved as it did. The archaic period represents the key juncture in which the institutions that characterize the Greek city state as a historical phenomenon developed. Scholars in recent decades have explored how state authority overtook individual authority in the fields of politics and law, but have not considered the problem from the standpoint of economic history.

This dissertation investigates the extent, definition, and use of sacred wealth, particularly in moveable forms, in the archaic Argolid, Corinthia, and Saronic Gulf. I argue that sacred wealth provided a means to build consensus as the city-state began to take on an increasingly abstract existence not tied to any one individual or magistrate. Because sacred wealth was neither privately controlled nor wholly public, it provided an important middle ground that facilitated consensus over the idea of an abstracted sphere of communal wealth. I suggest that this conceptual step was an essential point in the creation of robust stores of public wealth in the hands of the magistrates of the Greek city state.

Chapter 1 lays out my orientation towards archaic history and outlines the problems that the study of the archaic economy raises. Chapter 2 studies the terminology for sacred and public wealth across the Greek-speaking world and concludes that archaic public organization is more complex than a survey of any one city would suggest. Chapters 3 and 4 address the archaeological evidence for sacred wealth through studies of temple construction (Chapter 3) and extra-urban sanctuaries (Chapter 4). Temple construction has long raised the question of who was responsible for these vast undertakings. The assumption has long been that private sponsorship was essential to these infrastructural projects, but a reexamination of the epigraphic and literary sources suggests that construction actually attests to a dynamic process of centralizing public, sacred, and private holdings, which provided a concerted shared project that bolstered the sense of the polis as an entity. At the same time, the constructions in the study area are relatively modest in size and elaboration, suggesting limits on the appropriate scope of the public sphere. Chapter 4 examines the phenomenon of public investment in the specific case of extra-urban sanctuaries and finds that shared sanctuaries offered another opportunity for the polis to present itself as a unitary entity with the ability to promote an agenda, despite the complex internal dynamics underlying the history of these sanctuaries. Chapter 5 returns to the epigraphic evidence and examines how moveable sacred wealth was transferred between different physical statuses (as cash, objects, and dedications) and argues that movement between these categories reflects historically contingent anxieties about cash reserves. It is suggested that this pattern informed the polis’ cautious approach to sacred and public wealth in subsequent centuries. Chapter 6 concludes by suggesting that features of the Greek polis that have been seen as economically uninformed or irrational may stem from the social needs of the archaic period as institutions were becoming more complex. Rather than poorly attested predecessor to Classical Greece, the archaic period may hold the key to understanding the peculiar paths along which Greek economic institutions developed.