Some Aspects of Large Estate Management in the Greek World During Classical and Hellenistic Times

This chapter considers the importance of agriculture in economic life during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. It surveys how managers were employed in large business ventures, and how such experts used a well-developed system of accounting. It argues that big agricultural enterprises constituted the largest scale of business ventures known in pre-Imperial times. The driver of ancient economic activity really was agriculture. There is no way around this fact, no point in trying to trace an evolution of autonomous crafts and of exchange practices, in order to maintain the spurious idea of Antiquity's supposed precocious development. But the implications of this conclusion provide no justification whatever for the kinds of judgements of ancient agricultural exploitation that have often been made in the past, on the implicit assumption that it was uniformly unchanging, routine-driven, and backward-looking.

Agriculture · Archaeology · Business · Cartography · Economics · Economy · Entrepreneurship · Estate · Geography · Order (exchange) · Point (geometry) · Scale (ratio) · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Classical Antiquity Studies · Finance · History · Mathematics · Philosophy

• The Agricultural Background of the Harvest Logion in Matthew 9.37–8 and Luke (Q) 10.2

  Open Access•Llewellyn Howes•New Testament Studies•2022

  Add to list