Angelis - 2006 - Going Against The Grain in Sicilian Greek Economic

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Greece & Rome,Vol. 2006.All rights reserved 53, No. 1, ? TheClassical Association, doi: 10.

1017/S0017383506000027

GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN IN SICILIAN GREEK ECONOMICS*


By FRANCO DE ANGELIS

On his recent retirement from the chair of classical archaeology in Cambridge University, Anthony Snodgrass reflected on the state of the subject, wondering whether a paradigm shift has occurred.' Snodgrass assesses various matters, including, for our purposes, how archaeological approaches to ancient literary sources have changed. His comments deserve quotation in full:
. . . Classical archaeology is often stigmatized, by its many critics, as being 'textdriven' . . . [in] that the subject takes its orientation from, and adapts its whole narrative to, the lead given by the literary sources. Thus the archaeology of Roman Britain has been built around Tacitus' narrative of conquest; the study of Greek art around the text of the Elder Pliny; the archaeology of fifth-century Athens around the narratives supplied by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon; that of Republican Rome similarly around those of Livy and Diodorus; that of Sicily again around Thucydides; and most notoriously, that of Aegean prehistory and protohistory around Homer. . . . But there is a deeper level still. Traditional Classical archaeology is stated . . . to have directed its energies at those aspects of the ancient world on which the written sources, taken as a whole, throw light. Thus, on urban but not on rural life; on public and civic, but not on domestic activity; on periods seen as historically important, but not on the obscurer ones; on the permanent physical manifestations of religion, but not on the temporary ones - sacrifice, patterns of dedication, ritual meals, pilgrimage; on the artefacts interred in burials, but not on burial itself; on the historically prominent states - in Greece, Athens and Sparta - but not on what has recently been called 'the Third Greece'. .. .2

This is an important point which classical scholarship usually takes lightly or fails to notice. Yet we will be the richer for it if we recognize, embrace, anc ampiity Snodgrass point, since tne situation he describes is still alive and well, when we have done so much to create narrowly defined intellectual frameworks in which our concerns and
* I would like to thankIan Morris,Robin Osborne,and Roy Kok for theirhelpfulcomments on earlierdrafts of this work. I am also gratefulto various audience members for comments made afterthe deliveryof the originaloral version of this paper at the ClassicalAssociationof the CanadianWest'sAnnual Meeting, held on March 19-20, 2004 at the Fort GarryHotel in infelicitiesand errorsare my own responsibility. Winnipeg,MB. Any remaining 12 (2002), 179-94. 1 A. Snodgrass,CArchJ 2 Snodgrass(n. 1), 183.

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questions, and hence our data and theory, are dictated by a selection of passages in one or two ancient writers. As Snodgrass notes, this has happened for Sicily with Thucydides. In this paper I would like to suggest another, more specific way in which literary sources have been instrumental in shaping modern narratives of Greek Sicily, and that is in the sphere of economics. Grain dominated ancient discussions of Sicilian Greek economics, and modern discussions have perpetuated the stories found in the ancient literary sources. I will begin by arguing that Sicilian agriculture and grain were used in ancient political and cultural discourses, and that using these stories as evidence tout court that ancient Sicilian economics were only about agriculture, and grain monoculture especially, as has often been done, has resulted in problematic modern historical reconstructions.3 We need to go against the grain, so to speak, of these literary sources and to provide a greater role for ecological and economic variety in reconstructions of ancient Sicilian economics. To do so, I will put forth a scenario for the overall framework of ancient Sicilian economics, a more contextualized one than has usually been the case, and turn to the available ancient textual and material sources for other economic dimensions.

Sicilian agriculture and grain as discourse Two questions are the focus of this section. How could stories about ancient Sicilian agriculture and grain play a part in political and cultural discourses? Why were such stories used in this manner? In antiquity different sorts of grain were very differently used and valued, and grain terms thus became available as value terms. Modern scholarship has usually faithfully followed, and sometimes amplified, these ancient value terms, a point well brought out by Luigi Gallo in an insightful study devoted to barley.4 Gallo starts by reviewing modern scholarly attitudes, which almost unanimously maintained that barley was less nutritious than wheat, and that amongst the ancient Greeks barley was the cereal consumed exclusively by the poor, slaves, and sometimes animals. He then re-examines the relevant ancient passages, largely of course from Athenian writers, on
3 It is worth noting that it is with this same problem that M. McCormick launches his monumental study, The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and CommerceAD 300-900 (Cambridge, 2001), 4. 4 L. Gallo, Opus 2 (1983), 449-72.

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which these modern opinions are based, demonstrating that the ancients distinguishedbetween kritheand alphitain discussing barley. The latterwas not viewed negativelybecause it was worked into flour and thus became availablefor widespreaddaily use. The negative attitudes existed only towards krithebecause it remained in grain form, and was not worked into flour. While there clearly existed different ancient Greek attitudes,both positive and negative,to barley,modern scholarshiphas mostly failed to recognize the nuance uncovered by Gallo, and this has resultedin distorted historicalreconstructions. Gallo's study may be regardedas the turning-pointin modern attitudes to barley in the ancient Greek world, as can be seen in subsequent scholarship.Peter Garnsey and Robert Sallareshave been the driving forces in arguing convincingly that most Greeks actually lived on barleyto deal with interannualvariabilityin rainfall,and that Athens moved awayfrom barley towardwheat in the fifth century BC only because it had the money to do so.5 Gallo himself, in a later article, drew attention to the evidence for barley production and consumptionfrom Sicily, a region that, comparedwith Greece, suffers less from interannualvariabilityin rainfall and whose natural conditions are well suited to wheat production.6 A general lesson that emerges from all this is that extending the negative attitudes some ancient Greeks had about barley in specific and defined contexts to the entire ancient Greek world as some kind of normative mode of behaviour, as has frequentlybeen done in modern scholarship,is to have gone too far. Gallo's 1983 article has shown conclusively the way in which certain values are attached to different types of cereals, underlining the need to handle carefullysuch attachments.That particularpolitical and cultural connotations could be applied to these values was first broached for Sicily by the late Giuseppe Nenci, who, until his recent death, directedthe Scuola Normale Superioredi Pisa's excavation and survey project in the native Elymian site of Entella. Nenci argued that the Sicilian Greeks gave the name Elymoito these natives of north-west Sicily, whose own name(s) for themselves remain(s)
Responsesto Risk and Crisis 5 P. Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: (Cambridge, 1988), 50-1, 99-105; id., Food and Society in ClassicalAntiquity (Cambridge, 1999), 18-21; R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World(London, 1991), 313-61. 6 L. Gallo, AION(archeol) 11 (1989), 31-53, to which can now be added the preliminary results from Monte Polizzo and Selinous: see H.-P. Stika in I. Morris et al., MAAR 48 (2003), Appendix 3, MAAR 49 (2004), Appendix 6. For the environmental differences between Greece and Sicily, see R. Osborne, Greecein the Making c. 1200-479 BC (London, 1996), 54-60; F. De Angelis, PBSR 68 (2000), 111-48.

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unknown, from the Greek word iAvtzos meaning 'millet'.7 Nenci brings out well the implications of this etic, or externally observed, view of ethnicity. On the ancient Greeks' yardstick, millet was regarded as the most inferior of cereal types, carrying with it negative connotations. Therefore, equating millet with the natives of northwest Sicily, the so-called Elymians of ancient Greek sources, implies that they were in Greek eyes under-developed barbarians. These label because they are said to natives were attractive for the 'AvkogS have come from Asia Minor, particularly Troy and Phrygia, which were associated in antiquity with this type of cereal. Nenci did not specify when he thought this label came into use, but a date two decades on either side of the start of the Peloponnesian War seems likeliest, since this was when the Elymians came to the political fore.8 In particular, Egesta, the chief Elymian city, must have been at the centre of this Greek stereotyping and cultural assault, as it was wealthy and politically savvy, having tricked into an alliance the Athenians (and then the Carthaginians in 410 BC) in the period between the Archidamian and Decelean Wars, using as part of its strategy the well-known and beautiful Doric temple missing from Thucydides' account (6.46).' Simply, the Egestans challenged the Sicilian Greeks. There is some evidence for the cultivation of millet in 'Elymian Sicily': in a twelfth-century-BC context at Mokarta, in a fourth-century-BC context at Entella, and on coins of Egesta and Eryx of the first half of the fifth century BC.1" It is interesting to contrast this limited evidence with the early results of recent palaeoethnobotanical work at Monte Polizzo in Western Sicily, a native site within the political and economic orbit of Egesta. This work has not identified a single grain of millet in the hundreds of litres of sediment floated, whereas barley and wheat are well represented, as are some legumes and fruit crops." As Nenci has shown, the Sicilian Greeks used agriculture and grain
7 G. Nenci, ASNP 19 (1989), 1255-65. 8 P. Anello, 'Lo <<stato>> elimo nel VI e V sec. a.C.', in S. De Vido (ed.), Secondegiornate internazionali di studi sull'area elima (Pisa and Gibellina, 1997), 41-75; G. Vanotti, 'L'identita etnica degli Elimi e le ragioni della politica', in L. Moscati Castelnuovo (ed.), Identita e prassi nel Mediterraneo Greco (Milan, 2002), 91-101. G. Nenci's article 'Per una definizione dell'area elima', in G. Nenci, S. Tusa, and V. Tusa (eds.), Gli Elimi e l'area elima fino all'inizio della prima Guerrapunica. Atti del seminario di studi, Palermo-ContessaEntellina 25-28 maggio 1989 (Palermo, 1990), 21-6, contains the fullest treatment of the history of the use of the Elymian ethnic label. 9 For the temple, see A. Burford, CQ 11 (1961), 87-93; D. Mertens, Der Tempelvon Segesta und die dorischeTemplebaukunst in klassischer Zeit (Mainz, 1984). des griechischen Westens 10 G. Nenci, 'I miglio e il panico nell'alimentazione delle popolazioni mediterranee', in D. Vera (ed.), Demografia, sistemi agrari, regimi alimentari nel mondo antico. Atti del convegno internazionaledi studi, Parma 17-19 ottobre1997 (Bari, 1999), 25-36, at 32. " Stika (n. 6).

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as part of political and cultural discourses, and, as the palaeoethnobotanical data from Monte Polizzo seems to be indicating so far, this discourse may not be representingthe entire spectrum of economic realitieson the ground. How else were stories about agricultureand grain used in ancient Sicilian political and culturaldiscourses, and why?In answeringthese questions, the intention is not to review, yet again, all the generally quite meagre details which the surviving ancient texts record about Sicilian Greek agriculture and grain.'2 Rather, the intention is to single out the three main agriculture and grain stories which have contributedthe most to shaping modern narrativesof ancient Sicilian economics, and to discuss the purposes they servedin ancient life. We begin with Sicily's association with the agricultural deities Demeter and Persephone and the origins of wheat. There are two elements in particularto the Demeter-Persephonemyth that need to be addressed. First, Demeter and Persephone were thought to have been from Sicily itself (Cic., Verr. 4.48.106; Diod. Sic. 5.2.3-4), and the reasons behind this view are not difficult to work out: in addition to agriculture being important to Sicily, the cult of Demeter and Persephone was widely distributed throughout the island in all periods of classical antiquityand in all kinds of topographicsetting urban, suburban,and rural.13As settlementsdeveloped and territorial possessions increased, so too, not surprisingly,did the goddesses' cult.'14 Second, according to popular ancient belief (Cic., Verr. 4.48.106; Diod. Sic. 5.2.4), wheat (pyros)and grain in general (sitos) are said to have originatedin Sicily owing to its fertility.Sicily's classical inhabitantseven claimed that wild wheat grew particularlyin the plain of Leontinoi, though in other parts of the island as well (Diod. Sic. 5.2.4). For these reasons, therefore, it is easy to see how the ancient Greek world's two most important agriculturaldeities and crops were located in and identifiedwith Sicily.

12

This material has been convenientlycollected in various works: T. J. Dunbabin, The

WesternGreeks:The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the GreekColoniesto 480 B.C. (Oxford, 1948), 211-17; B. Pace, Arte e Civiltinella Sicilia antica 12 (Milan, 1958), 389-93; U. Fantasia, ASNP 23 (1993), 9-31; G. Nenci, ASNP 23 (1993), 1-7. 13 P. Orlandini, Kokalos 14-15 (1968-1969), 334-8; S. G. Cole, 'Demeter in the Ancient Greek City and its Countryside', in S. E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds.), Placing the Gods:Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece(Oxford, 1994), 199-216, at 206-13; G. Maddoli, 'Cults and Religious Doctrines of the Western Greeks', in G. Pugliese Carratelli (ed.), The Western Greeks(Milan, 1996), 481-98, at 491. 14 This is a point which V. Hinz, Der Kult von Demeter und Kore aufSizilien und in der Magna Graecia (Wiesbaden, 1998), has highlighted.

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But what should we make of all these ancient claims? Two soto-speak scientific objections could be advanced to challenge their validity: the Sicilian origins of wheat have not been supported by archaeological discoveries; instead, they are to be placed, without an ounce of doubt, in the Fertile Crescent over 10,000 years ago, as Jared Diamond has so eloquently reminded us in his best-selling book Guns, Germs,and Steel,15while the development of the Greek pantheon, and the place of Demeter and Persephone within it, occurred long before the Greeks settled in Sicily.16 These ancient claims, however, should not be viewed by us moderns in this manner. There is no doubt that we cannot literally take them at face value by today's knowledge standards. Instead, we should look at them with ancient eyes. Sicily was one of the central agricultural regions of the ancient Greek world, something which the ancients took very seriously. In a round-about way, it could be argued that these myths were essentially saying that agriculture was so important to Sicily that, when the ancient Greeks came to discuss the birth-place of their two agricultural deities and their staple crops, they could convincingly set their sights on Sicily to provide that pedigree. Discarding altogether these myths as simply being useless ancient speculation would be rash: they must be seen as part of Sicilian political and cultural discourses, which reflect realities on the ground to a large degree no doubt, but which also served other purposes. The myths were created and retold, by people like the Syracusan tyrant Gelon (see further below), to reinforce and highlight the importance of agriculture to ancient Sicily. The Sicilians could have used them as a way to compete economically with other grain-producing regions, like Cyrenaica.17 The myths could also be used to compete politically with other regions. In the Archaic and Classical periods, Athens and Sicily had competing versions of these myths which centred the story on their respective regions;18 they no doubt fought a war of words for dominance over these myths, just as they fought a real war in 415-13 BC. But Sicily ultimately won the day, so that by the time of the Roman Empire at
J. Diamond, Guns, Germs,and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997), 138. Cf. W. Burkert, GreekReligion:Archaic and Classical (Oxford, 1985), 13. 17 A. Laronde, CRAI (1996), 503-27, has underlined the competition that existed between major grain-producing regions of the ancient Greek world. The power of ancient agriculture and grain stories should not be under-estimated. Their retelling and endurance may explain in part why in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Naples preferred to import Sicilian grain over Puglian grain, which was cheaper in price. Peter Musgrave, The Early Modern EuropeanEconomy (London, 1999), 134, singles out the ease of transporting Sicilian grain by sea as the key factor, as well as fashion and perception, but says nothing of the origins of the latter two factors. 8 See Burkert (n. 16), 159-60.
16

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the latest the Sicilian version was preferred. The reason is not far to seek. Sicily was Rome's first province, and a big supplier of grain to the Empire, whose imports pre-dated Rome's conquest of the island and, on top of that, are said to have been responsible for a new way of eating and for the introduction of the cult of Ceres and Libera on the Aventine Hill in Rome in the 490s BC.19 The Romans openly acknowledged that Sicilian grain had changed their lives; Sicily, not Athens, became one of granaries of the Roman Empire. Rome was using Sicilian agriculture and grain for her own political and cultural discourses (on which more below). The texts recounting the myth of Demeter and Persephone have played a heavy role in shaping ancient and modern ideas about Sicilian agriculture and grain, but these texts are not alone. Two others need to be discussed to complete the picture. The first involves the Syracusan tyrant Gelon offering the entire Greek army in 481 BC grain (sitos) for the duration of the campaign against the Persians, an offer recounted by Herodotus (7.158.4). We need to remind ourselves of the larger context of this offer. Its origins can be traced to the early fifth century when Hippokrates, tyrant of Gela, set out to obtain other people's agricultural and demographic resources through conquest (Hdt. 7.154-5). Gelon, another citizen of Gela, continued by usurping power in his home city and taking over large parts of Eastern Sicily, including Syracuse. Gelon then made Syracuse his capital, and he transferred to it entire populations from other cities as fellow citizens, in the case of the wealthy, or as fodder for the slave-market, in the case of the poor (Hdt. 7.155-6). Gelon was a keen promoter of the cult of Demeter and Persephone, using it to unite these diverse peoples by smoothing over any political tensions that no doubt accompanied his radical upheavals.20 The pre-existing widespread worship of the goddesses by numerous social classes and
19 For Sicilian grain imports to Rome before the Punic Wars, see L. Gallo, ASNP 22 (1992), 365-98. For the cults and monuments on the Aventine Hill, O. De Cazanove, 'Le sanctuaire de C6r6s jusqu'a la deuxieme s6cession de la plebe: remarques sur l'6volution d'un culte public', in F-H. Massa-Pairault (ed.), Crise et transformationdes socitiis archaiques de l'Italie antique au Ve si&le av. J.-C.: Actes de la table ronde organisiepar l'Eolefranfaise de Rome et l'Uniti de recherches au CNRS (UA 1132) Rome 19-21 novembre1987 (Rome, 1990), 373-99; itrusco-italiquesassoci&e F. Zevi, 'Siculi e Troiani (Roma e la propaganda greca nel V secolo a.C.)', in La colonisation occidentale.Actes de la rencontrescientifique en homage a Georges Vallet grecque en Miditerran&e organisie par le Centre Jean-Brard, l'Eole franpaise de Rome, l'Istituto universitario orientale et studi di Napoli FedericoII> (Rome-Naples, 15-18 novembre1995) (Rome, 1999), l'Universittddegli 315-43, at 331-5; N. Purcell, AJPh 124 (2003), 329-58, at 334-5, 342-3, 353. 20 For a recent discussion of Gelon's connection with Demeter and Persephone, see Hinz (n. 14), 225-8, 240.

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its role as a cultural cohesive for the city's single most important activity, agriculture, must have been at the centre of Gelon's decision. This was the larger Sicilian context of the Hellenic League's plea to Gelon for help against the Persian Empire found in Herodotus. Gelon expressed the willingness to help out his fellow Greeks, offering

manpower,ships, and sufficient grain (sitos)to feed the entire Greek


army for the duration of the fight, on the condition that he be in command of all or half of the anti-Persian forces. In the end, the Spartan and Athenian ambassadors could not agree to this demand, and they returned home empty-handed. Nonetheless, Gelon is said to have been willing to supply the entire Greek army with what may certainly be taken to be a surplus of grain. It is difficult to put an exact number to this Greek army, but it would not be irrational to think of a number in the region of 20,000-40,000 men, including those provided by Gelon himself. It is clear that Gelon's claim found in Herodotus has shaped modern views of both Sicilian and Syracusan economics in the early fifth century.21 With few exceptions, historians have tended to leave discussion of this story in Herodotus at that: as a small tip of an otherwise still largely unknown economic iceberg.22 But there is more that can be extracted from this story, especially in connection with elucidating its political and cultural discourses. Charles Fornara has been one of the very few scholars who has delved deeper in this way.23 In a still penetrating analysis, Fornara draws the conclusion that Herodotus includes this episode as the centre-piece of the embassies sent by the homeland Greeks for help as part of his general aim to inform his contemporaries of how Athens and Sparta came to be involved in the Peloponnesian War. Gelon's words only make sense to an audience listening during the Archidamian War, and the implications would only have been fully understood by this later generation. In other words, the story involving Gelon is the context for embedding an invented anachronism that Herodotus' narrative required. Fornara has been widely

21 Note, for instance, Dunbabin (n. 12), 214-15; M. Cary, The GeographicBackground of Greek and Roman History (Oxford, 1949), 144 with n. 6; Pace (n. 12), 391; M. I. Finley, Ancient Sicily (London, 19792), 52; Fantasia (n. 12), 9. 22 W. How and J. Wells' still standard, though outdated, A Commentary on Herodotus 2 (Oxford, 1912), 195-7 has no comment to make on Gelon's grain-producing abilities, perhaps because they view the negotiations with Gelon as 'almost certain' but Herodotus' version of them as 'clearly unhistorical'. 23 C. W. Fornara, Herodotus: An InterpretativeEssay (Oxford, 1971), 75-91.

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followed,24 but with one notable exception. While John Gould has acknowledged that there is much to commend to Fornara's reconstruction, he feels overall that it has gone too far in one direction, not allowing enough for what Herodotus himself says in his introduction he is setting out to do: to record the deeds of heroic figures so that they are not lost to posterity.25 The positions of Fornara and Gould are compatible, but have never been combined in a single approach and applied to Herodotus' story of the embassy to Gelon. Juliette de la Geniere, a leading authority in Sicilian archaeology and history, has recently suggested that Sicily was so wealthy in and around the time of the Persian Wars that it may have been for a time the cultural centre of the ancient Greek world.26 She is no doubt right, basing her opinion on such things as literary and artistic patronage and monumental art and architecture. Gelon's Syracuse was at the forefront of this Sicilian wealth and cultural power, and, like many Sicilian aristocrats, Gelon had suitably Homeric overtones for Herodotus' purposes.27 Was Gelon merely engaging in idle talk with the Athenian and Spartan ambassadors? It seems perverse to deny any substantial truth to this whole episode, while of course allowing for some later post-eventum modifications of Gelon's image and deeds to suit the needs of Herodotus and others. Gelon's stature in the Greek world during the Persian War period was real. His wealth was owed to Greek Sicily's agricultural richness, which may have received an additional boost by a shift to residence on the land, which eliminated commuting to fields from nucleated settlements and increased yields, as attested in numerous other parts of the ancient Greek world at this time.28 At the same time, Gelon's offer to supply the entire Greek
24 See most recently E. Galvagno, Politica ed economia nella Sicilia greca (Rome, 2000), 15-63; R. V. Munson, TellingWonders: Ethnographicand Political Discourse in the Workof Herodotus (Ann Arbor, 2001), 219. 25 J. Gould, Herodotus (London, 1989), 118-19. On the connection between human agency and prose writing, see now S. Goldhill, The Invention of Prose (G&R New Surveys in the Classics 32) (Oxford, 2002). On Herodotus in general, see E. Bakker, I. J. F. de Jong, and H. van Wees (eds.), Brill's Companionto Herodotus (Leiden, 2002). 26 J. De la Geniere, CRAI (1995), 1005-21, at 1021. 27 For the Homeric-style behaviour of Sicilian Greek aristocrats, see S. Collin Bouffier, 'Les elites urbaines en Sicile grecque du VIIe au Ve siecle av. J.-C. ou la reproduction d'un modele des patriciats urbains et representation homerique', in C. Petitfrere (ed.), Construction,reproduction de l'Antiquiti au XXe sikle. Actes du colloquedes 7, 8, 9 septembre1998 tenu d Tours (Tours, 1999), 363-73. 28 Cf. De Angelis (n. 6), 140-1. Herodotus (7.158) also mentions that Gelon wanted to liberate some Sicilian emporia, the authenticity of which for reconstructions of the island's economic history has never been seriously doubted. See most recently S. N. Consolo Langher, 'Gelone e la conquista degli emporia in Erodoto', in Erodoto e l'Occidente. Atti del convegno, Palermo 27-28 aprile 1998 (Kokalos Suppl. 15) (Rome, 2000), 111-20.

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armywith grain for the durationof the fight againstthe Persiansmust also be viewed as political and cultural discourse aimed at translating his food-producing capabilitiesinto power. This was a good way to solidify his hold over his newly minted Syracusan-basedempire: on this reasoning,Gelon was not only the chief promoterand representative of the cult of Demeter and Persephone, as discussed earlier,but also the chief promoter of his subjects' sustenance.Herodotus' inclusion of the embassy to Gelon was also very effective in cementing in War the minds of his audiences outside Sicily duringthe Archidamian be used to build base could politperiod that Syracuse'sagricultural ical power. It should not cause surprise, therefore, that Athens attempted to do just that in 415 BC. Gelon's uses of Sicilian agriculture and grain as discourse must be seen as powerfulweapons,which were double-edgedin that they were capable of projectingone's power to both Sicilians and the outside world. This double-edged feature also figures prominentlyin the last agricultureand grain story to be examinedhere. We have alreadyencounteredthe Romans using Sicilian agriculture and food as political and cultural discourse; other instances can be Recent discussions of this work by Ann found in Cicero's Verrines. have and Wilson Roger emphasizedthat these speeches were a Vasaly turning-pointin Cicero'spolitical career,and that they had a purpose that went beyond representingfaithfully social and economic conditions in Sicily in the 70s BC.29 Wilson rightly joins a growing chorus of scholars who are very sceptical of the historical accuracy of the figuresCicero cites for Sicilian grain productionand for the decline of agriculturein the island, and the main way in which he does so is by turning to the archaeologicalremains of the first century BCto test Cicero'srhetoricagainstthe materialreality.All this is not seriouslyin doubt: Cicero had reallygood reasons to exaggerateVerres'behaviour as governor of Sicily, and taking Cicero's speeches at face value is altogethermisleading if we want to get a sense of what was going on historically in Sicily and Rome beyond the arena of rhetoric.While rhetoric is an important dimension to consider in historical reconstructions, the challenges of Cicero's speeches can be likened to the dilemmas faced by scholars trying to reconstruct the social and economic history of Athens in the fourth century BC. In the early
29 A. Vasaly, 'Cicero's Early Speeches', in J. M. May (ed.), Brill's Companion to Cicero: and Politics (Leiden,2002), 71-111; R. J. A. Wilson, 'CiceronianSicily:An ArchaeologOratory NewApproaches in C. Smith and J. Serrati(eds.), SicilyfromAeneastoAugustus: ical Perspective', in Archaeologyand History (Edinburgh, 2000), 134-60.

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1990s, we would do well to remember, Paul Millett and Edward Cohen came to radically different interpretations of the same material not only because of the different interpretative frameworks within which they were operating - namely substantivist versus formalist interpretations of the ancient economy (discussed further below) but also because of the different ways they handled the data found in the Athenian orators.30 How have Cicero's Verrinesshaped modern narratives of Sicilian economics? Modern scholarship has retrojected the role of Sicily as Rome's wheat granary found in this corpus of speeches to discussions of economics in pre-Roman Sicily. There is no doubt that Rome's conquest of Sicily changed or accelerated settlement patterns away from nucleation in hill-top settlements to dispersed farmsteads on the valley floors.31 Nenci, moreover, in one of his last articles before his death, brilliantly argued that Rome even intervened in the sphere of toponymy, observing that, after Rome's conquest of Sicily, there was a shift away from calling the city Egesta to calling it Segesta because of the latter's overtones with the region's agricultural abundance.32 The pun is with the word seges meaning, among other things, 'grain field'. When it comes to changes in land use, however, there has been a single line from Karl Beloch in the late nineteenth century onwards: the Roman Empire was the last ancient episode of a very old drama in which Sicily was planted pretty much only with wheat.33 According to this line of reasoning, therefore, Rome did not tamper with what it had inherited. It is difficult still to gauge overall the extent to which things changed in Sicily with the Roman takeover of the island. The idea that Rome had just a wheat monoculture in Sicily has itself come under attack now and again.34 This is not the place to discuss those arguments. Instead, we are concerned with the practice of extending

30 P. Millett, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, 1991); E. E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society:A Banking Perspective(Princeton, 1992). 31 R. J. A. Wilson, 'Changes in the Pattern of Urban Settlement in Roman, Byzantine and Arab Sicily', in C. Malone and S. Stoddart (eds.), Papers in Italian ArchaeologyIV- The Cambridge Conference(Oxford, 1985), 313-44; P. Giordano, 'Ricerche a Montagna dei Cavalli. Ricognizioni nel territorio', in C. Greco et al. (eds.), Archeologiae territorio(Palermo, 1997), 337-48. 32 G. Nenci, 'I toponimi Segesta e Calatafimi e il regime delle terre nell'ager Segestanus' in C. Montapaone (ed.), L'incidenza dell'antico.Studi in memoria di Ettore Lepore 3 (Naples, 1996), 479-88. 33 Full discussion, with examples, can be found in Gallo (n. 6), 36-8. 34 Gallo (n. 6), 38-9. More palaeoethnobotanical studies could, of course, help resolve the matter, but this kind of work is still in its infancy in Sicily. For the economy of Roman Sicily generally, see R. J. A. Wilson, Sicily under the Roman Empire. The Archaeology of a Roman Province, 36 BC-AD535 (Warminster, 1990), chs. 6-7.

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back in time a wheat monoculture to the Greek period, a habit which one still commonly encounters in the pages of recent scholarship.3 The most extended discussion of this problematic back-projection is that of Gallo from 1989.36 Gallo has argued that this modern practice of seeing both Greek and Roman Sicily as planted entirely with wheat was due to two things: the pushing back of Roman sources and conditions to the Greek period, and the ancient assumption (and hence modern too) of the inferiority of barley and other cereals to wheat.37 Gallo then goes on to tackle the major twentieth-century proponent of the wheat-only line, namely Thomas Dunbabin in his book The Western Greeks. Gallo concludes that Dunbabin simply misinterpreted ancient evidence in favour of the wheat-only line, and belittled existing indications of the production and consumption of cereals other than wheat, which have only grown since then and cannot be so easily dismissed as in Dunbabin's day.38 In a different study Gallo has drawn attention to another reason that may be of relevance here: sitos could commonly refer to wheat in the Hellenistic period."39But a case can be made for thinking yet another factor contributed to Dunbabin pushing the wheat-only line that Gallo does not pick up on. In recent years, the problem of Dunbabin's faulty and distorting analogy of comparing the Western Greeks to the British Empire of the 1930s has received full discussion.40 This analogy must also have played a part in his wheat-only interpretation for Sicily, causing Dunbabin to misinterpret and take lightly certain ancient evidence. Dunbabin's interpretative framework constrained his range of conclusions, and, more to the point, he compared the success of the Western Greeks in agriculture to Canada's wheat role during the British Empire.41 That must also be why Dunbabin insisted on
35 To Gallo's (n. 6) bibliography up to 1989, one can add two subsequent works: 0. Murray, Opus 11 (1992), 11-23, at 21; Nenci (n. 12). 36 The general problem, however, was noted long ago by Vincent Scramuzza in CPh 33 (1938), 337-8, in his review of the first edition of the first volume of Pace's (n. 12) history of ancient Sicily: 'Greek authorities of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.and Roman writers of the Republic and the Empire are thrown indiscriminately together to prove that Sicily produced horses or sheep or wine, as if these industries did not change in seven hundred years. 37 Gallo (n. 6), 37-40. 38 Gallo (n. 6), 39-42. 39 Gallo (n. 4), 463 n. 15 and 468-9 n. 78. 40 F. De Angelis, Antiquity 72 (1998), 539-49. 41 Dunbabin (n. 12), 214. Sir John Myres, one of Dunbabin's mentors, had made such a link in print as early as 1911 (for a reprint of the essay, see J. L. Myres, GeographicalHistory in Greek Lands (Oxford, 1953), 133-60, esp. 137, 153-5 on the link). Other scholars working during the British Empire, including Dunbabin's predecessor in Sicily, E. A. Freeman (The History of Sicily: From the Earliest Times, 4 vols. [Oxford, 1891-94]), often compared ancient Greek settlement in Sicily to New World developments. This habit was also commonplace among scholars working

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translating sitos as wheat: here ancient Sicilian grain was used as part of modern colonial discourse. In Dunbabin's vision, Greek Sicily had an imperial, dependent relationship with the Greek homeland, one in which agricultural products were exchanged for manufactured goods. From modern history, we know of numerous examples of colonial exploitation where one crop being planted was the rule in subject territories, but ancient Greek Sicily was not one of these colonial puppets. Greece did import Sicilian grain but not on the terms Dunbabin envisaged. To sum up the argument so far, while it is not to be doubted that grain was important to Sicilian Greek economics, given the island's environmental suitability to this crop and the position occupied by grain in overall consumption patterns,42 the ancient emphasis on grain, and by extension the modern one too, must be seen as part of larger political and cultural discourses which at times became something of a topos. We cannot handle this evidence lightly and freely extend it to cover all times and places in ancient Sicilian history. Taking a few grain stories and making grain the only feature of all of Sicily's economies, while not impossible, though unlikely (see below), needs to be demonstrated empirically rather than simply asserted or assumed for all times and places. We need to be careful how widely we apply these attitudes and stories. Stephan Epstein has made a similar point for late Medieval Sicily:
Grain exports were the result neither of a deliberate choice by domestic ruling classes, nor of foreign compulsion or exploitation. It is only because government income depended so heavily on export dues that such a vast documentation on the grain trade was produced, the trade thus appearing more important, and the government's role in promoting it more central, than was ever truly the case.

Epstein makes this point in the context of his re-evaluation of modern interpretations that situate the origins of Sicily's social and economic backwardness in the Norman period.43 Sicilian grain exchanged
in other countrieswith imperialterritories and ambitions.For a laterperiod of Sicilianhistory,it
is worth noting Fernand Braudel's comparison in La MMiterrani et le monde miditerranken a

II (Paris, 1949), 453, of the Sicilian grain marketand trade in the age of l'poquede Philippe Philip II of Spainwith those of modern Canadaand Argentina,a comparisonwith which some
Italian scholars have engaged: 0. Cancila, L'economiadella Sicilia. Aspetti storici (Turin, 1992), 3, 27; M. Verga, La Sicilia dei grani. Gestione dei feudi e cultura economicafra Sei e Settecento (Flor-

ence, 1993), 26-30. 42 I have acknowledged the importanceof grainto Greek Sicily,from the eighth centuryBC onwards,in OJA21 (2002), 299-310.
43 See the review of scholarship in S. R. Epstein, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily (Cambridge, 1992), 1-24, quotation at 291. See too

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under colonial circumstances for manufactured goods is a topos of modern scholarship for other historical periods, and, as in the case of Greek Sicily, it is a topos created as a result of the over-reliance on unrepresentative written sources and the assumption that grain monoculture was a long-term and dominant feature of Sicilian history. There was indeed a time between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries when large tracts of Sicily were given over to extensive grain monoculture.44 But this episode belongs to a particular time and place and should not be indiscriminately treated as a timeless feature of all Sicilian history.45 Such practices have helped to impede modern research on other aspects of Sicilian economics beyond grain, as Epstein himself went on to demonstrate. Agriculture and trade in the Greek period are not as well documented as in the late Medieval period, and as a result there is greater reliance on archaeological data. Modern scholarship's over-reliance on ancient Sicilian grain stories has stunted the archaeological study of other dimensions of ancient Sicilian economics.46 The archaeological study of oil and wine production and consumption is more readily pursuable than the archaeological study of grain production and consumption, and yet the study of oil and wine production and consumption in pre-Roman Sicily has only just started in the last decade.47 That is not to say that the archaeological study of grain production and consumption has advanced far: why bother when one
Musgrave (n. 17), 124, 204, who has argued that grain monoculture was out of place for the early modern Italian South, and that the so-called 'Southern problem' emerged only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 44 D. Mack Smith, PBA 51 (1965), 85-124; id., Modern Sicily: After 1713 (London, 1968), 271-7; 0. Cancila, Baroni e popolo nella Sicilia del grano (Palermo, 1983); Verga (n. 41). 45 U. Fantasia, in QS 57 (2003), 101-45, has underlined the modern uses of ancient agricultural history in Sicily and elsewhere. The assumption of Sicily's timelessness in grain monoculture was in part politically motivated by the big landowners practising it (Mack Smith [n. 44]). 46 Note the valuable observation made L. Bowkett et al., Classical Archaeology in the Field: Approaches (London, 2001), 5, with regard to the archaeology of literate periods: 'It was often claimed that it was pointless, even irresponsible, to use up valuable funding on expensive techniques which would show no more than could be discovered from reading contemporary written accounts. Increasingly, however, archaeologists studying the Classical world are adopting techniques which indicate far, far more about, say, environmental changes than could ever be discerned from the patchy historical record.' 47 C. Vandermersch, Vins et amphores de Grand Gr&e et de Sicile IVeIIll" s. avant J.-C. (Naples, 1994); id., Ostraka 5 (1996), 155-85. It is interesting to observe that there is not a single olive stone from Archaic levels at Elymian Monte Polizzo, though there are several from probably fourth-century levels at nearby Salemi (Stika [n. 6]). In general, there is also no good evidence for olive cultivation in Spain and Southern France either until the fourth century BC: M.-C. Amouretti and J.-P. Brun (eds.), La production du vin et de l'huile en Mdditerran&(BCH Suppl. 26) (Paris, 1993). It may be that Western Mediterranean natives were much slower to take to olive cultivation than to viticulture.

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has a handful of literary sources which would simply be duplicated? The discussion must move beyond grain in the coming decades, and even beyond agriculture, following the lead of David Mattingly and John Salmon's recently edited volume entitled Economies beyondAgriculturein the Classical World,48 to a more diversified picture of ancient Sicilian economics to include such aspects as manufacturing and services. But how should we proceed and where should we begin? The context of Sicilian economics Any attempt at outlining the context of ancient Sicilian economics must arguably begin by grappling with the various interpretative models and frameworks that have been advanced over the years to account for Sicily's development in the wider ancient Mediterranean world. In doing so, we want to try to insert ancient Greek Sicily into its original economic context. The point of departure is a matter touched on earlier. There still unhelpfully exists a strong modern belief that ancient Greece represented the 'centre' of some kind of imperial system, and that regions outside it the under-developed or undeveloped 'periphery'. At another level, this kind of centre-periphery thinking is to be considered unhelpful because ultimately these imported analytical concepts derive from world-system theory and were originally meant to explain the modern Western world's expropriation and control of resources and labour from the non-Western world. This is precisely the kind of thinking that we should be avoiding. While for some the jury is still out on the appropriateness of world-system theory to ancient Greece and Italy,49and for others it has been deemed to have no place in this world,50 for the time being we can begin by putting an end to simplistic frameworks that see, say, Athens as the centre of the
48 D. J. Mattingly and J. Salmon (eds.), Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World (London, 2001). 49 Cf. J. K. Davies, 'Hellenistic Economies in the Post-Finley Era', in Z. H. Archibald et al. (eds.), HellenisticEconomies(London, 2001), 11-62, at 40-2. 50 For the ancient Mediterranean and Europe as a whole, see M. Dietler, 'Consumption, Cultural Frontiers, and Identity: Anthropological Approaches to Greek Colonial Encounters', in A. Stazio and S. Ceccoli (eds.), Confini e frontiera nella grecitdd'Occidente. Atti del trentasettesimo convegno di studi sulla Magna Grecia, Taranto, 3-6 ottobre 1997 (Taranto, 1999), 475-501, at 479-80; A. F. Harding, 'Western Eurasia', in B. Cunliffe et al. (eds.), Archaeology: The Widening Debate (Oxford, 2002), 363-84, at 377-9. For the ancient Greek world, see J. Bintliff, JFA 24 (1997), 1-38; I. Morris, 'Negotiated Peripherality in Iron Age Greece: Accepting and Resisting the East', in P. N. Kardulias (ed.), World-SystemsTheory in Practice:Leadership,Production, and Exchange (Lanham, 1999), 63-84. For ancient Italy, see A. Guidi, Preistoria della complessitd sociale (Rome, 2000), 197.

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universe while nothing else matters or measures up. In his recent paper on the state of Roman archaeology in Britain, which is not dissimilar to the situation elsewhere in the world, Simon James makes the following laudable point:
Following the logic of emphasising more comparative approaches, and of reconceptualising the archaeology of the Roman world as the result of interaction, we need to decentre the empire, to look at its provinces in relation to their indigenous pasts and their contemporary neighbours. We must therefore make much greater efforts to cross and erode period and disciplinary boundaries.51

By decentring the ancient Greek world into a world where there were many centres and many peripheries,52 we are actually starting to get somewhere by recognizing that the ancient world consisted of many regions, some more central than others at certain moments in history. The Mediterranean was micro-regional, and sometimes these microregions were joined together, via connectivity, to use the language of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea,53 to form a larger whole. Even if we use world-system theory in unchanged or modified form, we have to allow for a multitude of central regions on the Mediterranean-wide stage, and no doubt Sicily figures prominently here. Sicily was at the centre of a very important and integrated Mediterranean micro-region, one which John Davies has recently defined as taking in, during the Hellenistic period at least, the areas stretching from Naples in Southern Italy, through Sicily and Carthage to the South, to Southern Spain over to the West in the Iberian peninsula.54 One could tinker with this by extending his picture in both time to include the micro-region's pre-Hellenistic antecedents (which can be traced back to the late Archaic and early Classical periods), and in space to include the Rome area and Sardinia, another important island, which has recently been dubbed, tongue-in-cheek, as the 'the periphery in the centre'.55 But the basic point remains: Sicily was at the heart of a micro-regional network and surrounded by many potential consumers and tastes, plenty of geographic diversity with conditions often not as favourable as those found in the island, and
52

51 S. James, Antiquity 77 (2003), 178-84, at 182.

Cf. C. Smith, 'Introduction',in C. Smith and J. Serrati (eds.), Sicily from Aeneas to

Augustus:New Approachesin Archaeologyand History (Edinburgh, 2000), 1-6, at 6. 53 P. Horden and N. Purcell, The CorruptingSea: A Study of MediterraneanHistory (Oxford,

I. Morris, 2000). This connectivityhas recentlybeen likenedto a kind of ancientglobalization:

MHR 18.2 (2003), 30-55; O. LaBianca and S. Arnold Scham (eds.), Connectivity in Antiquity: Globalizationas a Long-termProcess(London, 2005). 54 Davies (n. 49), 41. 5 R. J. Rowlands, The Periphery in the Centre:Sardinia in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

(Oxford,2001).

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countless economic opportunities. Recognizing both the microregional nature of the ancient world and Sicily's place within it has implications in all kinds of ways. Is one of these implications that agricultural specialization in grain was encouraged prior to the Roman conquest of Sicily? If it is true that pre-Roman Sicily was given over to grain monoculture, then Sicily's economy was different from most in the greater Greek diaspora to say the very least. The concept of grain monoculture needs to be handled carefully. Part of Sicily's monoculture image may be due to faulty perception. The ancient world beyond Sicily may have perceived the island to have been exclusively the supplier of grain; this is something which the Sicilians themselves may have sometimes wanted to emphasize for business, and something which only the importers themselves cared about. Orazio Cancila has put his finger on the two sides of this problem:
Gli antichi abitatori dicevano di avere avuto il dono del grano prima degli altri popoli, direttamente da Cerere, la dea delle biade e dell'agricoltura, e per millenni l'isola si e sempre sentita particolarmente vocata per la sua coltivazione, che in determinati periodi storici e stata favorita anche da ben precise scelte politiche. Per millenni esso [grano] e stato cosi la piui importante produzione siciliana e sino alla seconda meta del Settecento la voce piiAsignificativa del suo commercio estero, il prodotto per cui l'isola era maggiormente conosciuta nel mondo, anche quando altri prodotti come il sale o il tonno, lo zucchero o la seta, conquistavano anch'essi i mercati stranieri.56

But, apart from questions of perception and image, the idea of specializing in a single crop is coming under closer scrutiny in recent work in Mediterranean ecology and economy. Three points in particular deserve to be underlined. The first concerns farming behaviour and decision-making. According to Horden and Purcell:
The agrarian history of Sardinia for example shows a chiaroscuro of deadly famine and notable surpluses of wheat produced for export. The two are linked: specialization is potentially lethal; it is far better not to put too many eggs in the same basket. In Sardinia, as in other places of which we shall see more (VII.6), the pressure to specialize has been imposed from outside the decision-making ambit of the primary producers themselves, to their grave danger.57
56 Cancila (n. 41), 3: 'The ancient inhabitantsmaintainedthat they possessed, before any one else, the gift of grain directlyfrom Ceres, the goddess of sustenance and agriculture. For millenniathe island has alwaysfelt a particularvocation for its cultivation,which, in certain historicalperiods,veryprecisepoliticalchoices have favoured.For millenniagrainhas thus been the most importantSicilianproduct,and up to the second half of the of the eighteenthcentury the most significantvoice of its externalcommerce,the product for which the island was best known in the world, even when other products, like salt, tuna, sugar, and silk, were also foreignmarkets'. conquering 57 Hordenand Purcell(n. 53), 201-2.

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Other scholars, too, have recently stressed how the ancient Greeks planned their agriculture to avoid the high levels of risk involved in planting a single crop, making the situation described by Horden and Purcell for Sardinia something out of character for Sicily and the earlier Greek world as a whole.'" Secondly, the economy was insufficiently monetized to allow the sort of exchange and the ability to survive bad years that grain monoculture would require.59 Finally, transport networks in Greek Sicily were simply not good enough.60 Serious monoculture, therefore, in an area as big as Sicily is surely quite impossible. We need to abandon this idea, as well as another: namely the substantivism propounded most forcefully by Moses Finley as the interpretative framework for all of antiquity.61 Having done so, we will look more closely at the existing textual and material sources, as well as the intellectual frameworks that have guided their recognition as evidence, their collection as sources, and their interpretation, and find all kinds of very strong indications that the Sicilian Greeks practised a diversified economic programme. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this point. The first involves oil and wine production. Horden and Purcell have advanced insightful interpretations of passages in Diodorus Siculus (13.81.4-5, 83.3) that mention the wealth acquired in the late fifth century BC by individuals at Akragas, including a certain Tellias, by means of oil and wine production.62 In the case of oil, the Carthaginian market was primarily targeted. There is also the growing evidence of Western Greek amphorae in North Africa absent from Horden and Purcell's account that can help bolster Diodorus Siculus' evidence.63 All this shows, if anything, the rich opportunities offered by the non-Greek sectors of the micro-region to which Sicily
58 T. W. Gallant, Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy (Cambridge, 1991), 34-59; R. Osborne, 'Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Subsistence: Exchange and Society in the Greek City', in J. Rich and A. Wallace-Hadrill (eds.), City and Country in the Ancient World(London, 1991), 119-45, at 134; A. Burford, Land and Labor in the Greek World(Baltimore, 1993), 109-10; D. M. Schaps, The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece(Ann Arbor, 2004), 168-71. 59 See now Schaps (n. 58), 163-74, and A. Stazio, 'La documentazione numismatica', in A. Stazio (ed.), Problemi della chora coloniale dall'Occidente al Mar Nero. Atti del quarantesimo convegnodi studi sulla Magna Grecia, Taranto,29 settembre-3ottobre2000 (Taranto, 2001), 153-6 for coinage in the countryside. 60 Well into the twentieth century, the Roman period (cf. Wilson [n. 34], 10-17) stood out as the peak moment of transport networks in Sicily (Mack Smith [n. 44], 281-2; Cancila [n. 41], 168-94). 61 M. I. Finley, TheAncient Economy (Berkeley, 19852). Cf. Salmon and Mattingly (n. 48). 62 Horden and Purcell (n. 53), 212-14. 63 Cf. R.M. Albanese Procelli, Kokalos 42 (1996), 91-137, at 124-5; id., RA (1997), 3-25, at 13.

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belonged. The second example involves manufacturing. On the basis of archaeological data, Tobias Fischer-Hansen has recently spoken of a 'quasi-industrial quarter' at Selinous on Sicily's Southwest coast, a city for which literary sources and coinage also have something to say about the production of grain.64 Fischer-Hansen has reached a similar conclusion for other Western Greek cities, including others in Sicily. Other examples could be brought forward, and future work will doubtless add still more, but it is undeniable from these two examples alone that Greek Sicily could have many strings to its economic bow besides grain, including oil and wine production and manufacturing. In general, all indications are that mixed farming economies existed widely, and that there was an intensive exploitation of sea resources.65 Conclusions We need to move from coarse-grained to fine-grained reconstructions of ancient Sicilian economics, and we can begin to do so by heeding Snodgrass' point with which this paper began. The ancient texts were expressing ideas which sometimes reflect obliquely or not at all what was actually happening on the ground. In addition, extending one or two ancient passages to a long period of time, not to mention the whole of antiquity, is very problematic because it produces a static and one-dimensional picture of the ancient world. This practice has created the notion that the economics of ancient Greek Sicily were solely about agriculture and grain, in large part because the stories have been taken at face value. The written sources need to be combined with more archaeological economic history, in order to get a fuller picture of the past.66 It is only in this way that we can start to understand properly the economics that made possible Sicily's monumental and cultural achievements.

64 T. Fischer-Hansen, 'Ergasteria in the Western Greek World', in P. Flensted-Jensen et al. (eds.), Polis & Politics:Studies in Ancient Greek History presentedto Mogens Herman Hansen on his Sixtieth Birthday,August 20, 2000 (Copenhagen, 2000), 91-120, at 106-7. For grain production at Selinous, see F. De Angelis, Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Developmentof Two Greek Citystates in Archaic Sicily (Oxford University School of Archaeology, Monograph 57) (Oxford, 2003), 186-7. 65 Cf. S. Collin-Bouffier, Pallas 52 (2000), 195-208; De Angelis (n. 6). 66 As argued recently by I. Morris, 'Archaeology and Ancient Greek History', in C. Thomas (ed.), CurrentIssues and the Study of Ancient History (Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians 7) (Claremont, CA, 2002), 45-67, at 65-7.

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