Feeding the Ancient Greek City

by Alston, Richard; Van Nijf, Onno M.

• ISBN13: 9789042920378
• ISBN10: 9042920378
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-01
• Publisher: Peeters Pub & Booksellers

Summary

In ancient cities, 'daily bread' was a subject of prayer. Grain-harvests could be fickle, but a regular supply was a matter of survival. Food-shortage could lead to social unrest, and long-term solutions required all kinds of political an institutional resources from the authorities. Yet feeding the city was not just a problem. It was an opportunity for the political management of the poor, for competitive display among the elite, and for making money. The essays in this volume present cities and societies which responded to these challenges in very different ways, from the agro-towns in which the citizens commuted to their fields to the market-supplied towns in which an urban proletariat worked for their bread. The articles debate the food supply through all its aspects, economic, demographic, political and institutional to give a new perspective on this debate at the heart of our understandings of ancient society.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. VII
Preface	p. IX
Contributors	p. XI
Introduction	p. 1
Considerations on agricultural scale-economies in the Greco-Roman world	p. 17
Feeding Hellenistic Seleucia on the Tigris and Babylon	p. 33
`Grain for Athens'. The view from the Black Sea	p. 47
Town and country in Roman Antioch	p. 63
Urbanisation and access to land in Roman Egypt	p. 85
Grain funds and market intervention in the Roman world	p. 109
Hadrian and the Athenian Oil Law	p. 127
Grain for Cibyra. Veranius Philagros and the `great conspiracy'	p. 143
Feeding the Citizens. Municipal grain funds and civic benefactors in the Roman East	p. 159
Epilogue	p. 181
Index Locorum	p. 197
Index	p. 198
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