THE Greeks did not have the same idea of an economy as we do. The word economy is greek, but
to them it meant rules of a household. Because they did not think about
the economy as a whole, it is difficult to talk of a government economy policy.
Even as far back as the stone age a lot of greeks were sailors,
and sailed all around the Eastern Mediterranean.
Many Greek sailors worked as mercenaries,
hiring out themselves and their ships to fight for other countries like
epygt Egypt. Finally, other Greeks were pirates,
who simply raided wherever they could and took whatever they could get.
In real life, people probably didn't fit so neatly into any of these categories.
Pirates sometimes traded, and sometimes fished, and sometimes hired
themselves out as mercenaries.
Traders were not above doing a little raiding
if they got the chance. For soldiers, the difference between fighting
and raiding is not always very clear. The climate and soil of Greece are not very
good for growing things, and as the population of Greece began to grow
in the Bronze Age, there soon got to be more people than the Greeks could
easily feed. This forced the Greeks to rely more and moreon sailing and the
activities that went with sailing: fishing fighting, and trading.
Because so little is understood about how economics works
even today, historians also disagree about how
it worked in antiquity and in the middle ages. Some historians think that
long ago most people were self-sufficient: they ate and wore mostly what they
produced themselves on their own farms. Other historians think that most
people traded for what they needed, or bought it at the store, as people do
today. Certainly some people produced some things at home, and some people
bought some things at the store. It is hard to say where the balance really
was between these two ways of living.THE END