Containerization and the Rationalization of Consumption in Ancient Greek Households

Steven Johnstone (University of Arizona)

In attempting to understand Greek households as economic units, modern historians have focused extensively on how they organized agricultural production, but since the problem for such households was not simply producing but rather having enough, we should also pay attention to how Greeks organized storage and consumption.

This paper argues that Greek households rationalized consumption through containerization. In a society with limited literacy and where farmers did not precisely measure production, the model of written accounting is inappropriate. Indeed, for the most part, only the polis was large enough to bear the considerable costs of formal accounting, accurate measuring, and written records. Instead, households relied on physical methods of keeping track of produce and reconciling supplies with need. Containers were key. The “Attic Stelai” (IG (3) 421-430) demonstrate the prevalence of containers in households: most of the “measures” reported in these inscriptions should rather be understood as the containers in which produce was routinely stored. Such containers not only stored produce; they also functioned, in conjunction with an art of allocating, as mechanisms to monitor and account for use. As Hesiod’s Works and Days (esp. ll. 368-9) and Xenophon’s Oikonomikos (9.8-10) show, to allocate and monitor food for the year, farmers divided supplies into containers and then monitored their fullness through a specified period (e.g., a month). They also used containers to control “misappropriation” of supplies by applying seals.

Ordinary farm families achieved sufficiency not only through managing production, but also through the arts of storage and allocating. They exercised these arts not through numeric calculations, but through manipulating the physical objects in which things were stored.