Extract

Even if there was ‘an economy’ in ancient Greece (see capitalism), Greece itself was not a single entity, but a congeries of more than a thousand separate communities. One should therefore speak of Greek economies rather than the Greek economy, and for simplicity's sake it is convenient to divide them into three groups, types, or models. First, there is the ‘Archaic’ group of which *Sparta can stand as the representative instance. At the opposite extreme is Athens, distinguished both by the exceptional size and number of its economic transactions, and by the exceptional sophistication of its economic institutions. In between fall the vast range of ‘normal’ Greek cities or communities, differentiated from the latter chiefly in the scale, and from the former principally in the nature, of their economic arrangements.Consider the last group first. Our ‘economy’ is derived from the ancient Greek word oikonomia, but this meant originally and usually the management of a private household (oikos) rather than that of a ‘national’ economy (see household, greek).