Ancient Mercantile Crime

Crime in the Ancient World

Marketplace offenses can be examined to support at least the partial truth of Diogenes' fruitless search for an honest person, a matter that can be examined by looking at efforts to keep impoverished people from starving to death. Rulers throughout history have tried to control monopolization and cheating in transactions involving food so that inadequate food supplies did not decimate or incapacitate the work force and lead the masses to riot in rebellion against the rich and against the political leaders.

In ancient Egypt, near the end of the 7th century B.C.E., poor harvests led to Solon forbidding the export of agricultural products, with the exception of olive oil, a move taken because unscrupulous landowners were sending grain abroad in order to realize greater profits.

Centuries later, in 476 B.C.E. on the island of Teos, a Greek port on the west coast of Asia Minor, a “curse” was decreed by public officials on marketplace malefactors. It was to be read three times a year at public events: “If anyone prevents grains from being imported into the land of Teos by any pretext or device, either by sea or from the mainland, or forces up the price of imported grain, that man shall die, both himself and his family.”

The Greek Appolonius is said to have come to the city of Aspendus where he found the people eating weeds in order to stay alive. A mob was on the verge of burning the governor alive, until he disclosed the names of those who were hoarding corn. These merchants were summoned and the governor read to them a message composed by Appolonius, who had vowed to remain silent for five years: “The earth is mother of all, because she is just,” Appolonius had written. “But you are unjust and have pretended that she is your mother alone; and if you do not stop I will not permit you to remain on her.” The hoarders were said to have been so terrified by these words that they filled the marketplace with corn and the city revived.

In ancient Greece, the law decreed a penalty of death for exporting corn or secreting or hoarding it. Peter Gurney notes that scarcity was sometimes relieved by charitable food contributions by the wellto-do. He maintains that the typical donors were two-faced, looking for both financial profit and popular gratitude. Importantly, he notes, “in antiquity, food was power.”

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