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370 13. specialized production and exchange
In part, this is a debate born out of the nature of the evidence.
Archaeologists find a mass of imported pottery and no indication of how
it got there and, not unnaturally, think in terms of the obvious modern
means of distribution: trade. The ancient texts, by contrast, tell us much
about aristocrats and the state, but are notably silent about many of the
products that archaeologists discover, so that we are often forced to make
do with a cumbersome modern term (‘Oxford ware’, ‘African red-slip
ware’, etc.) for a common archaeological find. Between the abundance of
the archaeological evidence and the silence of the texts, there is obviously
room for much debate.
In recent years there has been some convergence of the ‘historical’ and
the ‘archaeological’ positions. 41 It does indeed seem likely that both mechanisms
of distribution (commercial and non-commercial) were of great
importance, probably to mutual advantage. For instance, in the fifth- and
sixth-century east, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that a great deal of
the Phocaean red-slip ware that reached the near east was taken there commercially
in empty ships returning to Egypt, whose main purpose had been
to carry grain for the state to Constantinople.
Similarly, it must have been the building projects of the emperors that
principally sustained the quarries of Proconnesos, in the Sea of Marmara
near Constantinople, since Proconnesian marble was the main fine material
used for both secular and ecclesiastical imperial projects throughout the
fourth, fifth and earlier sixth century. It is also possible that some of the
Proconnesian marble found in non-imperial buildings was a gift from
the emperor to influential patrons whose good will was worth cultivating.
Anicia Juliana for her church of St Polyeuktos in Constantinople, and
Julianus Argentarius and Theoderic the Ostrogoth for their many buildings
in Ravenna, perhaps received as gifts the large quantities of Proconnesian
marble that they needed. 42
However, it is equally possible that these rich patrons had to buy their
marble from the imperial quarries. Certainly, at a humbler level, it is far
easier to explain the very extensive distribution of basic architectural elements
in Proconnesian marble, like capitals and chancel-screens, in terms
of commerce rather than political favour, and, as we have seen at the beginning
of this chapter, there is even a scrap of literary evidence to confirm
this (see Fig. 15,p.359 above). State production and distribution and commerce
may indeed have been closely interlinked. The commercial sale of
Proconnesian probably depended on a state-run quarry, and it was certainly
the massive imperial projects which set the fashion for humbler patrons to
emulate; yet the state quarries perhaps also needed sales to a wider private
market in order to maintain large-scale production.
41 E.g. Hopkins in Garnsey et al. (1983) ix–xxv; Garnsey and Saller (1987) 43–63; Peacock and
Williams (1986) 54–63.
42 St Polyeuktos: Harrison (1989) 77–124. Ravenna: Angiolini Martinelli et al.(1968–9).
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