Christophe Flament

Just like literary and artistic productions, the economic systems and monetary practices of Greek cities are both emanations and revelations of the civilization that saw them emerge and evolve. Each political and social system therefore corresponds to a particular type of economy. With this in mind, the study of economic phenomena represents an interesting - and, to be honest, little-exploited - approach to the study of ancient Greek civilization. In any case, such investigations force us to approach the sources from a particular, even unprecedented angle, an approach that allows us to put to the test many of the reconstructions proposed by the Moderns, and which proves indispensable in a discipline characterized by the relative paucity and fixed nature of its documentation, where the questions forged by the historian are, more than anywhere else, essential to nourish and advance research.

This field of investigation therefore lies at the intersection of numerous fields of research, whether economic, financial, social, institutional or political, and encourages dialogue between them by drawing on the sources that usually underpin the work of specialists in these different approaches. Such research also requires mastery of many disciplines of ancient history, such as archaeology, epigraphy, textual exegesis, numismatics, the history of technology, as well as other techniques borrowed from nuclear physics or geology, notably metallic analysis and petrography.