Introduction

This contribution falls into three parts. In the first I share some philosophical and pedagogical reflections on playing “serious games” in an ancient studies undergraduate seminar on economics, law, and society in Ancient Greece. The second part, which appears below as an Appendix to the pedagogical prolegomena, describes the game we play, Agoranomika, which I designed to help students learn experientially about the challenges and costs of measuring goods in ancient Greek markets. This part ends with a brief presentation of some of the historical responses that those who inhabited the classical and Hellenistic world devised to meet some of those challenges. The third and final part is a condensed version of Appendix 1, a downloadable document abstracting the basic rules and game play of Agoranomika for those who would like to adapt and play this game for their own pedagogical purposes.⬈#p1

Serious games and teaching ancient Greece

Several years ago, at the suggestion of a colleague at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, I created a course called “Risky Business: Law, Economics, and Society in the Ancient World.” This course was designed specifically to appeal to business-oriented undergraduates who wish to satisfy their pre-modern distributional requirement with a course that speaks to their interests in business and finance. The subject matter (i.e., law and economics) lends itself naturally to teaching via games, but all the more so when it comes to Classical Greece, since its agonistic culture prompted many communities to organize their political, legal, economic, and fiscal institutions quite explicitly as contests.¹ Plato decried this predilection in his critique of Athenian democracy (e.g., Resp. 6.492b–d), and yet despite (or perhaps because) of this, he was what we might call an early educational play theorist, arguing that a society that ignores the psychological and social impact of the games it plays does so at its peril.² Plato understood games as social exercises in moral and political inculcation, with “good” games preparing a free citizenry for the “serious play” of a fully realized human life.³ Contemporary interest in “serious games,” on the other hand, is rooted in the less overtly political (though for that no less normative) dynamics of pedagogy, representing a 20th-century confluence of developmental psychology, educational theory, public policy studies, cultural critique (following Huizinga), and, most recently, digital gaming.⁴⬈#p2

The game I offer in the first Appendix is firmly in the tradition of Clark Abt’s vision of serious games, or an analogue simulation that takes place in the course of a single session, as opposed to the more ambitious and open-ended, multi-week role-playing games promoted by the Reacting to the Past consortium.⁵ While my game has more limited or, perhaps more precisely, more targeted pedagogical aims than, say, The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.E. (Ober, Norman, and Carnes 2015), it nevertheless shares many of the same overarching goals and salutary educational outcomes of these more elaborate games. Anyone who has attempted to teach ancient history will understand why it has become a byword for irrelevance: most students find the prosopography, geography, and dates stultifying, in large part because they seem to have so little connection to the places, people, events, interests, and pressures of contemporary life. This fundamental alienation often effectively prevents students from entering into the properly imaginative world of historical analysis and critical engagement with primary evidence. Games, as Abt argued a half century ago, are the perfect device for structuring critical engagement through problem-based learning: they are fun, cheap, harness our competitive natures, encourage interaction between students, and prompt second-order thinking and deep learning, i.e., not passively knowing basic facts or primary evidence, but doing something synthetic with the material.⁶⬈#p3

It is in this last connection that we should draw a distinction between what we are here calling “serious games,” which are problem-based simulations, and gamification.⁷ By “gamification” I mean game experiences wherein:⬈#p4

• the game structure is essentially independent of the occasion for playing and the subject matter of the lesson or course;
• the game design, mechanisms, and tactics respond first and foremost to the social and physical dimensions of the class and the classroom, not the subject matter;
• competition typically revolves around demonstrating traditional mastery of subject matter;
• cooperation is typically restricted to within teams, as opposed to between teams
• winning is typically signaled by a notionally impartial umpire, and any rewards are often awarded by the same non-player authority and are themselves arbitrarily related or exogenous to the game, e.g., points, stickers, classroom perks, prizes, etc.
• the results rarely surprise, since the goals are narrowly focused and the game mechanism comparatively simple, leaving little room for improvisation or emergence

So, for instance, breaking a class up into teams to compete in a contest of generating Greek verbal morphology would be an example of gamification.⁸ There is, of course, nothing wrong with deploying gamification tactics in a classroom (indeed, I have often done so myself); but this is very different from refracting a topic through the lens of a game.⬈#p5

I take the following as the hallmarks of a pedagogically-integrated simulation, or a serious game:⁹⬈#p6

• the game structure attempts to model and simulate the basic elements of a current, historical, or hypothetical situation or problem as a structured, problem-solving scenario
• game design, mechanisms, and tactics are all expressions of an integrated theory of the parameters of the strategic problem, which in turn activate knowledge or implicit theories of material, environmental, historical, cultural, and behavioral factors
• play requires that the players adopt and internalize strategic roles or personae to solve problems
• opportunities for competition and cooperation are complex, multi-leveled, and dynamic; and so
• results are frequently unanticipated by the game designer (in the parlance of game design, it is an “emergent game”)¹⁰

One of the most difficult challenges in designing an educational, goal-oriented, historical simulation (or one modeling a different culture) is the need to balance two opposed imperatives: (a) incentivizing player engagement, which necessarily requires players to operate from within their own thought-worlds while making choices inside the game; and (b) the structuring of heuristic discontinuities between the players’ thought-world and that of the society being modeled. In other words, one cannot privilege engagement to the point where one collapses completely the distance that separates (in this instance) antiquity from modernity, except at the expense of the substantive lesson of the game, which is to learn something about antiquity: doing so would be tantamount to trading self-defeating alienation for the false and no less inert familiarity of the accidental historical tourist. So, players must bring their whole, contemporary selves to the game; but in the course of play they must also discover that the assumptions guiding their choices are often inapt, and more specifically, that they are historically and culturally contingent – just as contingent as the assumptions and paradigms that must have guided ancient Greeks! – with the result that they begin to attempt to see things from a new (and in this case, quite old) perspective. This almost Hegelian antithesis inherent in the structure of historically serious games proceeds from a theory of human nature implicit in practice of history itself, namely that human nature is sufficiently stable to allow us to understand and interpret the actions of people who lived in places, times, and political, social, and cultural milieux far different from our own. As Arnaldo Momigliano once said, the reason we study change is that we are changeable;¹¹ however, to recognize and give meaning to change we must practice a historicism grounded in a certain set of universal human drives and propensities.¹²⬈#p7

I conclude with these reflections because they have important implications for what the students who play my game, or any ancient simulation, learn. What they do not learn is the experience of antiquity. By playing this or any other game, students no more relive the experience of ancient Greeks any more than Pierre Menard became Cervantes when he wrote the Quixote. Not only is this not possible; it is also, as Borges correctly insisted, not interesting. The ancient history we write may be about the Greeks, but it is most definitely our history of them. Instead, we should understand students playing serious historical games in class as engaging in an exercise very like what their classmates do in a scientific laboratory. So, when chemistry students experiment with air columns, pumps, and pressure valves to confirm Boyle’s Constant, they learn something about the physical properties of gasses and the mechanics and methods of experimentation. If the experiment fails, they know to repeat it: what failed was their method, not physics. No one, I think, would assert that chemistry students are attempting to recreate Boyle’s specific experience of discovery: modern students come to their experiments not only with a different purpose and perspective, but also with foreknowledge of what Boyle had to discover for himself. Their laboratory experience, however, is nevertheless pedagogically useful precisely because it is characterized by engagement and the discovery of all the (often frustrating) real-world elements of process that get elided in merely memorizing that pv = k.⬈#p8

In a similar fashion, I suggest that in playing the game about weights and measures in the ancient Greek world in the first Appendix my students learn four distinct, if interconnected, lessons. (1) They learn about some of the fundamental, ineluctable problems and costs associated with measurement, the manifestations of and responses to which are conditioned by the historical intersection of the physical properties of goods, technological capabilities or constraints, the economic value of goods, informal (i.e., norms) and formal (i.e., laws) modes of regulation, and political power. (2) After the game students study examples of specific responses or solutions Greeks (or in some cases, ancient people solving problems in a Hellenized society) devised to address certain measurement problems. They thereby also learn how to deploy their own experience creatively, critically, and responsibly in the analysis of ancient primary evidence, i.e., without losing sight of the distance that lies between them and antiquity. Indeed, in coming to understand measurement as a properly historical problem they often learn as much about measurement in their own lives as they do in the lives of ancient Greeks. (3) By playing they begin to appreciate the embeddedness of any social activity, since they must erect “market” norms for themselves in the classroom laboratory. They are thus more attuned to the importance of rules other than law, namely personal ethics and social norms, rules which often leave little explicit trace in our documentary or archaeological record. (4) Finally, they learn that “every historical topic is more or less explicitly a choice of problems to resolve.”¹³ History does not stop once we have answered the question, “What happened?” Indeed, it does not even begin at “What happened?”, since one first needs to ask, “What am I interested in knowing?” By modeling their historical inquiry as a game, and one that requires them to understand the problems, limitations, circumstances, and motivations of other players, students learn to approach history as a “Why?” in two registers: first, to interrogate what lies behind their own questions of historical cultures; and second, to search for the “why” that explains the evidence that survives and the ancient lives it represents. Learning this last lesson goes a long way to answering the question of relevance that so many students find insuperable at first, since it helps to construct history not as the science of an irrelevant past, but as the perennially relevant science of people in time.¹⁴⬈#p9

Agoranomika: Developing an Ancient Greek Trading Game

The game that I developed for the course “Risky Business,” which I have called Agoranomika, is designed to appeal to students with an academic interest in business and finance. The version I have taught to date is set in classical Greece, framed by the emerging case for substantial economic growth during this period (as compared to the pre-modern norm), roughly the sixth to the third centuries BCE.¹⁵ Set against this historical frame are a series of case studies exploring how individuals, organizations, and governments solved a variety of economic and organizational problems in their comparatively low-information, small-government institutional environments. The overarching theory of the course is that in the absence of major productivity gains related to technological innovation (even after granting the fact that most ancient historians today see technological innovation as more economically impactful than their predecessors a generation ago), it was these various institutional arrangements, solutions, and strategies that drove a significant proportion of the growth in this period, and so they repay serious study.⬈#p10

One of the chief pedagogical aims of the course is to have the students develop and practice legal and economic problem-solving skills, but with specific attention to historical and comparative approaches to law, society, and economics. This in turn requires that students not only become comfortable with legal and economic analysis, but also build over the term a basic cultural competency with respect to ancient Greek social structures, norms, and preferences, so that they begin to understand (in Douglass North’s metaphor) “the rules of the game” as it was “played” in Classical Greece, including some of the Greeks’ go-to strategies and tactics in economic life.¹⁶ The course is divided into thematic units, which progressively introduce the interconnected evolution and development of various institutions and related developments over this extended period, particularly, but not exclusively, in Athens, such as: poleis and oikoi (households), markets, courts, democracy, literacy, coinage, and banking. We also devote a significant number of our class sessions to analyzing specific disputes (e.g., Hypereides 3, “Against Athenogenes,” a contract case) and policy responses (e.g., Nikophon’s law [SEG XXVI 72] regulating coinage in the Athenian agora), most of which survive in court speeches or inscriptions. Finally, I supplement these case studies with ancient and contemporary theoretical readings in law, society, and economics, so that we develop a vocabulary to think economically, institutionally, and historically about concepts like: competition, conflict, cooperation, reputation, and self-help; courts, formal enforcement, and crime; private property and public goods; money supply and credit relations and instruments; contracts, torts, insurance, and liability; regulation and taxation; etc.⬈#p11

Agoranomika, described in detail in the first Appendix to this paper, takes place at an important inflection point in the term.¹⁷ Since most of these students come to this course without any formal study of either classical Greece or institutional economics, we spend the first few weeks reading descriptive overviews of the Greek economy (e.g., chapters from Scheidel et al. (eds.) 2007), a foundational text in institutional economics (e.g., North 1990), and a representative example of ancient “economic theory” (usually Xenophon’s Oeconomicus). After this introduction, we begin our first unit dedicated to a specific institution and its history and practices, the Greek agora, using Athens as our main case study. This shift in intellectual object is marked by a concomitant shift in pedagogical method: we move from establishing background and broad familiarity to active engagement with the history and sociology of a specific institution in the economic life of a classical Greek polis. North’s “rules of the game metaphor” is now reified in an actual game modeling an ancient strategic scenario in the Athenian agora, for what might otherwise be the most boring topic of the term: measurement.⬈#p12

Now, I suppose that markets as a certain kind of economic governance structure can function without standardized weights and measures, but not very well: the development and policing of standardized weights and measures represent vital institutional innovations for the lowering of key transaction costs associated with transacting in a market.¹⁸ Yet who but the most dedicated graduate student could ever sit through a lecture, much less a seminar meeting, devoted to historical weights and measures? Perhaps more to the point, I do not care if these students leave this course knowing the kinds of things one is likely to get from readings, such as the metric equivalent volume of a chous – in fact, this is precisely what I want them not to walk away with, because there really was no such thing as a standard chous, at least in the way we think of standardized pints or quarts or liters (that is, if we ever bother to think about them at all), except in very particular settings and circumstances.¹⁹ It is these qualifications – the very particular settings and circumstances – on which I wish them to meditate: the historical, political, and economic contingencies of weights and measures. To study abstract tables of equivalencies of ancient weights and measures in the absence of understanding their institutional contexts, their specific uses, and indeed their political origins and functions, avoids, if not obscures, what is fundamentally important and useful in studying measures in this particular educational context, which is the phenomenon and history of measurement itself.⬈#p13

In the context of this course, perhaps the most important thing to come to understand institutionally about measurement is that it was – and indeed remains – costly. It takes resources to measure valuable attributes and to make goods conform to standardized attributes, an essential ingredient in the alchemy that turns natural or craft products into commodities. The cost of measuring goods has an obvious impact on prices; but so does the awareness of the costliness of measurement itself: the recognition of the need to ascertain whether goods have been measured accurately and the costliness of doing so combine to create a platform for strategic opportunism, or an occasion for cheating, and one so broad as potentially to forestall many possible transactions in a market.²⁰ My object lesson for this class, in the first instance, is to make the students grapple with the fundamental problems of measurement: What are we measuring? How do we do it? How do we agree (or coordinate) on which measures to use and when to use them? And then: How might I be cheated? How might I cheat? My secondary aim is to communicate the ways in which these problems of measurement manifested in the ancient world and how they were “solved” in the specific historical and institutional context of the Athenian agora.⬈#p14

My suggestion, therefore, is that students will only really understand Greek measurement practices and regulations, and their social and economic significance, if they first learn their measurement challenges. This is, perhaps, a common contention when it comes to teaching ancient studies: the ancient world is in some ways deceptively familiar, and so one often has to emphasize the ways in which it was foreign to our social structures, our experiences, and our habits of thinking, so that students can confront it with an open mind. Measurement is just one such experience. What makes its exploration simultaneously challenging and rewarding for my students is precisely the fact that their own world is so thoroughly and incredibly standardized: so much measurement takes place behind the scenes, or has been routinized, that most people take it for granted. Consider the standardization of time, as it comes, simultaneously, instantaneously, identically, indeed almost magically, and yet unremarkably, to smart devices all over the world. Or the fact that a kilogram is obviously, self-evidently, tediously a kilogram in Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Bucharest, and Ulaanbaatar. Or the fact that the internet works, erected on the basis of a series of standards that only a fraction of its users are even aware of, much less comprehend. Pulling back this particular (and particularly modern) veil and revealing the hidden investment and institutional success it represents is both useful and, in my experience, stimulating for students. In my own teaching, I have found that one of the best ways to get students to feel the problem of living in a world without organizations like NIST or ANSI, is to inhabit the problem in the form of a game.²¹⬈#p15

Conclusion

Although I cannot say with scientific certainty that the ancient evidence presented in the endgame of Agoranomika is more meaningful to the students on average because of the game they just played, it does seem to me that they are much more willing to engage with this and other ancient evidence presented hereafter. I also find that they are much more willing to engage with each other in class after this experience and suggest hypothetical situations, or draw comparisons to their own lives, in suggesting an interpretation of an ancient policy or the trajectory of an ancient dispute. Finally, I allow students to design their own serious game in lieu of a traditional paper for the third and final writing assignment for the course. This is definitely a “high-risk, high-reward” proposition (which I am careful to stress); but the best of the games submitted are easily on a par with the best of the papers, and typically the students who excel in taking this route engage in an impressive amount of research in their quest to ground their game in the realia of economic and social life of Classical Greece.⬈#p16

Appendix: Agoranomika, the Ancient Greek Trading Game

What follows is a detailed description of a typical playing session of Agoranomika. See Appendix 2: Links to Basic Instructions to access a PDF intended to be useful for instructors interested in playing a version of this game in their own classrooms.⬈#p17

Rules of play

Time required for set-up and play

• 30-minute, one-time investment in making a simple DIY beam balance (figs. 4–5; instructions easily found online)
• 5–10 minutes for set-up before class
• 1 standard 50–75-minute class period for play
• 5 minutes to clean up

Players

• No more than 25 students, broken up into teams of 2–5 students each, depending on the size of your class. You need at least four teams to play; more than six gets unwieldy, unless you have a very large classroom.

Equipment

Commodities (fig. 1)

• 1 2-lb. bag of rice
• 1-lb. bag of red beans or kidney beans
• 1-lb. bag of red or green lentils (they should be easily distinguished from the red beans)
• 1-lb bag of small black lentils
• 1 large bag of cotton balls
• 1 pint strawberries, black berries, or raspberries (whatever is cheapest!)
• NB. These are minimum suggested quantities

Storage and measuring (figs. 2–5)

• 2 non-standardized, non-transparent small cups per student group, to be used as “traditional measures” (fig. 2)
• A random assortment of three-dimensional objects or figurines, to be used as “counterweights,” 1–2 per group, of various shapes, sizes, and weights (fig. 3)
• 3 different types of plastic, non-transparent cups to hold rice, beans, and lentils, so that each group has a set of three “silos” for commodities (cf. fig. 6)
• For the DIY beam balance (figs. 4–5)
  • 1 coat hanger
  • String
  • 2 identical, plastic take-out containers
  • A sharp knife to cut string and make small holes in the containers

The scenario

Do you have what it takes to trade in an ancient Greek market? Your community is depending on you to deliver the goods.⬈#p18

Each team represents either a delegation from a polis (a classical Greek city-state) trading in the emporion of the Piraeus (the import-export market of the port city of Athens)²² or the head of an Athenian oikos (household) trading in the Athenian agora.²³ Each polis/oikos produces the staples associated with Greek life, the so-called “Mediterranean triad” of wheat, olives, and wine, in this case represented by rice, red beans, and red or green lentils.²⁴ However, just as each polis/oikos differs in size, terrain, micro-climate, etc., so each produces these staples in different quantities and qualities. Each team therefore begins with a different initial endowment of rice, beans, and lentils. These staples are stored in unmarked, non-transparent “silos”: they are for holding only, not measuring, trading, or transport (fig. 6). Finally, each polis/oikos has a set of hand-made, “traditional” measures, idiosyncratic to their community or estate (fig. 2). These, and all subsequent instructions or important facts, are projected on a screen using slides.⬈#p19

Play

Play is organized as a series of trading games, which I will call “phases” below. The phases gradually add increasing conceptual complexity to the tasks the students are asked to complete, each revealing or isolating a facet of the phenomenon of measurement in the Greek world and its relationship to politics and economics. In order to achieve maximum pedagogical effect, each phase is designed and ordered strategically to build on (and sometimes undercut or nuance) the discoveries, relationships, and norms constructed in previous phases. Since this is a simulation, and one in which the players are intentionally granted tremendous freedom to compete and cooperate within and between teams, it is in practice virtually impossible to keep the phases completely distinct. That is to say, students will encounter or anticipate in phase 1 problems that properly or pedagogically belong to, say, phase 3. The role of the teacher in this game is therefore analogous that of a Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons: only the teacher knows the map of the territory to be covered, and the challenges that the players will confront as they make their way through that terrain. The teacher must simultaneously keep the players focused on the task at hand, while also guiding them discreetly to the next challenge, all without revealing what that will be until the time is ripe, so as to maintain the element of surprise, which is vital to the play and learning experience. So, while play is characterized and likely perceived as flow by the players, who are focused on trading and for whom measurement is merely instrumental to that activity, for the teacher it is articulated as a series of successive phases, each of which is defined by a set of lessons to be learned about measurement in the trading process. It is up to the teacher to read the state of play and decide when the core lessons of the current phase have been sufficiently achieved, or a sufficient number of the problems of the next phase have been adumbrated or broached, to trigger an intervention and mark a transition to the next phase.⬈#p20

Finally, a word on winning. There is no formal way to win this game. In practice, I have never made this fact explicit; nor has any student thus far ever asked how to win the measurement game. Instead, the students (being students, after all) focus on success or failure: can they complete the trading tasks or not? By the same token, since winning is not the formal aim of these games, failure does not disqualify a team from advancing to the next phase. To this extent, we here find another parallel with the science experiment as a genre of pedagogical exercise: no one “wins” in the chemistry lab, except at the level of implicit classroom competition. Departing from this analogy, however, is the fact that the tasks necessarily involve cooperation and competition between teams for resources, and so teams will often cognize the successful completion of a transaction as “beating” other teams, not only those teams that might have failed to conclude a trade, but also (and interestingly) the teams that were on the other side of their successful deal. This is to say, that in my experience, the students have naturally responded to core tasks of the various phases as if they were playing a game to “win.”⬈#p21

Phase 1: Prices and measures

Each polis/oikos begins with three containers or silos with unequal amounts of rice, red beans, and red or green lentils. That is to say that some teams have less rice, but more red beans and/or lentils, or vice versa. I mark each of the rice silos on the outside with a line that sets a minimum amount required for survival. One cannot go below this line and satisfy the trading requirements. Additionally, the rice of all but perhaps one or two of the teams is admixed with different concentrations of small black lentils. The lentils represent the adulteration one always finds in agricultural products (chaff, dirt, etc.; fig. 6). I am careful not to call attention to this: indeed, I deflect any questions (and there are usually not many) about the black lentils and instead direct attention to the first task: in order to thrive, each polis/oikos needs to achieve a balanced diet with complete proteins. A balanced diet with complete proteins requires rice and beans or lentils. The task of this first phase is to trade until the polis/oikos has (a) the minimum amount of rice for survival as indicated by the survival line on the silo; and (b) twice the amount of rice as beans or lentils.⬈#p22

Phase 1a: Prices, money, and standards

Now that they have their marching orders, the students start to explore their goods and their measures. Several approach other teams. Almost immediately, however, they turn around and ask me what the prices of the commodities are.⬈#p23

In the course we have not yet covered the invention of coinage, and for good reason. Coins are in fact the commodification of precious metals: their value proposition over bullion is carried by the state’s stamp, which signifies that the coin is of a certain, measured fineness and weight. In other words, unlike everything else in the market, coins come pre-measured, thus removing the costs and the opportunism associated with measuring (obviously, this depends on their being genuine and not fakes or imitations). This is usually our first lesson learned in this exercise: money is in fact part of the solution to the basic problem confronting us, which is to say, measurement. Put another way, we need to find our way to money.²⁵ So, instead of money prices, I suggest a set of relative prices.⬈#p24

• Beans are three times more valuable than rice
• Lentils are half as valuable as beans

This set of ratios obscures the possibility that any one good can or should serve as a standard of comparison. The aim is to have the students work one out for themselves. So, for instance, they could devolve upon rice, rewriting the expressions above in terms of rice:⬈#p25

• Beans are 3x more valuable than rice
• Lentils 1.5x more valuable than rice

Or, beans:⬈#p26

• Lentils are 1/2x as valuable as beans
• Rice is 1/3x as valuable as beans

Whatever standard they adopt (and they may need some prodding to get the ball rolling in this direction), there will be pros and cons; and if you have enough time after you tackle the issue of quality (below, Phase 2), it is worth asking them about these pros and cons, as against those involved in adopting a different standard. For instance, beans represent a higher store of value (in effect, trading with $100- instead of $1-dollar bills) and are easier to sift (a problem of quality). Finally, I am careful to stress that these are starting prices: teams may, and indeed will likely need to, negotiate higher and lower prices according to their needs and strategies.⬈#p27

Phase 1b: Measures and measuring

We now have prices, and the students are actively trading, but they quickly run into a new stumbling block: measures. Recall that each group has a set of “traditional” measures. Each measure is a bit different, and depending on the base commodity, they will each be more or less convenient for trading in the quantities needing to be exchanged. But even so, they are not necessarily easy to use. For example, how precisely do students know if they have “twice as much” rice as that quantity of beans? Also, twice as much what? They will ultimately have to decide what they are measuring and why: weight? volume? caloric value? Most classes, however, since they are so focused on accomplishing the task at hand, only come to this realization after several minutes of active trading.⬈#p28

Every class in which I have run this game begins by measuring volume, a natural choice, since the students have several volumetric containers in front of them. They therefore either negotiate on which volume to use in each transaction, or (less frequently) pick a volume as a standard for the entire agora (i.e., this particular cup is the “market cup”). Both coordination processes take time, and so serve as excellent demonstrations of some of the transaction costs associated with measuring (i.e., the costs involved in negotiating about measures in addition to measuring). One useful lesson imparted by these interactions is that while one accepted measure is good, a system of measures is even better, which is to say the establishment of a base unit complemented by fractions (1/4x, 1/3x, 1/2x) and multiples (2x, 3x, 4x). At least once a class actually cobbled together between their measures the beginnings of such a system of fractions and multiples around a conventional unit.²⁶⬈#p29

While volume may be a natural choice, it nevertheless has its drawbacks. For instance, in the absence of a system of measures, one must estimate fractional amounts of units. Or, if there is physically only one of the standard measures (which is likely to be the case), you will have to wait your turn to use it, like so many market Graiai (or a modern team of scientists in line to book time with the James Webb Space Telescope). More fundamentally, is volume really the most relevant attribute of these commodities to measure? One would presumably want to measure nutritional and gustatory values directly, if possible. As any student in the class who has ever perused a breakfast cereal box will know, modern food packaging in the United States takes advantage of our ability to measure some of these dietary attributes more directly in order to inform consumers, facilitate comparison, and so reduce the opportunity for fraud.²⁷ Of course, this was not possible in antiquity, nor will it be possible in your classroom. So, the question becomes: is volume the best proxy for these more elemental, yet more elusive attributes?⬈#p30

This question, and the realization that one is often measuring proxy values even in our contemporary world, whether that is in the marketplace, politics (e.g., voting), or astrophysics, represents another foundational lesson about measuring that this game often brings home to the players. Considerations like this will attend another important corollary lesson of this game, namely, that there is no point in standardizing quantity (e.g., volume), if you have not standardized quality.⬈#p31

Phase 2: Quantity and quality

At some point, someone will ask what the deal is with those little black lentils in the rice. So long as the question is asked after we have already learned some of the lessons in Phases 1a and 1b above, I will confirm that they are “inedible”: chaff, weeds, stones, dirt, etc. This marks a new phase, since it represents an intervention, adding or confirming a new fact that will have a decisive impact on play. The impact of this fact is most dramatic if one introduces it after teams have completed a transaction or two, since invariably one team will suddenly realize that it had been “cheated” by receiving too little rice, e.g., it paid for 100% rice, but received something like 98% rice and 2% dirt. It does not take long for the market to begin to demand “clean” or “pure” rice. This in turn imposes varying sifting costs on the teams, as each has a different level of adulteration – and the students feel the cost, picking lentils out of the rice by hand.²⁸⬈#p32

The question of quality strikes at the heart of what it means to measure the valuable attributes of a commodity, as well as what it costs to create, discover, and communicate that information in a marketplace. As suggested above, it is essential to determine quality if one is going to have a standardized base unit: the agora “cup” of rice is only really a standard volume if it is a standard volume of a standardized quality. Moreover, standardizing quality serves not only the purpose of an individual transaction, but also makes the broader market more efficient, because such goods can be traded again without being measured: they in effect become a form of money (like coins, which are standardized by weight and purity), acquiring a value above and beyond their specific use value.⬈#p33

The standardization of quality also allows the class to take another significant step in their adventures in the economics of measurement, which also marks this a new phase of play: measuring by weight. Indeed, it is often the student who asks whether or not we can weigh the rice who starts the discussion of quality, since the act of weighing tends to draw attention to the purity of the good being weighed as one watches it be poured out, as opposed to filling a certain volume, where the perceptual and intellectual focus is squarely on the limit of the container. In order to weigh the goods, I introduce the simple balance I made (figs. 4–5).²⁹ Now students have a second way of measuring goods: they may use the scale to set a standard unit volume, which will also have an equivalent standard weight. This is useful, and the students typically move quickly to weighing the goods, since it is easier to be precise about multiples and fractions (i.e., one can easily counterbalance against half a “cup” of rice or two “cups” of rice). Using rice as a counterweight is obviously cumbersome, and inevitably involves waste in the form of spillage.³⁰ More than one class has come up with the idea of using counterweights, which are far more convenient and never result in waste; and all have been quick to adopt them when I suggest that they experiment with some that I provide (fig. 3). One could of course use any small, heavy objects as counterweights, but I try to choose iconic objects for reasons that will become clear in the final portion of the class (see Endgame below). Fairly quickly, students start communicating and negotiating in terms of the counterweights (e.g., I need two “elephants” of X).⬈#p34

As soon as we have arrived at some set of class conventions around the use of volumes, qualities, and weights, I step back from the trading floor and listen carefully as teams calculate and negotiate the price ratios according to our conventions and then measure quantities for trading. I am watching for my chance to throw the second monkey wrench of this phase into the works. Thus far the students have been busy finding efficiencies in and building relationships between weight and measures, but with little to no attention to the specific qualities of the goods themselves. My aim at this point is to emphasize the point that one is not trading abstract measures or weights, but concrete goods. So, for instance, if I hear two teams involved in a transaction interpreting the relative price statement “Beans are 3x more valuable than rice” to mean that they are three times more valuable by volume, I will quietly suggest to the team selling, say, three cups of rice for one cup of beans that they should consider checking to see if one cup of rice weighs the same as one cup of beans. Because the scales are not particularly sensitive, I suggest that they conduct this test using at least two cups. My readers will perhaps not be surprised to learn that a volume of rice weighs more than the same volume of beans, because the rice is more densely packed.³¹ (One can obviously reverse this process of discovery if teams are trading weights uncritically by asking about volumes.) The question now before the class is which measure is more relevant: do we care more about getting a certain volume or a certain weight? The answer is obvious to everyone; the learning opportunity is that to most classes the question was not.⬈#p35

Phase 3: Packing and stacking

We are now ready for the final wrinkle.³² I tell the students that Greeks did not live on bread alone. Oikoi/poleis also traded in other raw materials, like linen (cotton balls) and luxury items (berries), since the aim of human life (at least according to Aristotle) was not merely to survive, but to thrive and live a fully civilized life. We therefore have a new task: each oikos/polis needs resources to engage in cultural activities, in this case organizing a ritual festival for the gods, like the Panathenaia.³³ A team may put on a festival once it acquires at least 2 strawberries and 5 cotton balls for each team member. Neither commodity is sold individually, i.e., teams must buy what they need in bulk and by volume. 1 cup of cotton balls is worth a 1⁄2 cup of rice, and 1 cup of strawberries is worth 1 cup of rice.⬈#p36

After giving these instructions, I distribute the strawberries and cotton balls, making sure that teams have sufficient quantities of at least one resource in order to induce selling. Well stocked and clear on their mission, the teams return to the trading floor. The preceding tasks have left them experienced, confident, and quick: they use sifted rice (or beans or lentils); they quickly agree on measures, or already know what a cup of rice is (and in fact, may have one pre-measured or use a counterweight equivalent); some try to work out the price of berries in terms of cotton balls (or vice versa), using rice as a common denominating unit of account; they trade. If I see that no team is packing cotton balls or heaping strawberries, I quietly suggest that they do so, usually eliciting an objection of “cheating” from their potential trading partners. After the initial expression of outrage, it is worth asking whether packing cotton balls is cheating or not; or why one might pack cotton, but not berries (and vice versa). By way of comparison, you might ask those who have any baking experience in the class why one packs brown sugar, but not flour, or why one levels off measures of baking powder – situations in which we measure foodstuffs differently, but without any suggestion of cheating.⬈#p37

The aim of this exercise and the questions above, of course, is to bring home the point once more that everything about economic measuring is conventional and contingent on the nature of the good being traded, from the perspective of human value. Packing cotton is more likely to result in a consistent amount of cotton per unit measure (and clearly faster than weighing out an amount), since one is merely stuffing a given measure with cotton by pushing out the air. Strawberries, on the other hand, are delicate, lumpy, and highly variable in shape and size: they can be heaped without damage, but cannot be efficiently packed without reducing their value. One could, of course, define a “cup” of strawberries as one in which the fruit (or anything else) does not rise above the rim. An excellent question for students to ponder is whether there is any advantage in defining a measure of such a good as however many one may fit in the measure without falling out. As they articulate answers to these questions, it is often worth reminding the students that these goods are not being measured in a laboratory, where one may focus more objectively on the physical properties of cotton or strawberries or the precision of measuring, but in the competitive fishbowl of the agora, such that they might need to take into account a particular complex set of psychological and sociological factors – which they just enacted themselves – in the mini-drama that is encapsulated in the market transaction.³⁴⬈#p38

Endgame

Once the students have successfully negotiated the task of trading in commodities that require new norms of measuring (Phase 3), I end the trading games. Not only has this taken 40 minutes or so, but the artificiality of the scenarios has also worn thin: to keep playing would require a more robust game world, articulated by defined rules of interaction and a clear win condition. The students are typically ready to move on. The last section of class is reserved for the real “win”: applying the experience of the last 40 minutes to the Greek world. To that end I present a selection of texts and objects from the ancient world that reveal responses to some of the problems they just encountered. So, for instance, I often present a Hellenistic land lease between a certain Maron and Ptolemaios from Kerkeosiris, a village in the Arsinoite nome of Egypt, highlighting the following lines:⬈#p39

The appointed rent shall be paid every year by Ptolemaios to Horion or his representatives in the month of Pauni, payment being made in wheat that is new, pure and unadulterated in any way, measured by the six-choinix-measure of the avenue of the temple of Souchos in the aforesaid village by just measurement, and it shall be delivered to Horion at the village at whatever place he may fix in the said village at Ptolemaios’s own expense. (P.Tebt. 1.105.39–42; 103 BCE)³⁵

This is a large and complicated lease, and so one must guard against being drawn into its many interesting details; but it is not difficult to get students to focus on these lines. They quickly appreciate what lies behind the stipulation of quality (“new, pure and unadulterated in any way”) and the specification of measures (“the six-choinix-measure of the avenue of the temple of Souchos in the aforesaid village”). Some also pick up on the explicit warning against cheating (“by just measurement,” which of course implies that there are sharp practices to guard against), and the fact that it is the lessee who bears the expense of cleaning, measurement, and delivery (which tells us that such costs are substantial enough to warrant explicit assignment, although nebulous enough to preclude precise quantification). This document, of course, is not from Athens, nor even the classical Greek world;³⁶ but it is a product of that history (the choinix was a Greek measure imported into Egypt, as is the contractual form of the lease, not to mention the language in which it is written), and it may therefore effectively represent the sort of negotiation over local weights and measures that was required before the advent of accepted and enforced super-regional standards.³⁷⬈#p40

The second text I present is from Athens, IG II².1013 (the text corrected by Pleket and translated by Austin 2006: no. 129, with bibliography), a late second-century BCE inscription that presents a combination of market regulations policing weights and measures, as well as a reform that appears to have brought Attic measures into conformity with Roman standards. The impetus for the decree may indeed have been the growing presence of Rome and the interest in facilitating trade with the new imperial superpower; the market regulations (as opposed to the new standards aimed at creating equivalencies), however, do not seem to depend on that particular historical context, except insofar as any changes to weights and measures hold the potential for confusion and opportunism in the market, if old measures persist in use alongside new ones. The reform, then, appears to have been an occasion for proposing new standards, clarifying the regulations of weights and measures in order to make the transition to new standards orderly, and receiving and codifying some existing market practices. Nothing in these received practices – or the locations or personnel – would have been radically out of place three centuries earlier (except the use of lead seals to validate the measures, § 9).⬈#p41

The text is too long to discuss here in detail, but I will mention a few topics that we typically address as a class and the sections in which they located (following Austin’s translation):⬈#p42

• The assertion of political control over weights and measures, but only in certain specified areas, i.e., the Athenians did not attempt to police weights and measures outside of controlled market zones in the Agora, the Piraeus, and the market at Eleusis (§§ 1-2, 5–6)³⁸
• The use and control of market measure exemplars kept in the symbolic political heart of the Athenian state, the tholos (§§ 2, 5–6)³⁹
• User fees for validating measures, to defray the cost to the state of providing a public good (§ 9)
• The mechanics, politics, and economics of the publication of laws and the role of literacy (§ 9; see below fig. 7)
• A distributed, “crowdsourcing” approach to enforcement that depended on the public, who would have been in the best position to observe cheating, including by officials (§ 2)
• A graduated scale of penalties based on status, in this case, free and enslaved (§§ 1, 6)
• Systems of checks and balances and redundancies that aim to discourage (or reveal) official corruption (§§ 7–8)

This text also invites us to examine the actual weights and measures that survive from the agora, including iconic counterweights (fig. 7), which of course recall those that the students had just “invented.” In addition to the use of iconic symbols keyed to the specific weights, it is worth noting (a) the use of writing, which not only records the denomination, but also proclaims the official, political nature of the object as authorized by the Athenian demos; and (b) the regularity of the shape, which marks the counterweights as products of nomos (social or political convention) that serve as measure of the products of physis (nature) in the agora.⬈#p43

Finally, the following regulation from the inscription in particular usually excites a good deal of discussion:⬈#p44

those who sell Persian nuts (walnuts), dried almonds, hazelnuts of Heraclea, pine-nuts, chestnuts, Egyptian beans, / dates and any other dried fruits that are sold with these, and (also) lupines, olives and pine kernels, shall sell them with a measure of a capacity of three half-choinikes of grain levelled off, selling them with this choinix heaped up, with a depth of five fingers and a width at the rim of one finger; similarly those who sell fresh almonds, [newly] picked [olives] and dried figs must sell them with a choinix heaped full, twice the size of the previously [mentioned one, / with a] rim three half-fingers (wide), and they must use measures (choinikes) made of wood. (Austin 2006: § 3; fig. 8).

This obviously hearkens back to their experience with strawberries and cotton. The fact that we seem to have recovered archaeologically an example of the three-choinix measure described in the text, which has a flared rim to accommodate heaping of certain goods, and validated with the prescribed lead seal (fig. 9; cf. § 9), is not only a vivid illustration connecting their experience to antiquity, but also an object lesson in how text and material culture can be effectively combined in ancient studies.⁴⁰⬈#p45

Appendix 2: Agoranomika, Links to Basic Instructions

The following links allow basic instructions for Agoranomika to be downloaded from either the New York University Faculty Digital Archive or from Zenodo. Both these repositories are designed to provide long-term, stable access to digital resources. The instructions are primarily intended for teachers interested playing a version of the game in their own classrooms.⬈#p46

• NYU FDA: https://hdl.handle.net/2451/69538
• Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8277082

Notes to Article and Appendix

¹ Consider the antidosis procedure, which constructed an information problem in the provision of public goods through liturgies (Who are the 300 richest Athenians this year liable for liturgical service?) as a game of financial chicken between potential liturgists, in which a nominee challenged another in the liturgical class either to assume the obligation to which he had been nominated (on the claim that the other was in fact richer) or to exchange property (so that nominee would then have the wherewithal to perform the liturgy). If the challenge failed, this game ended in a public display of competitive rhetoric, as each attempted to convince the demos that the other was richer. See Dem. 42 “Against Phaenippus” (translated by Scafuro 2011); Davies 1981: 9–37 (basic background on liturgies and the liturgical class), Christ 1990, Carmichael 1997, Lyttkens 1997, Kaiser 2007, Fawcett 2016, McCannon 2017, and Apolostakis 2018.⬈#footnote-1

² Resp. 536e, cf. 424e ff.; cf. Leg. 643b–d, 796–797 (good and bad games, and the educational imperative to regulate them), and 803a–e (classic statement of the cultural aims of “serious play”). This was an abiding concern for Plato: the opening of the Laches (an early dialogue, unlike the Laws) is essentially a critique of investing in the wrong sort of play.⬈#footnote-2

³ Pl. Leg. 803d: “Now I suppose they [i.e., most unphilosophical Greeks] think that serious things (τὰς σπουδὰς) necessarily exist for the sake of play (ἕνεκα τῶν παιδιῶν); for they believe that it is for the sake of peace that the serious work of war (τὰ ... περὶ τὸν πόλεμον σπουδαῖα) must be done well. Yet what we have in war, it seems, is neither natural play (παιδιὰ πεφυκυῖα) nor again education (παιδεία) worthy of the name – neither now nor in the future – which we of course assert to be, for us, the most serious thing (ὃ δή φαμεν ἡμῖν γε εἶναι σπουδαιότατον). On Plato and play, see D’Angour 2013 and Kidd 2019, esp. chs. 2 and 7.⬈#footnote-3

⁴ The phrase “serious games” is widely attributed to Clark Abt (1970; second ed. 1985). Johan Huizinga in the standard English translation of Homo Ludens (1949) uses the phrase “serious play” only once (61), and then not in his discussion of Plato’s concept and terminology of play. Wilkinson 2016 offers an accessible introduction to the development of the serious games movement. It will come as a surprise to no one that the majority of the gaming literature of the last thirty years takes digital games as its object, if not its point of departure. Another major strand remains in the public policy realm, which was Clark Abt’s point of departure: see, e.g., the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/serious-games-initiative. The closest Plato comes to a strictly pedagogical interest in games (as opposed to a political and cultural interest) is, I believe, at Leg. 819a–d, where he discusses gamification strategies typically employed by teachers (including the use of weights and measures); cf. Leg. 653c–e (humanity’s natural propensity for play) and 672–673 (the origins of cultural practices, like gymnastics, dance, and music).⬈#footnote-4

⁵ Reacting to the Past: https://reacting.barnard.edu/. For more on this pedagogical movement and role-playing in the teaching of history, see Carnes 2014.⬈#footnote-5

⁶ See Plass et al. 2015 for a recent overview of the cognitive mechanics of game-based learning and educational game design.⬈#footnote-6

⁷ For a recent academic review of educational gamification, see Dichev and Dicheva 2017, cf. Plass et al. 2015.⬈#footnote-7

⁸ E.g., the CUNY Latin/Greek Institute’s traditional “Hoplite Challenge,” now translated into a digital application by Jeremy March: https://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/11/12/teaching-ancient-greek-with-ios-and-android/⬈#footnote-8

⁹ For an excellent discussion of simulations (though largely from the perspective of digital game design), see Salen and Zimerman 2004: ch. 27.⬈#footnote-9

¹⁰ Salen and Zimmerman 2004: 158f.⬈#footnote-10

¹¹ 1974a: 66.⬈#footnote-11

¹² Cf. Momigliano’s second rule of historical practice: “Epistemological questions about the nature, validity, and limits of our objective knowledge of reality have only an oblique importance for historical analysis. The historian works on the assumption that it is possible to reconstruct and understand the facts of the past. If an epistemologist succeeds in convincing him of the contrary, the historian will have to take up some other line of work. If an epistemologist shows him impassable limits to his knowledge—that, for example, it is impossible to know the intentions of others or that we can arrive only at the probable, not at certainty—then the historian must surely pay attention, but only in order to define yet more rigorously the limits of his research” (1974b, trans. Yu 2016: 40). Of course, agreeing on those essential features of human nature that permit us to interpret human action in the past is tricky, and further complicated by the fact that any expression of these attributes will necessarily be historical and ideologically conditioned; cf. Boldizzoni’s (2011) critique of what he sees as the irredeemably neoliberal and anachronistic assumptions of many (American) economic historians.⬈#footnote-12

¹³ Momigliano 1974b: 1189; Yu 2016: 44.⬈#footnote-13

¹⁴ Adapted from Bloch 1953: 22, 27.⬈#footnote-14

¹⁵ For the case for economic growth, Ober 2015. I intend in the future to develop a Roman-period version of this course.⬈#footnote-15

¹⁶ North 1990: ch. 1.⬈#footnote-16

¹⁷ The name of the game is derived from the ancient Greek adjective ἀγορανομικός, which describes things related to the Greek office of the agoranomos, or market warden.The agoranomoi were the officers responsible for policing the market place in most Greek poleis. In Athens there was a subsidiary board of magistrates called the metronomoi, who were in charge of weights and measures ([Arist.] Ath. Pol. 51.1–2), but for reasons that will become clear, the game really is more about the wider market dynamics that drove Greek communities to establish and police weights and measures. On agoranomoi, see Stanley 1979, Van Alfen 2011, and the various essays in Capdetrey and Hasenohr (eds.) 2012.⬈#footnote-17

¹⁸ Cf. Williamson 1985 and 2000 for “governance structures” as a framework for understanding how they function institutionally.⬈#footnote-18

¹⁹ Cf. Johnstone 2011: Ch. 3.⬈#footnote-19

²⁰ Which not to say that cheating always happens, but merely that there is always the consciousness of the possibility. It is this awareness that drives various modes of social control, from moral codes (e.g., the value of honesty) and to formal laws. See the excellent discussion by Van Alfen (2011) on social controls in ancient marketplaces.⬈#footnote-20

²¹ NIST (The National Institute of Standards and Technology) was chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1901 “to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life” (https://www.nist.gov/about-nisthttps://www.nist.gov/about-nist). ANSI (American National Standards Institute; https://www.nist.gov/about-nisthttps://www.ansi.org/), in contrast, is not a government agency, but a non-profit founded shortly after World War I as an umbrella organization to facilitate the voluntary development and adoption of standards.⬈#footnote-21

²² Hansen 1997.⬈#footnote-22

²³ As part of the general background for the course, we study poleis and oikoi in the weeks before this game, so the students are generally prepared to assume these roles.⬈#footnote-23

²⁴ This version of the game uses only dry measures, but one could easily adapt it for liquid measures. Using natural ingredients for this game is admittedly wasting food; however, it does mean that with the notable exception of the berries, the game pieces are reusable and biodegradable. I have always found takers for the berries after class, and quite often for the rice and beans as well.⬈#footnote-24

²⁵ We typically get to money, coinage, and the problem of fakes and imitations about a week or two later, and the experience of this class is very helpful.⬈#footnote-25

²⁶ I am always careful to point out how the imperial measurement system still used in the United States is itself just such a cobbled-together system of now-abstracted, notional “cups,” “tablespoons,” “teaspoons,” etc.⬈#footnote-26

²⁷ For those interested in the regulatory history of labeling foodstuffs in the United States, the FDA has published a useful set of significant milestones: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history/milestones-us-food-and-drug-law. The current graphics Americans find on their packaging dates to the early 1990s, but represents a regulatory regime that began at the turn of the 20th century with the creation of the FDA in 1906. For an engaging account of some of this history in the context of the Progressive Era, see Junod 2017.⬈#footnote-27

²⁸ Thus far, every class has insisted on a standard of trading only in sifted rice. It is perhaps worth pointing out that this is not the only solution, especially in a market this small, where it is relatively easy (cheap) to negotiate. For example, “dirty” rice could trade at a discount, in effect passing the cost of sifting onto the buyer (at some risk to both parties, since the degree of contamination can only be approximated).⬈#footnote-28

²⁹ I tried to buy a child’s toy or educational balance, but I found that none of these worked nearly so well as the DIY versions I have constructed (which also has the advantage of being nearly free).⬈#footnote-29

³⁰ Most students will know from science classes that they should not count the weight of any container, and so pour the goods right into the scale pans, which increases the likelihood of spillage (have a broom handy!).⬈#footnote-30

³¹ Rice is approximately 25-30% heavier than dried kidney or pinto beans by volume.⬈#footnote-31

³² I have considered adding a final game phase related to liquid measures, but working with different kinds of liquid goods significantly complicates the logistics. That said, if I had more teaching support and access to a classroom with a sink, I would definitely try to work with liquid measures.⬈#footnote-32

³³ This is familiar to them from class readings. On the Panathenaia, now see Shear 2021.⬈#footnote-33

³⁴ Cf. Von Reden 1995; Van Alfen 2011; Johnstone 2011: Ch. 2.⬈#footnote-34

³⁵ Full text, metadata, and image available at https://papyri.info/ddbdp/p.tebt;1;105.⬈#footnote-35

³⁶ There are several other texts one could use from Hellenistic Egypt. The following have ready translations into English online, e.g., P.Mich. 1.43 (Arsinoite, 253 BCE, a letter to the nomarch, forwarding a report that he had not been careful with the measurement of grain); P.Ryl. 4.564 (Philadelphia, 250 BCE, an account specifying and converting measures); P.Col. 3.55 (Arsinoite (?), 250 BCE, a receipt of wine by a state agent specifying measures); and P.David 4 (2nd BCE, a loan of wine, specifying the measure). From the Hellenistic period on, we have several examples of metrological lists, either as part of the educational curriculum or for reference, e.g., P. Köln 13.525 (second half of the 2nd cent. BCE).⬈#footnote-36

³⁷ For the choinix, see Brill’s New Pauly, s.v. choinix (Mlasowsky 2012). For more on the debate about this measurement in Egypt, and the history of the persistence of local measures versus centralized fiscal control, see Duncan Jones 1976; Shelton 1977; Duncan Jones 1979; Shelton 1981; Rathbone 1983; Mayerson 1998; and esp. (in this context) Mairs 2010.⬈#footnote-37

³⁸ The designation of weights and measures is always a political act, whether in the ancient world (cf. the infamous and highly controverted Athenian standards decree of the second half of the 5th century, which we discuss later in the course [Rhodes and Osborne 2017: no. 155, https://www.atticinscriptions.com/inscription/OR/155]) or the modern, e.g., the political act that helped define and implement the metric system (Alder 2002) and the lack of political will (or popular resistance) that has led the United States to not implement it (cf. Hebra 2003). The ancient world was, and remained, unstandardized in ways that have interesting implications for a variety of functions we now take for granted (cf. Riggsby 2019, esp. ch. 3).⬈#footnote-38

³⁹ A map of the Hellenistic agora more or less contemporary with this decree may be found online courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens: https://agora.ascsa.net/id/agora/image/2012.58.1218⬈#footnote-39

⁴⁰ Crosby 1949 and Lang and Crosby 1964; cf. the comments in the ASCSA online catalog: Agora Object: P 14431.⬈#footnote-40

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