How classical Athens was fed is not a matter of marginal importance. Nothing less than the material base of a brilliant civilization is at issue. The subject gains additional interest from the apparent fact that Athens’ food needs far outstripped the capacity of its home territory to satisfy them.

However, any attempt to discover the extent of Athens’ dependence on external sources of supply in any particular period is hindered by the lack of precise and detailed information pertaining to land under cultivation, population level, food consumption rate, yield, and sowing rate. Absence of data has not deterred scholars in the past from attempting to calculate the relative importance of home-produced and imported grain, and for better or for worse their conjectures underpin current conceptions not only of the food supply policy of Athens but also of Athenian foreign policy in general over several centuries. Thus the pessimistic conclusions of Gernet, Jardé and Gomme (to cite only the most influential of those twentieth-century scholars who have worked on this topic) provide basic support for the doctrine that Athens’ dependence on imports for ‘by far the greater part of her corn supply … led almost inevitably to naval imperialism’, and also the more radical thesis that Athens relied on foreign grain as early as the turn of the seventh century BC, well before the era of ‘naval imperialism’.