The dikai emporikai (“private cases involving maritime traders”) constitute an important category under the rubric of Chapter 5 – “Official Attitudes to Maritime Traders” – for they unmistakably reflect Athens' willingness to afford special procedures to the emporoi and nauklēroi trading with Athens in the mid-fourth century. I deal here with this topic only because the problems surrounding it require more discussion than footnotes permit.

Before broaching these problems, I must mention a number of issues on which most scholars agree. Prior to the mid-fourth century special legal procedures for maritime trade already existed, but by c. 352 b.c. Xenophon can doubt if these are sufficiently rapid to accommodate traders: in Vect. 2.3 he argues for “fastest possible” legal actions, “so as not to detain anyone who wished to sail out” of Athens. By the 340s b.c. Athens seems to have responded to just such a need: the term dikai emporikai first appears in D. 21.176 (? 347/6); and from D. 7.12 we learn that at some point prior to the date of that speech (343/2 b.c.) “the emporikai dikai were not as now … monthly” (kata mena, elsewhere emmenoi). So at some point between 355 and 343/2 b.c. Athens instituted more convenient “monthly” arrangements for the settlement of legal disputes involving maritime traders, doubtless to continue attracting more of them in a period when the prosperity once guaranteed by power had waned.

INTRODUCTION

This catalogue records the following information about an emporos or a nauklēros:

1. What his name and state are, if known.

2. With what degree of certainty or uncertainty he qualifies as emporos or nauklēros. Such designations lead to a certain clumsiness of style: I ask the reader to forgive the unmusical effect of a phrase like “a possible emporos who possibly lends.” I resorted to these awkward formulations only in the interests of accurate tabulation.

3. Whether he makes bottomry loans. “Loans” in this entry always mean bottomry loans unless otherwise indicated.

4. What his juridical status is at Athens.

5. If an emporos, whether he is poor. If a nauklēros, whether he is wealthier than most nauklēroi. Different purposes dictated these different questions. On the one hand I wanted to test Hasebroek's theory that most emporoi were poor; on the other I already knew that nauklēroi were moderately wealthy by virtue of owning a ship and (probably) a slave crew. I further wanted to discover whether some were wealthier than average. It is only these wealthier nauklēroi who are identified as “wealthy” in the Catalogue.

6. If he has partners in emporia or nauklēria. Partnership here always refers to a business partnership unless otherwise indicated.

The Catalogue covers only the classical period and includes only those emporoi and nauklēroi about whom something is known individually. “Kitian emporoi,” “Achaean emporoi,” and the like therefore are not included.

THE “SOCIAL STATUS” OF MARITIME TRADERS

Having dealt with Athenian legal and administrative mechanisms, I now turn to the Athenians themselves. What were the attitudes adopted by Athenian society at large towards the emporoi and nauklēroi trading with Athens? In Chapter 5 we saw the vital service they performed for both citizens and others within the polis. Can we, in addition to identifying the economic role emporoi and nauklēroi played, say anything about their “social status”? How seriously, in other words, did their largely foreign origins influence Athenian estimations? Or, again, how respectable was the work they did?

That they did real work for a living may have earned maritime traders the blanket disapproval of the Athenian leisure class. Davies shows how during the classical period the composition of this leisure class changed, with newcomers whose sources of wealth were more diverse, but there is no evidence that it changed its view of those without leisure. In particular we should not misread an aristocrat's eagerness for imports as social approval of those who brought them.

How far down the social scale did this leisure ideal go? Relative estimations are another matter, and have to do with the various ways in which different Athenian strata viewed the sort of work a maritime trader did. Nowadays the corporal reserves his envy for the sergeant. He acknowledges the higher status of the major, but the gap fails to engage his aspiration.

The fourth main section presents the story's ‘rising action’, as events begin to head inevitably towards the promised death of the Son of Man which will be followed by the promised resurrection. The section begins with a clear temporal and geographical patterning which builds momentum towards the events in Jerusalem. It spans three days. The first two days establish the geographical pattern: a journey from Bethany to Jerusalem and back (Day 1: 11.1–11; Day 2: 11.12–19). On the third day, the same pattern commences: the morning journey to Jerusalem (11.20) ends in the temple (11.27). Although the journey home begins as they move away from the temple (13.1) across the Mount of Olives (13.3), its conclusion is never reported, even though it is assumed to have occurred (14.3). The journey home is delayed on the Mount of Olives while Jesus delivers his longest speech which functions as a narrative aside, i.e., it creates a pause in the movement in order to force reflection on the narrative. Because of the open-ended third day, the entire section (11.27–13.37) reads as a connected sequence, with the three days functioning together to bring the narrative to its crisis.

Day 1: the coming kingdom of David (11.1–11)

The first day is filled with expectation, but nothing happens. Jesus enters Jerusalem in a manner which appears to make a deliberate messianic claim. Whether or not the crowd realise what is going on, their words have great significance, sustaining the readers' expectation of the coming kingdom (vv.10f.).

Chapters 3–6 deal with the place of emporoi and nauklēroi both in the states they traded with and in the states they came from. Chapter 3 concerns the maritime trader's juridical place (whether citizen or foreigner where he traded); Chapter 4, his level of wealth relative to others in a polis; Chapter 5, the official polis attitude to traders; and Chapter 6, attitudes of citizens within the polis to traders.

Most of the evidene concerns those trading at Athens. Were they mainly Athenians? Since so much of our information dates from the fourth century, it is best to begin there and then consider separately the evidence from the fifth. The great majority of those trading with Athens in the fourth century appear to be non-Athenians: Aeschines (1.40) casually refers to “the emporoi or other foreigners or citizens…”; and of the sixty-one fourth-century emporoi and/or nauklēroi in the Catalogue only twelve are Athenians trading with Athens. Another revealing piece of evidence is more oblique: the speaker in [Lys.] 22 urges the jury (22.21) to “court” (Χαριεῖσθε) the emporoi who trade with Athens by voting death for the grain dealers, the implication being that if the emporoi are not courted they might take their grain elsewhere. Since one of the Athenian maritime laws (nomoi emporikoi) forbade Athenian citizens and metics to carry grain elsewhere, the speaker must be assuming that emporoi are non-citizen, even non-resident.

The project

General orientation to the topic

This project is an inquiry into the impact of Mark's Gospel on its early Graeco-Roman readers. It argues that the suppliants in the thirteen healing/exorcism scenes have an important role in engaging the implied readers, and, because they represent a sample of life from the real world, the suppliants enable flesh-and-blood Graeco-Roman readers to ‘become’ the implied readers, enter the story, and so feel its impact.

Each suppliant begins under the shadow of death, but their circumstances are changed as a result of their encounter with Jesus, who brings life where there once was death. Their stories are told as part of a larger narrative which presents Jesus, as Son of God, as an alternative leader for the world, who leads the way into the coming kingdom of God. Mark's early flesh-and-blood readers also lived under the shadow of death. When they entered the story through ‘becoming’ the suppliants, the larger narrative would have caused them to focus upon Jesus whose life, death and resurrection addressed their mortality and gave them the hope of their own future resurrection. In this way, Mark's message about Jesus' defeat of death had the potential to make a huge impact upon Graeco-Roman readers, and so to play a large role in the mission, and the remarkable growth, of early Christianity.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter addresses several questions. In the Greek world of the classical period what sorts of people engaged in inter-regional trade? Was there a clear division of labor, whereby some earned most of their living from long-distance trade and still others engaged in it as a sideline activity?

I argue that in the classical period there was a clear division of labor. One group, composed of those called emporoi and nauklēroi, derived most of their livelihood from inter-regional trade. (These two words are commonly and somewhat misleadingly rendered in English as “traders” and “shipowners”; in his 1935 article Finley [333–6] rightly pointed out that nauklēroi may have regularly engaged in emporia themselves.) The second group consists of various sorts of people who engaged in emporia from time to time but who did not rely on it for most of their livelihood.

That in brief is the general picture. Can we be more specific? Yes and no. On the one hand we can mention other traits that usually seem to characterize those called emporoi or nauklēroi. On the other, as Finley (1935: 320–2, 333–6) showed, the ways in which these words were actually used prevent us from claiming that, because someone is called an emporos, then by definition he must have made a career of wholesale trade in goods, carried by him on someone else's ship, that were owned but not produced by him.

Conclusions on method

This study has adopted a reader-oriented method, but has attempted to move beyond the textual construct known as the implied reader to examine the potential impact of the Gospel on real flesh-and-blood readers. The examination of the interface between the ancient text and the ancient reader utilised the combination of a reader-oriented literary analysis and a type of social description closely linked to Mark's vocabulary. The analysis of the text from two directions (text to implied reader; flesh-and-blood reader to text) has proved to be a useful way of approaching the ancient reading experience in order to examine the potential impact of Mark upon its early readers.

In particular, the study has focused upon the role of the thirteen suppliants in the creation of Mark's narrative impact. The analysis of the axis ‘text to implied reader’, paying close attention to focalisation and the dynamics of distance, showed that the narrative creates strong identification, aligning these characters with the implied readers. In addition, it was noted that the suppliants are not presented merely as types, subordinated to a plot deemed more important. Instead, through the often quite detailed presentation of their situations of need, i.e., their physical and social circumstances, the narrative presents them as person-like characters whom real readers could recognise as examples of people known to them from their real world.

In Mark's central section, Jesus embarks upon a journey ‘on the way’ (8.27; 9.33, 34; 10.17, 32, 52), which will eventually take him to his life's end in Jerusalem. Each of its three sub-sections begins with a prediction of Jesus' death and the resurrection to follow. The reader is caught up in the momentum of this journey towards the narrative's goal.

Prediction 1: the Son of Man must die (8.27–9.29)

The first sub-section opens by reissuing the Christological question (cf. 1.27; 4.41; 6.2), as Jesus asks what people were saying about him (8.27–30). After reporting the opinions of others (cf. 6.14–16), Peter confesses Jesus to be the Christ. This finally aligns the disciples with the opinion the narrator shared with the readers at the beginning (1.1), although the following events will show that further progress is required.

Jesus then announces that the Son of Man must die to rise again after three days (v.31). The necessity (cf. δεῖ) no doubt arises from his divine commissioning as the Servant (1.11) and his commitment to continue in the will of God (3.31–35). He announces that his death will come from Israel's leadership. This is no surprise to the readers (3.6), but Peter takes exception (v.32). Peter's rebuke has often been explained in terms of a supposed Christological misunderstanding, i.e., that he could not cope with a Christ who suffered. Cranfield suggests he takes offence at the idea of suffering after being rejected by Israel's religious authorities.

The patterns and flow of the narrative suggest that the first major movement of Mark's story stretches from the call of the four fishermen (1.16–20) through to the end of the parables discourse (4.1–34). This first major section is divided into four sub-sections each signalled by Jesus' presence παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν (1.16; 2.13; 3.7 (πρός); 4.1). This division is reinforced by the occurrence of πάλιν in the second and fourth instance and the presence of large crowds in the second, third and fourth sub-sections.

In each sub-section, the seaside location introduces some kind of call: Simon and Andrew and the brothers Zebedee (sub-section 1); Levi (sub-section 2); the complete number of the twelve (sub-section 3). After this threefold calling of disciples, the reader expects something similar when the narrative returns to the same location for the fourth time, but what occurs instead, through the vehicle of the parables discourse, is the general summons for ‘anyone with ears to hear’ to hear.

The prologue has already begun to commission Jesus for his role in the narrative. By the end of this first narrative section all major characters of Mark's Gospel are assembled and commissioned.

The kingdom is near (1.14–15)

Text to reader

The announcement of John's ‘handing over’ indicates that it is time for the one coming after him to arrive.