ECONOMISTS have smiled at the remark attributed to Keynes that practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. We delude ourselves if we do not recognize a similar bondage to the ancient Greeks. Theodor Gomperz wrote: Even those who have no acquaintance with the doctrines and writings of the great masters of antiquity, and who have not even heard the names of Plato and Aristotle, are, nevertheless under the spell of their authority. It not only that their often transmitted to us by their followers, ancient and modern: our whole mode of thinking, the categories in which our ideas move, the forms of language in which we express them, and which therefore govern our ideas,-all these are to no small extent the products of art, in large measure the art of the great thinkers of antiquity. A thorough comprehension of these origins, he warned, is indispensable if we are to escape from the overpowering despotism of their influence [49, Gomperz, 1896, pp. 528-29]. Although it frequently contended that the science of economics began with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or, at the earliest, with the writings of the French Physiocrats during the eighteenth century, we should not forget the remarkable fact that the name for the discipline of economics derived from the Greek word oikonomia [108, Kurt Singer, 1958].1 The Greeks used the word for a formal discipline that dealt with an abstract subject matter (estate management and public administration), a usage that maintained some continuity for more than two thousand years before the discipline became known as political economy.2 In Pla-