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The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Contents

List of Figures......................................................xiiiAbbreviations........................................................xv1. The Revolutionary Invention.......................................12. Questions and Controversies.......................................183. Money before Coinage The Ancient Near East.......................344. Greece before Money The Bronze Age...............................575. Homer Tripods and Oxen...........................................636. The Archaic Age Cauldrons, Spits, and Silver.....................807. The First Coins...................................................938. Money and the Market..............................................1119. The Monetization of Politics......................................12410. War by Other Means...............................................13811. The Monetization of Labor........................................15012. Money on the Farm................................................16313. Using Money to Make Money........................................17514. Monetization Limits and Illusions...............................1941. The Economist and the Historian...................................2152. Pre-Greek Coinage.................................................2223. Prices in Solon's Day.............................................2364. Unproductive Loans and Unproductive People........................241Bibliography.........................................................247Index................................................................273

Chapter One

OCCASIONALLY AN INVENTION succeeds so thoroughly that it changes permanently the terms in which its society thinks. It becomes an essential part of the world; life without it is hardly conceivable, and when observing other societies-or indeed, when remembering one's own society before the coming of the invention-one tends to imagine that there must have been something in the society that fulfilled, in a primitive manner, the place of the new invention. Writing was such an invention; not only the nature of communication but also our way of thinking about it has been changed permanently by literacy. Words have lost their wings and can be held for ages; we think we possess knowledge, even if nobody remains on earth who knows it, if only it remains written in a book; the most solemn agreements may not be binding until they have been written down. The clock was another such invention; within a few decades, it had organized society around fixed times of day, known with an accuracy that had once belonged only to the angels. All previous methods of measuring time-the notched taper, the hourglass, the sundial, the water clock (varied instruments serving various purposes)-were seen as primitive clocks; the new invention had superseded them all, and the difference in their functions became a matter for antiquarians.

Money, particularly coined money, was another invention that irrevocably changed people's way of thought. Here, too, various functions, previously separate, united themselves in a single concept; here, too, the invention has become an essential part of agreements that would once have been binding without it. People may consider themselves happy or miserable in proportion as they possess it, and they may dedicate most of their waking hours-indeed, most of their lives-to its acquisition. Yet money has not always been with us. Adam and Eve were penniless; so, if you prefer them for a pedigree, are the great apes. Money, as ubiquitous as it may seem to us, is not an essential part of the human condition.

Coined money was invented. It was invented in three times and places-Greece or Asia Minor, India, and China-that we can determine with what passes, at this distance, for reasonable exactness. Like other inventions, it developed out of certain predecessors and succeeded because it fulfilled an important need of the society that came to use it. Again like many other inventions, it developed in many extraordinary ways that could not have been foreseen; it had effects in areas of life that would have seemed to be vastly removed from its proper sphere; and it changed the world so profoundly that not only do subsequent generations find it difficult to imagine what the world can have been like without it, but-for that very reason-they can appreciate only with difficulty the effects that it continues to have on them.

The intention of the present study is to trace the invention of coinage and its introduction to ancient Greece, to demonstrate how it differed from its predecessors, and to show how its influence proceeded through the society that adopted it until most areas of that society had been fundamentally altered. This book is a historical one, written in the past tense, discussing things that happened to people long dead. The nature of the subject is such that its study should prove enlightening on many aspects of our contemporary lives, but I have not written it for any polemical purpose. Although I could hardly avoid occasional remarks of contemporary relevance (if only to keep the readers and myself from anachronism), readers are likely to find their own conclusions more interesting than any to which I could try to lead them.

WHAT IS MONEY?

The definition of money has exercised economists for generations, without producing a universally accepted definition. This need not and has not prevented intelligent discussion. Like hard-core pornography, money may be difficult to define, but we know it when we see it.

The question of a proper definition is important and essential for an economist; for a historian dealing with the genesis of an idea, it is not only nonessential but misleading. The purpose of a definition is, as its etymology indicates, to set up boundaries between one concept and another; a proper definition selects one characteristic-not necessarily the most obvious one-and limits the thing being defined to all items having that characteristic. It takes some mathematical sophistication to recognize that a circle-and only a circle-is the locus of all points at a given distance from another point, but this definition makes it possible for mathematicians to speak about a circle in a consistent and productive manner.

For the historian tracing the beginning of an idea, a definition is a hindrance. One person's circle is another person's loop; metaphorical uses ("This is popular in leftist circles"), contextual references ("The Arctic Circle"), and other linguistic phenomena extend a word's meaning yet further. Most problematic is our willingness to apply the term circle to any number of more or less round figures, not one of which fits the mathematical definition. Anyone who would discuss the genesis of the concept of a circle (if there ever was such a development) must bring into account many items that people may consider to be more or less circular. A scientist defines a concept in a way that makes it useful for science; that concept, once defined, ceases to mean to the scientist the same thing that it means to the rest of us. Geometry makes great use of circles as it has defined them, even though it is in fact impossible for anything tangible to fit the mathematical definition of a circle, for a circle as defined mathematically has no thickness and no width.

I shall not, then, define money precisely...