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ARISTOCRACY AND MONETIZATION: PLATO, PARMENIDES, HERAKLEITOS, AND PINDAR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2020

Richard Seaford
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Extract

If there was an ‘aristocracy’ in the archaic and classical polis, how was it differentiated from the rest of the polis? There are various possible criteria for differentiating a socio-political elite, notably birth, legal status, education, virtue, power, access to deity, wealth, and performance (or display). European history has left us with a strong association between ‘aristocracy’ and the criterion of birth, which produces a relatively closed elite. As for the ancient Greek polis, however, an excellent recent collection of essays entitled ‘Aristocracy’ in Antiquity edited by Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees generally rejects earlier assumptions that a hereditary aristocracy is clearly identifiable, and gives some prominence instead to the criterion of display or performance (such as competing in Panhellenic games or erecting an image of an ancestor). My concern is not directly with this interesting controversy, but rather with a historical process that is almost entirely omitted by ‘Aristocracy’ in Antiquity (and by most other discussions of Greek aristocracy), namely the monetization of the polis that was made pervasive by the invention of coinage and its rapid spread in Greek culture from the early sixth century bce.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 67 , Special Issue 1: Aristocracy and Monetization , April 2020 , pp. 54 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2020

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Footnotes

All translations are my own.

References

1 Fisher, N. and van Wees, H. (eds.), ‘Aristocracy’ in Antiquity. Redefining Greek and Roman Elites (Swansea, 2015)Google Scholar.

2 Apart from brief mention that Aegina seems to have been the first city of mainland Greece to issue its own coinage (ibid., 230), and brief mention that ‘the Solonian census classes were eventually monetised’ (ibid., 336).

3 Ibid., 27, 237–8.

4 Ibid., 23.

5 Ibid., 21–4.

6 Seaford, R., ‘Reading Money: Leslie Kurke on the Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece’, Arion 9.3 (2002), 145–65Google Scholar.

7 For bibliography on Homeric spheres of exchange, see Seaford, R., Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge, 2004), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 25.

8 Ibid., 24–6.

9 Wees, H. van, Status Warriors. War, Violence and Society in Homer and History (Amsterdam, 1992), 222–7Google Scholar.

10 At Odyssey 15.415–83 the trader is Phoenician; at Iliad 7.467–75 the metal given (along with other things) to Euneos for wine (enough for a whole army!) is merely bronze and iron, and Euneos, though Greek, is from Lemnos, which seems at this time to belong outside the Greek world: Seaford (n. 7) 27; Odyssey 14.323–6 does imply convertibility, but without mentioning exchange (and cf. Od. 2.75, 14.92).

11 Seaford (n. 7), 23–67.

12 Unless we choose to define ‘money’ so broadly (‘for something to be money, it is enough that it be used as a measure of value for a limited set of items’) as to be almost meaningless; see further Seaford (n. 7), 16–30.

13 Wees, H. van, Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute (London and New York, 2013), 107–33Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 132.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 112–13.

17 Ibid., 133.

18 Hdt. 5.62–3; 5.90; 6.123.

19 Isoc. Antid. 232; similar is Dem. Meid. 144. For detail see Rhodes, P. J., A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981), 236Google Scholar; van Wees (n. 13), 169 n. 51.

20 Seaford (n. 7), 97–8.

21 Ibid., 79, 94.

22 Ibid., 165–9, and index, s.v. ‘unlimit’, ‘unlimiteds’.

23 Though it is true that there are mentions in Homer of gifts gathered (especially from non-Greeks): Od. 4.125–32; 4.617–19; 11.356–61; 14.285–6; 15.80–5; 19.270–95.

24 Plut. Vit. Per. 16.

25 Seaford (n. 7), 147–337.

26 Herakleitos: DK22 A1(6), A2; Parmenides a wealthy aristocrat: DK28 A1(21) = Diog. Laert. 9.21; Plato: e.g. Diog. Laert. 3.1.

27 See Anth. Pal. 11.166: the money of a miser is not really his if he does not spend it.

28 Diog. Laert. 3.41–3. There is no reason to doubt the veracity of this report.

29 Currency ‘equalizes’ goods (Eth. Nic. 1133b16–18) but may seem artificial (Pol. 1257b10).

30 Pl. Leg. 918b. I use the capital B in ‘Being’ when it is a substantive: τὸ ὄν, οὐσία.

31 The desire for (real) money causes the decline of the ‘aristocratic’ state and individual: Rep. 544e7, 545c8, 547bc, 549b.

32 Arist. Pol. 1252b35: ‘τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα (the final cause) and the τέλος (end, completion) is best, and self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια) is the τέλος and best’.

33 See e.g. the abstract form of the good at Rep. 505a, 508a–e, 532b1, Leg. 965b–966b.

34 See e.g. Phaedo 81a; Symp. 212a7.

35 Diog. Laert. 9.21.

36 References in Seaford (n. 7), 185.

37 Plut. Mor. 842a; see also Dem. 12.158.

38 Seaford (n. 7).

39 ‘What χρέος (debt, obligation) would have driven it to come into being, later or sooner, from nothing?’ Here χρέος is almost always mistranslated ‘need’, because the translators (unaware of the economic origins of the One) can make no sense of what it certainly means. It frequently turns out to mean debt even when another translation is used: e.g. Aesch. Supp. 472 (see Fraenkel on Ag. 1275); Soph. OT 156 (see Dawe ad loc.); Eur. Andr. 337 (see Stevens ad loc.). Even in the (perhaps colloquial) expression ‘what (τί) χρέος?’ we cannot assume that the notion of obligation is absent (Aesch. Ag. 85; cf. Eur. HF 530, fr. 1011). For the meaning ‘need’, LSJ give only two passages, both of them with an object of the need in the genitive, but neither of them entirely convincing: at Ar. Ach. 454, the ‘χρέος for a wicker basket’ is parody (of the tragic Telephos) and so perhaps designed to sound absurd; at Bion fr. 5.2, the Doric genitive ἄλλω is a conjecture for ἄλλο, which could equally be restored as ἄλλῳ.

40 The original meaning (and lasting association) of moira is the distribution of goods: Seaford (n. 7), 51.

41 Plut. Adv. Col. 1126d.

42 Seaford (n. 7), 231.

43 Kurke, L., Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold. The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 41–64Google Scholar.

44 Thgn. 415–18; Kurke (n. 43), 43.

45 Seaford (n. 7) 30–3.

46 Diog. Laert. 9.6; Strabo 14.1.3 (632–3).

47 Seaford, R., ‘Immortality and the Elements’, HSPh 90 (1986), 1–26Google Scholar.

48 The city was conquered by Kroisos (Hdt. 1.26), and subsequently subjected to Persia. Strabo (14.1.21; 640) reports that the founder of Ephesos settled most of those who had come with him round the Athenaeum and the Hypelaeus, until the time of Kroisos, when ‘they came down from the mountainside and lived around the present temple until the time of Alexander’.

49 B1, B2, B44, B50, B89, B113, B114.

50 B54 ‘invisible harmony is stronger than visible’.

51 B1, B2, B17, B25, B29, B41, B49, B50, B51, B72, B104, B118.

52 For discussion of ἄλλοισι δ᾽ ἐμπίπτων γελᾷ see Most, Glenn W. ‘Pindar I. 1.67–68’, RhM NF 131 (1988), 101–108Google Scholar.

53 Seaford (n. 7), 296 n. 13.

54 For Plato, the decline of the ‘aristocratic’ state is caused by seeking and hoarding money (Rep. 549a). But even Plato, to judge from his will, kept a considerable amount of silver and gold in his house. For the introversion of hoarding as an underlying theme of Athenian tragedy (esp. Oedipus Tyrannus), see Seaford, R., Cosmology and the Polis (Cambridge, 2012)Google Scholar, esp. 332–6.

55 Untypically, the Homeric Odysseus does make up a story about travelling around to gather a mass of metals (bronze, gold, and iron), which it is implied might be exchanged for food (14.323–6): see n. 10 above, and Seaford (n. 7), 28–9.

56 Kurke, L., The Traffic in Praise. Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 239Google Scholar.

57 Iliad 12.322–8, 18.120–1.

58 Pl. Rep. 416e (quoted above), Phd. 69a; Seaford (n. 7), 297–8. See also e.g. Aesch. Psychostasia, Ag. 437, Cho. 518–21 (cf. Ag. 163–6); Soph. Ant. 322; Eur. Med. 968, Phoen. 1228; Isocrates 6.109; Anth. Pal. 7.622.6. Human life involves a debt to death: Eur. Alc. 419, 782, Andr. 1272; Pl. Tim. 42e–43a; Anth. Pal. 10.105.

59 At Ol. 10.11–12 Pindar acknowledges that he owes a patron interest (τόκος) on a debt, and says he ‘will pay’ ([τείσομεν] a κοινὸν λόγον): this means ‘a theme of communal concern’, but in the context surely also evokes monetized accounting (cf. Isthm. 5.27: λόγον ἐκέρδαναν). In Herakleitos’ ‘communal logos’ (B2), which regulates the circulation of money, there is the same ambivalence between verbal and monetary logos: Seaford (n. 7), 233.

60 Seaford (n. 7), 161.