The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece / David M. Schaps

Money and the Market 113

The classical agora of Athens, as traced by its public buildings, seems ?rstto have developed in the course of the sixth century, either simultaneously with the ?rst Athenian coins or shortly thereafter.6It may well have been theresult of city planning: although the impressive buildings were later construc-tions, the agora from the beginning seems to have been laid out over the samegeneral area and with the same general plan that later de?ned it.7The place inwhich Athenians had previously congregated was hardly remembered by theAthenians and has not been securely identi?ed to this day.8The agora grewup in the Kerameikos, the potters■ quarter, and excavations have foundevidence of potters■ waste from as far back as1000B.C.E., but there are noother signs of commercial or industrial activity before the growth of the agoraitself.9By the middle of the sixth century, the activity of potters and paintersseems to have increased almost tenfold,10and as the sixth century progressed,the agora seems to have become a true commercial center, without everlosing its position as the chief gathering place for citizens.11By the middle of the fourth century, one could buy there?gs, marshals of the court, grape bunches, turnips, pears, apples, wit-nesses, roses, medlars, haggis, honeycombs, chickpeas, lawsuits, beest-ings, curds, myrtle, allotment machines, blue cloth, lambs, water clocks,laws, indictments.12Not everything that went on in the agora was an innovation. We mustdistinguish between crafts and trade. Long before the sixth century, theproduction of pottery was in the hands of professional craftsmen. The pres-6. Schaps, ■Monetization of the Marketplace.■ Miller (224n.4) doubts that the agora has any connection at all with the Peisistratids; he thinks it is earlier, a product of the early sixth century.7. Von Steuben,33?37.8. Thompson and Wycherley,19. For the archaic agora, the most impassioned advocate wasOikonomides. Miller (214) brings strong and perhaps conclusive arguments for locating it on thenorth slope of the Acropolis, as suggested earlier by Robertson (157?68).9. Thompson and Wycherley,170?71.10. See Webster,Potter and Patron,1?3.11. Aristotle disliked this and thought that there should be a second agora, untainted by commercialism. He recommended ■what is called a free market, as is the custom of Thessaly■(Arist.Pol.VII12.4?6[1331a30?b4]).12. Eubulus,PCGfr.74, quoted in Athenaeus XIV640b?c. Eubulus is musing on the locationof the law courts and all the public buildings in the agora near the market stalls. It has beensuggested that two characters are speaking here, with one delivering the ■straight■ lines (■?gs . . .grape bunches, turnips, pears, apples . . .■) while the other interpolates (■marshals of the court . . .witnesses . . . lawsuits . . .■): seePCG,ad loc. 
  114Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greeceence of a blacksmith among the gods suggests, as we should have presumedon our own, that ironwork, too, was a specialized profession. The sameconclusion might be drawn from Achilles■ boast that the dependents of theman who won his iron shot ■will not go into town, but rather this [the shot]will supply him.■13It need not, perhaps, be the case that these crafts were theonly means of support for those who practiced them; it is possible thatpotters and blacksmiths were merely peasants who had a special skill, andwhatever pro?ts they derived may have been a matter of gravy rather thanbread and butter. The straightforward understanding of Achilles■ words,however, seems to point in the other direction: that the usual procedure for apeasant who was ■in need of iron■ was to go into town, where he would ?ndthe blacksmith in a particular place.14Hesiod, indeed, knows the smithy andwarns against wasting too much time there.15Iron forging is a particularly dif?cult craft to move, requiring as it does heavy equipment (anvil, bellows,and a heavy hammer), and it would not be surprising if blacksmiths wereamong the ?rst to ply their trade in a ?xed place, where their customerssought them out, although Achilles■ boast also suggests that if the iron wereavailable, forging itself might be done with local talent.16The existence of apotters■ quarter before the agora suggests that pottery, too, was an urbancraft, whose practitioners could live in town without having to tend ?elds atall. We do not know how they were paid, but there are various possibilities.There may have been other independent crafts in addition to pottery andmetallurgy.We must distinguish not only between craftsmen and tradesmen but alsobetween different kinds of tradesmen. International exchange, in whichpeople exported what they had in abundance to obtain what they lacked,dated from the Bronze Age; the practice of international trade for pro?t wasalready known to Homer and Hesiod. The one trade of which early epicmakes no mention is retail trade, where a single trader buys from variousproducers and then resells to individuals. We cannot state for certain thatsuch trade did not exist in Homer■s time: he had no need to mention13.Il.23.835; cf. p.78.14. This is the conclusion of Donlan (■Homeric Economy,■651), although he points out thatcarpenters would presumably be mobile, since they worked on buildings.15. HesiodWorks and Days493?95; cf. Hom.Od.18.328?29.16. Alternatively, one might understand that blacksmiths usually came to their customers,but iron was only available in town; a middle suggestion would be that the blacksmith maderounds for small jobs, such as sharpening tools, but took major jobs in the shop. In HellenisticDelos, it seems that the blacksmiths themselves usually, but not always, provided the iron: see, forexample,IGXI158A80?81,161A67?68,163A61?62. 
  Money and the Market115anything so unheroic,17and Hesiod was writing for farmers. Archaeology shows us no archaic shops, but the wooden stalls of shops rarely leave atrace, and traveling peddlers leave yet less.We cannot, then, prove that there was no retail trade before coins wereinvented; but what we have seen suggests that if there was any, there was notmuch. The utensil money of Crete and the Argolid was, as we saw, neitherabundant nor highly developed; the archaic marketplace of Athens vanishedwithout a trace both from the landscape and from the memory of the people.Herodotus may or may not have been correct in believing that the Lydianswere the ?rst to practice retail trade, but it is noteworthy that he thought of the trade itself as being an innovation.18By the classical period, there are notonly retailers but wholesalers, and laws to regulate them.19Innovators or not, the grain dealers who bought from farmers and fromships, the shopkeepers who bought pots from various workshops, and theinnkeepers who supplied food to wayfarers were all making a pro?t, andthey were doing it in a way that would have been a good deal more dif?cultbefore the invention of coinage.20If their trade had roots in the past, it musthave grown very quickly once coins were there to help it along.T H E M A R K E T A N D T H E L A N DRetail trade itself was at the root of other developments. The growth of theagora, of course, was in large part both a result and a measure of the multi-plication of shops and shopkeepers. More than that, it was the agora thatmade possible the growth of the city itself. The possibility of making a pro?tby buying and selling in the agora meant that a landless citizen, even if he17. That Euryalos taunts Odysseus by calling him an international trader, not a shopkeeper(Hom.Od.8.162?65), does not demonstrate anything; Odysseus was obviously the victim of ashipwreck.18. Hdt.1.94.1. That he mentions it in one breath with the minting of coins, however, is notvery signi?cant, since by his day that would have been an obvious connection. Kurke (Coins,3)builds an entire book on the collocation of these items (along with the Lydians■ custom of prostituting their daughters and their playing the same games as the Greeks). I ?nd the listunremarkable, but there is much more to Kurke■s book than her starting point.19. Lysias22. Not every trade is likely to have had wholesalers as the grain trade did. TheMishnah (Demai2:4;Baba Bathra5:10;Kelim12:1) uses the Greek termsiton(■Greek■■■■■■■?;cf. LSJ, s.v.) for a grain wholesaler, whence Modern Hebrew has taken the termsitonaifor any wholesaler.20. In fact, inns in Greece now developed into a popular and common institution, muchmore important than the ■travelers■ houses■ that had existed in Mesopotamia: Rosenfeld,134?37.(Firebaugh■s anecdotal account, though there is real scholarship behind it, is seriously outdated,and Kraynak■s unpublished thesis was not available to me).  
  116Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greecewas not a trained craftsman, could earn enough to keep himself alive. Noless signi?cantly, it meant that there was a regular place for him to buy hisfood and an established way to go about it.We have no way of knowing how many people made their living in theagora or how many sellers were simply peasants disposing of a surplus,though it is worth noting that Aristotle considered farmers, no less thanshopkeepers and tradesmen, to be characteristic of the commercial agora.21It is certainly true that at later times, selling in the agora was one of therefuges of the poor.22By the ?fth century, one could conceive of such a strategy on a commu-nal scale. Themistocles suggested that in case of war, the Athenians couldabandon their rural land entirely and resist all comers from the ships, anidea that obviously envisioned procuring all of Athens■s food from abroad.Themistocles himself forti?ed Athens■s harbor, the Piraeus, with this inmind;23his successors went further and built the Long Walls to connect theharbor with the city. From behind these walls, Pericles, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, implemented Themistocles■ strategy, bringing therural population inside the walls and allowing the Spartans to ravage theland. In the crowded conditions, a frightful number, Pericles included, diedof a plague, but they did not starve. How they actually supportedthemselves?whether by foreign imports or from the land itself once theenemy had gone home?is not recorded, and a strong case has been madefor the idea that the devastation could not have been so great as to destroy their livelihood entirely.24This may well have been the case, but Thucydidesdoes not offer it as having been Themistocles■ rationale, nor do we hear of Pericles giving such an argument. In Athens, the idea of a livelihood hadbecome suf?ciently divorced from the land that its leaders, at least, thoughtthey could maintain the state without it inde?nitely.The possibility of living away from the land lay, in turn, at the root of alarger revolution. In Homeric times and probably in archaic times, not every item was available for exchange. The items that Agamemnon offered toAchilles for his wounded pride were not things that he would have sold at21. Aristotle (Pol.VII12.4[1331a34]) includes farmers among those he would exclude fromthe ■free■ agora. Chremes, in Aristophanes■Ecclesiazusae(815?22), on the other hand, seems tohave come to the market for a commodity-to-commodity trade: he sold his grapes, then took hiscoins straight off to the barley market to buy barley. Cf. Markle,154?55.22. AristophanesThesmophoriazusae447?48; Dem.57.31?36.23. Thuc.1.93.7.24. Hanson,Warfare and Agriculture,131?73; cf.245. 
  Money and the Market117any price, though he would give them away under appropriate circum-stances. As we have seen, too,25it is likely that there was a certain prestigegradation, so that not every currency bought every commodity. The circula-tion of iron spits may normally have been limited to a certain class of items,and it would seem unlikely that a peasant with some extra produce todispose of could expect to get silver, even in small quantities, in return for it.Land may not have been alienable at all, though that is a subject of greatuncertainty. Exchange meant ?nding the appropriate item to give in returnfor what one wanted.Money did not work that way. An essential characteristic of money wasthat it was exchangeable for anything, great or small. It may have taken timefor this to be appreciated: many Greek cities, as already mentioned,26did notat ?rst mint coins smaller than a drachma, and the earliest electrum coinsneed not have been designed to purchase things for which precious metalwould not earlier have been used. But as money came to be availableanywhere it was wanted, in any denomination, there can be no doubt thatsilver coins could buy anything at all, from gold jewelry to sardines. Bronzeor copper coins, it should be noted, did not appear for another century thereafter and never achieved the importance that they had at Rome.27To the extent, then, that Homeric society had distinguished prestigegoods from nonprestige goods, money subverted that distinction: money could buy anything and could be gotten in exchange for anything. It fol-lowed that even a peasant or a shopkeeper could amass enough money tobuy the most prestigious of goods; and it followed from this that the posses-sion of those goods, which was now open to everybody, no longer distin-guished the best from the worst. The honor of Achilles and Diomedes wasgreater in proportion to the gifts they were given;28no classical Greek wouldhave de?ned his honor in that way. Wealth, indeed, conferred honor, butthe wealth was now measured by quantity, not quality.Yet more: the opening up of new and individual roads to wealth brokethe circle of dependency that reinforced the distinction between rich andpoor. In Homeric society, thebasileusboth received gifts from his depen-dents and bestowed gifts upon them: ■a house and a plot of land and a muchcourted wife■ was what the swineherd Eumaeus would have expected from25. P.76.26. P.104.27. Kraay,Archaic and Classical,252?53.28. P.73. 
  118Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient GreeceOdysseus. 29 The wealth and success of thebasileuswas not only conceded by his dependents but actively desired by them, for his success and wealth werethe success and the wealth of the whole community, dependents included.30It is easy to see that this kind of relationship is self-perpetuating and leadsto a society whose leaders are, like the Homericbasileis,leaders by virtue of hereditary right. This social construct, too, is undermined by money and themarket. A landless man or one whose land is insuf?cient may, perhaps, stillapply to the noble for ■a house and a plot of land and a much courted wife■;but he may also simply go off to try his luck in town. He does not need thebasileus,and to the extent that he does not need him, he is likely to chafe atthe gifts by which he is expected to support him. The retail market, of course, was not the only safety valve open to a landless man: he might godown to the sea as an overseas trader or join an expedition of colonization.Both options were risky, and the second removed him permanently from thecommunity. The marketplace, in comparison, might provide a living for aperson divorced from any patron but still a member of the polis.The availability of the market as an alternative source of livelihood wasall the more important because of the overpopulation that had beset Greecesince the archaic era.31The colonies with which the archaic Greeks tried tosolve their population problem were based on agriculture and internationaltrade, the two great means then available in Greece for making a living.Retail trade could not by itself provide more food for the landless; but by giving them an opportunity to amass silver, it made them potential?and inAthens, at least, very real?bene?ciaries of the international trade thatwould once have served only the powerful. Where the Mycenaeans hadimported luxury items to adorn their kings, the Athenians imported grain tofeed their urban poor.Trade was not necessarily practiced as an alternative to agriculture. Afarmer whose land did not suf?ce to feed his family could perhaps trade in29.Od.14.64; Hoekstra (ad loc., in Heubeck et al., vol.2) considers the swineherd■s hopes fora ■much-courted■ wife to be ■rather unrealistic and presumptuous,■ but even if we ignore thetraditional nature of epithets, there is no reason why a poor girl may not have many poor suitors.On the dependent relationship, cf. Red?eld■s discussion (33?37).30. This is normally taken as being a sign of Homer■s aristocratic prejudice, and it may be so;but modern parallels from Africa suggest that it is an accurate description. See Schapera,175?76,184. Tandy (101?6) underlines the importance of this attitude to a redistributive economy. Wemay add that it is no less important to subgroups that function redistributively (such as a gang of thieves) in a larger economy that may be organized on other principles.31. In modern Africa, land shortage has often been the factor forcing natives to adopt amoney economy, as described by Schapera (184?86) and Gulliver (444?46). 
  Money and the Market119the marketplace during the long periods of agricultural slack. A more pros-perous one might use the same opportunity to sell a surplus there, enablinghim, perhaps, to buy more land and increase his standing yet more. Hesiod■sadvice to would-be seafarers recommends times when they would not beneeded at the farm. The trader whom he imagines is a farmer who will notleave until the grain harvest is over and will have to be back home in time toharvest the grapes and plant the next year■s crop. 32As already mentioned,33this form of commerce was eventually supplanted by the more professional-izedemporie,34but the new merchant still offered the farmer a means to turnhis crops into money.In another world and time, in the later Middle Ages, the increasing use of money and the increasing power of merchants were important factors inthe breakdown of manorial ties, and it will be obvious that they may haveperformed a similar function in Greece and notably so in Athens, whereSolon is said to have forbidden debt-bondage and thereby to have freedthe poor.35That the poor did not fall back into a situation where ■there isnot ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands■36was abasic precondition to the development of the Athenian democracy and may indeed have been connected with the existence of alternative ways of makinga living. Retail trade was not, however, the only such alternative, and theexistence of serfdom in Attica before theseisachtheiais not as certain as it issometimes presented.37It is not only the universal buying power of money that subverts ties of dependency by offering the poor independence; it is also its anonymity, whichoffers power to those excluded by birth. The gifts offered to a Greek hero werevaluable, aswe saw, notonlyfor their exchange value ortheirusevaluebutfortheir history.Theshotthat Achillesoffered as a prizehad belonged to the heroEetion; Achilles had taken it as plunder ■with the rest of his possessions■38after killing its owner. The shot reinforced Achilles■ position of preeminencenot only because of its inherent value but because of what it said about32. HesiodWorks and Days,663?65,678?88; Mele,16.33. P.89.34.Emporiewas the practice of theemporoidescribed above, p.89.35. [Arist.]Ath. Pol.4.5,6.1.36. Gen.47:18.37. Hammond, ■Land and Society,■ on the one hand, and, on the other the heterodox butprovocative article of Rihll. Theseisachtheia,enacted by Solon in Athens (probably when he wasarchon in594/3B.C.E.) was the cancellation and prohibition of debts that turned the debtor intothe serf of the lender.38.Il.23.829. 
  120Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient GreeceAchilles himself: it was a physical reminder of his martial prowess. WhenPolypoetes threw it the furthest and won it, the shot gained another story, onethat emphasized both Polypoetes■ great strength and his connection with thegreat Achilles. Even when it was used for a plowshare, the farmer who used itwould remind both himself and others of his own connection with Polypoetesand of the importance of the lord he served.No coin was like this. Coins would not be countable if they were notessentially identical. They had a value in exchange, but the value was not tiedup with their history. They said nothing about their owner, and the itemsbought with them were similarly anonymous. This did not mean that a personwith a treasure-house full of coins was not a powerful person; but it did meanthat power could now be achieved and exercised without the prestigiousactivities that had once been the occasion of transferring prestige goods.Wealth, and hence power, were open to people who would not have beeninvited to lead the raid against Eetion or to compete for Achilles■ shot. Callias,the richest man of classical Athens, was known as■■■■■■■■■■■■?, ■pit rich,■because he was said to have found his enormous wealth in a pit; those whocalled him so seem to have had no clearer idea of where his money camefrom.39It does not seem to have mattered, nor to have prevented Callias fromplaying an in?uential role in Athenian politics.For both these reasons?the freeing of the poor and the creation of nou-veaux riches?money tends to be subversive of hereditary rights, as the aristo-crats of France discovered in the last centuries of the Old Regime. The history of the late archaic age in Greece is the story of the crumbling of oligarchies.This development was already underway before coinage had been invented;the Cypselid tyrants of Corinth and the Orthagorids of Sicyon were seventh-century phenomena.40Nevertheless, it is more than probable that money andthe market had their share in continuing the process and in changing theentire concept of oligarchy. Throughout the classical period, neo-oligarchical39. Plut.Aristeides5.7?8;Suda,s.v.■■■■■■■■■■■■■. Cf. schol. AristophanesClouds64;Athenaeus XII536f?537c■Herakleides F58Wehrli. The ■obvious rationalization,■ as J. K. Daviesputs it (APF,p.260), is that he had made his fortune through the Laureion mines, informationcorroborated by Xenophon (Ways and Means4.15) and Nepos (Cimon1.3).40. For the date of the Cypselids, Servais■s treatment has won general acceptance. On thechronology of the Orthagorids, I follow, in its essence, the reconstruction of Hammond (■Fam-ily■), against that of Mary White, which seems to me to force the text of the Rylands papyrusbeyond what is reasonable. White would move the beginning of the Orthagorid dynasty down to610, perhaps after the very earliest coins (which were, of course, not in Sicyon but in Lydia), buthardly late enough to make coinage a factor in undermining the oligarchy. At any rate, it seemsclear from Herodotus that the roots of the Sicyonian revolution were chie?y ethnic rather thaneconomic. 
  Money and the Market121movements were based on restoring an oligarchy of wealth, never of pedigree.The power of birth, once broken, did not revive.The new freedom undoubtedly came at the price of a weakening of thetraditional bonds of society, and it dissolved them in both directions. Just asthe poor had opportunities for survival that did not require their masters■assistance, the wealthy had less need for the loyalty of their dependents: theirwealth could purchase advantages from anyone, not only from those withtraditional ties to their estates. If a Eumaeus of the classical age was freedfrom his master■s dependency for a house and a plot of land and a muchcourted wife, his master was also freed from any need to provide such athing. Liberation, by de?nition, dissolves bonds, and a later generation, inAristophanes■Cloudsand in the trial of Socrates, sometimes questionedwhether the dissolution of bonds had perhaps proceeded too far.There was one Greek state that did maintain an economy based on thebrutal exploitation of dependents by a small and hereditary class of ?ghtingbut nonproducing citizens. That state was Sparta, and for centuries, Spartarefused, apparently on principle,41to adopt a silver currency.I N F L A T I ONIt is not very meaningful to ask whether the invention of coinage causedin?ation. The growth of markets that accompanied the use of coins meantthat questions of value that might be judged by various standards wereturning into questions of exchange value, so that when we compare precoin-age and postcoinage prices, we are dealing with ?gures that are not entirely comparable. That said, we must admit that a person with goods to exchangecould probably get more silver for them after the invention of coinage thanbefore. This is, on the face of it, a paradox; in other places, the adoption of amonetary economy, by increasing greatly the demand for silver, causes pricesto fall, not to rise.42With the invention of coinage, however, an increasingdemand for silver was matched by an enormous increase in the velocity withwhich it circulated. In Homeric times, silver was a prestige item, and it washoarded, not freely exchanged. A person wishing to trade for silver beforethe invention of coinage seems to have had to offer a good deal to justify parting with so important an item. Coins, which were made to pass fromhand to hand, conferred no special prestige and were more freely given.41. See Hodkinson,96.42. Wordie,65?69.  
  122Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient GreeceCoins circulated as silver had never done before in Greece?indeed, as evenspits do not seem to have done. At the beginning of the ?fth century,moreover, there was a great increase in the amount of silver available, whena major discovery of silver at Laureion provided the basis for a vast volumeof Athenian silver coins, which were exported far and wide. A passage inPlutarch seems to indicate that there was a time when a drachma?perhapsa drachma of silver, perhaps a handful of spits?was in some way consid-ered the equivalent of a sheep.43That would never be the case again.T R A D E R S A N D P OL I T I CSMoney, we may reiterate, did not create trade, but it marked the beginningof a new age of commerce in Greece. Commerce did not supplant agricul-ture: most poleis were still supported by their surrounding countryside,44and even Attica, the city most notably dependent on imported grain, main-tained a numerous and in?uential peasantry.45Even the most committedmodernist cannot claim that Athens, the queen of Greek commerce, had acommercial class whose political importance approached that of the Romanpublicani,46much less the bourgeoisie of the last few centuries.47But traderswere no longer marginal to the community. The tax law gave Atheniancitizens preferential treatment as retailers.48The laws that were made toprotect the grain supply of Athens49were designed to protect consumers,43. See appendix3.44. Aristotle■s claim (Pol.I8.7[1256a38?40]) that ■the largest part of the human race livesfrom the land and from cultivated crops■ means at least that; from the context, it is clear that hedoes not simply mean to say that most people eat the produce of farms, which would be a truism.He may mean to say that most people support themselves by agriculture, which would be an evenmore interesting statement and may well have been true. Finley■s discussion (Ancient Economy,123?49) is still a good introduction to the topic, although the nature of the relationships betweentown and country has been elucidated much further by more recent studies.45. For the percentage of its grain that Attica imported, see Noonan as well as Garnsey,■Grain for Athens,■ disputing the higher ?gures of Jard■e. Whitby argues that Athenian policy wasto encourage generous supply or even an oversupply of grain.46. Thepublicaniwere wealthy Romans who collected public revenues under contract to thestate. On the nature of their in?uence, see Badian,82?118, whose analysis may also offer somegood indications of why Athenians of proportionally comparable fortunes never exercised signi?-cant political in?uence.47. De Ste. Croix,Class Struggle,41?42. De Ste. Croix points out correctly that the Romanequitesthemselves were in no way a commercial class. Cf. Finley,Ancient Economy,47?50.48. Dem.57.34; cf. Whitehead,Ideology,77?78. This was distinct from themetoikion,thetwelve-drachma annual tax on every foreigner who remained in Athens for an extended period:Whitehead, op. cit.,7?9,75?77.49. And of other communities: see ML30.  
  Money and the Market123not traders, but they presupposed a class of traders capable of feeding asigni?cant part of the population on a regular basis. Laws were made, priceswere ?xed, and of?cials were appointed50to regulate commercial practice.The commercial agora that crowded the political agora kept the new class of retailers very much in public view, and Aristophanes could even joke that apolitician could win over the Athenian public if he could only lower theprice of sardines.51This development caused some disquiet among the Greeks. In archaicSparta, Theognis inveighed against the people of wealth but no breeding; inthe fourth century, we ?nd an Athenian■s citizenship being impugned on thegrounds that his mother sold ribbons in the agora.52Aristotle dealt with thematter more analytically. He blamed the pursuit of money for the perversionof society and saw in commerce and even more in usury an unnatural andparasitic way of gaining one■s livelihood. There may have been other voices,but our sources do not preserve them.53The malaise that the sources expresscontinued to be heard throughout the life of Greece and Rome and longthereafter. At Rome, senators were forbidden to engage in commerce. InFrance, it was only with the Revolution that traders came to exercise realpolitical power. Even then, the feeling was not dead: the nation of shopkeep-ers54had the last laugh on Napoleon, but Karl Marx, the bitterest of allopponents of the merchant class, remains in?uential even after the fall of theUSSR.50. [Arist.]Ath. Pol.51, with Rhodes■s commentary ad loc.; J. Oehler inREI cols.883?85, s.v.■Agoranomoi■; Garland,76?78.51. AristophanesKnights624?82. Cf. van Leeuwen (on line645) on the volatility of prices of small ?sh. On the precise identi?cation of the ?sh called■■■■■■■ (line645) and■■■■■■■■?(line662), see D■Arcy Wentworth Thompson, s.vv.52. Theognis, passim; Dem.57.30. Demosthenes puts in his mouth the obvious rejoinder thatthe existence of the tax on metics shows that, on the contrary, the agora was the peculiar preserveof citizens, but the fact that the charge could be made suggests that there were many whodoubted that a true Athenian citizen would so lower himself.53. It is a priori unlikely that retailers themselves considered their calling to be shameful,though that is indeed the attitude of the speaker of Dem.57.30?31, who nevertheless states thatthe laws prohibit speaking ill of a citizen because he or she works in the agora. Whitehead(Ideology,116?21) found no sources speaking well of banausia(roughly, the career of an artisan);neither, apparently, did Ehrenberg (114?15) forkapelia(retailing). For the philosophers, seeSchaps, ■Socrates.■54. The phrase seems already to have been proverbial at the time of Adam Smith, who uses itat IV.vii.iii.