Preface

WHEN MY PREVIOUS BOOK left my hands, somewhat more than twenty
years ago, I decided, in my youthful self-confidence, to undertake a project
that had defeated two of the great scholars of the economic life of antiquity:
an annotated catalog of all the known prices from the ancient Greek world.
Gustave Glotz had left behind at his death a manuscript including all the
prices known to him■surely a large percentage of all the prices known to
anyone at that time. Fritz Heichelheim proposed to publish Glotz■s manuscript,
1 but he, too, left this world with the work still uncompleted. I myself
have never seen this manuscript (though not for lack of effort),2 but I
undertook to collect all prices that I could and publish them on my own.
It was an unfortunate time for such a decision; after two years of assiduously
recording boxes full of index cards, I realized that the work I was doing
would become hopelessly out-of-date as advances in computing made the
words of Clement of Alexandria and the inscriptions of Acraephia as easily
available as the words of Thucydides and the inscriptions of Attica. The
simple collection of information, itself a task for a Glotz or a Heichelheim, was
done three times, each time with a vast increase in depth and precision,
but each time making the job of evaluating and annotating the material,
the task that had defeated both Glotz and Heichelheim, yet more gargantuan.
That task still lies before me, and I doubt that I shall complete it in
this lifetime.3
In the course of this work, however, it became apparent to me that much
of the information could not be dealt with intelligently without addressing
certain questions of principle. Disagreements between primitivists and modernists;
among substantivists, formalists, and Marxists; among historians,
economists, philologists, and anthropologists made problematical the interpretation
of even the simplest item of economic evidence. Increasingly, I
found myself constrained to try to come to an understanding among the
various competing models for the ancient economic world. It became, moreover,
increasingly clear that the meaning of an exchange in the archaic
period was very different from what it became thereafter. Something had
happened with the introduction of coinage.
I became convinced that the invention of coinage and its adoption by the
Greeks involved an intellectual change of great importance■to put it
clearly, if too simply, that the notion of money as we think about it, although
it surely had antecedents, was something that had not been thought
of before the Greeks adopted coinage. I became convinced, moreover, that
this new concept arose at a time when it was particularly appropriate to the
Greeks, for whom it offered a way of organizing and of thinking about many
crucial matters for which their existing institutions were inadequate. I determined
to write a short book about the invention of coinage.
As I came to discuss the effects of that invention, however, I discovered
that they were by no means uniform. In some areas of society, the effects of
monetization were immediate; in others, much slower. In some, they were
complete; in others, much less so. The question of the effects of monetization
grew so large that it now occupies more than half of the book to which
it was once thought of as a mere concluding chapter.
There will perhaps be those who think that the current book is, as Andy
Capp once complained about a shot glass full of six-year-old whisky, a bit
small for its age, not to mention its subject. I do not deny that the subject
could easily have produced a book ten times the size of the one I have
written. The reader should not be misled into thinking that any chapter of
this book constitutes a thoroughgoing analysis of the role of money in the
particular area discussed■that, for example, chapter 9 is a complete analysis
of the role of money in Greek politics. Beside such a project, my original
planned list of prices would have shrunk into insignificance. Suffice it to
remind the reader that the vastly erudite B¨ockh, the father of modern
scholarship in ancient realia, devoted almost a thousand pages to the economic
management of the Athenian state alone and that Kallet-Marx■s
recent study found quite adequate material for a densely argued book without
going beyond the first half of Thucydides.
I have tried throughout only to sketch the ways in which Greek thought
and behavior were changed by the introduction of money. Even so, the
subject was a large one, requiring me to deal with every age and every aspect
of life. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that nearly every paragraph in this
book could be expanded into an illuminating article. I have tried to provide
in this book a framework in which continued research can take place. By this
approach, I hope to have won everybody■s thanks: the thanks of the scholars
for having offered them fertile fields for further research and the thanks of
the less committed for not having inflicted all of that research upon them.
There is an important thread of recent scholarship, of undoubted relevance
to my theme, that I have touched lightly, if at all: the explication of
themes of exchange in literature,4 in particular with reference to gender
relationships.5 Exchange relationships, as I shall show and as others have
already pointed out,6 were highly developed among the Greeks before the
introduction of coinage and had much to do with the way in which coinage
developed in Greece. It follows that not every exchange relationship can be
seen, even metaphorically, as a type of monetary relationship and that the
extent to which coinage changed the Greeks■ way of acting■the subject of
the present book■must be investigated independently before we can establish
to what extent the observed exchange terminology is a reflection of
monetization.
I began work on this book in 1992; at that time, as far as I know, little work
had been done on the subject, and my ideas were entirely my own. Under
pressure from my university to prove that I was doing something, I have been
speaking about the invention of coinage at conferences since 1994. Since then,
I have occasionally heard and even read some of my own ideas presented by
people who apparently thought they were their own, and perhaps they were
(if, after all, my ideas are correct, there is no reason why somebody else should
not have realized them as well), although on occasion, it became clear that the
people involved had actually heard the ideas from me. Since my hopes for
eternal life do not base themselves on this book, I see no need for arguments
over precedence. Suffice it to say that I have tried to be exceedingly scrupulous
not to peddle anyone else■s work or ideas as my own.
For the footnotes, I have preferred a shortened citation form that utilizes
short titles where necessary (e.g., ■Finley, Ancient Economy■), although the
author-date form (e.g., ■Finley 1985■) is today more commonly used in the
humanities. Perhaps better scholars than I remember without a moment■s
reflection the publication date of every book they have ever seen and so
know at a glance what book is being referred to by a surname and a year. In
case, however, there are those who remember titles better than year of
publication, I have given a short title when referring to an author for whom
more than one work appears in the bibliography. I apologize, lest anyone
suspect me of the opposite, for the fact that, although I have tried to be
certain that I am not misrepresenting anyone■s opinions, I cannot claim to
have read every word of every item mentioned in the bibliography.7
Where historical reasons did not dictate otherwise, I have done my best
to maintain gender-neutral language. This has introducd a number of stylistic
infelicities, but I would rather be awkward than offensive. I think, however,
that this problem has not found its ideal solution, and I apologize to
the reader for those places where my effort to be courteous has merely made
me obscure.
I owe thanks to the Israel Science Foundation founded by the Israel
Academy of Sciences and Humanities, who four times gave me research
grants; to the American Council of Learned Societies, whose fellowship in
1984■85 got me into the research on prices past the point of no return; to the
Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University, where I was a Summer
Scholar in 1994 and whose directors, Kurt Raaflaub and Deborah Boedeker,
along with all of the staff, continued generously to put the scholarly resources
of the center at my disposal whenever I was able to use them; to Bar-
Ilan University, for internal grants that have continued to help nudge the
project along; to the Lechter Institute for Literary Research, by whose grant
the book includes illustrations; and to the staffs of the libraries of Bar-Ilan
University and Tel-Aviv University, who continue to provide the base for
many first-rate research projects. I will add the library of the Institute of
Classical Studies at the University of London and the Van Pelt Library at the
University of Pennsylvania, whose excellent resources, generously provided,
have afforded a more solid foundation for many originally unsupported
assertions. Henry Kim of the Ashmolean Museum offered helpful advice
about illustrations. At the China Numismatic Museum in Beijing, the hospitality
and scholarly generosity of Professors Dai Zhiqiang, Zhou Weirong,
and Wang Dan (director, head of the Department of Scientific Research,
and curator, respectively) gave me the confidence to write on a subject that
is only poorly documented in Western libraries. Although, in the end, I used
only one of her illustrations, Cecilia Meir of the Kadman Numismatics
Pavilion, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, was so generous with her help and
her time that I must express my thanks. Professor Miriam Balmuth has
offered interest and even a public forum in the spirit of true scholarship,
despite the fact that my own opinions differ sharply from those she has
expressed (and from which, as the reader can see, I have profited considerably).
Similar things may be said of Professor John Kroll. Among various
Assyriologists who expressed an interest in my ideas and offered me their
own, I am grateful to Professor Aaron Skaist for reading and commenting
on a draft of the relevant sections.
Particular thanks go to Dr. Gabriel Danzig, my partner on a two-year
project of research into monetization and philosophy. That subject is touched
upon only lightly in this book, but our discussions over the course of those
two years have contributed greatly to the clarification of my thinking on the
main topics involved.
I include thanks to my parents and my wife only because it would be
churlish not to do so, not because these words or this book can in any way
repay the enormous debt I shall always owe them.