The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece

10. War by Other Means

The Monetization of Politics 127 kind of alliance was at the basis of tyrannic power throughout archaic Greece,14 and it had been the basis for Peisistratus’s first exile and his first return.15 On his second return, however, Peisistratus seems to have secured a more reliable income, and to have spread it widely without the specificity of personal gifts and binding relationships. He had hit on something that worked, for a while, better than the elite alliances that had once served him and then disappointed him. T H E A L C M E O N I D S Money had become power, and the Peisistratids knew it. It would appear that their rivals either knew it as well or quickly learned it. The Alcmeonids tried traditional methods at first, raising an army of exiles and attempting to force their return; they were defeated. Like Peisistratus, they now turned to a more indirect method of restoring their influence. What they undertook was nothing less than the rebuilding of the Delphic sanctuary, the first building project known to us that was let out by contract. The sanctuary had burned down and had not been replaced for decades;16 its reconstruction was now entrusted to the Alcmeonids. The money involved (three hundred talents, according to Herodotus)17 was enormous. Whatever precise part the Alcmeonids played in the contract or contracts,18 they were considered to have gained both money and prestige from the project. This was undoubtedly a form of aristocratic competition,19 and the Alcmeonids will have enhanced their position simply by the honor that accrued to them for achieving the project and achieving it grandly, building a marble face on 14. Scheid-Tissinier. 15. Hdt. 1.60; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 14.4. Cf. FGrH 323 F 15 (⫽ Athenaeus XIII 609c–d). 16. Pausanias 10.5.13; Eusebius Chronicon p. 103b Helm: their dates are almost in agreement, ca. 548–547. 17. Hdt. 2.180.1; cf. 5.62.3. It is noteworthy that the contribution of Pharaoh Amasis was given in alum, not in coin. The twenty minas of the Naucratites on the other hand, were more likely given in silver, as Stein (ad loc.) noticed long ago: twenty minas of alum, as Pomtow (333 n. 1) also said (though without drawing the same conclusion), was strikingly little for a prosperous trading community. How and Wells’s judgment (ad loc.) that “more probably H. intends to contrast the liberality of the king with the meanness of the Greeks” is only comprehensible when we consider that twenty minas is less than ten kilos, “an astonishingly low contribution from what must have been a large and prosperous population” (Lloyd, 3:233). 18. The contract was presumably let out not to the entire Alcmeonid clan but to certain of its members. See Schaps, “Builders,” 81–82. 19. This is emphasized by Stahl (129–33). 128 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece the temple where the contract had specified only poros stone.20 To an extent, we are seeing here only the kind of aristocratic kydos that the Homeric heroes had pursued in more dangerous competitions. Herodotus’s description of their work as a contract, however, surely implies that the enterprise was undertaken with a view to profit as well. The precise way in which this money furthered the Alcmeonids’ political purposes is variously reported.21 Some fourth-century historians believed that they had used the money to raise their own mercenary force,22 but this, though a natural presumption in the fourth century,23 is not very likely. Had there been any such force, Herodotus, who was very partial to the Alcmeonids , would not have omitted their presence from the description of the tyrants’ overthrow.24 Nor is it likely, though Herodotus claims so in the name of “the Athenians,” that the Alcmeonids bribed the Pythia to urge the Spartans to intervene.25 Their very visible presence at Delphi over a period of years, employing dozens or perhaps hundreds of people and expending large amounts of money on the temple, would have been enough to make their opinions about the Athenian political situation seem very persuasive in Delphi.26 What interests us is not the particular way in which this contract was 20. Hdt. 5.62.3. Even if, as Philochorus says (FGrH 328 F 115) and as is perfectly likely, the work was not completed until after the overthrow of the Peisistratids, it would not have taken long...