The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece

Appendixes

202 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece but since his monthly statements had those big numbers on them, they, he, and we consider him to have been much richer than they. This person, indeed, got prestige from his wealth, but that is not what we mean by calling him “rich,” for if another man had a similar reputation but was found at his death to have had only a small bank account, we would say, “Why, he wasn’t rich at all!” One may perhaps defend our perception by saying that the two people described were wealthy in that their money opened up to them possibilities for its use, even though those possibilities were never exploited: they both were rich in that they could have achieved power and pleasure that were beyond the reach of people with less money. There is some truth in this, but it does not tell the whole story. For one thing, we consider them to have been not potentially rich but really rich. We do not think of them, for example, in the same way that we think of promising students who never achieved anything. In the case of the rich people, we say, “They were rich”; in the case of the students, we say, “They could have been great.” The students, too, could have achieved power and pleasure that less intelligent people could not have, but we do not consider them to have been wealthy because of that. Moreover, if two people have the same amount of money, we consider them equally wealthy, regardless of the personal qualities, family ties, or available opportunities that may make the possibilities of one hugely greater than those of the other. The one person in ancient literature who lives the life of a pauper while actually possessing money is Euclio in Plautus’s Aulularia,14 who is so obsessed with the possible theft of the pot of gold he has found that he moves it from hiding place to hiding place and is careful not to miss any possible handouts lest people guess that he has come into money.15 He ostentatiously calls himself a poor man,16 but that is part of the act. When a neighbor’s slave gets his hand on the money, the slave immediately thinks himself “richer than the griffins who live in the golden mountains,”17 though he is still a slave. When Euclio discovers that the pot of gold is gone, he mourns that “this day has brought me hunger and poverty,”18 although he has lived 14. The Aulularia, like all the comedies of Plautus and Terence that we possess, is a Latin reworking of a Greek original. 15. Plaut. Aul. 105–12. 16. Plaut. Aul. 184, 196, and elsewhere. His neighbors, of course, who know no better, also call him poor. 17. Plaut. Aul. 701–2. 18. Plaut. Aul. 722. Limits and Illusions 203 in hunger and poverty for all of his life. He does not actually say that he had been rich as long as the gold had been buried in the ground, but he certainly implies as much. Other Greek characters who live a poor life despite the possession of money are less appropriate parallels. The grouch after whom Menander’s Dyscolus is named lives simply, but he simply has no use for his money, since he hates human company.19 No more appropriate is the “self-punisher,” Terence’s Heautontimorumenos, who sold everything he had to buy himself a plot of land on which he performed grueling labor: he, too, used his money as he wished. The wealth of these people is not denied, but it is not an issue. No examples exist of people who got rich by mendicancy. The population and the volume of coinage were not so great, nor the habit of charity so well developed,20 that a pauper could amass any great store of coins by begging. The second kind of unenjoyed wealth also existed. A person of wide possessions who lived a simple life would have been considered by the ancients as an example not of an unimaginative nature but of piety, though he would be expected (unlike the Dyscolus) to expend money on helping his friends and on honoring the gods and the city,21 but Xenophon recognized that it was also possible for money to give a man no benefit at all. At the beginning of his Oeconomicus, he has Socrates convince Critobulus that nothing is...