The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece

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For my wife, whose price is far above rubies Copyright 䉷 by the University of Michigan 2004 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America 嘷 ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper 2007 2006 2005 2004 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaps, David M. The invention of coinage and the monetization of Ancient Greece / David M. Schaps. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11333-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Coins, Greek. 2. Coinage—Greece—History—To 1500. I. Title. CJ335.S3 2003 737.4938—dc22 2003055998 ISBN-13 978-0-472-02533-6 (electronic) Preface W H E N M Y P R E V I OU S B OOK 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years of assiduously recording boxes full of index cards, I realized that the work I was doing would become hopelessly out-of-date as advances in computing made the words of Clement of Alexandria and the inscriptions of Acraephia as easily available as the words of Thucydides and the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 1. Heichelheim, 2:171 n. 8. 2. It did not become part of the “Bibliothèque G. Glotz” at the Sorbonne, presumably because it was in Heichelheim’s hands when the library was set up. Heichelheim’s widow, whom I contacted, thought that it had been returned to the Glotz family. I later learned that Sterling Dow, at approximately the time when I was studying at Harvard, had been in possession of a photocopy of the manuscript, which he lent out to a graduate student and apparently never got back; but I was not that student. vi Preface 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...