The Power of Money
Coinage and Politics in the Athenian Empire
Publication Year: 1998
Was Athens an imperialistic state, deserving all the reputation for exploitation that adjective can imply, or was the Athenian alliance, even at its most unequal, still characterized by a convergence of interests?
The Power of Money explores monetary and metrological policy at Athens as a way of discerning the character of Athenian hegemony in midfifth-century Greece. It begins with the Athenian Coinage Decree, which, after decades of scholarly attention, still presents unresolved questions for Greek historians about content, intent, date, and effect. Was the Decree an act of commercial imperialism or simply the codification of what was already current practice?
Figueira interprets the Decree as one in a series concerned with financial matters affecting the Athenian city-state and emerging from the way the collection of tribute functioned in the alliance that we call the Athenian empire. He contends that the Decree served primarily to legislate the status quo ante.
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
COVER
TITLE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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pp. xvii-xix
I SHOULD LIKE to render thanks to the many friends and colleagues who gave so generously of their time and expertise to aid the researching and writing of this volume. I have tried to do justice to their suggestions and to correct or adjust where they have ...
INTRODUCTION: GENESIS AND ORGANIZATION
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pp. 1-19
THE MERE PHRASING of the title of my book could be thought to propound a fanciful interpretation of the interrelation between economic and political history during the fifth-century hegemony of the Athenians; at...
PART I: NUMISMATIC EVIDENCE FOR MONETARY POLICY
CHAPTER 1: NUMISMATIC BASICS AND HOARD EVIDENCE
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pp. 21-48
THE EVIDENCE of coins can be used in several modes of analysis.One emphasizes the issues of a particular mint, whose coins reveal data about the circumstances of their issuance. The weight of coins can tell us about the ...
CHAPTER 2: CURTAILMENT OF ALLIED MINTING
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pp. 49-91
An analysis of the chronology of the coin emissions of Athenian allies has had a long history in scholarship on the Coinage Decree. Current analysts owe debts to several generations of investigators: to the work of ...
CHAPTER 3: ELECTRUM MINTS
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pp. 92-109
THE NEXT TOPIC in our investigation of minting activity and Attic monetary policy concerns the mints that produced electrum coins (see Table 3.1). Taking up these mints at this point is particularly appropriate because the .....
CHAPTER 4: MINTS IN CONTINUOUS OPERATION
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pp. 110-149
To CONTINUE OUR SURVEY of allied mints, we turn in this chapter and the next to a consideration of those mints that seem to have manifested some degree of continuing, regular operation during the Attic hegemony and to have produced a range of ...
CHAPTER 5: THE MINTS OF THE AUTONOMOUS ALLIES
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pp. 150-174
It has been recognized since the earliest work on the Coinage Decree that the coinages of the autonomous states, Samos, Chios, and the Lesbian cities represent special problems in analysis...
CHAPTER 6: WAS MINTING SILVER EVER PROHIBITED?
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pp. 175-179
ALTHOUGH THE FINAL SECTION of this work will discuss the evolution of consolidation of monetary and metrological standards among the city-states of the Delian League...
CHAPTER 7: THE ATTIC MINT AND MONETARY OUTPUT
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pp. 180-199
UNFORTUNATELY, we cannot approach the investigation of the monetary aspects of fifth-century Athenian political hegemony through an exhaustive review of the history of the Attic mint. The great number of surviving examples...
PART II: LITERARY EVIDENCE FOR MONETARY POLICY
CHAPTER 8: THE LITERARY EVIDENCE
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pp. 201-217
THE ONLY LITERARY ALLUSION to Athenian monetary legislation is provided by Aristophanes' Birds. Note that the expression"monetary legislation" is used here and not "Coinage Decree" because it is not certain at this point whether Aristophanes is referring ...
PART III: MONETARY POLICY IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CHAPTER 9: CONTEXTS FOR MONETARY POLICY
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pp. 219-258
I DO NOT PROPOSE in this chapter to essay the considerable task of writing a summary history of imperial Athens, although it would take little less than that effort to exhaust all the political and economic...
CHAPTER 10: TRIBUTE AND MONETARY POLICY
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pp. 259-295
IN THE PRECEDING DISCUSSION, two areas of particular difficulty emerged in our investigation of earlier interpretations of the Coinage Decree. One problematical area involved envisaging the decree as economic imperialism or ...
CHAPTER 11: METROLOGICAL CONSOLIDATION
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pp. 296-317
WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN how other interpretations of the Coinage Decree, both the economic exploitation hypothesis and the symbolism/autonomy theory, founder on our inability to incorporate the enactment of a consolidation of weights and measures...
PART IV: EPIGRAPHICAL EVIDENCE FOR MONETARY POLICY
CHAPTER 12: THE COINAGE DEGREE: PART I
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pp. 319-352
THE DISCUSSION in the preceding chapters, working from the numismatic data and from the literary evidence for Athenian monetary legislation, has subjected the earlier interpretations of the Coinage Decree to thorough criticism for their implications ...
CHAPTER 13: THE COINAGE DEGREE: PART II
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pp. 353-379
The part of the decree starting with section v shifts to a new subject, the coining of money by the Athenian mint and its conversion. Yet there is a bit of a surprise lurking for us here, inasmuch as our expectation that monies received...
CHAPTER 14: THE COINAGE DEGREE: PART III
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pp. 380-410
By its subject matter, the next part of the decree signals that the psephism is moving toward culmination (as originally suggested by Hiller von Gaertringen and Klaffenbach). The contributions of the Aphytis and Syme fragments...
CHAPTER 15: THE COINAGE DEGREE: PART IV AND CONCLUSION
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pp. 411-423
As we saw in Chapter 14, the last part of the decree is attested only from the lost Smyrna fragment. Thus the possibility cannot be excluded that this inscription represents a closely related, but not identical, psephism to the one represented...
CHAPTER 16: IG I3 90 AND MONETARY LEGISLATION
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pp. 424-430
A FRAGMENTARY stoichedon inscription in Pentelic marble(IG 13 90 = SEG 10.87) that deals (in part) with coinage and stathma 'weights' has survived. The connections of this enactment with the Coinage Decree have been subjected to so much speculation that it will be necessary...
CHAPTER 17: THE DATING AND THE INSCRIPTION OF THE COINAGE DEGREE
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pp. 431-467
I T SHOULD NOT SURPRISE even a reader who is largely unaware of the bibliography on the Coinage Decree that the investigation of its chronology has been pervaded by assumptions about both its supposed imperialistic character and specifically its presumptive ...
PART V: SYNTHESIS
CHAPTER 18: MONETARY INTEGRATION
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pp. 469-495
THIS and the following chapters attempt to assess the monetary system of the arkhi during the second half of the fifth century.Naturally, much will flow through extrapolation out of the conclusions that .have already emerged in the course of our ...
CHAPTER 19: HEGEMONY AND MONETARY DISINTEGRATION: THE HOME FRONT
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pp. 496-527
THE MONETARY CONSOLIDATION achieved by the Athenians and their allies during the Pentekontaeteia was put under great stress by the Peloponnesian War. The high level of production of the silver mines at ...
CHAPTER 20: IMITATIONS OF ATTIC COINS
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pp. 528-535
THE EVOLUTION of the imitation of Athenian coinage allows us a means of ingress into the subject of how the unraveling of Athenian hegemony affected the use of money in the Aegean basin and more widely in the eastern Mediterranean...
CHAPTER 21: THE COINAGE LAW OF 375/4
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pp. 536-547
THE COLLAPSE of the fifth-century Attic hegemony and the monetary arrangements that were correlated with it find important retrospective illumination in Nikophon's law on coinage of 375/4, found on stone in the ....
CHAPTER 22: FINAL THOUGHTS: HEGEMONY AND MONETARY POLICY
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pp. 548-562
IT IS UNCERTAIN whether it was someone endowed with political authority acting on behalf of his community or an individual acting on his own behalf who conceived the idea of coinage, which, for our purposes, may be defined as standardized weights of precious ...
APPENDIX: ATHENIAN ALLIES: COINAGE AND TRIBUTE
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pp. 563-598
The name of the allied state is followed by assessment period/estimated assessment for each assessment period. Variant payments are listed in parentheses after or below entry. Doubtful amounts are followed by...
E-ISBN-13: 9780812201901
Print-ISBN-13: 9780812234411
Page Count: 648
Publication Year: 1998
