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22 FINAL THOUGHTS HEGEMONY AND MONETARY POLICY 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 metal (at first electrum), arranged in a hierarchy of values, and stamped with some particularizing symbol, be it expressive of authority, ownership, or appropriation. Any private innovator soon yielded to the state as the social agent most concerned with the benefits that control of a coinage conferred. Chief among these advantages was the ability that coins afforded their issuers for managing disbursements of assets. Coins expedited, simplified, and regularized outlays of resources in a manner easily represented to the members of a community and readily evaluated in terms of equity. They permitted a more sophisticated recirculation of goods, mediated through the government, among the members of society in a manner that allowed more continuity of policy. Such recirculation enhanced social cohesion. The mental revolution worked by the commencement of coined money was hardly less momentous. Indeed, it would be tempting to call it a spiritual transformation, except that the pairing of money and soul appears paradoxical to our present sensibilities. Money provided a single, simple scale of valuation against which all other aspects of human existence could be held up for better or worse. The abiding worth of gold and silver (which preceded their monetary usage) lent a solidity and permanence to such appraisals. Money gave to each person a powerful tool for analyzing the institutions and interactions surrounding him, for monetary evaluation of material or social goods was intensely individual and at the same time easily communicated. To be sure, the despairing cry of XP~~ct"t' Civ1}p 'money is the man' reveals how the reorientation that was worked by thinking (and even feeling) in terms of money could be corrosive of traditional social relations,' but it also bespeaks the liberating and individualizing effects of the monetary sensibility for the purposive 1 See Ale. fro360 LIP; ef. Apostolius 12.31b, CPG2.550. FINAL THOUGHTS 549 optimization of personal happiness.f The emergence of entrepreneurial activity and the differentiation of economic behavior and socioeconomic roles that typify late archaic Greece rests on monetary foundations. The inauguration of minting in silver (ca. 560?) signified another watershed, scarcely less important than the initiation of coinage itself. The lesser value of this metal extended the number of transactions that could be mediated monetarily, especially as silver fractions became more prevalent toward the end of the sixth century. The purity of objects in silver, including coins, could be judged much more easily by physical means, visually or by touchstone, than electrum.l The importance of the authority of a governmental issuer in guaranteeing the value of his coin was thereby lessened, while the range of utilization by the individual user was extended. That opened for coinage less stereotypical interactions, a wider range of transactors, and a depersonalization of business. - So market forces, including competition, had a greater impact within the silver economy than in the barter, premonetary standard (for example, tripods, cattle, or raw metal)," and gold/ electrum economies that had gone before. Throughout the Greek mainland and the Cyclades, Aiginetan coins played a critical role in monetizing compartmentalized local economies. The activities of Aiginetan retailers within the "capillaries" here of interregional commercial networks introduced silver coins as a monetary medium. Local political elites looked on Aiginetan staters as a primary means for treasurizing wealth and for the accumulation of familial reserves that could be used in the face of political vicissitudes. Furthermore , the possession of savings or surpluses converted into Aiginetan coins allowed members of the elite to tap stocks of prestige trade goods likejewelry, fine pottery, metalwork, luxury goods of Near Eastern provenience , and slaves. The acquisition of such distinguishing articles established a presumptive claim to elite status. Secondarily, fiscaland symbolic motivations prompted the same local elites to initiate their own minting, often using the Aiginetic standard. 2 Note Figueira, "Khiimata:Acquisition and Possession in Archaic Greece," in K.D. Irani and M. Silver (eds.), Social Justicein theAncientWorld(Westport CN 1995) 41-60. See also T.R. Martin, "Why Did the Greek PolisOriginally Need Coins?" Historia 45 (1996) 257-83. 3 Note, for example, Theognis 117-18; 119-26; 415-18; also Adespota Elegiaca fro22 W; cf. Theognis 963-70. Gold coins could also be evaluated by touchstone: Theognis 447-52...

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