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War by Other Means 139 prevented that, not saying what he would use the money for, but proposing to lend a talent to each of the hundred richest Athenians. Then, if they were satisfied with the way the money had been spent, it would be charged to the state; if not, they could get the money back from those who had borrowed it. Getting the money on those terms, he had a hundred triremes built, with each one of the hundred citizens building one. These were the ships with which they fought at Salamis against the barbarians.3 The fairy-tale theme of asking for money and not revealing its purpose is hardly likely; more probable is Herodotus’s version that Themistocles urged building the ships for use in the war against Aegina (in which, he adds, they were never employed).4 It was, however, these ships that gave Athens the basis on which to defy Xerxes.5 The use of the silver to finance the ships did not, perhaps, have anything directly to do with the fact that the silver could be (and presumably was) minted into coins. A Levantine monarch could also have had ships built for silver, had he had the forethought and the ambition of Themistocles; Darius would have chopped the requisite amount of silver out of the jars in his treasury.6 This use of money was, however, new to Greece and could not have taken place until the introduction of coinage had made buying and selling the normal way that goods changed hands. A hundred and fifty years earlier, the state could perhaps have enriched itself by taking the silver for its own purposes, but it is not likely that it could have gotten a hundred ships of war built in a short time simply by distributing silver. T H E D E L I A N L E A G U E The interchangeability of money and military strength was grasped immediately by the Athenians. Directly after the war, when the allies sought a new and 3. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 22.7. 4. Hdt. 7.144.1–2. According to Herodotus, two hundred ships were built. Polyaenus (1.30.6), whose story is closely parallel to that of the Ath. Pol. in its phrasing, agrees with Herodotus about the reason advanced. 5. For the way Athens outfitted ships before Themistocles, see Jordan, 5–16, and Thomsen. Jordan notes the expression of Pollux 8.108 (δ  υο  ιππ  εας παρει  χε και ναυ  ν µ ιαν), but when he says (10) that “the word for ‘supplied,’ pareiche, would seem to mean ‘provided the money for’ the ships,” he is projecting the use of money for war back before the time when it is attested. Thomsen (147) admits that “we do not know anything for certain about the construction of warships at Athens in the period of the naukraric system,” but he also prefers the theory that the naucrary “financed the construction” of the ship. 6. See p. 51. 140 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece permanent basis for the alliance, Aristeides the Athenian set up the Delian League on principles that no Spartan would have been likely to lay down. When the Athenians had taken over the leadership in this way, . . . they determined which of the cities had to provide money against the barbarian and which ships, for their pretext was to retaliate for what they had suffered by laying waste the king’s land. Then, for the first time, there was established among the Athenians a magistrature called the hellenotamiai [treasurers of Greece], who received the phoros—for that was what the payment of money was called. The first phoros that was assessed was four hundred and sixty talents. Delos was their treasury, and their meetings were held there.7 That the war against Persia should be continued was not surprising, and that the states that fought the war should seek a more permanent structure for their alliance was only reasonable. What was utterly new was that the structure set up should be a treasury and that the contribution of most members of the alliance should be money.8 There could be no clearer recognition of the principle that wars are waged with money.9 The determination “which of the cities had to provide money . . . and which ships” takes as its basis the equivalence of money and ships, the equation of money with its value.10 This is precisely the conceptual revolution of which I spoke in chapter 1. This was not...

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