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Homer 69 dress for its purpose is explicitly determined not by any “market value” but by how precious it is to its owner. Hecuba did as she was told, but the goddess was not persuaded.25 Even here we can see the difference between a Homeric hero and a Phoenician merchant. For the Phoenicians, silver traded hands by weight; not only was one ring like another, but half a ring would do just as well if that was what was needed to make up the weight.26 Agamemnon offers not only tripods but “tripods never touched by the flame.” The sheen of new bronze interests him. One can scarcely imagine Agamemnon chopping up a tripod to make the weight come out evenly. S T A N D A R D O F V A L U E This does not mean that Homer was incapable, as the Mycenaean Greeks seem to have been, of measuring the relative worth of disparate commodities . Lycaon was able to say that he had been ransomed for three times as much as the price for which Achilles had sold him;27 Achilles told the doomed Hector that no one would save his body from defilement, “not if they were to weigh ten or twenty times as great a ransom and bring it here and promise more as well.”28 Homer had, as the Linear B legislator does not seem to have had, a regular standard for deciding how much of one commodity was worth a given amount of another. The standard was the ox. A slave-woman was offered as a consolation prize for the losing wrestler at the funeral games of Patroclus; “they estimated her at four oxen.”29 Eurycleia, on the other hand, had been bought by Laertes for “twenty oxen’s worth,”30 while Lycaon, a king’s son, was sold by Achilles for a hundred oxen’s worth and fetched three times as much in ransom.31 We find bronze armor valued at nine oxen, a tripod at twelve, and gold armor at a hundred.32 There is no reason to consider these valuations to 25. Il. 6.84–101, 286–311. 26. This is not to imply that the Phoenicians were utter Philistines. Hacksilber hoards may contain jewelry, but it is not chopped into pieces. Coins, however, were at first fair game: see p. 107. Nebuchadnezzar was not above chopping up the brass pillars and vessels of the Temple at Jerusalem (II Kings 25:13; Jer. 52:17), but the behavior of temple plunderers cannot be taken as a norm of daily life. 27. Il. 21.80. 28. Il. 22.349–50. 29. Il. 23.705. 30. Od. 1.431. 31. Il. 21.79–80. 32. Il. 6.236, 23.703. 70 Invention of Coinage and Monetization of Ancient Greece represent any sort of regular exchange value of which we can speak: the very fact of their belonging to heroes of epic poetry would warn us against that, without considering the questions of economic history involved. But they do indicate that for Homer an ox was a unit of value, as a dollar or a pound is for us. Of course, no physical ox needed to be present for the Achaeans to estimate how many oxen a woman was worth; even when a sum was paid, no oxen need have changed hands.33 Laertes had bought Eurycleia for twenty oxen’s worth, not for twenty oxen;34 Eurymachus, trying to buy the suitors’ lives from the returned Odysseus, offered to have each suitor pay for what he had eaten and add to that “a price of twenty oxen’s worth” [τιµ  ην . . . ε εικοσα  βοιον].35 One could even speak of the value of items that obviously could not be bought: as noted earlier,36 Homer says that each tassel of the aegis was worth a hundred oxen,37 although that was not meant, even in imagination, to be a “market value.” It goes without saying that less important items could not have been valued in oxen, but we do not know how they were estimated, if at all. A dog may have had a value, too, but its value was simply unheroic.38 If my earlier conclusion that the economies of the great Bronze Age palaces had neither fixed media of payment nor standard of value is correct, the Homeric age, whenever it may have been, seems to show clear progress toward a monetary society, though it was still nothing like Babylonia or Phoenicia...

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