“The result is the paradox that even coinage of unadulterated silver.. may tend to become in effect fiduciary coinage: although the silver contributes to confidence, it is envisaged as a commodity” (p. 145).
Richard Seaford’s Money and the Greek Mind (2004) is a book with a simple thesis: the inclusive egalitarian spirit of “the Homeric society” (which he believes is found in the institution of communal feasting) is what ultimately explains the Greek origin of coinage. “Trust” in the polis as a communal institution is the explanation. Thus, “the first people in history to use extensively something approaching modern money were, I believe, almost certainly the Greeks” (p. 4). It is interesting that Seaford adds the note: “I leave aside the difficult problem of early Chinese ‘money.’ In the following page, he notes that while “the Greeks attributed the invention of coinage to the Lydians,” we should remember that the Greeks have the habit of “projecting the negative qualities of their own attitude to money onto barbarians” (p. 13, n. 25). Only the Greeks derived money from “the ancient and powerfully persistent notion of the universal right to a share of sacrificial meat, carried over into pieces of metal that, just like the meat, would have to be in small pieces of standard size and quality, acceptably equal for all” (p. 110). Like nearly all scholars of his milieu, he accepts M.I. Finley’s basic extollation of the Homeric works as a fundamental break between the Near Eastern “palace society” of Mycenaean Greek and the Homeric origin of Western society. This thesis is central Seaford’s work and is a confusing addition to a work on the the origin of “money” in Greece. Most scholars would disagree on the obvious grounds that money is developed in the Near East in the Bronze Age and coinage in Lydia (in Anatolia). To claim such “origins” for Greece is unfortunately part and parcel of the discipline of Classics and rarely does much for understanding of difficult historical problems.
To make such a thesis work, Seaford is forced to employ extremely vague and confused definitions of economic terms. Money is the first term Seaford must define and it shows how confused his work is from the start. Seaford asks, “What are people doing when they construct x as money” (p. 16).
One, one do construction means “to value x” “for its power to meet social obligation” – of which there are two kinds: (a) of receipt of something else (means of exchange) or (b) obligation of “tribute, compensation, etc.” (means of payment) (p. 16). To store x for either end is “sometimes called” the store of value. This is an idiosyncratic way to put forth the general theory of money. He adds the following conditions for x. Two, It “tends to be” quantified. Three, It “may provide” a measure of value. Four, It possesses the “characteristic” of general acceptability. Five, it might have exclusive acceptability. With four and five, x “becomes distinct from all other commodities.
In sum, “If x has all the characteristics listed so far, i.e. it is valued and stored for power to meet obligation (in exchange and payment), is quantified, provides a measure of value, and is generally and exclusively acceptable, we call it money” (p. 19). Why did Seaford present it this way? Almost all economic textbooks define money simply as (1) a means of exchange, (2) a medium of value (or unit of account), and a (3a) store and (*3b) standard of value. It is hard to say. He indicates that he has taken up from Jevons and Polanyi. Furthermore, his language clearly indicates his attempt at a broadly Wittgensteinian cultural history. For Seaford, to construct and to perform appear to be synonyms and thus we are trying to see the social construct that money performs in history. This is a reasonable (and popular) way to define key concepts of a theory.
The problem is that there are many historical facts that cause trouble for this idiosyncratic contribution to political economy. First, it fails to capture the basic difference between using a cow to purchase a slave and handing over 40kg of grain to stop a man on a horse from killing you. Yet, both are valued and stored to meet a social obligation in exchange and payment. These also need not but can be stored which is why it is traditionally considered as a separate function. Furthermore, we can count these, they can provide a measure of value (though Seaford never defines value beyond “social obligation”) and both have general acceptability. The one thing they might lack is exclusive acceptability. Therefore, are they money? It is hard to say. In Homer, value is exclusively expressed as cattle according to Seaford. So yes. The 40kg of wheat became what is known as the talent in the Near East. Was the talent money is Akkadia in 1900 BC? Seaford gives us no way to determine the question.
It is hard to understand what purpose Seaford’s personal list serves to do in the end. In besides make it easier to define Greek coinage as money. For this purpose he explicitly adds two unusual “characteristics” of money
- Fiduciarity: “the excess of the fixed conventional value of pieces of money over their intrinsic value” (p. 7).
- The State
Thus, the main thesis in full form is stated: “What is unprecedented about Greek coined money is that a substance with ornamental use-value and association with immortality, precious metal, was transformed by a sign into an object which, inasmuch as its conventional was generally greater than its intrinsic value, was unlikely to be melted down to make objects. Precious metal, which had exchange-value based on its ornamental use-value, was in effect deprived of this use-value by being stamped” (p. 6). Here, Seaford cites Marx’s Grundrisse.
Despite using Marx’s theory of use-value and exchange-value to define his thesis, we are told little more about what these essential terms might mean. After a one page summary of the “duality of money,” a duality that “underlies the historical opposition, which has taken political as well as theoretical forms, between those who insist that money is, or should be tied to, something with intrinsic value (precious metal) and those, who are happy with money as a mere token of value” (p. 9), Seaford declares there are two scholarly views of Greek coinage. First, Aristotle’s view of coinage as an instrument of trade and “the disembedded market.” Second, that coinage “emerged from the redistributive activity of the polis” and thus was “embedded” in the society. The reader must try to infer what these two schools of thought are that have dominated Seaford’s subject of study for more than 2,000 years. (My own guess is that he must be speaking of Polanyi and Finley’s reading of Aristotle and the major schism known in the field as the Bücher-Meyer debate). Without citation, Seaford concludes: “I have given no more than a crude summary of this controversy, for I do not intend to enter it” (p. 9). Seaford prefers his orientalism sails clear of the serious questions and study of economic history.
Some hundred pages later, he makes his main point clear:
“Even if the very first coins were made by the Lydians, it was the Greeks who first made pervasive everyday use of them, in small denominations (obol and drachma) as well as large ones. This use arose out of the synthesis of Near-Eastern with Greek practice.” (113)
The Near East gave money its substance (precious metal), the Greeks gave it its soul.
“What was new, among the Greeks, was… the social centrality of sacrificial communality. The collective confidence in the guarantee of future conventional values destined by the standard stamp on pieces of precious metal into the (regardless of small variations in quantity and size) arises – at least in part – from the entry of precious metals into the communal sacrificial distribution in which each individual citizen has the right to (ownership of) a standard portion of communally sacrificed meat, just as most citizens in a polis like Athens own a plot of land. Both ingredients are crucial: individual ownership bestows independence on the citizen, and communal ritual provides general familiarity with the objects distributed and confidence in their equal value. The naming of low-value coins of everyday use ‘obol’ and ‘drachma’ marks the continuity between two forms of confidence – sacrificial spit and stamp – in the standardization of value “ (113).
The next paragraph begins, “Such socially central sacrificial communality was unknown in the redistributive economies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, where accordingly money functions were performed by mere substances…” (p.113). The near east did not know the spirit of Homer and Greece. They did not know citizenship, the polis, and thus the true spirit of fiduciary money.
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