Blood and Money. David McNally
indicates that cauldrons were being used as a regular means of payment in Crete by the eighth century BCE.48 A growing body of literary and archaeological evidence further suggests that iron roasting spits—known as obolos—functioned as a sort of proto-money in several parts of Greece by the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.
Iron spits are significant for several reasons. First, they are metallic objects, as are coins. Secondly, they are items associated with sacrifice and food sharing. Finally, unlike cattle, they were highly portable and could be easily combined into packages of multiple units. The literary and archaeological record exhibits two celebrated examples of roasting spits being used as what appears to be special-purpose money. One comes from the temple of Hera at Argos and concerns a decree from the first half of the sixth century BCE by King Pheidon, who is said to have ordered the replacement of spits by coins. A famous account contends that “Pheidon of Argos struck money in Aegina; and having given them (his subjects) coin and abolished the spits, he dedicated them to Hera in Argos.”49 This textual source received significant confirmation when archaeological excavations at the temple of Hera unearthed a bundle of about ninety-six iron spits.50 While we cannot discern the motivation for this dedication of spits, we know that similar offerings were made elsewhere. Herodotus, for instance, tells of a large donation made by Rhodopis, a courtesan and formerly enslaved person, in Naucratis. After having become quite rich, Rhodopis is said to have contributed one-tenth of her wealth to the temple by purchasing “as many iron roasting spits” as this part of her fortune could procure.”51 Herodotus implies that he had seen these spits and, apparently unaware of their monetary function, assumed they had first been purchased with money, although considerable scholarly opinion suggests they were in fact money—or, more precisely, a special-purpose money. Furthermore, we find bundles of iron spits in aristocratic tombs, presumably as offerings to the gods.52 Classicist David Tandy has plausibly suggested that spits served “as a sort of value unit” (or measure of value) for trades among commercially minded nobles.53
Etymology strongly reinforces this interpretation. The basic silver monetary unit to emerge in the Aegean world was called the obelos, a name that reverberates with the word for iron spit, obolos. More than this, a coin worth six obeloi was called a drachma, whose older meaning was “graspful,” or “handful.” We have seen that iron spits were often bundled together in handfuls (drachmae) when they were used as donations to temples. So, this monetary term, too, may well have referred to roasting spits.54 From the sixth century BCE, we find a variety of precious metal objects being offered in temple donations.55 These hearken back to aristocratic prizes, particularly metal goblets, oriental tripods, cauldrons, swords, and other weapons—the treasured goods of aristocratic gift exchange. The gifting of such precious metal objects was glorified in the epics and in aristocratic poetry. Yet, these aristocratic circuits of wealth were self-enclosed, encompassing only wealthy aristoi. In fact, aristocratic art and poetry extolled the sphere of truly precious gifts precisely because it was uncontaminated by the presence of commoners. By the eighth century BCE, however, the values of elite culture were under attack by the plebeian or “middling” sort.56 This makes the appearance of iron spits as a proto-currency quite intriguing. For spits were integral elements of communal festivals in which every citizen partook. Both materially and symbolically, they were thus inclusive rather than exclusive. That they should have been socially validated as a representation of value suggests the evolution of more inclusionary practices within Greek society. Moreover, as we have seen, the democratizing thrust of the period discouraged the rich from lavish exhibitions of wealth, particularly on funerals and burials. As the polis ascended, so luxurious displays of jewelry, fine clothes, and decorative hairstyles declined.57 It would not be surprising, then, if culturally accepted representations of value came to pivot on metallic objects like spits, which were emblematic of the social solidarity manifest in communal feasts.
The emergence of coinage would thus suggest efforts to re-embed wealth and exchange in the wake of a breakdown in older practices of reciprocity. With the erosion of clientelist relations of aristocratic life, the temple-agora-polis nexus arose in part to subordinate wealth to the community as a whole. Coinage emerged, therefore, as part of a project to assert the supremacy of polis-produced tokens of value over transactional spheres dominated by aristocratic luxury goods. Further, as urban temples became the organizers of communal festivities, durable donations not requiring ongoing labor and maintenance (as did animals) might be preferred, if they could later be used to purchase livestock. Additionally, metal objects, like cauldrons and iron spits, might be loaned out when not needed right away. Such items could then circulate as means of payment and exchange because temple or civic authorities would eventually need to buy them back to purchase livestock. As a result, temple goods might have readily acquired a social acceptance as representations of wealth in general. Goods collected by temples could thus circulate as general forms of wealth precisely because sacred institutions were sure to accept them as means of payment. Ultimately, it would not have been a big step for the polis to mint and stamp precious objects—coins—that assumed social validity as means of exchange and payment and as stores of value. But here we need a slight detour, since coins appear to have first emerged in states known as tyrannies. Only by discerning the underlying reasons for this can we appreciate their enduring association with the democratic polis.
Coins, Religion, Law, and the Polis
Herodotus tells us, “The Lydians were the first people that we know of to use a gold and silver coinage and to introduce retail trade.”58 While many of the conclusions Herodotus draws from this origin are dubious, attribution of the invention of coinage to Lydia is not. It is widely accepted among scholars that the first coins, made of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, were produced by the Lydian monarchy in Asia Minor around 600 BCE. Half a century later, the last of the Lydian kings, Croesus, had the first coins minted from gold and silver. By then or shortly thereafter, a number of Greek city-states, Athens, Corinth, and Aegina among them, began producing silver coins.59
What is controversial in Herodotus’s account of coinage are his claims that the Lydians invented trade; that poor girls in Lydia “prostitute themselves without exception to collect money for their dowries”; that these prostituted women then—scandalously, in his eyes—“choose their own husbands”; and that Lydians invented idle pastimes like “dice, knucklebones, and ball-games.”60 As historian Leslie Kurke has shown, we have here a network of associations (money → trade → prostitution → female assertiveness → unmanly games) that reflects an aristocratic critique of coinage and its effects.61 Coinage is hereby counterposed to the heroic virtues of the noble-warrior, however much the reality was one of an aristocracy that increasingly engaged in slaving, trading, and dispossessing peasant farmers. Yet these elite activities had revolved around use of precious metals, largely a monopoly of aristocrats. Coinage overcame this noble exclusiveness by putting stamped precious metals into general circulation.62 Circumventing aristocratic circuits of gift exchange and display, coins gave gold and silver a new promiscuity, allowing them to crisscross through the hands of the multitude. Coinage thus contributed to a wider dislodging of traditional aristocratic grids of power, and this is where its association with tyrants originates.
Tyranny as a political form emerged across the Greek world in the century after 650 BCE. Corinth experienced perhaps the most long-lasting succession of tyrannies (roughly 655 to 585 BCE), but Athens, too, knew tyrannical rule for much of the half century from 560 to 510. Often, tyrants were dissident nobles seeking to break the domination of an elite network of aristocrats. In reconstituting political rule, tyrants not only concentrated powers in their own hands; typically, they also appealed to the people for support, enhancing the rights of commoners in efforts to curb aristocratic influence. Aristotle’s summary is instructive: “Tyrants are drawn from the [people] and the masses, to serve as their protectors against the notables, and in order to prevent them suffering any injustice from that class” (Politics, 5.1310b).63 The emergence of such tyrannies seems to have been a product of major social transformations.
First, the growth of poverty, indebtedness, and dispossession was rendering aristocratic rule increasingly intolerable for many of the lower sort. It is instructive