TLS on Greeks and money

Money makes the (Greek) world go round

What the ancient Greek anxiety about money has to tell us about our own economic predicaments
by Richard Seaford
What makes the ancient Greeks worth studying is that they are sufficiently like us to be comprehensible but sufficiently unlike us to be worth making the effort to understand. It may be a common theme among enthusiastic modern supporters of the Classics that the Greeks and Romans were very much like us (and that they therefore legitimate the present). Most academics, on the other hand, prefer to emphasize how different and simultaneously how similar they were. The culture of – say – pharaonic Egypt is, despite its fascination, beyond the grasp of all but a few specialists, whereas ancient Greece and Rome are both inside and outside our ken.
Let me explore just one example. A crucial factor in this pattern of “similarity and difference”, and one with tremendous resonance in the early twenty-first century, is money. As I argued some years ago in Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004), the pivotal position of the Greeks in world culture stems largely from the fact that the sixth-century polis was the first society in history (with the conceivable exception of China) to be pervaded by money. Coinage was invented towards the end of the seventh century BC, and spread rapidly in the Greek city-states from the beginning of the sixth. Did not the Babylonians, for instance, use silver as money well before that? On any sensibly narrow definition of money, no they did not.

This new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century, “philosophy” and tragedy. “Philosophy” (or rather idea of the cosmos as an impersonal system) was first produced in the very first monetized society, early sixth-century Ionia, and – even more specifically – in its commercial centre Miletos. The tendency of pre-modern society to project social power onto cosmology (for example, “king Zeus rules the world”) applies to the new social power of money. And the following description applies equally to money and to much of the cosmology of the early philosophers: universal power resides not in a person but in an impersonal, all-underlying, semi-abstract substance.

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But the relationship of money and tragedy is no less striking. Tragedy was created shortly after the introduction into Athens of coinage. This – though it has no place in the voluminous literature on the subject – seems to me one of the most important facts about tragedy. Greek myth is, of course, largely pre-monetary, but in tragedy it is shaped by the new all-pervasive power of money. It is not only the obsession with money of some tragic tyrants (Oedipus, for example) that I have in mind. An entirely new feature of money is that its possession renders unnecessary in principle all pre-monetary forms of social relationship: reciprocity, redistribution, kinship, ritual, and so on. Money allows you to fulfil all your needs. It provides the power to increase itself. And it tends to promote predatory isolation. Hence the focus of much Athenian tragedy on the extreme isolation of the individual – from the gods and even (through killing) from his closest kin. I know of no precedent for this in literature, certainly not in the pre-monetary society depicted in Homer. This horrifying possibility is embodied in the figure of the tyrant (turannos), who in historiographic, philosophical and tragic texts characteristically kills his own kin, violates the sacred, and is much concerned with money as a means of power. The word “hero”, the preoccupation of so much critical literature on the subject, barely occurs in Athenian tragedy, but turannos (or some form of that word) occurs over 170 times.

Money is so desirable and powerful that some people will do anything for it. Moreover, there is no limit to its accumulation or to the desire to accumulate it. All this is familiar to us, but it was new to the Greeks, who can therefore help us to look afresh at the singularity of money. The unlimitedness of money is described disapprovingly by the sixth-century BC sage Solon and later by Aristotle, and it is brought to life in Aristophanes’ Wealth. This wonderful comedy is (almost certainly) the earliest surviving text on economics, a subject that thereafter has become less entertaining. It describes the homogenizing effect of money (everything happens for its sake) and its omnipotence; and a rapid dialogue reveals that – whereas one can have enough sex, or loaves, or music, or dessert, or honour, cakes, or manliness and so on – money is different: if someone obtains thirteen talents (a lot of money), he is eager for sixteen, and if he obtains sixteen he swears that life is unbearable unless he obtains forty. What, we may add, would have been the point in Homeric society of accumulating a million of those prestige items that embody wealth, such as tripods? Money is different. It isolates the individual, and is unlimited.

But it is not only in tragedy that myth was influenced by money. The most obvious instance of a myth about the (disastrous) unlimited homogenizing power of money is Midas transforming everything by his touch into gold. Consider also the myth of Erysichthon, a full version of which can be put together from a few sources (notably Callimachus and Ovid). Erysichthon cuts down a sacred grove to make himself a banqueting hall and is punished by being made insatiable. No food is enough – whether from land, sea, or air – to satisfy him. He is driven to sell his daughter in marriage, from which she returns to him, and the process is constantly repeated. In the end he eats himself. This myth contains a unique combination of unusual features: the transformation of nature into product, selling to obtain food, and eating the self. The constant return of the daughter from marriage excludes progeny (the future). The Greeks had a myth for many of our central concerns, and here is one for global warming: exploitation of nature produces pathological insatiability, the unlimited need for a source of income that sacrifices the future, and self-destruction.

The Greeks had money but not capitalism, in which constant innovation is a precondition for survival, and in which accordingly – as Marx and Engels famously put it – “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”, producing an age of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation”. Here constant intense desire for novelty means that new fashions and ideas “become antiquated before they can ossify into custom”. Even this we now simply take as part of nature. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, by contrast, investment, and techniques of production and marketing remained crude and relatively static, and a poetic genre, for instance epic, could remain fundamentally the same for a thousand years.

And yet, after two-and-a-half millennia, money remains isolating, unlimited and homogenizing. The Greeks were struck and sometimes horrified by this. Aristotle maintained that using money to make money is – in contrast to other forms of economic activity – unlimited and unnatural. And so he would be equipped to understand the novelty contained in the following typical observation, from a recent textbook of economics. “International financial flows hold out the promise of liberating a country’s rate of investment from the limitation imposed by its savings.”

This liberation is just one element in a universal deregulation or “unlimitedness” that has in the last generation changed the world. This has involved the destruction of limits of all kinds: limits on the movement of capital (once controlled by nation-states); limits articulating cultural space, with the result that a Holiday Inn in Minneapolis is now exactly the same as a Holiday Inn in Mombasa (money homogenizes); limits on the salaries-cum-bonuses that the money-controllers pay themselves; limits on the gap between rich and poor (an unlimitedness that makes common purpose impossible). It has also destroyed the limitation of speculative price by any internal relation to its financial or artistic product (investing in junk bonds is essentially the same as investing in junk art, and done by some of the same people).

Aristotle might also recognize the concomitant deregulation of the subject, the liberation of signs from the limits imposed by reality. The myth of Midas marked the replacement of money as a means of exchange by money as the primary but strangely unreal object of aspiration. Aristotle cites the myth to illustrate the nonsensicality of money, the arbitrariness of the monetary sign; and so he would be equipped to understand the claim that money has now been joined (or even replaced) in the unlimited realm of hyper-reality by the images purveyed by media and advertising.

Greeks of the classical period were anxious about the potentially unlimited scope and power of money, and this anxiety contributed to their explicit privileging of limit over the unlimited, especially but not only in metaphysics and ethics. For instance Plato in the Philebus states that limit should control the unlimited, and that the introduction of limit brings safety in countless spheres, notably in health and music. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “bad is of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans surmised, and good is of the limited”. This persists into the Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies that remained popular throughout antiquity.

But these Greek ideas are not confined to philosophical texts. If I was forced to characterize the outcome of Aeschylus' Oresteia in a single abstract formula, I would call it the victory of limit over the unlimited, in various respects that include the limitation of the potentially unlimited cycle of revenge and of the potentially unlimited accumulation of wealth. Among the ancient Greeks there is what I call a culture of limit. By contrast, our culture is characterized by hostility to closure (limit) in various spheres: economic, metaphysical, conceptual, narrative and others.

This opposition is related to an opposition in basic forms of life. For the Greeks, the realm of freedom (economic and ethical) was stable self-sufficiency; and this determined the manner in which they (or at least those whose voices have survived) reacted to the unlimitedness of money. But we react to it in a manner determined by the fact that for us the realm of freedom is constant exchange. “Metaphysical categories”, wrote Adorno, “are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences”. The same is true of the modern theoretical hostility to metaphysics, the postmodern fetishization of fragmentation, depthlessness, and indeterminacy, and its sublimation of the universe of free-floating images.

The postmodern devotion to abolishing “Western” (that is Greek) metaphysics would be illuminated by considering the economic conditions of its genesis. Just as our politico-economic discourse assumes the maximization of earning and expenditure (even of borrowing) by groups and individuals alike, so our theoretical discourse is hostile to all forms of closure. But to turn again to global warming, which our own culture of the unlimited makes it so difficult for us to confront. The myth of Erysichthon lacked a central element of our own contemporary predicament, that is our knowledge that our actions will cause our self-destruction. For this we look to tragedy, Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes. During the siege of Thebes, the chorus implore King Eteokles not to go out to fight his own brother. But he is compelled to do so by his father Oedipus' curse, which doomed the brothers to divide up their inheritance with the sword. He rejects the possibility that he can be saved by ritual or helped by the gods, and rushes out for the mutual fratricide. As he does so, he claims that the curse is telling him to put kerdos (selfish gain) first, death afterwards (kerdos proteron husterou morou).

This implies that kerdos, in this case the inheritance, is worth dying for. Kerdos has replaced honour as the one thing more powerful even than the desire for life. Here is the typical tragic individual, completely alienated from the gods and from his closest kin. A mysterious and terrifying power of pre-monetary myth, the curse, has been adapted to express a new mysterious and terrifying power, the unlimited isolating passion for individual gain, more powerful even than the instinct for self-preservation. With global warming the unlimitedness and conscious self-destructiveness of money reaches a logical conclusion. We are still, now as a species, under the curse of Oedipus.

What did the Greeks have with which to combat this horror? The original ending of the play is, it seems, lost, but its last extant authentic words indicate – in contrast to Eteokles' rejection of ritual – the founding of a ritual for the whole polis. The polis had communal ritual to save it from unlimited individual greed, but we do not. Such (fragmented) rituals as we do have tend, like ancient Greek ritual, to sustain existing myths and patterns of belief. But they may also, in contrast to their ancient function, serve the agenda of the unlimited. Our contexts of powerful decision-making tend to be ritualized – by reassuring familiarity of dress, seating arrangements, syntax, tone of voice, body language and so on. And ritualization tends to foster the unconscious formation of “group-think”. How can politicians continue to assume the desirability of unlimited economic growth that is patently inconsistent with preventing global warming? One small but unremarked factor is the power of ritualization, now and in the past, to efface inconsistency of belief. A meeting on economic policy or to plan the expansion of aviation is ritualized, and ritualization generates and confirms its appropriate beliefs and decisions. On the Titanic as we are, we should be ridiculing not the rearrangement of the deckchairs but the formal dress and reassuring protocols of the captain’s table.

In the final year of the First World War, the Presidential address to the Classical Association was given by Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. He was, unsurprisingly, gloomy. The “horizon looks dark” for classical studies, he said. And he ended with an attack on “the enemy”, he “who has forgotten that there is such a thing as truth, and measures the world by advertisement or by money . . . whose innermost religion is the worship of the Lie in his Soul . . . . From him and his influence we find our escape by means of the Grammata into that calm world [of the Greeks], where stridency and clamour are forgotten in the ancient stillness”.

Some thirty-five years later, after the Second World War, Murray gave a radio broadcast in which that view of Ancient Greece as a refuge from the present had been transformed into Ancient Greece as inspiration for the future. “The old Hellenistic world had three great aspirations”, he observed. “It aimed at a hellenizing or humanizing of the brutal world; it longed and strove for Homonoia, Concord, between community and community, between man and man; lastly, it proclaimed a conception of the world as One Great City . . . .” And he urged support for what he called “the same aspirations . . . at work in the modern world”, especially through the work of the United Nations. American readers may be pleasantly surprised to learn that, despite his pessimism about Europe, “there is waiting across the Atlantic a greater Rome which may at the best establish a true world peace, and will at worst maintain in an ocean of Barbarism a large and enduring island of true Hellenic life”.

This was broadcast in 1953, the year in which British and American secret services – well below Murray’s radar – replaced the democratically elected government of Iran by a dictatorship that, though savage, was favourable to the British and American oil interest, thereby initiating a new world order. This was called “Operation Ajax”, a name not alas symptomatic of true Hellenic life but inspired by the household cleansing liquid.

The politics of Gilbert Murray now seem as loftily unrealistic as does his political and cultural ambition for Hellenism, and not only because of his tendency to overlook the shortcomings of ancient Greek society. But he was the last prominent proponent of the idea that Hellenism has implications for every sphere of life, including politics. And this I cannot help admiring. Did not Pericles say, in the supreme expression of the culture of ancient democracy, the funeral speech reported by Thucydides, that the Athenians “regard the person who does not participate in politics as useless”? Can the understanding of the ancient past still contribute, as it did for Murray, to an active engagement with the present?

We cannot use the systematic Greek respect for limit to subvert the systematic unlimitedness of our own self-destructive culture. But the Greek culture of the limit provides a place that allows us to see the oddness, the historical contingency of the lethally limiting unlimitedness in our economy, social practices and theory. Hellenism is one of a number of precious resources – a way of being, understanding and perceiving – that can help to liberate us from the homogenized sensibility of our hyper-monetized, atomized and self-destructive culture of the unlimited.



This is a version of the Presidential Address to the Classical Association, delivered in Glasgow earlier this year.



Richard Seaford is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and tragedy in the developing city-state, 1994, and of a commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae, 1996.