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CHAPTER 1

“Droves I Took Alive and Auctioned Off as Slaves”

War, Slavery, and Ancient Markets

Half a century before the dawn of the Christian era, a Roman provincial governor gazed with delight at the loot from a recent military campaign. Exulting in his gains, the governor, known to posterity as Cicero, dashed off a letter to a friend. “As I write,” he enthused, “there is about 120,000 sesterces on the platform.”¹ In fact, there were no sesterces, the predominant Roman coin of the time, atop the platform he regarded. No, rather than coins, it was human beings he observed—enslaved humans, taken as plunder by the army. Yet, Cicero was in one sense speaking truthfully. What he perceived was indeed a heap of coins. After all, the people before him were commodified humans, readily translatable into a monetary equivalent. Our Roman politician might not have known their names, but he knew their approximate market value. So developed was exchange in enslaved humans, so routine was the economic transformation of persons into money, that Cicero simply performed the conversion in thought. What he saw on the platform was just what he reported—sesterces, piles and piles of sesterces.

To perceive human beings as heaps of coins requires a distinctive intertwining of slavery, markets, and money. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, these had evolved in tandem, each indispensable to the other. Today, liberal exponents of markets and money disavow these interconnections. Even in a heterodox work in economics, we still find claims to the effect that the invention of money and finance represented “a great civilizational advance.”² Yet this really will not do. In offering its uplifting fable of civilizing commerce, mainstream thought seeks to expunge the embarrassing commodity that has been fundamental to the story of markets and money—humans in bondage.

Questions of money are also questions of truth. In order to function as a means of exchange and payment, or as a measure of value, a monetary item (be it a coin or a bill) must be accepted as the real thing and not an imposter, not a counterfeit. The truth value of money is not merely a conceptual matter. Money’s validity must be realized in everyday human practice, in concrete interactions among people. A social epistemology thus accompanies money, a set of symbolic and socio-material practices for determining its veracity. At the origin of Western culture, these practices ran through the enslaved body.³

A general equivalent, let us recall—be it a silver coin, a digital inscription, or a note issued by a central bank—requires a guarantee of its integrity; to be universally accepted, it must be recognized as legitimate, as the real thing, the incarnation of wealth as such. This recognition can be fraught when new media of payment and exchange are emerging—say, banknotes in societies that have been regulated by coinage, or debit cards when they first appear as substitutes for cash. The same is true in a society in which older means of exchange, such as conventional weights of gold and silver, or iron spits and metal cauldrons, are being displaced by coins stamped by the state. And with this transition, we encounter a fascinating shift in ancient Greece with respect to the testing of money, a shift that inserted the enslaved body directly into the truth regime of money.

During the era in which coinage emerged, the authenticity of a gold coin could be checked by recourse to a basanos, a touchstone upon which pure gold, when rubbed, left a unique mark. Over time, the term basanos came to refer to the test itself, not merely the touchstone. But the most intriguing semantic shift took place sometime after silver coinage was introduced by the Athenian polis (probably in the late sixth century BCE). Having minted coins, the state also needed to protect against counterfeits, and to provide a public test of authenticity. For a period of time, testing of coins was performed publicly in the agora by a state-owned enslaved person, known as the Dokimastes, who received fifty lashes for failure to stay at his post, or for failing to test according to stipulations of the law.⁴ A slave’s body—always subject to the threat of violence—functioned here as the ultimate guarantee of the integrity of money. The enslaved person who served as Dokimastes became a sort of human basanos, and thus implicitly something both animate and inanimate, inhabiting an uncertain zone between the living and the dead. The epistemology of money was thus grounded in the enslaved body and the right of violence against it, in a series that went money → touchstone → slave. This direct link between truth, violence, and the enslaved body facilitated a further, somewhat jarring, semantic shift as the word basanos came to designate not a stone for testing coins, nor the test itself, but the act of torturing an enslaved person’s body in order to elicit testimony in a legal proceeding. This alteration in meaning thus connected coins and enslaved people as objects whose bodies could be vessels of truth. This was the context in which basanos came to denote the use of violence against the enslaved body to produce truth in a legal proceeding.⁵

Discussing this semantic evolution, classicist Page duBois writes that such a shift in meaning “is literally catachresis, the improper use of words … abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor (OED).”⁶ Yet, while abuse (of enslaved bodies) was certainly involved, duBois might overstate the distance between coins and the enslaved body. After all, with the Athenian coinage decree (375–4 BCE), which made the Dokimastes a touchstone for the truth of money, a legal conflation of coins and the enslaved body had occurred: force applied to one, the enslaved body, guaranteed the authenticity of the other, money. Judicial truth and the validity of money were thereby tethered to the enslaved body. We encounter here a chain of substitutions in which the enslaved body could stand in for coins, as it could for truth.

Consider also the following substitution: whereas legal penalties imposed on enslaved people in Greece were frequently paid by lashes on the body, free persons could pay monetary penalties as a substitute. A late fourth-century Attic inscription, for instance, imposed a penalty of fifty lashes on an enslaved person for cutting wood in the sacred precincts of Apollo; a free man, on the other hand, was to pay fifty drachmas for the same offense, an evident substitution of money for the (free) body.⁷ Surely these translations between enslaved bodies and money owed something to the fact that enslaved people were bought and sold in the market. Enslaved people, after all, were directly exchangeable with coins. And this involved an inherent ontological conflation of (at least some) persons with things—an example of which we saw with Cicero. It may not have been such an abuse of language, therefore, for the meaning of basanos to shift from a touchstone for testing gold to the judicial exercise of violence on an enslaved body. This slippage between gold and enslaved bodies discursively mimicked real circuits of exchange. However, these transactional circuits had originated within an overwhelmingly nonmonetary economy. If we want to understand how exchanges became monetized, we will need to explore the economy of violence in the heroic period. Before doing that, however, let us attend to another site in this dialectic of money, truth, and the enslaved body: ancient philosophy.

Tracking the Invisible: Philosophy and the Enslaved Body

Ancient Greek philosophy has an intriguing connection to the emergence of money. It also has a curious connection to enslaved people. Enslaved bodies were, of course, highly visible throughout Athens—in their public labors, in the open-air markets where they were bought and sold, and in the tattoos, brands, and fetters with which their bodies were marked, all signs of their status as chattel property. This public visibility of the enslaved operated, however, to invisibilize their personhood, to render them imperceptible as humans. The enhanced conspicuousness of those in bondage, etched in markings on their bodies, demarcated them from the fully human world of the polis, reducing them to thing-like elements outside the culture-building activities of adult male citizens, including the practice of philosophy. The corporeal semiotics of slavery thereby relegated the enslaved to a twilight zone inhabited by cattle and commodities. “A living piece of property,” says Aristotle, the enslaved is “one of the tools” that ministers to the activity of a master.⁸ Enslaved people are embodiments of death-in-life, uniting the activity of living labor with the status of creatures who are meant to be socially dead.⁹ Yet, this confinement of the enslaved to a zombie domain of death-in-life left traces, clues accessible to the dialectical investigator, which are inscribed in the very rules of intelligibility of the worlds of mind and money.

The enslaved body was inherently scandalous, precisely because it grounded the domains of philosophy and commerce; it ranked among their fundamental conditions of possibility. The scandal did not consist, of course, in the fact of slavery, as this seems to have caused little embarrassment at all (with the remote exception of a few intransigent defenders of democratic egalitarianism).¹⁰ Not only was slavery compatible with ancient justice, it was foundational to it, providing an essential precondition for legal truth, as we have seen. Reading Aristotle, it is evident that he considers the submission of enslaved people to masters to be part of the just ordering of our world, equally indispensable to virtue as the domination of men over women and children. The scandal of slavery had to do not with its existence per se, but with the unspoken threat it posed to aristocratic pretensions to cultural autonomy. As Hegel famously demonstrated, the great irony of the master–slave relation is that it harbors a dialectical reversal. In relation to the material world around them, masters are passive beings, reliant on the labors of the people they enslave. The enslaved, on the other hand, develop themselves as social agents in and through these same labors. The master–slave relation is thus the site of a possible reversal in the poles of dependence and independence; it carries the seeds of its own radical undoing at the hands of the enslaved themselves.¹¹ And this threatens the claims of culture, commerce, and truth to be self-sufficient. After all, philosophy has traditionally assumed that only the true can produce truth, and that only the pure can produce purity.¹² However, the reliance of the world of the masters on the activity of enslaved people represents its dependence on the putatively impure, the domain of people of the body, be they women, enslaved people, or day laborers, whose existence hints at the heteronomy of the world of the masters. The return of the repressed takes here the form of a return of the oppressed. This is one reason why classical Greek culture, nowhere more than in Plato’s philosophy, sought to banish not just the enslaved but everything that smelled of its presence—women, labor, the body, nature.¹³

Plato’s Meno is among the most interesting texts in this regard. While enslaved people are frequently mentioned in Plato’s dialogues, this is the one case in which an enslaved person actually speaks. While giving him a voice, however, Plato reenacts the social death of the enslaved person by refusing to give him a name, identifying him merely as “boy.” This makes it all the easier for Plato to shuttle the boy off the stage and out of the dialogue once he has served to illustrate Socrates’ argument.¹⁴ Yet, the repressed returns hauntingly in the final pages of the text, where the philosopher revisits the problem of truth.¹⁵ Socrates here urges his interlocutors not to confuse the chance possibility of having the right opinions about something with possessing true knowledge of it. We may be right about something without having acquired genuine and comprehensive knowledge of it. He then likens accurate opinions not grounded in knowledge to statues of Daedalus that “run away and escape” unless they are tied down. Knowledge, by contrast, is said to be fixed, permanent, locked in place. Opinion, even when correct, is fleeting—indeed, fleeing, like “a runaway slave,” who “gives you the slip” if left “untethered” (97D–97E). Mere opinions, even correct ones, threaten to escape from us so long as they are unshackled by knowledge. To prevent them from slipping away, they must be tethered: “Once they are tied down, they become knowledge” (98). The pursuit of truth thus requires doing to correct opinions what is done to enslaved bodies—binding them with chains and fetters.

Try though he might to banish them, Plato cannot avoid the conclusion that the enslaved—the one who remains in bondage, the one who cannot escape—is a necessary condition of philosophical truth. This phantom haunts Western culture from its inception, threatening to expose the constitution of the worlds of mind and money in and through the labors of the enslaved. Avery Gordon’s insight that modernity is haunted by ghostly images of violence and wounds applies as well to the ancient cultural traditions embraced by the masters of the modern world, which derive from the culture of an antique slave-owning class.¹⁶ Yet, while liberalism disowned its debt to a world of whips and chains, it was Nietzsche’s perverse genius to have embraced it. Nietzsche in fact celebrates the domination of the enslaved as indispensable to the noble work of culture building. Railing against democracy, socialism, and feminism, he meets head-on their attacks on slavery: “as if slavery were a counterargument,” he writes, “and not instead a condition of every higher culture, an enhancement of culture.” Time and again, he affirms aristocratic domination over enslaved people: “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society … that needs slavery in some sense or the other.”¹⁷

Liberalism recoils from this aristocratic affirmation of the indispensability of the enslaved to the regimes of money and philosophy. It knows that such an affirmation undermines its own polite history of Western culture, its claim for the self-constitution of the modern individual through the poetics of mind and exchange, free of blood and dirt, whips and chains. Yet, it cannot evade Walter Benjamin’s insistence that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” a statement that is as true of coins as it is of vases, or texts by Plato.¹⁸ The dialectical archaeology of truth thus requires an excavation of its degraded sites, a reconnection of objects of culture to the bloodied, abjected body-things that haunt the world of refinement. To return to the enslaved body is thus to revisit the spheres of labor and bondage that comprise the truths of our world. Among these essential truths are those of money.

“A Measure of Everything”

Ancient Greece is rightly recognized as the first extensively monetized society in history. Not that markets and commodity exchange were unique to Greece. On the contrary, these were widespread in the ancient world, as were a variety of special-purpose monies, items that performed a range of monetary functions—such as measuring the value of things—without operating as universal currencies. In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, payments were frequently made by means of a common standard unit, or measure of value, such as copper, silver, or grain, in which the values of goods or services could be expressed. When two traders wanted to exchange quantities of cloth and barley, for instance, each good might be said to be worth a particular amount of copper. This enabled a comparison of quantities of one thing with another. But copper served here merely as a unit of account, that is, a standard measure that could be used as a reference point to enable trade. Frequently, very little or no copper, grain, or silver actually changed hands in such an exchange. A document from the New Kingdom in Egypt (1550–1070 BCE), for instance, registers the purchase of an ox by a policeman. It indicates that the price of the ox was fifty deben of copper (a little over 4.5 kilograms). But only five deben of the fifty were actually paid in copper; the balance was rendered in other commodities, like oil, clothing, and fat, whose values were expressed in copper. So, while copper measured the value of goods involved in exchange, it was not itself the universal means of exchange or payment. A similar pattern is observed in Mesopotamia, where various legal codes regulated payments like fines and wages, as well as commodity prices, in fixed weights of silver. But we know from the same documents that grain, too, could be used for payments according to an established silver/grain ratio.¹⁹ Under the dynasty of Hammurabi in Babylonia (1792–1750 BCE), while prices were expressed in silver, most payments were made in barley or corn. Indeed, the Code of Hammurabi (Laws 113–115) refers to payment as “a claim for corn or money.” Likewise, in Homer we frequently observe cattle serving as a standard of value, but never as a means of exchange. In all these cases, the items that functioned as standards of value (or units of account) did not figure as a general equivalent that united the functions of means of exchange, measure of value, and means of payment. Nor did they bear visible markings of state authority designating them the sole legal means of payment, as was the case with state-minted coins. In short, special-purpose monies did not operate as the unique socially sanctioned representative of value that moved through circuits of exchange in the way that full-fledged or general-purpose money does.²⁰

Even where, as in Assyria and Egypt, ingots of precious metal sometimes carried a seal of authority, they lacked universality, coexisting with basic commodities like wool, barley, sheep, and wine, all of which also served monetary purposes. And while the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor, in what is now part of western Turkey, seems to have been the first in the Mediterranean world to have introduced coinage bearing an insignia of the state, the absence of small coins there suggests it was not a highly monetized society, since everyday transactions by the demos could only have been undertaken with small units. But among the states of classical Greece, particularly Athens, a unified coinage issued by the state would become fundamental to daily life, mediating incessant exchanges of goods and services. Coins functioned as means of exchange and as general equivalents, capable of being traded for everything from olive oil to sex, or for paying government fines. An interesting portrayal of the extent of monetization can be found in Plato’s Republic, where he describes “all the pains and pangs which men experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy necessaries, for their household, borrowing and repudiating, getting how they can, and giving the money into the hands of women and slaves to keep” (V465). So thoroughly monetized was Plato’s society that “finding money” haunted the heads of the household, while women and enslaved people are said to have frequented the market, dispensing money to purchase domestic “necessaries.”

We shall return to the Republic later in this chapter. For the moment, however, let us observe that Plato’s description meshes with compelling evidence for the ubiquity of Greek coins as media of exchange. Most significant here is the archaeological recovery of large quantities of small coins from the classical period, indicating that they were not simply used by the wealthy for large purchases of land, enslaved people, and livestock, but were also deployed in small denominations to facilitate everyday transactions among ordinary citizens.²¹ State-issued money in Athens (among other Greek city-states) was to be found everywhere, forming an indispensable element of daily life and provoking insecurities, lest one not have enough of it.

Describing the classical Greek situation, historian Richard Seaford notes the novelty of coined money as “the single, ubiquitous, and visible embodiment of universal exchange value,” and observes that the Greek polis of the sixth century BCE produced “the first ever words for and thought about money.”²² A conceptual revolution was at work here as much as a socio-material one. In societies that are not extensively monetized, measures of wealth involve inventories: lists of discrete items, from cattle to gold chalices, from wheat to enslaved people. Rather than translating all forms of property into the single quantitative index provided by money, such societies require serial lists of qualitatively distinct objects. In the Old Testament, for instance, Solomon’s wealth is described by enumerating all the specific things that entered into his daily provisions—flour, meal, cattle, sheep, goats, deer, gazelles, roebucks, and fowl—as well as various items he received on a monthly basis, among them barley and straw for his horses (I Kings 4:22–28). But societies governed by a universal equivalent need merely compute every such item into units of money in order to produce a single sum, a homogeneous lump of wealth—be it drachmas or dollars, or Cicero’s sesterces. “From the Greeks onward, we find a new way of speaking and of thinking. Now a person might state the entirety of a household’s possessions in terms of money, as no member of a premonetary society would ever do.”²³ Not for nothing did Aristotle declare that money (nomisma) “is a measure of everything,” and that it functions as such by “making things commensurable.”²⁴ But if money is a measure of everything, we have entered a unique set of social relations with a history. And as much as that history involved cultural and intellectual revolutions, it equally pivoted on socioeconomic ones that refashioned aristocratic gift economies and reorganized social life.

Markets Powered by Warfare: Gifts, Reciprocity, and Violence

Homeric Greece, or at least the life of the Greek heroes depicted in the epics, revolved around an aristocratic gift economy.²⁵ Social status was tied to “competitive generosity,” to the ability to bestow lavish gifts on one’s peers along with displays of munificence toward those beneath one in the social order.²⁶ Gift giving was essential to the exercise and display of noble virtue. Guest-friendship (xenia) and gift exchange bound people together in a nexus of reciprocal obligation, where receivers owed their benefactors services, assistance, and counter-gifts. Gift-giving systems can certainly be hierarchical ones, reproducing patterns of social inequality. But some critics have mistakenly assumed that these patterns involved a sort of capitalist calculation. They were in fact something entirely different.²⁷ As much as gifts involved expectations of counter-gifts (hospitality, services, or prized items), the wealthy were driven not to accumulate goods as ends in themselves, but rather to outdo other aristocrats in the extravagance of their generosity. More accurately, perhaps, they were driven to accumulate wealth in order to disperse it. Confronted with similar values in the gift-giving economy on the Solomon Islands, one appalled self-styled anthropologist proclaimed such actions “absurd.” “The only profit a man can make in a deal in this absurd society is a reputation for generosity,” she wrote.²⁸ Yet generosity—which pivoted on accumulation of wealth for purposes of dispersal—was crucial to social esteem. Alongside valor on the battlefield, gift giving was the key to honor and power. Indeed, oral histories were built upon these exchanges and displays. “No single detail in the life of the heroes receives so much attention in the Iliad and the Odyssey as gift-giving,” writes M. I. Finley, “and always there is frank reference to adequacy, appropriateness, recompense.”²⁹ Similar values pervaded the earliest written histories, so much so that Herodotus, often dubbed “the first historian,” exhibited an “obsessive” attention to the bestowal of aristocratic gifts that were “worthy to be seen.”³⁰

It is often said by anthropologists that societies based on gift exchange are governed by principles of reciprocity.³¹ This distinguishes them from centralized systems of redistribution, in which the state (or a proto-state) receives contributions, like grain, and reallocates them. Whereas in a redistributive system the circulation of wealth is centrally organized, in reciprocal economies it is decentralized, often revolving around a small number of big men, or “chiefs,” and their gifting. To be sure, systems of reciprocity can be highly stratified and tilted in favor of those with greater resources. To get at these complexities, critical anthropology has identified three dominant forms of socioeconomic reciprocity: generalized, balanced, and negative. Generalized reciprocity approximates a system of “pure” gift giving: those who can shall give; those who need shall receive. Balanced reciprocity involves direct exchange (barter) of goods that are considered in some sense to be equivalents. Finally, negative reciprocity entails getting something for nothing, or at least for as little as possible, by means of plunder, theft, and other forms of violent appropriation. As Marshall Sahlins suggests, these three modes of reciprocity are governed by social distance. The closer and more intimate the social bond (e.g., kinship), the more the pure gift giving of generalized reciprocity will prevail. The greater the social distance, the more negative reciprocity (plunder and theft) will be the norm.³² Where two or more of these modes of interaction are in play, relations between them often become unstable. Indeed, it was characteristic of the archaic Greek world before coinage that a dramatic growth in the sphere of negative reciprocity—particularly raiding and plunder—began to undermine the generalized reciprocity that prevailed within more intimate social relations.

Before turning to those developments, let us note other crucial features of nonmonetary economies based on reciprocity. To begin with, they are multicentric systems.³³ Their socioeconomic organization involves distinct spheres, governed by divergent principles and values. A realm in which direct exchange (trade, or balanced reciprocity) occurs may coexist with a domain of negative reciprocity (plunder and theft). Trade and plunder (balanced and negative reciprocity) are permissible only with “outsiders.” The sphere of generalized reciprocity will be allergic to such practices. There, within the domain of the clan, tribe, or village community, gift giving will dominate. In the intimate world of the local community, not only are theft and plunder considered evil, but so are efforts to commodify and instrumentalize people and most goods. The bulk of goods move through reciprocal circuits of societal reproduction, preserving and reproducing people and their social bonds in an ethos of mutuality. Rather than things belonging to people, persons adhere to things. People belong, for instance, to the land, the rivers, and the forest. They belong to their ancestors and their gods, to their community and kin, to the shared histories of the living and the dead. Individuals belong to their dwellings and to those of public life—the assembly spaces, sacred trees, temples, and communal sites. In fact, the Homeric adjective indicating that an individual is free, eleutheros, actually refers to a state of belonging to others and to the community. To be free is to belong, whereas the unfree lack belonging, like a captured foreigner ripped from her community, with whom the conquerors acknowledge no shared histories or communal obligations.³⁴ Whereas the unfree inhabit a realm of disconnection, the free belong to a social world in which persons and things are alive with memory and life; they connect groups in the here and now, and they link generations throughout time.

As for aristocratic gift giving, the nature of a prestigious gift was that it had a distinguished history. The most prized shield was worn by a legendary hero in an epic battle; a valued goblet touched the lips of a great king; a treasured cauldron had been passed down through the generations of a noble household. The same was true, albeit on a much more modest scale, for commoners. Land, jewelry, treasured heirlooms, and pieces of clothing—all of these embodied histories and identities. They were no more alienable by the individual than was their own body (a condition that was reserved for enslaved people). For an individual to belong to these histories was to be a part of the very material items in which history was sedimented. This is why in societies where important goods are alive with sociality, many possessions are inalienable. Even when they change hands, they still belong to their histories and those who embody them. “Inalienable possessions,” writes anthropologist Annette Weiner, “are symbolic repositories of genealogies and historical events, their unique, subjective value gives them absolute value, placing them above the exchangeability of one thing for another.”³⁵ I could no more give away such possessions—items of family jewelry or clothing, fertility stones, musical instruments, talismans, or blankets—than I could disown my history, my belonging, my kin relations, my identity. Such items were bound up with life itself. For this reason, they were incommensurable; their histories were specific to persons and groups. They could not be traded because they had no equivalent.³⁶

When Achilles declares, “Nothing equals the worth of my life” (Iliad, 9:402), he invokes the nonequivalence between life and plundered goods.³⁷ And, as things that are constitutive of life, memory and identity likewise have no equivalent. They are incomparable, immeasurable—and inalienable. We see this repeatedly in the world of the Greek epics. It is striking that the terms used for possession and ownership in the Iliad and the Odyssey refer to relationships toward both persons and things. This is most clear with the adjective philos, whose meaning “ranges from ‘beloved’ to ‘one’s own,’” as Sitta von Reden notes. “The heart, limbs, clothes, treasure, wives, husbands, compatriots, guest-friends and the fatherland all belong to the repertoire of philos objects, being at once beloved and owned.”³⁸ What is one’s own is what is beloved, what is an extension of oneself. Philos objects, precious items to which the individual “belongs,” adhere to a sphere of inalienability. Even when gifted, they carry with them their histories and attachments to their donors. The instrumentalization of such things as a mere means (via exchange) to obtain something else is not merely impermissible, it is incomprehensible. Possessing absolute value, such items are radically unique; what has no equivalent cannot be exchanged.

A society of this sort may well have had special-purpose monies, that is, specific goods used to measure value or serve as a means of payment. These would have operated largely in the sphere of trade with strangers. But entire realms of socioeconomic life were cordoned off from such dealings. And even when monetary transactions encroached on relations internal to a community, they did not involve a general equivalent that expressed a singular value framework for measuring the worth of most goods. Money was still marginal and episodic to social life, and Schaps is entirely correct when he states of Homeric Greece that it “not only lacked money; it did not yet conceive of money.”³⁹

To be sure, goods were exchanged in Homeric Greece (1100–800 BCE, also known as the Greek Dark Age). But within local communities, this predominantly took the form of gift—not market—exchange. Gifts, as we have seen, created and reinscribed social relations and networks of obligation. For this reason, they were memorialized, so that the obligations might be remembered and stable social bonds preserved. In the public recounting of gifts, social ties and obligations were renewed and consolidated.⁴⁰ Of course, the social ties reproduced through narration of gifts given and received were often hierarchical ones. After all, esteemed gifts obeyed a ranking system. Prestige adhered to both the possession of specific goods and to the wealth that enabled one to give away gifts, particularly those comprised of precious metal. Consequently, aristocratic gift giving reproduced rank and social difference at the same time that it reknitted networks of reciprocity. And for the poor, obligations to provide flows of wealth to those above oneself—what would later develop into rent and taxes—were modeled on the image of the gift. In the world of the epics, the term gift included a disparate set of goods and services, including prizes, rewards, fines, taxes, fees, and even loans.⁴¹ Yet fines, fees, and taxes could easily morph into exactions, just as loans might culminate in debt service and even debt bondage. In all these ways, the “gift economy” could shade into relations of appropriation and class exploitation, especially if intra-ruling class competition were heightened in response to new forms of accumulation, such as raiding and plundering.

It is significant that during the heroic age much of the very wealth that could be dis-accumulated through gift giving was acquired via warfare, raiding, and slaving. Gift economies could thus be deeply imbricated with slavery and debt bondage, as was certainly the case in ancient Greece. Nevertheless, however much hierarchical social relations were reproduced in and through some forms of gift economy, the latter obeyed a social logic foreign to commodity exchange. The appropriateness of expressions of generosity and hospitality among aristocrats, for instance, was not determined by market considerations of equivalence. What was appropriate was governed by historical patterns of reciprocity and by social standing. Similarly, social norms were meant to govern the sharing of booty (goods acquired through negative reciprocity). Yet, these norms might become unstable and contested. And in turning to Homer’s texts, we readily detect symptoms of precisely such a breakdown in aristocratic norms—symptoms not unrelated to growing social tensions and class conflicts.⁴²

From the outset of the Iliad, we encounter a collapse of noble leadership, centered on a crisis over distribution of wealth acquired through war, plunder, and trade. By the eighth century BCE, raiding was an established aristocratic practice for accumulating wealth in archaic Greece. Conducted via longboats rowed by dozens of men, raiders launched surprise attacks in order to capture cattle, enslaved women, and items of precious metal. So routine was such plundering activity that in his Politics Aristotle simply describes warfare as “a way of acquiring wealth” (1256b23). In this he echoed Homer’s glowing references to noble Odysseus as a “sacker of cities.” Turning also to King Nestor of Pylos, Homer describes how he and his fellow Greek warriors engaged in “many raids from shipboard down the foggy sea, cruising for plunder” (Odyssey, 3.17–18).⁴³ So inextricably connected were plunder and trade in the ancient world that markets were literally powered by warfare. Yet as accumulation by raiding grew from about 800 BCE on, it also produced powerful conflicts over distributive norms within the dominant group. Tensions arose between private accumulation and practices of dis-accumulation through gift giving. We get more than a glimpse of these tensions in the epics.

At the beginning of the Iliad, we learn that the noble warrior Achilles had been angered by Agamemnon, leader of the Greek war against the Trojans. Having had to part with some of his booty in order to appease gods and men, Agamemnon demands that he be granted Briseis, daughter of a noble Trojan family, who was earlier awarded to Achilles as a war “prize.” Achilles’ anger over this command drives the epic narrative. “Most acquisitive of all men,” Achilles rails at Agamemnon, complaining, “Your thoughts are always set on gain.” Withdrawing from battle, he declares, “I have no mind to stay here heaping up riches and treasure for you and receiving no honour myself” (1:119–74). Fueling Achilles’ rage is indignation that Agamemnon’s acquisitiveness violates customary norms of distribution. A dispute over the sharing of plunder (in the form, let us note, of an enslaved woman) thus discloses a rupture in elite reciprocity. Once booty has been divided, insists Achilles, “it is not right that the army should gather it back again” (1.125–26). Agamemnon has allowed personal accumulation to supersede the reciprocity that binds aristocratic households in a web of mutual obligation. In a telling passage in book 9 of the Iliad, Achilles condemns the one-sidedness of Agamemnon’s behavior:

Like a bird that brings back to her unfledged chicks every morsel she can find, and has to go without herself, so it has been with me…. I have sacked twelve of men’s cities from my

ships,

and I claim eleven more by land across the fertile Troad. From all of these I took many fine treasures, and every time I brought them all and gave them to Agamemnon son of

Atreus: and

every time, back there by the fast ships he never left, he would take them in, share out a few, and keep the most for himself (9.322–30).

“The crisis of the Iliad” suggests Seaford, “is a breakdown of the form of reciprocity … controlled by the leader.”⁴⁴ While the poet dramatizes it in terms of a clash between two godlike warriors, it is clear that a wider social conflict between antagonistic forms of distribution is in play. The crisis sketched in the Iliad, which also runs throughout the Odyssey, reflected the undermining of more traditional relations by new patterns of war, exchange, and accumulation, which were also creating preconditions for the emergence of coinage.

The Limits of Reciprocity: Colonization, Plunder, and the Slave Trade

Archaic Greece (roughly 700–480 BCE) underwent a protracted expansion in people, settlement, and trade. As population increased, so did the movements of persons and goods. New colonies were established, and new cultural contacts created. With these came an upsurge in raiding and communal warfare, the first records of which date from the late eighth century.⁴⁵ All of this drove a series of socioeconomic transformations, culminating in the political revolutions that would usher in both the classical polis and coinage.

While historians continue to debate the scale of the demographic takeoff in the archaic era, there is little doubt that crucial changes in diet and metallurgy propelled population growth, which in turn sent land-hungry people in search of colonies.⁴⁶ Fueled though it may have been by a desire for agricultural land, colonization also fostered slaving and market exchange. The capture of women as unfree wives and concubines was nothing new, of course, as the disputes charging the drama of the Iliad indicate. And in the Odyssey, King Nestor remarks that on leaving Troy, “we stowed our plunder, our sashed and lovely women” (3.170). Recounting his sacking of Ismarus, Odysseus further claims that he “killed the men, but as for the wives and plunder, that rich haul we dragged away from the place” (9.45–47). As colonists established households on land they had occupied, there is little doubt that they also seized local women. But not all the women and children captured would necessarily be incorporated into the household. There was increasingly an option to sell them. Recalling one battle against the Trojans, Achilles brags that he took “droves” of women, whom he “auctioned off as slaves” (Iliad, 21.99). And Thucydides, writing in a later period, describes Greek soldiers killing the Corcyraen men they had defeated, while “all the women taken in the stronghold were sold as slaves” (IV.48.4). Later in his History, Thucydides narrates a Spartan invasion of Iasus that led to the capture of “a very great booty.” The Spartans, he says, turned the town over to Tissaphernes along with “all the captives,” who were relinquished for “the stipulated price of one Doric stater a head” (VIII.28.4). These multiple references to the sale of enslaved persons mesh with historical evidence suggesting that early Greek colonists, at least on the Black Sea coast, collaborated with local chieftains in the slave trade.⁴⁷ Conquest of land involved not just capture of persons, but also the sale of some as human commodities.

Colonization additionally involved establishment of Greek trading posts. For instance, the early colonial settlement of Pithecusae was founded as a trading station, and the commercial colony at al-Mina served as the base of Greek trade to the East for two centuries (roughly 800 to 600 BCE). To be sure, agricultural produce comprised a considerable part of what Greek colonists sent to these markets. But shares of the booty claimed by raiding parties—from precious metal goods to enslaved people—would have played no small part. The fruits of this plunder were often exchanged for manufactured goods from the East, such as iron, fabrics, metal objects, and precious ornaments. Indeed, Greeks may well have deliberately increased their slaving activities to enhance trade with the East. In the Old Testament, Ezekiel specifically mentions enslaved people “as a typical Greek commodity.”⁴⁸ Yet, while colonization and raiding opened up new market-oriented activities bound up with slaving, we should not assume this involved the rise of a new merchant class. On the contrary, raiding was a preeminently aristocratic activity. It was wealthy nobles (aristoi) who had the resources to build or purchase boats and equip them with both rowers and weapons, and the epics clearly depict them as leaders of raiding parties. In particular, younger sons of aristocratic families were often raiders, just as they were among the most numerous of colonizers. The distinction between warriors and traders is thus a fluid one, revolving on “little but an ideological hairline.”⁴⁹ So widely accepted was the image of the seafaring noble that Odysseus pronounces, “Most men risk the seas to trade with other men” (Odyssey, 9.141), and the whole of his epic tale pivots on maritime misadventures.

Whether heads of households or younger sons, aristocratic warrior-traders propelled the geographic expansion that opened new horizons for raiding, the booty from which fired exchange for Eastern luxuries. Yet, this patrician activity significantly altered traditional aristocratic society, in large measure because goods acquired through raiding (and related trading activity) did not originate in the households (oikoi) in which the plunderers had been born. Pillaged goods from new territories could thus readily be treated as treasure acquired outside the networks of obligation that defined the household and its agricultural wealth. This may not have been especially significant when slaving and trading were more sporadic activities. But the sustained wave of colonization, which created new settlements and trading centers, removed the young men of the colonies from traditional spaces of aristocratic reciprocity. At sea for extended periods and no longer living alongside the old noble families, colonists and traders advanced more in the world by piling up personal wealth than by relying on customary networks of obligation. Indeed, when establishing constitutions for new poleis, they marked their novel status with more egalitarian laws, at least for those deemed citizens.⁵⁰ As a result, the colonies often contributed to the growth of an anti-aristocratic ethos that became increasingly potent after about 700.⁵¹ As new fortunes were made in the nexus of raiding, slaving, and trading, a new fluidity entered the order of rank and power, with lesser lords sometimes acquiring fortunes exceeding those of their former superiors. At the same time, craftsmen and soldiers increasingly entered into market transactions. Throughout Greek society, older noble values and settled hierarchies jostled with new modes of accumulation via warrior-trading. Aristocratic poets of the era can be found complaining that wealth now mattered more than birth.

With these changes came the cultural transformations associated with “the orientalizing revolution.” Luxury goods from the East entered the lives of Greek aristocrats on a growing scale, and both traders and migrant craftsmen established new cultural contacts. The myths, rituals, and household goods of the nobility increasingly reflected admiration of Eastern societies, their art, and their highly stratified social orders.⁵² Although they were excluded from some of these cultural shifts, particularly the aristocratic symposia, the common folk were not unaffected by the changing patterns of social life. In the words of one historian,

The man who draws his boat down into the sea and sails it is no longer tied to the man

who had

previously ordered his life across the boundary of his fields…. The potter who sells his

vases by

the docks must make what the foreigner wants, not what the basileus [lord] used to demand….

The mercenary must learn to take orders from any general set over him, not just from the commander of his phratry [extended kinship group]. ⁵³

This was not, of course, a market society in any modern sense of the term, never mind a capitalist one. The vast majority of people were peasants producing most of their own subsistence goods through the labors of their households. Nonetheless, more members of all social classes, including peasant farmers, did enter markets, and the wealth and sensibilities generated there disrupted older patterns of social life, putting considerable strain on traditional forms of reciprocity. Wealth derived at a spatial distance from the community augmented the social distances between its members. Distancing, as we have already observed, was fundamental to negative reciprocity. It permitted unbalanced transactions, including violent ones. And as colonization, slaving, and the growth of trade networks all developed, wealth based on negative reciprocity began to have ever more profound impacts within traditional Greek communities.

Perhaps most significant, these new dynamics of accumulation shook up long-standing relations between rich and poor. To begin with, it seems clear that private ownership of land became more entrenched during this period, and that land was increasingly alienable.⁵⁴ Moreover, the general direction of land transfers was from the poor to the rich, implying both growing dispossession, on the one hand, and increased concentration of landed wealth, on the other. Concomitantly, the practice of smallholders honoring the nobility with “gifts” was being displaced by regular payment of rents.⁵⁵ By 600 BCE substantial numbers of small peasant farmers were classified as hektemoroi, tenants who probably turned over one-sixth of their produce to a lord. These rents had lost all semblance of gifts by the time of Draco’s legal codes (probably 621 BCE), which harshly punished the poor for transgressions of the law, including failure to make payments.⁵⁶ When rent was too onerous, or other economic hardships intervened, the small farmer, unable to count on the generosity associated with older norms of reciprocity, would have had to contract a debt. But debts incurred in this way were negotiated against the security of their land or their body (or that of one of their kin). Indeed, for the rich, the whole purpose of loans may by now have been as a step toward indebting the poor in order to dispossess them of their holdings. For the peasant, of course, to be displaced and rendered landless could only be a catastrophe. Indeed, dispossession often went hand in hand with enslavement or exile, calamities that Solon was to denounce, as we shall see.⁵⁷

Many of these themes run through Hesiod’s Works and Days, as the poet narrates how his brother, “foolish Perses,” lost his oikos in Boeotia due to an accumulation of chrea (debts).⁵⁸ Hesiod instructs his brother on the work habits and social behaviors necessary to remake himself as an independent peasant farmer, as well as on appropriate practices of farm management. A presupposition of these is “clearing of your debts” (403). Having accomplished that, he tells Perses, you will need to acquire sufficient money through your labors that “you may negotiate for another man’s kleros [plot of land, allotment], not another man for yours” (341). That one could negotiate to acquire another man’s plot, or he for yours, indicates that land was indeed alienable, and the whole text suggests a growing crisis of impoverishment and dispossession. The poet Theognis would seem to have been referring to precisely such phenomena when he wrote, at some point during the sixth century, “They seize possessions by force, and order has been destroyed/There is no longer an equitable distribution” (677–78).⁵⁹ Older forms of reciprocity, or “equitable distribution,” had broken down, and now “possessions,” particularly land, were being seized by the rich.

This is the context in which Works and Days advises the poor man on how to avoid debts and loss of his land. Hesiod describes a social crisis of indebtedness and dispossession. And where relinquishment of land could not discharge debts, the handover of persons could—by way of the debt bondage of the debtor or his dependents.⁶⁰ Even those commoners who could evade debt bondage, unable to count on the “generosity” of their superiors, had increasingly to resort to greater engagement with the market. It is revealing that Hesiod instructs his brother on how to conduct “seafaring” so that he might get his produce to market (641–45). With communal assistance receding, rudiments of market dependence emerged. This is why, rather than an isolated complaint, Hesiod’s poem would have resonated with audiences throughout Greece, expressing a widespread egalitarian sensibility.⁶¹

The increase in dispossession appears to have been discursively registered in the growing use by aristocrats of servile terms to refer to the poor of Attica, not merely to enslaved people. In the early part of the archaic age, slavery or servility, as we have seen, applied to foreigners, to those captured via war and conquest. Native members of the community, irrespective of wealth, were “free,” a term that connoted, among other things, being undefeated by outsiders.⁶² Now, however, many were being defeated by insiders, and subjugated to them. By the beginning of the sixth century BCE, according to the Constitution of Athens, written by Aristotle or one of his students, terms for slavery and bondage were applied interchangeably to the condition of the Athenian-born poor:

The poor were in a state of bondage to the rich, both themselves, their wives, and their children, and were called Pelatæ [bond-slaves for hire], and Hektemori [paying a sixth of the produce as rent]; for at this rate of hire they used to work the lands of the rich. Now, the whole of the land was in the hands of a few, and if the cultivators did not pay their rents, they became subject to bondage, both they and their children, and were bound to their creditors on the security of their persons, up to the time of Solon.⁶³

It is this historical situation that haunts Hesiod’s Works and Days. In its treatment of market practices and the crisis confronting the poor, this work contrasts mightily with the Homeric epics. In Homer, remarks critic James Redfield, “the heroes do not buy and sell”—though he quickly adds, “except perhaps to purchase a slave,” a vital exception to which we shall return. Odysseus does proclaim that “most men risk the seas to trade with other men” (Odyssey, 9.141). But as a general rule, the epics do not portray the aristoi buying and selling, practices that are frequently treated as unheroic. King Nestor, for instance, scorns both traders and pirates, even though, incongruously, he recounts the fortune he attained through plunder (Odyssey, 3.80–83, 117–18, 170). Yet, we know that buying and selling, along with raiding and slaving, were well-established noble undertakings by the time Homer’s epic poems were written down, around 650 BCE. If, as a growing scholarly consensus has it, Homer largely projected the relations of his society onto a glorious past in ways meant to heroize aristocratic warriors,⁶⁴ then his near silence about noble involvement in market transactions would seem symptomatic. It suggests that the poet suppressed evidence of a practice of which he was well aware, but whose effects troubled him or his listeners; it suggests that trade was considered unheroic. Redfield proposes that Homer’s avoidance of trade in the epics is “a specific literary strategy—which, paradoxically, implies the importance of trade in the world of the poet.”⁶⁵ After all, one does not deliberately conceal an inconsequential feature of one’s world when recasting it in heroic guise. One suppresses something significant that provokes anxiety. And trade, joined to new forms of wealth and the erosion of reciprocity, was just such a troubling phenomenon. To be sure, the epics do interrogate the clash of greedy individualism or hubris (Agamemnon) versus proper noble generosity of the sort that Achilles recommends. But the conflict is portrayed in largely personal terms, as behaviors pursued by individual noble figures, disconnected from social practices of accumulation associated with warrior-trading. Yet if Homer shies away from these realities, Hesiod does not. For this peasant poet, the new social dynamics—and the crisis they wrought on the small producer—are on full display.

Works and Days has been described, reasonably, as an anti-aristocratic broadside against the upheavals deriving from new market relations and practices.⁶⁶ The text fairly seethes with rage against the wealthy and powerful. The poet condemns his era as an age of envy, and he denounces “those who occupy themselves with violence and wickedness and brutal deeds,” reserving special scorn for those lords who, when acting as judges, had become “bribe-swallowers” issuing “crooked judgments” (238–64). Commentators have observed the similarities between Hesiod’s social justice rhetoric and that of the great Athenian reformer, Solon, about a century later.⁶⁷ By Solon’s time (590s BCE), the social tensions depicted by Homer and Hesiod had erupted into intense social conflict. So profound was the turmoil brought on by popular insurgence that the Athenian aristocracy, seeing no way out, conferred on Solon dictatorial authority to rewrite the laws in an effort to end the crisis and restabilize the polis. Echoing Hesiod, Solon plainly signaled that rapacious practices of exploitation would have to be drastically curbed. “The leaders of the people have an evil mind,” Solon warns in his poems, which were recited publicly, and “they know not how to restrain their greed” (4.7–9).⁶⁸ He further intones that

I brought back to their god-given homeland Athens

many who had been sold, one unjustly,

another justly, others fleeing

from dire necessity …

Others here held in shameful slavery

Trembling at their masters’ whims

I freed … (36.8–14)

Solon’s verses condemn the oppressions afflicting the poor: the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, the displacement of growing numbers of commoners from their lands, and the languishing of others in slavery due to unpayable debts. To be condemned to exile, debt bondage, or chattel slavery also meant exclusion from the political community, and thus loss of communal rights, social belonging, and identity. Crucial to Solon’s reforms was the momentous “shaking off of the burdens” (seisachtheia), which famously involved elimination of debts and of debt bondage. But the social transformation almost certainly entailed “a more substantial structural change”—the abolition of rents on land, such as hektemorage.⁶⁹ The result was momentous: the “abolition of the relationship of clientship between peasants and aristocrats.”⁷⁰ Throwing off their economic bonds, peasants acquired a powerful social, political, and legal independence. The Solonian program thus expressed the dynamics of a plebeian insurgency—“a political struggle that bordered on civil war”⁷¹—even if the lawgiver stopped at deep-seated reforms rather than a radical redistribution of the land, and even if it would be another four generations before democracy was fully implanted.⁷² Notwithstanding these limits, Solon’s reforms were a landmark moment in the process that gave birth to the independent peasant-citizen—a unique social type that united labor and self-rule, and that comprised the most radical ingredient of ancient democracy.⁷³

The scale of the Athenian social crisis that raged in 594 BCE, when Solon was given dictatorial powers, can be gleaned from Plutarch’s account, written seven centuries later. While he is surely unreliable in details, Plutarch seems to have grasped the broad sweep of the historical moment:

And the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor, at that time, also reached its height; so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances and settling it to be possible but a despotic power. All the people were indebted to the rich; and either they tilled the land for their creditors, paying them a sixth part of the increase, and were therefore called Hectemorii or Thetes, or else they engaged their body for the debt, and might be seized and either sent into slavery, or sold to strangers; some (for no law forbade it) were forced to sell their children, or fly the country to avoid the cruelty of their creditors; but for the most part and the bravest of them began to combine together and encourage one another to stand to it, to choose a leader, to liberate the condemned debtors, divide the land, and change the government.

Then the wisest of the Athenians, perceiving Solon … pressed him to succour the commonwealth

and compose the differences. ⁷⁴

We will return to these issues and the rise of democracy later in this chapter. But for the moment one further result ought to be underlined: due to the democratic transformations at Athens, the definition of servility was once more restricted to enslaved people. We saw earlier that by at least 600 BCE, in the midst of dispossession and impoverishment, the lines of servitude had become blurred. With tenant farmers becoming poorer, increasingly indebted to noble men, and even enslaved, relations of servility had been extended to the native born. A variety of conditions of “bondage”—which included, according to the author of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, the hektemoroi, or rent-owing peasants—had come to overlap with slavery. Indeed, historians note that by now, most of the terms used for enslaved people—among them doulos, oiketes, therapon, pais, soma—designated any kind of servant or wage laborer.⁷⁵ With the Solonian abolition of debts, rents, and debt bondage, however, such intermediate forms of subordination and subjection were eliminated, and free and servile statuses became sharply differentiated in Athens. While elitists like Plato might continue to use servile terms for all who labored, they did so on contested ground, as democrats were challenging degrading depictions of laboring citizens. Rather than a continuum of forms of bondage that overlapped and bled into one another, Athenian society in its democratic phase knew only freemen—divided, to be sure, by wealth, but still fully free participants in making the laws by which they were governed—as against enslaved people. Non-enslaved women, however, notwithstanding the greater liberties they experienced at Athens compared to other Greek cities,⁷⁶ were denied the rights that adhered to their male counterparts. Male social status was now organized around a single binary structure. And given the Solonian decree that no Athenian could be enslaved, servility was aligned with foreignness. To be enslaved was to be an outsider (which is not to say that all foreigners were enslaved). And for the rich, the relaxation of exactions on the Athenian poor meant that the bulk of their surplus product would henceforth have to come from enslaved people.⁷⁷ Moreover, if poor members of the community could no longer be subjected to bondage in any form, then it followed that enslaved people would henceforth enter the society principally as commodities purchased on the market.⁷⁸ Fundamentally, slavery assumed not only a chattel form, with enslaved people as outright pieces of property, but also a commodity form. And this returns us to the equivalence between enslaved people and money that is central to the story of ancient money.

War, Slavery, and Market Exchange

As Marx suspected, commodity exchange appears to have originated between strangers.⁷⁹ Certainly this was true for the Greek society of the Homeric epics. As Finley pointed out, there is not a single example in the epics of a market exchange involving two Greeks or two Trojans.⁸⁰ The evidence we have suggests that members of the same archaic communities did not conduct commercial transactions with one another.⁸¹ It is surely no surprise that within a community organized around generalized reciprocity, theft and plunder would be considered antisocial acts. That haggling over equivalents (balanced reciprocity) should also be considered antisocial seems less obvious to those of us raised in a market economy. However, in societies of generalized reciprocity, what one gave to neighbors and kin had nothing to do with their capacity to return an equivalent. Need was need, and it involved a moral obligation beyond the calculus of equivalence. True, support in time of need presumed an obligation on the recipient to reciprocate in the future, if necessary. But this obligation was not subjected to rules of quantitative measure. The principle of commercial exchange—to bargain for trade of equivalents—was foreign to those that regulated this sort of communal life. Indeed, market exchange was considered closer to piracy, which is why it was undertaken with outsiders. Another reason that commercial exchange was kept at a distance from communal life may have had to do with the fact that the principal commodity exchanged with foreigners was often enslaved persons. In fact, linguistic evidence suggests that the concepts of purchase and sale originated in the rights of captors to possess and transfer captives.⁸² What could be sold was that which had been seized outside the bounds of the community, and human captives topped the list. Not only was trade conducted with outsiders; it often comprised the exchange of outsiders.

The ancient Greek world was by no means unique in this regard. Enslaved people appear to have been the earliest goods traded in Neolithic Europe, and the principal item of commerce among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In some societies, enslaved people in fact appear to have been the first acceptable form of private property, particularly where land was not privatized.⁸³ We find evidence of slave sales in Babylonia and Assyria around 2400 BCE. And further south, in Sumer, temple records indicate the presence of enslaved people by 2700 BCE and of an active market in foreign captives by about 2000 BCE.⁸⁴ The commodification of enslaved people was thus a phenomenon familiar to the ancient Middle East for at least two thousand years before the Christian era. As early as 1580 BCE, a large-scale trade in enslaved people had developed across the Indian Ocean—a case that prompted Patterson to remark, “Slavery was intricately tied up with the origins of trade itself.”⁸⁵ Indeed, outside the ambit of the Greco-Roman world, the evidence strongly suggests that the Arab slave trade that began in the eighth and ninth centuries CE exceeded in size the staggering scale of the Roman trade, which at its height involved 250,000 to 400,000 enslaved people per year.⁸⁶ But even though slave markets came later to the Greco-Roman world, by the time of Homer, war, slavery, and market exchange were inextricably connected, and the Mediterranean was home to some of the most active slave markets anywhere. Indeed, all of the enslaved people whose names and histories appear in the Odyssey were either purchased, or are the descendants of enslaved people acquired on the market.⁸⁷ So closely integrated were warfare and trade that slave dealers in the ancient Greek world trailed behind armies, purchasing their captives.⁸⁸

Let us recall Achilles’ boast, with reference to one of his battles against the Trojans: “Droves I took alive and auctioned off as slaves” (Iliad, 21.99). As elsewhere, Homer here depicts violence as the primary means of enslaving others, and markets as the place where the victims of such violence—people enslaved as chattel—were sold. Recognizing the decisive role of force in determining personal fate, Heraclitus proclaimed, “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free.”⁸⁹ Throughout the ancient Greek world, violence and enslavement were central to a heroic narrative that pivoted, as we have seen, on the exploits of the aristocratic warrior. To be sure, there were other routes to enslavement. Debt bondage, or the sale of children and kin in order to raise money or acquire food and land, defined alternate passages to slavery. By the classical periods in Greece and Rome, however, both these routes were closed off following uprisings of the demos that won legal protection against the enslavement of citizens.⁹⁰ Henceforth, enslaved people in these societies would be foreigners, outsiders seized in war or imported for sale. And with the growth of markets in the Greek world, slavery become predominantly an “economic phenomenon, conforming to laws of supply and demand,”⁹¹ as most captives of war were purchased from troops by slave merchants and transported to market towns for sale.

Recall for a moment Redfield’s argument that the omission of buying and selling in the epics is a literary strategy, meant to evade new and destabilizing socioeconomic practices. Redfield acknowledges one exception, though only to effectively ignore it. “The heroes,” he tells us, “do not buy and sell—except perhaps to purchase a slave.” Yet, rather than exceptional, the buying and selling of enslaved people was one of the most routine of archaic market activities. Redfield evades this by denying that purchase and sale of enslaved people is in fact a market action. Trafficking in women and children, he insists, “does not establish in any important sense a market relation.”⁹² But this claim simply will not hold. Human trafficking was (and is) quintessentially a market relation. That it might sometimes occur outside geographically settled markets is of little consequence. In fact, descriptions of commercial exchange in the epics often involve the episodic markets that were typical of much early archaic trade—what can best be characterized as a one-time market. Homer describes just this, during a pause in the siege of Troy: the heroes turn their eyes to the sea to discover that “ships had come from Lemnos bringing wine, many of them, sent by Jason’s son Euneos … From these ships the long-haired Achaeans bought their wine. Some paid in bronze, some by gleaming iron, some in hides, some in live oxen, some in slaves” (Iliad, 7.473–75).

To be sure, this is trade without a generalized equivalent: bronze, iron, hides, oxen, and enslaved people are all used here to purchase wine. But it is certainly market activity, organized by seafaring traders. Furthermore, we do in fact find clear allusions to settled markets in the epics. The Iliad contains multiple references to ports of trade, particularly to towns that specialized in slave markets, including Samos, Imbros, and Euneos’s town of Lemnos. The poet says of one captive that Achilles “took him on board ship to well-founded Lemnos and sold him there” (Iliad, 21.40). And in the final pages of the epic, Hekabe laments that if Achilles were to capture her sons, he would sell them by “sending them over the harvestless sea to Samos and Imbros and misty Lemnos” (Iliad, 24.753–55). Redfield downplays these references, largely because he insists on separating slaving from commerce, and theft from trade.⁹³ Yet this is to promote a sanitized liberal image of trade and markets, one that evades the overwhelming evidence of piracy, plunder, and slaving as constitutive of early commerce. As one historian of ancient Rome comments, “Pillage and commerce were two complimentary and interconnected methods of exchange … it was a long time before the ancient world established a clear distinction between them.”⁹⁴ Preferring idyllic fables of primitive barter, mainstream economists and historians have elided the profound ties linking markets to slavery.⁹⁵ Nevertheless, as we have seen, enslaved people were among the earliest goods traded in countless human societies, and frequently the most significant items of long-distance exchange.⁹⁶ Rather than the product of peaceful encounters for mutually beneficial exchanges of basic or luxury goods, markets were frequently born of the violent capture and sale of persons.

This growth of markets in enslaved people prompted Giuseppe Salvioli to declare that enslaved people were the first commodities regularly sold for a profit in the Greek world.⁹⁷ While the evidence is sketchy, it does seem that enslaved people were among the first commodities bought and sold—and among the most significant. Not only were ancient wars “slave hunts,” as Max Weber suggested;⁹⁸ they also fueled some of the most active large-scale markets in the world at the time. In the Greek society captured in Homer’s epics, the prevailing aristocratic-warrior ethos meant that slavery was highly gendered. The victors typically killed the men who survived the field of battle, while enslaving the women and children. Warrior elites appropriated for themselves a select number of female and child captives, distributed some as booty, and sold off others for commercial gain, as Achilles brags of doing. In classical antiquity, as across most of human history, enslaved people were disproportionately female, and their primary role was domestic—labor in the home and its fields, including sexual favors for their masters, and the bearing and rearing of the children the latter fathered (both with them and with other women).⁹⁹ Over time, however, enslaved adult male, too, became available through commercial markets, and even the epics portray such sales. Homer instructs us that Odysseus purchased his loyal male swineherd, Eumaeus, from Taphian pirates; and the old swineherd later purchased an enslaved male of his own (Odyssey; 14:511–14, 15.429–30). We know that merchants trafficking in the “barbarian” regions on the edges of the Greek world carried thousands of enslaved people, many from the Danubian and Black Sea areas, to markets on the main trade routes, like Delos, Corinth, Chios, and Rhodes. Following the end of the Peloponnesian War (414–404 BCE), an extremely active trade in war captives and victims of raids developed at Delos, perhaps peaking around 100 BCE. And by the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, public slave auctions were held every month in the Athenian agora, by which time commerce had supplanted warfare as the principal source of enslaved people in Greece.¹⁰⁰

The pattern was somewhat different in the case of Rome. While slave markets burgeoned throughout the empire, a majority of enslaved people may have been direct captives of war and of predatory raiding by the imperial army, though large numbers were undoubtedly sold off after capture, as Cicero clearly intimates in his visions of sesterces.¹⁰¹ It is striking that by the second half of the first century CE, chains with manacles were “part of the standard equipment of the Roman soldier.”¹⁰² Various snippets of historical evidence on this front are revealing. Following the defeat of Gallic forces in 52 BCE, Julius Caesar distributed one enslaved captive to every soldier in his army. Over one hundred years later, in the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, approximately ninety-seven thousand apprehended Jews are said to have been enslaved by the victorious Romans. Equally telling, in the subsequent victory procession organized by Titus, son of the emperor, 700 of these enslaved people were paraded as part of the wealth plundered in battle, alongside the animals, and precious objects of gold, silver, and ivory that had been looted.¹⁰³ Enslaved people, in short, were plunder; they were objects of wealth, no different in principle from cattle.

Walking with the Feet of Other People: Animals, Possessions, and Enslaved Bodies

“Those commodities which are the first necessaries of existence, cattle and slaves.”

—Polybius¹⁰⁴

Polybius’s matter-of-fact description of the commodities most necessary to life in ancient Rome expressed the common sense of his social class. Enslaved people were an essential good, a possession vital to aristocratic comfort in the same way that cattle were necessary to a flourishing agricultural estate. Indeed, enslaved people were of the same category as cattle, a sort of human livestock indispensable to lordly refinement. The conflation of enslaved people with animals also permeated the symbolic registers of classical Greek culture.¹⁰⁵ The only unambiguous term for enslaved person—andrapodon—was related etymologically to tetrapodon (a being with four feet), which denoted livestock. Literally, therefore, andrapodon meant a beast with human feet. And in a military context, the term signified a prisoner, not merely in the sense of a captive, but, crucially, that of “an object acquired as booty.”¹⁰⁶ The semantic connection of andrapodon to both animals and war loot is arresting. We know that by Homeric times oxen had become the standard measure for the value of commodities, including enslaved persons. We learn in the epics, for instance, that an enslaved woman, Eurycleia, had been purchased for the equivalent of twenty oxen, while bronze armor was valued at nine, and a tripod at twelve (Odyssey, 1:490–91; Iliad, 6.236, 23.703). Alone among human beings, then, enslaved people were literally equated with cattle. Consistent with this, from the fourth century BCE, one of the most common terms for enslaved person was soma, or “body.” To designate a person as a body is, of course, to reify them, to strip them of personhood and personality, to represent them as strictly physical beings, simple beasts of burden—ancient zombies lacking consciousness, identity, thought, and reason.

It is customary to imagine that what distinguishes an enslaved person is their legal status as human property. True as this is, it does not go far enough. For law in this regard merely expresses deeper social processes. To be an enslaved person, as we have seen, is to be socially dispossessed, to be humanly uprooted—indeed de-rooted, or deracinated. Foundational to slavery is the stripping away of kinship, the deprivation of communal belonging, the destruction of personal identity. Nothing so defines such destruction as the forcible disconnection of people from communities and kin. As Finley points out, of roughly sixty records of private sales of enslaved people in ancient Egypt, not one shows an enslaved adult male being sold with their wife or children.¹⁰⁷ Not only were enslaved people “natally alienated,” as Patterson rightly points out—that is, dispossessed of kin relations dating from their birth—but their status also left them at permanent risk of losing whatever precarious bonds they might have forged with children and spouses.¹⁰⁸ While slavery began in the calamity of capture, exile, and sale, the original trauma of social death might be repeated with every subsequent sale. It is illuminating in this regard that the literal translation of the Egyptian word for captive was “living death.”¹⁰⁹ Of course, in many societies members of the community could be enslaved, too (not just foreigners), particularly those considered to have committed transgressions against their neighbors, including the “crime” of failure to pay back loans, whose result was frequently debt bondage of the debtor or one of their kin. Through such processes, an insider was effectively expelled from membership in their community, becoming an outsider, someone to whom others did not owe communal obligations—and thus someone who could be treated as a thing. In Egypt, as ’Abd al-Muhsin Bakir pointed out, insiders who were enslaved, usually due to their extreme poverty, acquired a status equivalent to legal and social death.¹¹⁰ One anthropologist of slave societies has remarked that characteristic of all forms of slavery is “the slave’s juridical inability to become ‘kin.’”¹¹¹ Indeed, during the Late Period (first millennium BCE) in Egypt, enslaved people directly owned by the royal treasury were called nemeh, or “orphan.”¹¹²

Trade in enslaved people thus involved an intriguing symmetry. In most of the “primitive” societies we have studied, enslaved people were outsiders, and trade in these societies was undertaken with outsiders. Trade, slavery, and money were thus all connected in a circuit of alienation; they were constituted in relationships outside of and alien to the societies from which traders came. Slave trading was thus the exchange of (socially dead) outsiders with other outsiders to whom one owed no communal obligations. And money, as the means of conducting such trade, was a medium for these alienated social interactions. It should come as little surprise, then, that in many societies, enslaved people have also served as money, or at least as a measure of value. Given their frequent status as the primary items of trade, enslaved people readily became the item by which other goods were measured. We observe this sort of slave-money in a wide range of societies, including many in precolonial and colonial Africa, in the Pacific Northwest of what is now Canada, among the Obydo people of what is now Brazil, and, perhaps most famously, in early Christian Ireland.¹¹³

The Irish monetary system of the early Christian era pivoted on a dual metric. The most common measure of value was the sét, which referred to a head of cattle. Above that, the highest unit of value was the cumal, whose literal meaning is “female slave.” Fines for bodily injuries were often established in cumal, as were prices for land, even though typically no enslaved people changed hands in any of these purchases and sales. Just as enslaved people were abstracted from their communities—indeed one of the oldest Latin meanings of the verb abstract is “to separate or pull away”—so the cumal provided an abstract standard by which the value of other things could be measured. The violent abstraction inherent in slavery thus transformed enslaved-people-as-things into a generic measure of value, into a metric for expressing the value of one thing relative to another. Exchange value, as Marx demonstrated, is expressed in quantity, not quality. On the market, a thing represents an amount of money—not an amount of beauty, nourishment, warmth, et cetera. It is with money, in appropriate quantities, that we can buy the things of life. Money thus acquires the quality of being a measure-in-general (and ultimately of general exchangeability with all things). Its unique “quality” is to embody pure quantitativeness. Clearly, only those human beings who had been dispossessed of the qualities of personhood could serve as money, as measures of abstract quantity. Suggestively, enslaved people shared with coins the fact of being branded, of bearing signs imprinted on their surfaces. It is even said of the Samian prisoners of war captured by Athens in 439 BCE that they were branded with an owl, the very sign with which Athenian coins were marked.¹¹⁴ Enslaved people and coins, interchangeable in everyday life, shared the characteristic of being emblazoned with insignias of state power.

We see these social processes codified in Roman law, where ownership is defined as dominium (power or domination) over a res (a thing). It is significant that the word dominus originally meant “slave master,” not “owner.” But as the concept of absolute property was developed, dominus came to refer to one who owned anything that could be considered private property. Meanwhile, an enslaved person came to be a res in law, “the only human res,” as Patterson notes.¹¹⁵

But law here followed the social phenomenology of everyday life in slave society. After all, the same linguistic convention prevailed in Rome as in Greece, where enslaved people were frequently described as somata, particularly in documents of sale, and of manumission. Historian Keith Hopkins cites multiple texts in this idiom, including one specifying, “sold to Pythian Apollo, the female body whose name is Pistis” for “a price of four and a half mnae [450 drachmas],” as well as a manumission statement that described the freeing of “two female bodies whose names are Onasiphoron and Sotero.”¹¹⁶ Like work animals, enslaved people functioned as bodies that extended the corporeal reach and powers of the slave owner. For Aristotle, what enslaved people share with “tame animals” is that both “help with their bodies to supply our essential needs.”¹¹⁷ Referring to how Roman masters were transported by people they enslaved, Pliny the Elder remarked, “We walk with the feet of other people.”¹¹⁸ So identified were enslaved people with animal bodies that Athenian and Roman laws meant to protect buyers against unseen defects applied to the purchase of both animals and enslaved people.¹¹⁹ As the esteemed jurist Gaius observed, “The statute treats equally our slaves and our four-footed cattle which are kept in herds.”¹²⁰ With such conflations of humans and beasts of burden in mind, Marx quipped that the slaveholder purchases an enslaved person “in the same way as he buys his horse.”¹²¹

Purchase, of course, was preceded by examination—often by inspection of enslaved people displayed on a platform, known as a catastra, of the sort to which Cicero alludes in his letter to Atticus. Roman law required that essential information about an enslaved person be hung on a label around their neck, and it was common practice for the potential buyer to poke, prod, and unclothe the enslaved in order to discern the qualities of the commodity on display. Undressing also operated as a crucial act of degradation, a way of stripping the enslaved of everything that made them social beings. Recounting his “day of slavery,” the great Odysseus tells Eumaeus, “They stripped from my back the shirt and cloak I wore, decked me out in a new suit of clothes, all rags, ripped and filthy” (Odyssey, 14:386–88). Enforced disrobing operated as an essential moment in the “secular excommunication” that rendered the enslaved culturally bare.¹²² The semiotics of nakedness functioned to negate personhood and the elements of social belonging defined by dress. By eliminating the individual’s social skin, masters were empowered to take control of the very identity of the bonded person. So naturalized was this mode of domination that even Seneca, who viewed enslaved people less inhumanely than many of his contemporaries, casually compared buying enslaved people to the purchase of a horse, recommending that the purchaser “pull off the garments from slaves that are advertised for sale, so that no bodily flaws may escape your notice.”¹²³

Buyers inspected for height, strength, wounds, disease, and beauty. Yet, notwithstanding the appraisal of specific qualities, the enslaved body was in fact being quantitatively assessed. As much as it inscribed an order of domination, qualitative assessment of the enslaved person was intended to arrive at a price, a quantitative measure. “No less for buyer than seller,” notes one historian, “the slave was his or her price, and thus comparable to any other slave, despite differences of age, sex, origin, appearance.”¹²⁴ Monetary price was the metric for all enslaved people; each had a cost in a common measure of value, be it units of oxen, pieces of gold, or silver coins. A price having been established and a sale transacted, the change in ownership of the enslaved body might be marked by a brand or tattoo. Just as branding was a claim of ownership, so were chains, as the god Pluto acknowledges in Aristophanes’ play The Frogs when he remarks, “And branded and fettered the slaves shall go.”¹²⁵ Slavery was literally written on the body, and it was regularly reinscribed in the course of daily practices of degradation. Nothing more fundamentally distinguished the enslaved from the citizen in classical Greece and Rome than the bodily imprints of power that they bore. If anything symbolized both the exercise of masterly power and the distinction between citizen and enslaved, it was the whip, as it would in modern slavery.¹²⁶ But corporeal domination did not end with the whip. Branding, manacles, fetters, neck chains, and slave prisons were all elements of the technology of power, while flogging, burning, and racking figured among its practices.¹²⁷ Brutality against enslaved bodies encoded a banality of violence intrinsic to Greco-Roman culture. In his Memorabilia, Xenophon describes Socrates asking his interlocutor Aristippus whether in dealing with recalcitrant enslaved people, prudent masters “keep them from running away by putting them in bonds, and drive away their laziness with the compulsion of blows?” To which Aristippus replies, “I punish him with everything bad … until I compel him to serve as a slave.”¹²⁸

“Until I compel him to serve as a slave”: this pithy response encapsulates a whole program of social domination. What is stunning about the exchange is precisely its ordinariness, the utterly mundane quality of a dialogue about the use of “bonds” and “the compulsion of blows.” Consider also Aristophanes’ comedic commentary on brutality against enslaved people, which enumerates the use of chains, shackles, beatings, branding, whipping, and starvation.¹²⁹ The Frogs is a particularly striking play in this regard, as it pivots on a carnivalesque inversion, a role reversal in which the god Dionysus appears as a slave, and his slave Xanthias as his master. In order to avoid arrest, Xanthias (misrepresenting himself as Dionysius) offers to give over his slave (in actuality the god Dionysus) for torture. The dialogue that follows returns us to the term basanos. Challenged as to the truth of his tale, Xanthias promises, “I’ll let you torture [basanize] this slave of mine.” The judge on the scene replies, “What kind of torture do you suggest, sir?” To which Xanthias responds: “Oh, give him the whole works. Rack, thumbscrew, gallows, cat-o’-nine-tails: pour vinegar up his nostrils, pile bricks on his chest—anything you like. Only don’t hit him with a leek or a fresh spring onion. I won’t stand for that—brings tears to my eyes.”¹³⁰

The absurdity of the final sentences packs a comedic effect. So much so that it is easy to ignore the sheer cruelty of what precedes it—an inventory of instruments of physical torture, whose usage against an enslaved person was entirely routine. Similarly, the use of basanos to describe legal torture of an enslaved person makes it easy to forget the earlier connection of the term to the authenticity of money. Yet, symptomatically perhaps, Aristophanes’ play itself returns to this question. Act I of The Frogs ends with a speech by the leader of the play’s chorus. He declares:

I’ll tell you what I think about the way

This city treats her soundest men today

By a coincidence more sad than funny

It’s very like the way we treat our money

Coins that rang true, clean-stamped and worth their weight

Throughout the world, have ceased to circulate.

Instead the purses of Athenian shoppers

Are full of shoddy, silver-plated coppers.

Having compared the integrity of coinage to the soundness of men, the leader goes on to lament the debasement of money, specifically the substitution of silver-plated copper coins for fully silver ones. Then, he compares debased coinage to the sort of men being celebrated in Athens:

Just so, when men are needed by the nation,

The best have been withdrawn from circulation.

Men of good birth and breeding, men of parts,

Well-schooled in wrestling and in gentler arts,

These we abuse, and trust instead to knaves,

Newcomers, aliens, copper-plated slaves. ¹³¹

Here is a straightforward equation of high-quality money with human nobility. By the last line, foreigners and enslaved people are likened to copper, reflecting a long-standing elitist idiom in which purity of character was linked to the most coveted precious metals, and impurity to the most commonplace metals. Aristocratic discourse allied nobility to gold, and inferiority to copper, with silver occupying an intermediate position—precisely the hierarchy deployed by Plato in the myth of metals in his Republic. In the passage above, Aristophanes cleverly adapts the analogy between virtuous character and purity of metal. He modifies the aristocratic schema, however, by making the silver coinage produced by the polis the supreme standard of value, signaling the strength of democratic values at the time. Yet, the poet fears that this high-quality silver coinage, the “gold standard” of a nonaristocratic order, is in the throes of degradation. Linking noble character to silver coins, Aristophanes worries that virtue and money are being simultaneously devalued, “knaves” being celebrated at the expense of “men of good birth and breeding,” just as copper coins (with silver plating) are being treated as equivalent to pure silver. More than merely associating the quality of persons with that of money, the playwright also worries that commerce damages the value of both by rewarding greed, rather than virtue. “In everything it’s clear that money talks,” intones a character in another of his plays,¹³² expressing a critical tension in the dialectic of monetization.

While provoking anxieties, monetized relations also elevated the principle of abstract generality as a primary “way of seeing”—the comparison of all (or most) things with money. We see this not merely in Attic comedy, but also in philosophy, where Socrates, a philosopher ostensibly beyond the influence of commerce, nevertheless conflates money and character. This occurs when Xenophon describes the philosopher’s comparison of free men to enslaved in terms of their monetary value. “Have friends like servants their own values?” Socrates asks an interlocutor. “For one servant, I suppose, may be worth two minas, another no less than ten…. So I am led to inquire whether friends may not differ in value.”¹³³ Conspicuous here is Socrates’ conflation of the pricing of enslaved people—whose value may vary from two minas to ten—with estimates of the value of free men. In his Republic Plato famously used the myth of metals—a quintessentially aristocratic grammar—in order to justify inequality and the exclusion of the masses from political decision making. Yet Socrates here elides these premises by generalizing the monetary principle and discussing the value of free men by comparison with the metric that applies to enslaved people—monetary prices. Rather than ascribing each group a different value measure—gold for the elite, copper for the masses, silver for the middling sort—Socrates advances here a common measure of the worth of free men and enslaved people. This might seem to introduce an egalitarian element into Plato’s philosophy. Yet, this would be an egalitarianism modeled on the commodity form—an abstracted sameness in which people represent different quantities of the same substance (monetary value). Ironically, the critical-utopian charge that is identifiable in Platonic thought derives largely from its attempt to conceive of the “good life” as requiring a society beyond the self-interested calculations of monetary acquisition and accumulation, a point to which we shall return. Here, however, Socratic thinking is enmeshed in monetary calculation.

As much as aristocratic thinkers like Socrates resisted the “leveling” effects of democracy, they moved in a social universe inscribed by money, under whose influence philosophy increasingly imagined the world as consisting of universal substances or forms¹³⁴—which also predisposed them to conceptualize persons and things as subsumed by the universal form of money. These are symptoms of a society with a full-fledged universal equivalent, whose metrics infiltrate manifold spheres of everyday life, from the cost of enslaved people to the relative values of friends. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. To fully explore the meanings of monetization, we must revisit the emergence of money itself in ancient Greece.