Money (42 page)

  
1.
Mitchell Innes, 1914, p. 155.

  
2.
B. Applebaum, “A Life’s Value May Depend on the Agency, but It’s Rising: As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret,”
New York Times
, 16 February 2011.

  
3.
These verses announce that the cup is the famous drinking vessel belonging to the Homeric hero Nestor—and thereby represent an example of instant sophistication of technique to rival Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
, since this earliest extant specimen of Greek writing is also both the earliest literary allusion—to a passage of the
Iliad
—and the earliest ironic subversion of such an allusion—since the Homeric cup of Nestor was so large and ornate it could barely be lifted, whilst the inscribed
cup is a modest clay bowl. See Murray, O., 1993, pp. 92–101 for further details on the transmission of literacy and its impact.

  
4.
The modern fountainhead of the analysis of the impact of literacy on Greek culture is Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s 1963 article “The Consequences of Literacy,” reprinted in Goody, J., 1968. Goody and Watt were anthropologists, rather than ancient historians—and their hypotheses were strongly influenced by the anthropological research of the Soviet psychologist Alfred Luria, who made an extraordinary study of the cognitive effects of the transition from oral to literate culture in the unique circumstances to be found in Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s (collected in English in his 1976
Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Development
). The Jesuit Walter Ong’s
Orality and Literacy
, 1982, was another foundational contribution. The subject has since come to be seen as fundamental for the understanding of archaic Greek history: see Murray, O., 1993, pp. 98–101 for a concise discussion.

  
5.
Of course, it was not only the flow of new technologies from the ancient Near East that catalysed this intellectual revolution: there were substantive borrowings as well. See West, 1971.

  
6.
Murray, O., 1993, p. 248.

  
7.
Nissen, Damerow, and Englund, 1993, p. 51.

  
8.
The hypothesis that it was the particular ritual of sacrificial distribution that provided the raw material for the idea of universal economic value can hardly be conclusively proved. Nevertheless, the case in its favour is not limited to its unusual role in expressing the equality of the individual within the tribe. There is also important circumstantial evidence: the earliest Greek monetary units were the
obol
—the term for the spits on which celebrants’ portions of the sacrificial meat were distributed—and the
drachma
—which originally meant “a handful,” presumably of such spits. See Parker, 1996, for details of the ritual itself; Seaford, 1994, and Seaford, 2004, for the exposition of the theory from which the hypothesis here is derived. Evidence in favour of the general hypothesis that abstract monetary units derive originally from social institutions of this broad type has been provided by Grierson, 1977; Grierson’s famous lecture made an analogous case for the origins of medieval European monetary units in the similarly egalitarian political ideology of the Germanic tribes of the European Dark Ages, ritualised in that case via the institution of wergild, the conventional compensation for personal injury.

  
9.
See, for example,
Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum
XII. 391, quoted in von Reden, 2010, p. 36.

10.
Plutarch,
Solon
, 23.4, quoted in von Reden, 2010, p. 37.

11.
Jeffrey, L. H. and Morpurgo Davies, A. in
Kadmos
, 1970, fig. 1, side A; cited in von Reden, 2010, p. 36.

12.
Peter Spufford has demonstrated the intrinsic connection between money and markets in the Middle Ages in his 1988
Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe
: “One of the striking phenomena of the tenth century in both Germany and England is the great number of new commercial centres deliberately created by imperial or royal fiat … The twin grants of the rights to hold a market and to operate a mint added a new dimension to urban life … Market and mint went together. The market was not for barter, but for selling and buying with money, and to provide for this a mint was needed” (p. 75). Of one of the very earliest specific examples of such a grant—to the Abbey of St. Gall by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I in 947, he writes “Mint and market are firmly linked together. Without money there can be no market” (p. 77).

13.
Kim, H., “Archaic Coinage as Evidence for the Use of Money,” p. 8, in Meadows and Shipton, 2001. The earliest Lydian coinage was minted from electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. Most Greek coins were minted from silver—though base metals were sometimes used as well.

14.
Von Reden, 2010, p. 40.

15.
The first experience of monetisation in Europe, that is. It appears that money may have been invented, independently of the Greeks, in India and China as well—to say nothing of the controversy over whether it was in fact invented in the ancient Near East.

16.
Pindar,
Isthmian
, 2.11–12. The sentiment evidently resonated widely, however: Alcaeus too quoted it in one of his poems: see Seaford, 2004, p. 161.

17.
Or as Parry and Bloch put it: “By a remarkable conceptual revolution … the values of the short-term order have become elaborated into a theory of long-run reproduction. What our culture (like others) had previously made room for in a separate and subordinate domain has, in some quarters at least, been turned into a theory of the encompassing order—a theory in which it is
only
unalloyed private vice that can sustain the public benefit,” Parry and Bloch, 1989, p. 29.

18.
This and the following examples are taken from M. Sandel, “What isn’t for sale?”
The Atlantic
, April 2012. Available at:
http://​www.​theatlantic.​com/​magazine/​archive/​2012/​04/​what-​isn-​8217-​t-​for-​sale/​8902/
.

19.
The statement (“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life”) is attributed to Cecil Rhodes by Peter Ustinov in chapter 4 of his 1977 autobiography,
Dear Me
. Elsewhere it is attributed to Rudyard Kipling.

20.
Sandel, 2012.

21.
Locke, 2009, chapter 11, §106.

  
1.
De la Torre, Levy Yeyati and Schmukler, 2003.

  
2.
T. Catan, “Argentina Snowed under by Paper IOUs: Pesos or Pacificos? A Dizzying Array of Quasi-currencies Now Fill up the Tills,”
Financial Times
, 11 April 2002. The peso was Argentina’s currency. The
lecops
, or
Letra de Cancelacion de Obligaciones Provinciales
was a peso-denominated quasi-currency issued by the Argentine National Treasury. The
patacon
, or
Letra de Tesoreria para Cancelacion de Obligaciones
was a peso-denominated quasi-currency issued by the Treasury of the Province of Buenos Aires. Eleven other provinces and cities issued their own quasi-currencies. See De la Torre, et al., 2003, p. 77.

  
3.
Colacelli and Blackburn, 2006, p. 4, fn. 8.

  
4.
L’Armée des Ombres
—“The Army of Shadows”—is the title of a famous account of the Maquis by Joseph Kessels published in 1943 and filmed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969.

  
5.
IMF, “Introductory remarks on the Role of the IMF Mission in Argentina by Anoop Singh, Director for Special Operations, IMF,” Press Briefing, Buenos Aires, 10 April 2002. Available at
http://​www.​imf.​org/​external/​np/​tr/​2002/​tr020410.​htm
.

  
6.
Aukutsionek, 1998.

  
7.
Ryabchenko, P., “Talony vmeste deneg,”
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
, 13 October 1998, quoted in Caroline Humphrey’s chapter in Seabright, 2000, p. 290.

  
8.
Seabright, 2000.

  
9.
WIR Bank Annual Report 2011, summarised in press release at
www.​wir.​ch
.

10.
Indeed, one can learn a lot about money from this, one of its simplest incarnations—as the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman often points out. A famous analysis of what one can learn—and the one which initially captured Krugman’s attention—is Sweeney and Sweeney, 1977.

11.
There are historical examples of just this happening during the early 1930s in Europe, when mutual credit networks gained widespread popularity as a means to escape the economic depression. In Germany for example, the owner of a mine in the Bavarian town of Schwanenkirchen put a scrip currency into circulation, with spectacular economic results: “[N]ews of the town’s prosperity in the midst of depression-ridden Germany spread quickly,” wrote the American economist Irving Fisher; “[f]rom all over the country reporters came to see and write about the ‘Miracle of Schwanenkirchen.’ ” When the news reached the German government in November 1931, it passed an emergency law banning all private scrip money. See Greco, 2001, p. 64 ff.

12.
Constitution of the United States
, Article 1, Section 8, states that “The Congress shall have power … to coin money, [and] regulate the value thereof.”

13.
Even less popular have been the occasional proposals to endorse officially the co-circulation of existing national currencies. Friedrich von Hayek, for example, proposed this in von Hayek, 1976. When the U.K. Treasury adopted this policy as a serious proposal for how a transition to the euro might work in the early 1990s, it was interpreted by other EU member states as a spoiling tactic.

14.
Madison, J., 1788, “Federalist 51: The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments,” in Genovese, 2009, p. 120.

15.
The protagonist of a more recent constitutional debate also makes just this connection: “If a society were truly moral, a written constitution would hardly be necessary. The moral principles that would guarantee sound money, and our not needing a central bank to maintain it, are honesty, which would reject fraud, and keeping one’s word” (Paul, 2009, p. 149). Dr. Paul, however, believes that this Utopia is attainable.

16.
Plutarch,
Pericles
, 12; quoted in Trevett, J., “Coinage and Democracy at Athens,” in Meadows and Shipton, 2001, p. 24.

17.
Trevett, J., “Coinage and Democracy at Athens,” in Meadows and Shipton, 2001, p. 24.

18.
International Monetary Fund, 2012, Statistical Table 5, p. 65.

19.
This is the essence of the chartalist theory of money, the foundation text of which is Knapp, 1924.

20.
This is an extreme simplification of the view put forward by the great German philosopher Georg Simmel in his 1907 book,
The Philosophy of Money
, see Simmel, 1978.

21.
Plato,
Laws
5.741e–742b.

22.
This estimate of the number of Athenian citizens in the second half of the fourth century
BC
is from Hansen, 1985, pp. 67–78.

23.
Aristotle, 1932, I.3.13–14.

24.
Guanzi
73, “Guoxu” III: 70, quoted in von Glahn, 1996, p. 29. Von Glahn’s superb account of ancient Chinese monetary thought is the primary source for this section.

25.
Guanzi
74, “Shanguoshi” III: 71, quoted
ibid
., p. 33.

26.
Sima Chen, “Shi Chi 30: Treatise on the Balanced Standard,” in Watson, 1961, p. 80.

27.
Quoted in von Glahn, 1996, p. 36.

28.
Guanzi
73, “Guoxu” III: 66, quoted ibid., p. 30.

  
1.
“Others, I doubt not, shall with softer mould beat out the breathing bronze, coax from the marble features to life, plead cases with greater eloquence and with a pointer trace heaven’s motions and predict the risings of the stars: you, Roman, be sure to rule the world (be these your arts), to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and to crush the proud,” Virgil,
Aeneid
VI.847–53 (in H.R. Fairclough’s translation).

  
2.
The Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus recovered astronomical instruments from Archimedes’ academy following the sack of Syracuse—Cicero saw them in his grandson’s house—that were probably similar to the Antikythera Mechanism, the extraordinary ancient computer the workings of which were deciphered in 2006 by the international Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. The carvings on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, a Roman baking tycoon of the Augustan age, proudly depict the mechanised mass production of bread.

  
3.
Cicero,
De Officiis
, 3.59, quoted in Harris, 2008, p. 176.

  
4.
Ovid,
Ars Amatoria
, 1.428, quoted
ibid
., 2008, p. 178.

  
5.
Horace,
Ars Poetica
, l.421.

  
6.
For example, the jurist Scaevola refers to a certain banker who
paene totam fortunam in nominibus [habebat]
(“had almost his entire fortune in bonds”). The
Digest
of Justinian, 40.7.40.8. See Harris, 2006, p. 6.

  
7.
Andreau, 1999.

  
8.
Cicero,
De Officiis
, 2.87. Quoted in Jones, 2006. Janus was, of course, the two-faced god—though this did not have the same connotations for the Romans as for us.

  
9.
The law was
de modo credendi possidendique intra Italiam
(“Regulating lending and title within Italy”).

10.
Tacitus,
Annales
, 6.16.

11.
Tacitus,
Annales
, 6.17. The history of this and other banking crises is analysed in Andreau, 1999, chapter 9.

12.
See Harris, W., “The Nature of Roman Money,” in Harris, 2008, p. 205.

13.
Ibid
.

14.
Spufford, 1988, p. 9.

15.
Spufford, 2002, p. 60 ff. In the most economically advanced and politically coherent parts of Europe it had started even earlier: “… in the hinterland of Genoa and Lucca rents in kind gave way to rents in money in the course of the eleventh century, and in the Campania the exploitation of estates began with labour hired for money wages” (Spufford, 1988, p. 97).

16.
Spufford, 2002, p. 63.

17.
For example, in England, where direct taxation re-emerged at the end of the twelfth century. See Spufford, 2002, p. 65.

18.
On the impact of monetisation on social mobility and on the social roles of ambition and avarice, see in particular Murray, A., 1978.

19.
Hildebert of Lavardin
Carmina misc
., 50, quoted in Murray, A., 1978, p. 81. “Money is the man!” was the famous saying attributed to the Argive aristocrat Aristodemus, quoted both by Pindar and by Alcaeus; see
chapter 3
.

20.
Rolnick, Velde, and Weber, 1996, 797.

21.
Ibid
.

22.
Ibid
.

23.
Sumption, 2001, p. 195.

24.
Johnson, 1956.

25.
Ibid
., p. 10.

26.
Ibid
., pp. 19–20.

27.
Ibid
., p. 38.

28.
Ibid
., p. 40.

29.
Ibid
., p. 6.

30.
Ibid
., p. 17.

31.
Ibid
., p. 44.

32.
Ibid
., p. 42.