Blood and Money. David McNally

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