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.
CHAPTER 2
The Law of the Body
Money and the State
Across human societies, early forms of money have consisted of things that sustain the body (grain, barley, corn, cattle), things that adorn and decorate the body (shells, gold, silver), and things that assist the body in producing the things of life (hand tools of various sorts). Perhaps more than anything else, money has been comprised of foodstuffs, the very fuel of the body. It is no accident, therefore, that we use terms like circulation to describe the movement of money through the social organism, just as we use it for the flow of nutrition within the individual body. Indeed, the greatest political economists of the mid-eighteenth century, the French physiocrats, built a theoretical model whose central concept was the “circular flow” of wealth through the economy.1 Like blood, wealth was said to flow, circulate, and nourish. The original material and semiotic link between blood and money may be located at this juncture.
In ancient Greece, money had such deep roots in communal practices of food sharing that the common meal has been described as “the first money in our culture.”2 Common meals reproduce the body politic by bringing people together in ceremonies for the sharing of food, as well as of memories, recreation, and folklore. It comes as no surprise, then, that money in Greece was often symbolically represented by food and other sources of subsistence, like bulls and olive sprigs. And in a monetized society, of course, it is often better to receive the symbol than the substance: to have money rather than food. For money in such contexts is the means of access to virtually all of life’s necessaries. For this reason, it comprises a vital element of the second nature through which such societies reproduce themselves; it is part of a human-created web of technologies, practices, and institutions that are indispensable to societal life.3 All of these social artifacts constitute a sort of second body for fostering the daily reproduction of people. And, like tools, technologies, and social institutions, money is a bodily extension that can become autonomous of its corporeal base. In modern capitalism, money becomes an alienated power, one that dominates the reproduction of human life.
Ancient monetized economies were not, of course, capitalist ones. The latter emerge where the reproduction of both laborers and owners has become market dependent, and thus inherently mediated by alienated value forms.4 Thus, as Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács noted, as much as “Greek philosophy was no stranger to reification,” it did not experience these “as universal forms of existence.”5 Even when regularly engaged in market exchange, the peasant producers of ancient Greece were not, as a rule, compelled to reproduce themselves by means of the systematic sale of their produce through the market—in large measure because the revolts of the demos had blocked mass dispossession of the poor and the market dependence it creates. Only in the entirely self-reproducing monetary economy (capitalism) does money become a full-fledged substitute for the body, which happens once capital has directly subsumed the bodies of workers to its own reproduction.6 In capitalist society, money directs and labor obeys. The modern capitalist, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel explained, operates as “producer” of commodities “not by way of labour, not with his hands, not by tools or machines which he operates. He performs it with his money.”7 Money enables this by taking command of the labor of others. Its social power resides in the domination of their bodies (as repositories of labor power). In the fully developed capitalist mode of production, this happens primarily by way of its domination of wage labor. To be sure, it can also occur through command over slave labor. But typically, slave labor in ancient society—unlike plantation slavery in the New World—was not commodity producing, notwithstanding slave-based silver mining in Greece or agricultural slavery in the Roman Empire. On the whole, in the Greco-Roman world, the work of the enslaved—predominantly women—largely produced use values (including sexual “favors”) for immediate consumption.
If money had roots in food-sharing rituals in ancient Greece, then we need to track the specific social transformations that made possible its emergence as an increasingly autonomous social power. Food-sharing rituals are widespread across human cultures, after all, and rarely in archaic and ancient societies did they give rise to full-fledged money. It required the specific ways in which generalized reciprocity broke down in ancient Greece to open up the space for new modes of social integration and the emergence of money.
From Food to Metals: The Emergence of Money in Ancient Greece
As the epics demonstrate, food sharing was the basis of reciprocity in ancient Greece. At an ancient panegyris (festive gathering), everyone participated in processions, songs, prayers, feasts, and competitions, and all brought an abundance of food to be shared during the dais (communal feast). Such occasions were certainly opportunities for aristocratic display, with a great man contributing sheep and oxen, much as a male head-of-house did in the oikos.8 But these were also egalitarian gatherings of commoners. Even where they took place at the home of a noble man, the focal point was the sacrifice of an animal, typically an ox or a goat, whose flesh and blood were shared by all. Animal sacrifices were deeply sacred acts, involving offerings to nature and the gods, and may have been substitutes for earlier practices involving the killing of persons, even members of the royal family. In this regard, they observed a social logic of substitution, with non-human animals being offered to the gods in place of human sacrifices.9 As I show below, such a logic of substitution is observed in the history of money, along a chain that runs: people → animals → roasting utensils → coins. And this chain of substitutions returns us to the crisis of reciprocity in ancient Greece.
Sacrificial rituals for augmenting the fertility of humans and extra-human nature have been widespread across human cultures, including the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. In Egypt, Persia, and Mesopotamia, a sacred status was ascribed to bulls, and their sacrifice served as a ceremonial payment to the gods who regulated food supply and human procreation, while also providing meat for communal feasts. In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus, associated with blood, wine, and fertility, is frequently depicted as a bull. Moreover, Greek tragedy may have originated in spring rites meant to celebrate the planting of crops and, crucially, in the ritual killing and eating of a sacred bull.10 During the City Dionysia at Athens—a five- or six-day festival organized by officials of the polis during the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries—scores of oxen were sacrificed, and an image of Dionysus was escorted to the theater and placed in the orchestra, while select young men led a prized bull into the theater precinct.11 And at Magnesia, in Asia Minor, the stewards of the city purchased a bull at the annual fair in the fall, then sacrificed it in the spring as part of a huge feast.12 As symbols of blood and fertility, bulls were associated with the gods. But in their consumption at the great feasts, their flesh and blood literally flowed through the community, enabling both the physical and social reproduction of its members, and reminding us again of the connection of blood to money. Given their semiotic and material circulation through the community, it is not difficult to see how bulls might come to symbolize wealth in general.
An argument along these lines was first advanced by German historian Bernhard Laum in the 1920s.13 Laum handily demolished the idea that the origin of money as a unit of account in ancient Greece derived from an item’s use as a means of exchange. After all, the inconveniences of using cattle as a medium, passed from person to person,