When they had offered prayers and sprinkled the barley-grains, first they pulled back the victims’ heads and slaughtered them and flayed them: and they cut out the thigh bones and covered them with fat…. The old man burned them on cut firewood, and poured
libations of
gleaming wine, while the young men stood by with five-tanged forks in their hands.
Then when
the thighs were burnt up and they had tasted the innards, they chopped the rest into
pieces and
threaded them on spits, and roasted them carefully, and then drew all the meat off.
When they
had finished their work and prepared the meal, they set to eating, and no man’s desire went without an equal share in the feast (Iliad, 1.447–76).
Note that this ritual feast begins with prayers to the gods. After that, the victims are slaughtered and properly prepared for roasting, which is overseen by an elder who pours wine—another symbol of life and of the god Dionysus—over the meat. The young men carry five-pronged forks, utensils vital to the banquet. Next, the meat is threaded onto roasting spits, implements which would eventually become a sort of proto-money. Finally, the men sit down to eat, each receiving an “equal” share.
The idea that everyone at the feast received an equal share can be found frequently in the epics (e.g., Odyssey, 19.481). And while the egalitarian sentiments in circulation by the eighth century should not be underestimated,15 it may be that the equality in question here was a proportionate, rather than an arithmetic, one: each individual’s portion being relative to (equivalent with) their social standing, with priests and aristoi receiving the largest amounts.16 A similar description of feasting can be found in the Odyssey (3.510–30). Not only does this all look highly ordered, even lawlike; more telling, one meaning of the fifth-century BCE Greek word for law, nomos, was distribution. At the root of law in the democratic polis, we thus find the idea of appropriate sharing in a communal meal: the just allocation of food. A just republic is therefore defined as one in which wealth is properly shared. We glimpse here the reason why, from its inception, the democratic norm of justice has been tied to distribution. And, as we shall see, the word for money—nomisma—carries this semantic charge as well.
In addition to its long-standing link to distribution, the word nomos involved a whole series of connotations that suggested order, way of life, societal norms, and appropriate social relations.17 The social order in question was shared by both men and gods, who communicated and exchanged gifts with one another. The human side of this equation required sacrifices and feasts, often the responsibility of priests associated with hereditary groups known as gene (singular: genos). These esteemed private citizens continued to preside over communal rituals even as the democratic polis developed throughout the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, when city-funded festivals came to dominate the Athenian calendar.18 From Solon’s early sixth-century reforms on, religious life and public ritual were increasingly governed by the city-state rather than noble households. The laws of distribution, nomoi, were regulated by public officials, working with the priests of the temple, as were the rites observed in sacrifices. Crucially, payments to the gods were matters of sacred custom, governed by civic statutes, not market relations. People did not haggle with the gods; they repaid the debt of life according to community norms.19 While they did indeed foreshadow money, communal disbursements of meat did not originate in barter or commerce. As much as sacrifices were a sort of payment to the gods, their domain was that of the divine, not the market. They were holy obligations, not exchange values.
Law, Money, the Body … and War
Another way that money emanates from the body stems from the body’s role as the foundational site of justice. Life and liberty are fundamentally corporeal, involving conditions of human survival and the exercise of bodily powers in the world around us. This is why the very language of justice in the polis is steeped in the idea of a proper distribution of the goods of life. In ancient legal codes more generally, the body is omnipresent, with crimes against the body dominating the law, and with transgressors subject to corporal punishment and confinement. Justice and injustice were written on the body. Indeed, bodily mutilation may have been the most common of archaic punishments.20 It is equally noteworthy, however, that antique codes also provided for a significant interchangeability of money with the body.
One study of seventeen ancient law collections—including the Babylonian Laws of Eshnunna (ca. 1770 BCE) and Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BCE), as well as the Roman Twelve Tables (450 BCE)—shows the substitution of monetary penalties for corporal punishment to have been widespread, and based on the social rank of the victim. In the Laws of Eshnunna, for instance, if a man causes the death of another man’s wife or child, the penalty is capital punishment. If he causes the death of an enslaved woman, however, his own life is not imperiled; instead, he must turn over two enslaved women as compensation. Under the same codes, if a dog or an ox, whose owner has been previously warned, causes the death of a man, the owner shall be fined forty shekels of silver. If the dog or ox kills an enslaved person, the fine is reduced by nearly two-thirds, to fifteen shekels. In the Code of Hammurabi, written two decades later, a lender who beats to death a debtor’s male child must turn over his own son to be killed in return. In the event that he kills someone enslaved by a debtor, he must pay the borrower twenty shekels and forgive the loan.21 In the last case, we observe money’s substitution for bodily injury according to the social valuation of the life involved. Where enslaved people were concerned, of course, money and life were always interchangeable. But this monetary principle infiltrated the domain of law and justice in complex ways.22 We see this especially in the custom of wergild, widespread in ancient Germanic law, in which monetary payments substituted for corporal punishment or death for legal offenses.
This practice of monetary substitution was widespread throughout the ancient world, beyond the examples cited above. Broadly similar arrangements can be observed in the Hittite codes of Central Anatolia (today’s Turkey), from about 1400 BCE; the laws set forth in Exodus of the Old Testament; the Law Code of Gortyn (Crete, ca. 480–450 BCE); and the Twelve Tables of Rome, which were almost contemporary with the Code of Gortyn.23 We also find clear references to such practices in Homer, where Ajax recounts men having accepted payment, rather than direct retribution, for the murder of their brothers and sons (Iliad, 9.632–36). These norms for measuring the value of bodies and lives originated at least as much in the domain of law as that of the market.
While it is misleading to see in these ancient codes a long history of “commodification” of persons24—largely because none of these “prices” was determined by market relations—it is certainly true that these codes exhibit a set of values attached to persons and their body parts. Indeed, in ancient law, unique “prices” (monetary penalties) were often set for disfiguring, breaking, tearing off, or mutilating eyes, fingers, teeth, bones, and so on. All these body parts acquired monetary values in codes that originated with the state. And it was not just legal penalties that were state regulated. In the Laws of Eshnunna, the itemization of financial penalties was laid out in concert with the determination of wages—that is, the price for “renting” someone’s body.25 The state also decreed prices for food and subsistence goods, the very stuff of corporeal existence. These state-regulated wage rates and prices were certainly money values of a sort, but they were not market-determined prices, as commerce was not an autonomous domain of social life. The same was true