Returning to markets and money, we observe that tyrants frequently encouraged the growth of trade and colonization, perhaps as sources of funding for a new kind of state. After all, the new infrastructures of public space and power all came with considerable costs, whether these were used to expand the agora, construct temples, foster urban festivals, create water systems, or finance warfare. But if trade and colonization were to provide the wealth indispensable to emergent forms of governance, they could more readily do so if they were integrated into monetary circuits dominated by state-sanctioned means of payment and exchange. The advantage of coinage is that it can incorporate flows of wealth into monetary forms that are authorized by civic authority and that bear emblems of public office. Coinage is publicly produced at the discretion of civic authorities, not noblemen. Just as politics were increasingly recentered—shifting from the noble oikos and the aristocratic symposium toward the agora and the assembly—so were the circuits of wealth, as coins bearing the authority of the city-state displaced precious metals exchanged between aristocratic households. In addition to assisting political authorities in collecting their “cut,” both processes also involved a visibilization of power crucial to emergent democracy. As centers of political life, the agora and the assembly undercut the relative invisibility of aristocratic households as bastions of private power, much as coinage visibilized economic transactions. These processes simultaneously involved transformations in religious life.
“In archaic Greece,” it has been rightly observed, “religion was the sphere of public activity par excellence.”67 But the nature of such activity was undergoing major renovations by the seventh century BCE, as we have observed. The building of temples, the creation of new state-run festivals, the growth of the agora, and the delineation of law created a new public sphere—the collective space of peasant-citizens—meant to displace the power of the aristocratic household. The upsurge in temple building in the late eighth century involved large communal efforts that accompanied the political rise of the demos.68 By the time of Solon’s reforms (the 590s BCE), the polis and urban religion were advancing together, as exemplified in the erection of stone temples, the reorganization of festivals, and dedications of marble statues. All were processes that were extended under the tyrannies of Peisistratus and his sons, who dominated most of the half century from 561 to 510, and which made religion more accessible to all.69
Under Peisistratus, the city festivals, known as Panathenaea, were revamped, as was the City Dionysia, which also became the platform for the performance of tragedies.70 All of these remodeled urban festivals, with their games, processions, sacrifices, and performances, as classical historian Robert Parker notes, were “unthinkable outside the context of the developed polis, with its civic consciousness and pride.”71 As much as reforming tyrants may have reworked the grammar of festivity to legitimate their rule, they could only succeed by adapting their reforms to the growing civic consciousness of the demos. Through the city-state, the demos applied pressure on the rich to publicly contribute tribal dinners to their less well-off colleagues during the Panathenaea and the City Dionysia.72 Private wealth was thereby rendered accountable to a polis that expressed a new civic consciousness.
This visibilization of power also involved a spatial revolution, and places of assembly, ritual celebration, theater, and market activity were fundamental to the development of the city-state around 600 BCE. Much of this was incarnated in the physical stuff of building materials, as Athens went from being a city of brick to one of marble and limestone. The expansion of the agora and the erection of temples were accompanied by the construction of a new theater of Dionysia to accommodate tragic performances.73 Such spatial transformations invariably involve economies of human labor and expenditures of wealth to pay wages, and to purchase tools and building materials. After their construction, many of the activities conducted within these public spaces also required ongoing expenditures, from the purchase of meat for festivals to the payment of poets for their performances. Tellingly, the new festivals substituted cash prizes for competitions, making monetary payments to poets in place of precious metal gifts like goblets or cauldrons.74
In addition, the preeminent Greek coin—the Athenian owl, first produced around 515 BCE—carried the seal of the polis and was backed by its laws. Monetization was thus as much about new practices related to law, religion, and the state as it was about novel patterns of trade. Nevertheless, the owl was legendary for the purity of its silver content, which in part enabled it to become the first real world money, accepted throughout the whole of the Mediterranean trading region (and regularly copied by other states) because of its intrinsic value. Archaeologists have found owls in southern Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, and Afghanistan.75 Athens’s owl coins thus represented a unique fusion of political and economic dynamics: they bore the imprint of a powerful state that could enforce their circulation within its sovereign domain; and they were made of such high-quality silver that they were widely accepted by merchants, state officials, and others far beyond the field of Athenian jurisdiction. They thus represented money’s first full-fledged modular form, metallic coinage.
Before proceeding, it is essential to pause and underline key facts about the production of the Athenian owl. As we have observed, the enduring value of the coins had much to do with the purity of their silver content, which was consistently maintained across the decades. To acquire general exchangeability in an age of nascent monetization, coinage needed a foundation in earlier forms of wealth, particularly precious metals. However—and this is decisive—for much of its history, the silver that comprised the owls came from Attica’s silver mines at Laurium. And these mines were worked by probably the largest concentration of enslaved people to be found in the Greek world—perhaps as many as thirty thousand in the late fourth century BCE.76 In terms of the activity that produced them, the value of Athenian owls—which created the dominant modular form of money for nearly twenty-five hundred years—was therefore rooted in the past labor of thousands of enslaved people. The original world money was tethered to the toil of enslaved bodies. Equally crucial, the reach of this world money owed more to war than it did to trade, more to blood than it did to markets. Like enslaved people, soldiers were acquired through money. And in this connection between soldiers and enslaved people, we are returned to the question of money and bondage.
Coins and Armies
More than one historian has argued that coins were first produced in Lydia in order to pay Greek mercenary soldiers.77 There is a powerful insight here. Yet, to acknowledge the pronounced significance of mercenary payments in the ancient history of monetization need not commit us to mono-causal explanation. Like every complex historical process, the emergence of coinage involved the interweaving of multiple, reciprocally reinforcing historical “causes” whose results were never predetermined. Such processes have logics of retro-determination that can be reconstructed after the fact. Once coinage arose as a multifaceted “solution” to particular historical problems—both political and economic—its emergence clarified tendencies at work earlier and established an after-the-fact path dependency. As Marx observed in this regard, “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the