Questions of money are also questions of truth. In order to function as a means of exchange and payment, or as a measure of value, a monetary item (be it a coin or a bill) must be accepted as the real thing and not an imposter, not a counterfeit. The truth value of money is not merely a conceptual matter. Money’s validity must be realized in everyday human practice, in concrete interactions among people. A social epistemology thus accompanies money, a set of symbolic and socio-material practices for determining its veracity. At the origin of Western culture, these practices ran through the enslaved body.3
A general equivalent, let us recall—be it a silver coin, a digital inscription, or a note issued by a central bank—requires a guarantee of its integrity; to be universally accepted, it must be recognized as legitimate, as the real thing, the incarnation of wealth as such. This recognition can be fraught when new media of payment and exchange are emerging—say, banknotes in societies that have been regulated by coinage, or debit cards when they first appear as substitutes for cash. The same is true in a society in which older means of exchange, such as conventional weights of gold and silver, or iron spits and metal cauldrons, are being displaced by coins stamped by the state. And with this transition, we encounter a fascinating shift in ancient Greece with respect to the testing of money, a shift that inserted the enslaved body directly into the truth regime of money.
During the era in which coinage emerged, the authenticity of a gold coin could be checked by recourse to a basanos, a touchstone upon which pure gold, when rubbed, left a unique mark. Over time, the term basanos came to refer to the test itself, not merely the touchstone. But the most intriguing semantic shift took place sometime after silver coinage was introduced by the Athenian polis (probably in the late sixth century BCE). Having minted coins, the state also needed to protect against counterfeits, and to provide a public test of authenticity. For a period of time, testing of coins was performed publicly in the agora by a state-owned enslaved person, known as the Dokimastes, who received fifty lashes for failure to stay at his post, or for failing to test according to stipulations of the law.4 A slave’s body—always subject to the threat of violence—functioned here as the ultimate guarantee of the integrity of money. The enslaved person who served as Dokimastes became a sort of human basanos, and thus implicitly something both animate and inanimate, inhabiting an uncertain zone between the living and the dead. The epistemology of money was thus grounded in the enslaved body and the right of violence against it, in a series that went money → touchstone → slave. This direct link between truth, violence, and the enslaved body facilitated a further, somewhat jarring, semantic shift as the word basanos came to designate not a stone for testing coins, nor the test itself, but the act of torturing an enslaved person’s body in order to elicit testimony in a legal proceeding. This alteration in meaning thus connected coins and enslaved people as objects whose bodies could be vessels of truth. This was the context in which basanos came to denote the use of violence against the enslaved body to produce truth in a legal proceeding.5
Discussing this semantic evolution, classicist Page duBois writes that such a shift in meaning “is literally catachresis, the improper use of words … abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor (OED).”6 Yet, while abuse (of enslaved bodies) was certainly involved, duBois might overstate the distance between coins and the enslaved body. After all, with the Athenian coinage decree (375–4 BCE), which made the Dokimastes a touchstone for the truth of money, a legal conflation of coins and the enslaved body had occurred: force applied to one, the enslaved body, guaranteed the authenticity of the other, money. Judicial truth and the validity of money were thereby tethered to the enslaved body. We encounter here a chain of substitutions in which the enslaved body could stand in for coins, as it could for truth.
Consider also the following substitution: whereas legal penalties imposed on enslaved people in Greece were frequently paid by lashes on the body, free persons could pay monetary penalties as a substitute. A late fourth-century Attic inscription, for instance, imposed a penalty of fifty lashes on an enslaved person for cutting wood in the sacred precincts of Apollo; a free man, on the other hand, was to pay fifty drachmas for the same offense, an evident substitution of money for the (free) body.7 Surely these translations between enslaved bodies and money owed something to the fact that enslaved people were bought and sold in the market. Enslaved people, after all, were directly exchangeable with coins. And this involved an inherent ontological conflation of (at least some) persons with things—an example of which we saw with Cicero. It may not have been such an abuse of language, therefore, for the meaning of basanos to shift from a touchstone for testing gold to the judicial exercise of violence on an enslaved body. This slippage between gold and enslaved bodies discursively mimicked real circuits of exchange. However, these transactional circuits had originated within an overwhelmingly nonmonetary economy. If we want to understand how exchanges became monetized, we will need to explore the economy of violence in the heroic period. Before doing that, however, let us attend to another site in this dialectic of money, truth, and the enslaved body: ancient philosophy.
Tracking the Invisible: Philosophy and the Enslaved Body
Ancient Greek philosophy has an intriguing connection to the emergence of money. It also has a curious connection to enslaved people. Enslaved bodies were, of course, highly visible throughout Athens—in their public labors, in the open-air markets where they were bought and sold, and in the tattoos, brands, and fetters with which their bodies were marked, all signs of their status as chattel property. This public visibility of the enslaved operated, however, to invisibilize their personhood, to render them imperceptible as humans. The enhanced conspicuousness of those in bondage, etched in markings on their bodies, demarcated them from the fully human world of the polis, reducing them to thing-like elements outside the culture-building activities of adult male citizens, including the practice of philosophy. The corporeal semiotics of slavery thereby relegated the enslaved to a twilight zone inhabited by cattle and commodities. “A living piece of property,” says Aristotle, the enslaved is “one of the tools” that ministers to the activity of a master.8 Enslaved people are embodiments of death-in-life, uniting the activity of living labor with the status of creatures who are meant to be socially dead.9 Yet, this confinement of the enslaved to a zombie domain of death-in-life left traces, clues accessible to the dialectical investigator, which are inscribed in the very rules of intelligibility of the worlds of mind and money.
The enslaved body was inherently scandalous, precisely because it grounded the domains of philosophy and commerce; it ranked among their fundamental conditions of possibility. The scandal did not consist, of course, in the fact of slavery, as this seems to have caused little embarrassment at all (with the remote exception of a few intransigent defenders of democratic egalitarianism).10 Not only was slavery compatible with ancient justice, it was foundational to it, providing an essential precondition for legal truth, as we have seen. Reading Aristotle, it is evident that he considers the submission of enslaved people to masters to be part of the just ordering of our world, equally indispensable to virtue as the domination of men over women and children. The scandal of slavery had to do not with its existence per se, but with the unspoken threat it posed to aristocratic pretensions to cultural autonomy. As Hegel famously demonstrated, the great irony of the master–slave relation is that it harbors a dialectical reversal. In relation to the material world around them, masters are passive beings, reliant on the labors of the people they enslave. The enslaved, on the other hand, develop themselves as social agents in and through these same labors. The master–slave relation is thus the site of a possible reversal in the poles of dependence and independence; it carries the seeds of its own radical undoing at the hands of the enslaved themselves.11 And this threatens the claims of culture, commerce, and truth to be self-sufficient. After all, philosophy has traditionally assumed that only the true can produce truth, and that only the pure can produce purity.12 However, the reliance of the world of the masters on the activity of enslaved people represents its dependence on the putatively impure,