Plato’s Meno is among the most interesting texts in this regard. While enslaved people are frequently mentioned in Plato’s dialogues, this is the one case in which an enslaved person actually speaks. While giving him a voice, however, Plato reenacts the social death of the enslaved person by refusing to give him a name, identifying him merely as “boy.” This makes it all the easier for Plato to shuttle the boy off the stage and out of the dialogue once he has served to illustrate Socrates’ argument.14 Yet, the repressed returns hauntingly in the final pages of the text, where the philosopher revisits the problem of truth.15 Socrates here urges his interlocutors not to confuse the chance possibility of having the right opinions about something with possessing true knowledge of it. We may be right about something without having acquired genuine and comprehensive knowledge of it. He then likens accurate opinions not grounded in knowledge to statues of Daedalus that “run away and escape” unless they are tied down. Knowledge, by contrast, is said to be fixed, permanent, locked in place. Opinion, even when correct, is fleeting—indeed, fleeing, like “a runaway slave,” who “gives you the slip” if left “untethered” (97D–97E). Mere opinions, even correct ones, threaten to escape from us so long as they are unshackled by knowledge. To prevent them from slipping away, they must be tethered: “Once they are tied down, they become knowledge” (98). The pursuit of truth thus requires doing to correct opinions what is done to enslaved bodies—binding them with chains and fetters.
Try though he might to banish them, Plato cannot avoid the conclusion that the enslaved—the one who remains in bondage, the one who cannot escape—is a necessary condition of philosophical truth. This phantom haunts Western culture from its inception, threatening to expose the constitution of the worlds of mind and money in and through the labors of the enslaved. Avery Gordon’s insight that modernity is haunted by ghostly images of violence and wounds applies as well to the ancient cultural traditions embraced by the masters of the modern world, which derive from the culture of an antique slave-owning class.16 Yet, while liberalism disowned its debt to a world of whips and chains, it was Nietzsche’s perverse genius to have embraced it. Nietzsche in fact celebrates the domination of the enslaved as indispensable to the noble work of culture building. Railing against democracy, socialism, and feminism, he meets head-on their attacks on slavery: “as if slavery were a counterargument,” he writes, “and not instead a condition of every higher culture, an enhancement of culture.” Time and again, he affirms aristocratic domination over enslaved people: “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society … that needs slavery in some sense or the other.”17
Liberalism recoils from this aristocratic affirmation of the indispensability of the enslaved to the regimes of money and philosophy. It knows that such an affirmation undermines its own polite history of Western culture, its claim for the self-constitution of the modern individual through the poetics of mind and exchange, free of blood and dirt, whips and chains. Yet, it cannot evade Walter Benjamin’s insistence that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” a statement that is as true of coins as it is of vases, or texts by Plato.18 The dialectical archaeology of truth thus requires an excavation of its degraded sites, a reconnection of objects of culture to the bloodied, abjected body-things that haunt the world of refinement. To return to the enslaved body is thus to revisit the spheres of labor and bondage that comprise the truths of our world. Among these essential truths are those of money.
“A Measure of Everything”
Ancient Greece is rightly recognized as the first extensively monetized society in history. Not that markets and commodity exchange were unique to Greece. On the contrary, these were widespread in the ancient world, as were a variety of special-purpose monies, items that performed a range of monetary functions—such as measuring the value of things—without operating as universal currencies. In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, payments were frequently made by means of a common standard unit, or measure of value, such as copper, silver, or grain, in which the values of goods or services could be expressed. When two traders wanted to exchange quantities of cloth and barley, for instance, each good might be said to be worth a particular amount of copper. This enabled a comparison of quantities of one thing with another. But copper served here merely as a unit of account, that is, a standard measure that could be used as a reference point to enable trade. Frequently, very little or no copper, grain, or silver actually changed hands in such an exchange. A document from the New Kingdom in Egypt (1550–1070 BCE), for instance, registers the purchase of an ox by a policeman. It indicates that the price of the ox was fifty deben of copper (a little over 4.5 kilograms). But only five deben of the fifty were actually paid in copper; the balance was rendered in other commodities, like oil, clothing, and fat, whose values were expressed in copper. So, while copper measured the value of goods involved in exchange, it was not itself the universal means of exchange or payment. A similar pattern is observed in Mesopotamia, where various legal codes regulated payments like fines and wages, as well as commodity prices, in fixed weights of silver. But we know from the same documents that grain, too, could be used for payments according to an established silver/grain ratio.19 Under the dynasty of Hammurabi in Babylonia (1792–1750 BCE), while prices were expressed in silver, most payments were made in barley or corn. Indeed, the Code of Hammurabi (Laws 113–115) refers to payment as “a claim for corn or money.” Likewise, in Homer we frequently observe cattle serving as a standard of value, but never as a means of exchange. In all these cases, the items that functioned as standards of value (or units of account) did not figure as a general equivalent that united the functions of means of exchange, measure of value, and means of payment. Nor did they bear visible markings of state authority designating them the sole legal means of payment, as was the case with state-minted coins. In short, special-purpose monies did not operate as the unique socially sanctioned representative of value that moved through circuits of exchange in the way that full-fledged or general-purpose money does.20
Even where, as in Assyria and Egypt, ingots of precious metal sometimes carried a seal of authority, they lacked universality, coexisting with basic commodities like wool, barley, sheep, and wine, all of which also served monetary purposes. And while the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor, in what is now part of western Turkey, seems to have been the first in the Mediterranean world to have introduced coinage bearing an insignia of the state, the absence of small coins there suggests it was not a highly monetized society, since everyday transactions by the demos could only have been undertaken with small units. But among the states of classical Greece, particularly Athens, a unified coinage issued by the state would become fundamental to daily life, mediating incessant exchanges of goods and services. Coins functioned as means of exchange and as general equivalents, capable of being traded for everything from olive oil to sex, or for paying government fines. An interesting portrayal of the extent of monetization can be found in Plato’s Republic, where he describes “all the pains and pangs which men experience in bringing up a family, and in finding money to buy necessaries, for their household, borrowing and repudiating, getting how they can, and giving the money into the hands of women and slaves to keep” (V465). So thoroughly monetized was Plato’s society that “finding money” haunted the heads of the household, while women and enslaved people are said to have frequented the market, dispensing money to purchase domestic “necessaries.”
We shall return to the Republic later in this chapter. For the moment, however, let us observe that Plato’s description meshes with compelling evidence for the ubiquity of Greek coins as media of exchange. Most significant here is the archaeological recovery of large quantities of small coins from the classical period, indicating that they were not simply used by the wealthy for large purchases of land, enslaved people, and livestock, but were also deployed in small denominations to facilitate everyday transactions among ordinary citizens.21 State-issued money in Athens (among other Greek city-states) was to be found everywhere, forming an indispensable element of daily