When Achilles declares, “Nothing equals the worth of my life” (Iliad, 9:402), he invokes the nonequivalence between life and plundered goods.37 And, as things that are constitutive of life, memory and identity likewise have no equivalent. They are incomparable, immeasurable—and inalienable. We see this repeatedly in the world of the Greek epics. It is striking that the terms used for possession and ownership in the Iliad and the Odyssey refer to relationships toward both persons and things. This is most clear with the adjective philos, whose meaning “ranges from ‘beloved’ to ‘one’s own,’” as Sitta von Reden notes. “The heart, limbs, clothes, treasure, wives, husbands, compatriots, guest-friends and the fatherland all belong to the repertoire of philos objects, being at once beloved and owned.”38 What is one’s own is what is beloved, what is an extension of oneself. Philos objects, precious items to which the individual “belongs,” adhere to a sphere of inalienability. Even when gifted, they carry with them their histories and attachments to their donors. The instrumentalization of such things as a mere means (via exchange) to obtain something else is not merely impermissible, it is incomprehensible. Possessing absolute value, such items are radically unique; what has no equivalent cannot be exchanged.
A society of this sort may well have had special-purpose monies, that is, specific goods used to measure value or serve as a means of payment. These would have operated largely in the sphere of trade with strangers. But entire realms of socioeconomic life were cordoned off from such dealings. And even when monetary transactions encroached on relations internal to a community, they did not involve a general equivalent that expressed a singular value framework for measuring the worth of most goods. Money was still marginal and episodic to social life, and Schaps is entirely correct when he states of Homeric Greece that it “not only lacked money; it did not yet conceive of money.”39
To be sure, goods were exchanged in Homeric Greece (1100–800 BCE, also known as the Greek Dark Age). But within local communities, this predominantly took the form of gift—not market—exchange. Gifts, as we have seen, created and reinscribed social relations and networks of obligation. For this reason, they were memorialized, so that the obligations might be remembered and stable social bonds preserved. In the public recounting of gifts, social ties and obligations were renewed and consolidated.40 Of course, the social ties reproduced through narration of gifts given and received were often hierarchical ones. After all, esteemed gifts obeyed a ranking system. Prestige adhered to both the possession of specific goods and to the wealth that enabled one to give away gifts, particularly those comprised of precious metal. Consequently, aristocratic gift giving reproduced rank and social difference at the same time that it reknitted networks of reciprocity. And for the poor, obligations to provide flows of wealth to those above oneself—what would later develop into rent and taxes—were modeled on the image of the gift. In the world of the epics, the term gift included a disparate set of goods and services, including prizes, rewards, fines, taxes, fees, and even loans.41 Yet fines, fees, and taxes could easily morph into exactions, just as loans might culminate in debt service and even debt bondage. In all these ways, the “gift economy” could shade into relations of appropriation and class exploitation, especially if intra-ruling class competition were heightened in response to new forms of accumulation, such as raiding and plundering.
It is significant that during the heroic age much of the very wealth that could be dis-accumulated through gift giving was acquired via warfare, raiding, and slaving. Gift economies could thus be deeply imbricated with slavery and debt bondage, as was certainly the case in ancient Greece. Nevertheless, however much hierarchical social relations were reproduced in and through some forms of gift economy, the latter obeyed a social logic foreign to commodity exchange. The appropriateness of expressions of generosity and hospitality among aristocrats, for instance, was not determined by market considerations of equivalence. What was appropriate was governed by historical patterns of reciprocity and by social standing. Similarly, social norms were meant to govern the sharing of booty (goods acquired through negative reciprocity). Yet, these norms might become unstable and contested. And in turning to Homer’s texts, we readily detect symptoms of precisely such a breakdown in aristocratic norms—symptoms not unrelated to growing social tensions and class conflicts.42
From the outset of the Iliad, we encounter a collapse of noble leadership, centered on a crisis over distribution of wealth acquired through war, plunder, and trade. By the eighth century BCE, raiding was an established aristocratic practice for accumulating wealth in archaic Greece. Conducted via longboats rowed by dozens of men, raiders launched surprise attacks in order to capture cattle, enslaved women, and items of precious metal. So routine was such plundering activity that in his Politics Aristotle simply describes warfare as “a way of acquiring wealth” (1256b23). In this he echoed Homer’s glowing references to noble Odysseus as a “sacker of cities.” Turning also to King Nestor of Pylos, Homer describes how he and his fellow Greek warriors engaged in “many raids from shipboard down the foggy sea, cruising for plunder” (Odyssey, 3.17–18).43 So inextricably connected were plunder and trade in the ancient world that markets were literally powered by warfare. Yet as accumulation by raiding grew from about 800 BCE on, it also produced powerful conflicts over distributive norms within the dominant group. Tensions arose between private accumulation and practices of dis-accumulation through gift giving. We get more than a glimpse of these tensions in the epics.
At the beginning of the Iliad, we learn that the noble warrior Achilles had been angered by Agamemnon, leader of the Greek war against the Trojans. Having had to part with some of his booty in order to appease gods and men, Agamemnon demands that he be granted Briseis, daughter of a noble Trojan family, who was earlier awarded to Achilles as a war “prize.” Achilles’ anger over this command drives the epic narrative. “Most acquisitive of all men,” Achilles rails at Agamemnon, complaining, “Your thoughts are always set on gain.” Withdrawing from battle, he declares, “I have no mind to stay here heaping up riches and treasure for you and receiving no honour myself” (1:119–74). Fueling Achilles’ rage is indignation that Agamemnon’s acquisitiveness violates customary norms of distribution. A dispute over the sharing of plunder (in the form, let us note, of an enslaved woman) thus discloses a rupture in elite reciprocity. Once booty has been divided, insists Achilles, “it is not right that the army should gather it back again” (1.125–26). Agamemnon has allowed personal accumulation to supersede the reciprocity that binds aristocratic households in a web of mutual obligation. In a telling passage in book 9 of the Iliad, Achilles condemns the one-sidedness of Agamemnon’s behavior:
Like a bird that brings back to her unfledged chicks every morsel she can find, and has to go without herself, so it has been with me…. I have sacked twelve of men’s cities from my
ships,
and I claim eleven more by land across the fertile Troad. From all of these I took many fine treasures, and every time I brought them all and gave them to Agamemnon son of
Atreus: and
every time, back there by the fast ships he never left, he would take them in, share out a few, and keep the most for himself (9.322–30).
“The crisis of the Iliad” suggests Seaford, “is a breakdown of the form of reciprocity … controlled by the leader.”44 While the poet dramatizes it in terms of a clash between two godlike warriors, it is clear that a wider social conflict between antagonistic forms of distribution is in play. The crisis sketched in the Iliad, which also runs throughout the Odyssey, reflected the undermining of more traditional relations by new patterns of war, exchange, and accumulation, which were also creating preconditions for the emergence of coinage.
The Limits of Reciprocity: Colonization, Plunder, and the Slave Trade
Archaic Greece (roughly 700–480 BCE) underwent a protracted expansion in people, settlement, and trade. As population increased, so did the movements