Debt (35 page)

This resulted in a slightly different play of push and pull than we saw in Mesopotamia. On the one hand, we see a culture of aristocratic protest against what they saw as the lowly commercial sensibilities of ordinary citizens. On the other hand, we see an almost schizophrenic reaction on the part of the ordinary citizens themselves, who simultaneously tried to limit or even ban aspects of aristocratic culture and to imitate aristocratic sensibilities. Pederasty is an excellent case in point here. On the one hand, man-boy love was seen as the quintessential aristocratic practice—it was the way, in fact, that young aristocrats would ordinarily become initiated into the privileges of high society. As a result, the democratic polis saw it as politically subversive and made sexual relations between male citizens illegal. At the same time, almost everyone began to practice it.

The famous Greek obsession with male honor that still informs so much of the texture of daily life in rural communities in Greece hearkens back not so much to Homeric honor but to this aristocratic rebellion against the values of the marketplace, which everyone, eventually, began to make their own.
⁶²
The effects on women, though, were even more severe than they had been in the Middle East. Already by the age of Socrates, while a man’s honor was increasingly tied to disdain for commerce and assertiveness in public life, a woman’s honor had come to be defined in almost exclusively sexual terms: as a matter of virginity, modesty, and chastity, to the extent that respectable women were expected to be shut up inside the household and any woman who played a part in public life was considered for that reason a prostitute, or tantamount to one.
⁶³
The Assyrian habit of veiling was not widely adopted in the Middle East, but it
was
adopted in Greece. As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of “Western” freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.
⁶⁴

Money, then, had passed from a measure of honor to a measure of everything that honor was not. To suggest that a man’s honor could be bought with money became a terrible insult—this despite the fact that, since men were often taken in war or even by bandits or pirates and held for ransom, they often did go through dramas of bondage and redemption not unlike those experienced by so many Middle Eastern women. One particularly striking way of hammering it home—actually, in this case, almost literally—was by branding ransomed prisoners with the mark of their own currency, much as if today some
imaginary foreign kidnapper, after having received the ransom money for an American victim, made a point of burning a dollar sign onto the victim’s forehead before returning him.
⁶⁵

One question that isn’t clear from all this is, Why? Why had money, in particular, become such a symbol of degradation? Was it all because of slavery? One might be tempted to conclude that it was: perhaps the newfound presence of thousands of utterly degraded human beings in ancient Greek cities made any suggestion that a free man (let alone a free woman) might in any sense be bought or sold particularly insulting. But this is clearly not the case. Our discussion of the slave money of Ireland showed that the possibility of the utter degradation of a human being was in no sense a threat to heroic honor—in a way, it was its very essence. Homeric Greeks do not appear to have been any different. It seems hardly coincidental that the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles that sets off the action of the
Iliad
, generally considered to be the first great work of Western literature, is a dispute over honor between two heroic warriors over the disposition of a slave girl.
⁶⁶
Agamemnon and Achilles were also well aware that it would only take an unfortunate turn in battle, or perhaps a shipwreck, for either of them to wind up as a slave. Odysseus barely escapes being enslaved on several occasions in the
Odyssey
. Even in the third century ad, the Roman emperor Valerian (253–260 ad), defeated at the Battle of Edessa, was captured and spent the last years of his life as the footstool that the Sassanian emperor Shapur I used to mount his horse. Such were the perils of war. All this was essential to the nature of martial honor. A warrior’s honor is his willingness to play a game on which he stakes everything. His grandeur is directly proportional to how far he can fall.

Was it, then, that the advent of commercial money threw traditional social hierarchies into disarray? Greek aristocrats often spoke this way, but the complaints seem rather disingenuous. Surely it was money that allowed such a polished aristocracy to exist in the first place.
⁶⁷
Rather, the thing that really seemed to bother them about money was simply that they wanted it so much. Since money could be used to buy just about anything, everybody wanted it. That is: it was desirable
because
it was non-discriminating. One could see how the metaphor of the
porne
might seem particularly appropriate. A woman “common to the people”—as the poet Archilochos put it—is available to everyone. In principle, we shouldn’t be attracted to such an undiscriminating creature. In fact, of course, we are.
⁶⁸
And nothing was both so undiscriminating, and so desirable, as money. True, Greek aristocrats would ordinarily insist that they were not attracted to common
porne
,
and that the courtesans, flute-girls, acrobats, and beautiful boys that frequented their symposia were not really prostitutes at all (though at times they also admitted that they really were), they also struggled with the fact that their own high-minded pursuits, such as chariot-racing, outfitting ships for the navy, and sponsoring tragic dramas, required the exact same coins as the ones used to buy cheap perfume and pies for a fisherman’s wife—the only real difference being that their pursuits tended to require a lot more of them.
⁶⁹

We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire. Insofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous substance. But even more: increasingly, they did not just want money. They needed it. This was a profound change. In the Homeric world, as in most human economies, we hear almost no discussion of those things considered necessary to human life (food, shelter, clothing) because it is simply assumed that everybody has them. A man with no possessions could, at the very least, become a retainer in some rich man’s household. Even slaves had enough to eat.
⁷⁰
Here too, the prostitute was a potent symbol for what had changed, since while some of the denizens of brothels were slaves, others were simply poor; the fact that their basic needs could no longer be taken for granted were precisely what made them submit to others’ desires. This extreme fear of dependency on others’ whims lies at the basis of the Greek obsession with the self-sufficient household.

All this lies behind the unusually assiduous efforts of the male citizens of Greek city-states—like the later Romans—to insulate their wives and daughters from both the dangers and the freedoms of the marketplace. Unlike their equivalents in the Middle East, they do not seem to have offered them as debt pawns. Neither, at least in Athens, was it legal for the daughters of free citizens to be employed as prostitutes.
⁷¹
As a result, respectable women became invisible, largely removed from the high dramas of economic and political life.
⁷²
If anyone was enslaved for debt, it was normally the debtor. Even more dramatically, it was ordinarily
male
citizens who accused one another of prostitution—with Athenian politicians regularly asserting that their rivals, when they were young boys being plied with gifts from their male suitors, were really trading sex for money, and hence deserved to lose their civic freedoms.
⁷³

It might be helpful here, to return to the principles laid out in chapter five. What we see above all is the erosion both of older forms of
hierarchy—the Homeric world of great men with their retainers—and, at the same time, of older forms of mutual aid, with communistic relations increasingly being confined to the interior of the household.

It’s the former—the erosion of hierarchy—that really seems to have been at stake in the “debt crises” that struck so many Greek cities around 600 bc, right around the time that commercial markets were first taking shape.
⁷⁴
When Aristotle spoke of the Athenian poor as falling slave to the rich, what he appears to have meant was that in harsh years, many poor farmers fell into debt; as a result they ended up as sharecroppers on their own property, dependents. Some were even sold abroad as slaves. This led to unrest and agitation, and also to demands for clean slates, for the freeing of those held in bondage, and for the redistribution of agricultural land. In a few cases it led to outright revolution. In Megara, we are told, a radical faction that seized power not only made interest-bearing loans illegal, but did so retroactively, forcing creditors to make restitution of all interest they had collected in the past.
⁷⁵
In other cities, populist tyrants seized power on promises to abrogate agricultural debts.

On the face of it, all this doesn’t seem all that surprising: the moment when commercial markets developed, Greek cities quickly developed all the social problems that had been plaguing Middle Eastern cities for millennia: debt crises, debt resistance, political unrest. In reality, things are not so clear. For one thing, for the poor to be “enslaved to the rich,” in the loose sense that Aristotle seems to be using, was hardly a new development. Even in Homeric society, it was assumed as a matter of course that rich men would live surrounded by dependents and retainers, drawn from the ranks of the dependent poor. The critical thing, though, about such relations of patronage is that they involved responsibilities on both sides. A noble warrior and his humble client were assumed to be fundamentally different sorts of people, but both were also expected to take account of each other’s (fundamentally different) needs. Transforming patronage into debt relations—treating, say, an advance of seed corn as a
loan
, let alone an interest-bearing loan—changed all this.
⁷⁶
What’s more, it did so in two completely contradictory respects. On the one hand, a loan implies no ongoing responsibilities on the part of the creditor. On the other, as I have continually emphasized, a loan does assume a certain formal, legal equality between contractor and contractee. It assumes that they are, at least in some ways on some level, fundamentally the same kind of person. This is certainly about the most ruthless and violent form of equality imaginable. But the fact it was conceived as equality before the market made such arrangements even more difficult to endure.
⁷⁷

The same tensions can be observed between neighbors, who in farming communities tend to give, lend, and borrow things amongst themselves—anything from sieves and sickles, to charcoal and cooking oil, to seed corn or oxen for plowing. On the one hand, such giving and lending were considered essential parts of the basic fabric of human sociability in farm communities, on the other, overly demanding neighbors were a notorious irritant—one that could only have grown worse when all parties are aware of precisely how much it would have cost to buy or rent the same items that were being given away. Again, one of the best ways to get a sense of what were considered everyday dilemmas for Mediterranean peasants is to look at jokes. Late stories from across the Aegean in Turkey echo exactly the same concerns: