Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

18 6 DEBT
other members of the upper castes jealously sequestered their daughters,
and married them off with lavish dowries, while the lower castes
practiced brideprice, allowing members of the higher ("twice-born")
castes to scoff at them for selling their daughters. The twice-born were
likewise largely protected from falling into debt bondage, while for
much of the rural poor, debt dependency was institutionalized, with
the daughters of poor debtors, predictably, often dispatched to brothels
or to the kitchens or laundries of the rich.55 In either case, between the
push of commoditization, which fell disproportionally on daughters,
and the pull of those trying to reassert patriarchal rights to "protect"
women from any suggestion that they might be commoditized,
women's formal and practical freedoms appear to have been gradually
but increasingly restricted and effaced. As a result, notions of honor
changed too, becoming a kind of protest against the implications of the
market, even as at the same time (like the world religions) they came
to echo that market logic in endless subtle ways.
Nowhere, however, are our sources as rich and detailed as they
are for ancient Greece. This is partly because a commercial economy
arrived there so late, almost three thousand years later than in Sumer.
As a result, Classical Greek literature gives us a unique opportunity to
observe the transformation as it was actually taking place.
Ancient Greece (Honor and Debt)
The world of the Homeric epics is one dominated by heroic warriors
who are disdainful of trade. In many ways, it is strikingly reminiscent
of medieval Ireland. Money existed, but it was not used to buy anything;
important men lived their lives in pursuit of honor, which took
material form in followers and treasure. Treasures were given as gifts,
awarded as prizes, carried off as loot.56 This is no doubt how tfme first
came to mean both "honor" and "price"-in such a world, no one
sensed any sort of contradiction between the two.57
All this was to change dramatically when commercial markets began
to develop two hundred years later. Greek coinage seem to have
been first used mainly to pay soldiers, as well as to pay fines and fees
and payments made to and by the government, but by about 6oo BC,
just about every Greek city-state was producing its own coins as a
mark of civic independence. It did not take long, though, before coins
were in common use in everyday transactions. By the fifth century, in