Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADA TION 18 7
Greek cities, the agora, the place of public debate and communal assembly,
also doubled as a marketplace.
One of the first effects of the arrival of a commercial economy was
a series of debt crises, of the sort long familiar from Mesopotamia and
Israel. "The poor," as Aristotle succinctly put it in his Constitution of
the Athenians, "together with their wives and children, were enslaved
to the rich."58 Revolutionary factions emerged, demanding amnesties,
and most Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist
strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt
relief. The solution most cities ultimately found, however, was quite
different than it had been in the Near East. Rather than institutionalize
periodic amnesties, Greek cities tended to adopt legislation limiting or
abolishing debt peonage altogether, and then, to forestall future crises,
they would turn to a policy of expansion, shipping off the children of
the poor to found military colonies overseas. Before long, the entire
coast from Crimea to Marseille was dotted with Greek cities, which
served, in turn, as conduits for a lively trade in slaves.59 The sudden
abundance of chattel slaves, in turn, completely transformed the nature
of Greek society. First and most famously, it allowed even citizens of
modest means to take part in the political and cultural life of the city
and have a genuine sense of citizenship. But this, in turn, drove the
old aristocratic classes to develop more and more elaborate means of
setting themselves off from what they considered the tawdriness and
moral corruption of the new democratic state.
When the curtain truly goes up on Greece, in the fifth century, we
find everybody arguing about money. For the aristocrats, who wrote
most of the surviving texts, money was the embodiment of corruption.
Aristocrats disdained the market. Ideally, a man of honor should be
able to raise everything he needed on his own estates, and never have
to handle cash at all.60 In practice, they knew this was impossible.
Yet at every point they tried to set themselves apart from the values
of the ordinary denizens of the marketplace: to contrast the beautiful
gold and silver beakers and tripods they gave one another at funerals
and weddings with the vulgar hawking of sausages or charcoal; the
dignity of the athletic contests for which they endlessly trained with
commoners' vulgar gambling; the sophisticated and literate courtesans
who attended to them at their drinking clubs, and common prostitutes
(porne)-slave-girls housed in brothels near the agora, brothels often
sponsored by the democratic polis itself as a service to the sexual needs
of its male citizenry. In each case, they placed a world of gifts, generosity,
and honor above sordid commercial exchange.61