Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

18 8 DEBT
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 oneY 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
I I I I I
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 homeactually,
in this case, almost literally-was by branding ransomed prisoners
with the mark of their own currency, much as if today some