Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

190 DEBT
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 eat0
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.71
I I I I I
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