by David Astle
The thing was to find a use for their surfeit of bullion, particularly silver, and of which metal they were now in a position to arrange extensive supplies to any banker who would be able to use such advantageously towards the promotion of their general worldwide plans. The growing commercial and industrial vigour of the Greeks showed them an answer to this problem. Thus the significance of the advent of the tyrants as promoters of heavy public spending of moneys based originally, on the silver standards of Babylonia, cannot be dismissed.
The policy of the bankers, for whom the tyrants fronted, would be to spread the main practice, at least their most profitable one, of private money creation, one way or the other. Using silver as base, they knew full well the tremendous possibilities that existed towards the creation of an abstract money whose equally efficient units cost them no more than entry by the slave scribe on the clay tablet that sufficed as his ledger. Such policy spread, together with competition in manufacture, the need for that which the international bankers of that day, faceless as in this day, loaned against collateral as money. This money was based on the silver bullion they let it be known they were possessed of or held on deposit for their customers, be they individual, corporate body, or state.
It is reasonable to assume that there was little difference as between that first tangible money of private issuance in England as denoted by the goldsmiths receipts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[270] and the money as issued by the banks of the Greek cities. Its efficacy in the exchanges, although it was in reality no more than a highly organized system of counterfeit, derived from the total secrecy maintained by those involved in its issue. Little clear information exists on this subject today as in ancient times and much of which, even if all the millions of tablets unearthed in Mesopotamia are ever translated and evaluated by scholars competent to do so, must remain as but faint outline.
One such faint outline of particular interest, though not deriving from the Mesopotamian tablets, is discernible in this information of Servius Tullius, slave king of early Rome:
“According to Charisius, Varro wrote: Nummum argenteum flatum primum a Servio Tullio dicunt, is IIII scripulis major fuit quam nunc.” “It is said that silver money was first made by Servius Tullius and was IIII scripulis heavier than now.”[271]
As it was Servius Tullius who ordered the establishment of the census at Rome that gave the basis for both taxation and military service, both essential organizations as to a state being taken over by international money power, the truth of this statement by Varro need not be questioned.
It is interesting to note in passing that although Servius Tullius was a usurper undoubtedly of slave origin, Livy carefully draws him in rather more favourable light than the Tarquins, particularly Superbus, the last of the line. By the time of Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) the most powerful sector of the Roman population, the equites or knights, was taken over by wealthy freedmen and enfranchised foreigners.[272] Livy, when writing in that day under the threat of Lex Majestus[273] would clearly have seen the value of finding and extolling true virtue in the character of the slave king, whether such virtue was there or not.
However, if Servius actually did exist, and there seems to be a school of thought amongst the scholars that questions his existence, then it would be more likely as one who had raised himself up in a similar manner to Gyges of Lydia,[274] having at the same time a special backing by local money power; possibly in opposition to that money power emigrant from Corinth to Tarquinii in Etruria, which, according to Livy, was the Tarquin family.
The establishment of a silver standard as a base for monetary issuance might very well have been their reward for their assistance towards raising Servius to the throne. The Census, supposedly established by Servius, while being the foundation of the organization of the whole state for defence or aggression, would give that money power a complete picture of the people it was their intention, one way or another, to exploit. In the same manner the doomsday books of the Middle Ages, while recording for the reference of the king, all that in the kingdom was, also made valuable record for the money creative power, which had kings, nobles, ecclesiastics, and the common people, groaning under a burden of debt quite impossible to meet (which certainly was one of the main causes of the mood of the English that gave rise to Magna Carta, and of those events which followed until 1290 A.D. when the tax-collecting and money-lending classes, such as had followed the “Conqueror” across the English Channel, were finally evicted).[275]
In a similar manner some 2500 years later, William III of England, owing his throne to the intrigues of the international bullion brokers at Amsterdam, granted them as reward that which they wanted more than anything on earth, which was the establishment of the legality of an undeterminable amount of abstract money, ledger credit page entry, or paper notes, to be based on their gold loans to the state, and the creation of a “Bank” at London from which they might issue this money known as “Credit” as loan against real collateral throughout the whole kingdom. This bank was to be given the appearance of a state department. In this case such status was obtained by permitting it to be named: “The Bank of England.”[276]
Considering the above known instance of reward to international money powers for their services, far reaching in its consequences, and many other instances of which there is neither time nor place to write herewith, conjecture in respect to the establishment of a silver standard at Rome by Servius, may not be too far afield. That Romans later rejected this standard as a base for their money, and the calamity and loss of sovereignty it brought them also is clear, for there is no further reference to silver money until that period when Rome was drifting towards the all-out struggle with Carthage: the year of the establishment of the board of Moneyers for the striking of bronze, silver and gold money (289 B.C.): tresviri aere argento auro flando feriurado;[277] thereby no doubt yielding to the importunities of the International Bullion brokers, with the ensuing outbreak of war thus being made a certainty.
One of the main purposes of those extensive public works which almost invariably followed the establishment of a tyranny, would be towards the establishment of some kind of National Debt, in which is, and was in that day too, most control and profit to those manipulating international finance. That there is no evidence of the existence of such state indebtedness in those days does not necessarily mean that such did not exist. Excavation, or other methods, 2500 years from now would not reveal this indebtedness for instance in the case of England, so far as its relation to the Bank of England was concerned, for, unbelievable though it may seem, there is “remarkable absence of official records” for the first hundred years of the bank’s existence![278] In the time of the tyrants, failure to keep books or records would be even more of a certainty.
Valuable by-products of their extensive public works programmes would be:
1. The peasants would leave the land enticed by the money wages offered for work on these projects, and the pleasures and excitement that could be bought in the city with such money wages. There, once the construction boom was over, they formed a leaderless, hungry, and easily embittered “Proletariat.”
2. The same “Proletariat” could be manipulated by the agents of Money Power as a mob, towards such political purposes as such Money Power might desire; including, besides removal of the natural nobility, removal of the so-called tyrant when his purpose was served.
Professor Ure, author of The Origins of Tyranny, ventures as close to the truth in respect to the meaning of a tyranny as any others who have written on the subject. Although attributing the rise of the tyrants to Money Power he does not define what this Money Power may be; whether money creative power, or just those of considerable possession and treasure. In this omission he cannot be blamed. Professor Ure for instance traces the source of the power of Peisistratus, Tyrant of Athens 561-527 B.C. according to Herodotus,[279] as being partly from those silver mines in the district in Thrace through which flows the Strymon river, and partly from
the Laurion mines in Attica.
However, it must be pointed out that a man who apparently was a mining man and lived therefore within that restriction, would be unlikely to understand the finer shades of monetary emission. It seems quite reasonable to suppose that the class of persons hidden within the Aramaic speaking middle classes that permeated the whole Levant and Near East during the first Millennium B.C., and whose business was money and all that stemmed therefrom, in that they were interfering with that which clearly was a power to be exercised only by the very gods themselves, were scarcely likely to instruct their instrument, Peisistratus, therein. Therefore, it may be concluded, the tyrant rose because he was the one who had found favour with the all-pervading money power of the day. He was not money power itself!
In that most of the great public works of the Greek cities had been carried forward by the tyrants is the evidence; for as the secretive money power of today, world-wide in scope, thrives primarily upon government loans directed to purposes of war and the enormous spending that wars involve in order to strengthen their outrageous claims against the nations, in ancient days similar heavy spending had to be devised. In that day, as previously pointed out, a great Acropolis or some other such magnificent public work with whose construction and financial organization Money Power was fully conversant, sufficed equally well with war; which, all said and done, with hardy aggressive peoples could also prove considerable danger to themselves, or their purposes.
So, with the tyrant, we see the force by which Greece, previously living in natural order, was moulded to an instrument more suitable to those bankers: private money creative power, who, lurking in the shade as needs they had to, burned with rancour at the natural rulers who but treated them as stewards, although the essence of power for all that, lay in their hands for more than such rulers understood.
Thus were the simple and industrious and brave Greeks now raised up to be the new vehicle through which the final and destructive purposes of those controlling international bullion and slave trades would be achieved, as they shepherd the peoples of the world further down that road of no hope for themselves or the rest of mankind.
Pergamum And Pitane
Aristotle, author of some lucid thinking on the subject of money, if not ruthlessly penetrative, was himself married to the niece of a banker installed as co-tyrant (or “Front Man”) with another such tyrant-banker. “(Hermias the Tyrant of Assos and Atarneus) was a eunuch slave of a certain banker: he went to Athens and attended the lectures of Plato and Aristotle, and returning, he shared the tyranny of his master who had previously secured the places around Atarneus and Assos. Subsequently he succeeded him and sent for Aristotle and married his niece to him.[280]
.In this slave, banker, philosopher and despot Leaf[281] sees a tyrant who owed his position to his wealth. He quotes Euaion, the pupil of Plato, who, not far to the North at Lampsacus “lent money to the city on security of the Acropolis, and when the city defaulted, wanted to become a tyrant.”[282]
While bankers in the present dream of entrapping the whole world via their “United Nations,” in the past they contented themselves with the entrapping of a city! Just as in the present they create an entirely false picture of the nature of their operations and carefully promote the legend they are lending the public’s money, so they did in antiquity, we may rest assured. No doubt they spread exactly the same story in the time of the tyrants, and people in that day, understanding no more about money than they do today, believed it.[283] The following may be accepted as instance of their activities in ancient times.
.Pergamum, that city that arose in South West Asia Minor, lasting as independent from 283-133 B.C., was originally founded as the fortified treasury of Lysimachus, successor to Alexander in Thrace. This fort and the treasure therein amounting to 9000 talents, was in the charge of a eunuch steward named Philetairos who justified the trust reposed in him in so far as the management of this treasure was concerned. During the quarrels of the Diadochoi or Successors to Alexander, presumably at the strategic moment, he transferred his allegiance from Lysimachus to Seleucus, doubtless on condition he be guaranteed his continued position as Master of the Treasury.
Despite the murder of Seleucus by Ptolemy Keraunus, the wily Philetairos clung to the fortunes of the Seleucids, probably understanding in their particular case, the political purposes of the International Money Power of Babylonia and Alexandria in these respects, and ingratiated himself with Antiochus, son of Seleucus, by buying the body of Seleucus from Ptolemy for return to Antiochus,[284] thus, through it all maintaining his position at Pergamum.
Philetairos proceeded to use the treasure to which he had so masterfully established almost total right, with a skill which could only suggest training in the money shops of Babylonia, or Alexandria, or as close advisor, one so trained. The conception of the 9000 talents of treasure in itself being the sole maintaining force behind the extended power of Pergamum, would be quaint to say the least; as quaint indeed as the story of the 6000 talents of silver held in reserve in the Acropolis at Athens as the sole finances with which the Peloponnesian war was fought; or in a later day of the gold supposedly existing in the vaults of the Bank of England or its predecessor, and its parent bank, the Bank of Amsterdam (the vaults of the latter on inspection by Napoleon[285] after occupation of Holland, proving absolutely bare!). 9000 talents drawn on for military and civilian expenditures, extensive bribes, etc., would not go very far.
Returning again to Professor Andreades, in his Finances De Guerre d’alexandre le grand,[286] the annual expenditures of Alexander during the earlier years of his campaigning were 5000-7000 talents, which would, in the first year or two, certainly until the battle of Issus (Oct. 333 B.C.), have been in hard cash for the most part, to use the terminology of today’s banker; that is, coined money or silver bullion, or the gold bullion of which the mines at Phillipi had made steady yield. In the later years of campaigning, Andreades estimated the annual expenditures of Alexander at 15,000 talents. If the money for this expenditure derived from coined precious metal plunder, it would go even less far, for in newly occupied territories, the exploitation of the miseries of the people usual to these circumstances would exist, and there would be a collapse of “Credit” or abstract money, until reorganization set in. There would be total disturbance of the revenues deriving from taxes. Silver, particularly, would either move eastward against luxury trading, which seems to continue as much as ever in such times, or would disappear into hoards.
During the first Millennium B.C., the ratio of silver to gold never went below 10:1, being usually 13:1 in Europe and the so-called Middle East. In farther Bactria, India and China, it was rarely more than 6:1 and in some parts as low as 1:1.[287] Therefore, once precious metal coinage was spent, particularly silver coinage, and passed into the hands of merchants, contractors, etc., finally returning to the bankers or money changers, with that field for assured profit by settlement of oriental trade balances with coined silver or silver bullion such as clearly existed, as according to Gresham’s law,[288] its local circulating volume might be assumed to decrease rapidly, and without a doubt did so decrease.
It might safely be said that the money power which enabled Pergamum to secure controlling interest over the cities of Pitane and Cyzicus,[289] was not drawn from what might be left of that store of 9000 talents (the loan in the case of Pitane, probably a very minor transaction, was sufficient to substantially ease the burden of a debt of 380 talents). It would have been part of a credit inflation which would have used the 9000 talents, or the legend in respect thereto, as its base, and more than likely those interests holding the debt of the city of Pitane were themselves indebted by another ledger entry transaction to Pergamum. Thus that “Credit Money” transaction whereby pitane was loaned money would be no more than an entry in the books of pergamum as a credit to pitane, automatically being thence debited and transferred to the credit column of the holder of the loan as previously existing against pitane, and t
hus returning him to solvency.
In other words, Pergamum, at cost of pen, ink, vellum,[290] and slave scribe or perhaps (and more likely) cost of clay tablet and stylus book entry, was now in a position to dictate the political affairs of Pitane. Perhaps the agent for the Babylonian bankers or their Alexandrian counterparts, as the previous holder of the Pitane loan may have been, consequently recovered his liquid position so far as Pergamum was concerned, and was now able to look around again for more profitable investments.
The extent of the semi-military operations of the Attalid Money Power of Pergamum was shown above all by their purchase of the island of Aegina for thirty talents.[291] This island they most likely set up as a centre for entre-pôt trade and a financial outpost, i.e., “Branch Bank”: which had to be in opposition to the decaying athenian money power which at that time did not have the silver resources of its earlier days on which to base its money power, and the legend of its great wealth.
The Laurion mines were petering out, and those markets in South Russia,[292] Thrace, etc., formerly supplied by Athenian manufactured products, were fast failing at the time of Pergamum and the Attalids; having set up their own local manufacturies. Athens, no longer centre of an Empire, neither military, or financial power, with fewer markets ready to settle debit trade balances with those slaves so much required for silver mining, as had been South Russia, was likely just a pleasant place to live in; the storms brewed by settlement of International Money Power as in days gone by, passed over.