The Babylonian Woe

by David Astle

  This surprises us less especially as since the 7th century, Pheidon, King of Argos, when he struck the first silver money of Aegina, and introduced a standard system of weights and measures into the Peloponnese, withdrew the former iron spits from circulation that had served as money until then, and consecrated a certain number of samples, “in Ex-voto,” in the sanctuary of Hera at Argos. At the time of Aristotle they could still be seen in the Temple.”[372]

  Babelon, most learned scholar as he was, however reflects the complacent attitude of the bankers of the end of the last century, which was founded on the idea, such had been their luck during the previous century, that their millennium had finally come. With him, money was precious metal, and precious metal was money. Although of interest, his information, a repetition of Xenophon the journalist and Plutarch, offers not much more light. Though over two thousand years had gone by, precious metal money and its promoters still ruled, despite a dozen great kingdoms and empires having risen at its behest and having fallen at its behest Did Babelon see the shadow which lurked behind the throne, he closed his eyes and turned his head away!

  Lycurgus was without doubt inspired to reestablish this national monetary system by the clear understanding he must have come to have of the evil effects of this gold and silver madness, and its disastrous effects as a result of the operations of the trapezitae or bankers, relative to the destruction of national morale and being. Precious metal coinage was currency whose total circulation the state could in no way control because of the desirability of its material internationally. In the common money market of the silver bullion brokers it was material, which, whether minted into money by state authority or otherwise, produced a money always of value regardless of local convention. Its value was dictated by the arbitrary decision of that international fraternity who controlled its mining, and the slaves that mined it, and out of manipulation of that pyramid of abstract money they created thereon, controlled the political affairs of states.

  The money that had been established in Sparta was of value to Spartans alone. Although no record exists of such matter, it may be safely assumed that the Pelanors and the leather multiples or divisibles of Suidas, entered the circulation as against state indebtedness; thus reducing taxation, that vicious destroyer of peoples, to relatively negligible amounts. Their pitted and otherwise worthless appearance deriving from their being immersed in vinegar when red hot, made them of no value for any other purpose than that for which they were intended. The use of this national money was the force that gave Sparta the leadership of Hellas until the end of the Peloponnesian War, even if decline had commenced with the execution of the great General Pausanias[373] by the Ephors in 479 B.C., and was that which necessarily dictated the policy of the extirpation of the tyrannies; the tyrant always being representative for the agent of international money creative power through precious metal control. There might be temptation to assume the pelanors were a system of “Iron Greenbacks.” But while they resembled the “Greenbacks” in this that they were the total will to be of the Spartans,[374] assuming the truth of their great weight, as pointed out above, they may have been more in the character of that monetary system of very ancient days of which the stone rings of Uap are a last remaining evincement.

  A healthy wholesome people who controlled totally their state and existence would have little reason to accumulate money fortunes, and wealth as distinct from the land which was their patrimony; and as such money fortunes begin and end as little more than figures in the banker’s ledger, nor could they be guided into becoming mouthpieces for the policies of the bankers. Meals were eaten in common amongst men as in Carthage of earlier days, and a genuine contempt for luxury existed. A simple life was not sought after, so much as it came of its own accord as a natural outcome of such monetary system created for their better and right living, and which preserved them from the encroachments of that liberalizing, demoralizing, and debt creating force of international trade, and its destructive effect on the esprit de corps of any particular race or people who are foolish enough to permit its proponents to have their way.

  Although it was said of the early days of the Laws of Lycurgus and his monetary reforms that precious metals seized in War were deposited with the Arcadians, of later days Augustus Boeckh wrote of gold and silver in Sparta:

  “Sparta during a period of several generations, swallowed up large quantities of the precious metals; as in Aesop’s Fables, the footsteps of the animals which went in were to be seen, but never of those which came out. The principal cause of this stagnation was that the state kept the gold and silver in store, and only reissued them for war and foreign enterprise; although there were instances of individuals who amassed treasures according to the law.”[375]

  Xenophon stated that Lycurgus made the privilege of citizenship equally available to all who observed what was enjoined by laws, without taking any account of weakness of body, or scantiness of means; which would mean that no Spartan suffered in respect to the mess or syssition to which he was entitled to belong, on account of economic condition. Xenophon had lived in Sparta and was writing before the loss of Messenia. Aristotle who declared failure to pay dues entailed political disenfranchisement, wrote after the loss of Messenia in 370 B.C., and the certain penetration by the bankers of the Piraeus, and the assumption of control of Spartan fiscal affairs which it may safely be said, they were already conceded by an already corrupted Sparta, ready to accept any humiliation to save itself from total ruin. The final military collapse at Leuctra rose from that weakened condition that followed the apparent victory of the “Great” Peloponnesian War, and those concessions that already would have been made to the international bankers, now in the Persian court, as a result of the desperate need of the Spartans for ships. The loan of 5000 talents towards the building of ships which was granted to Sparta by Persia as a result of the Treaty of Miletus, 412 B.C., would not have been granted without major concessions being exacted; most likely abrogation of those Spartan edicts forbidding the sojourn of foreign traders etc. on Spartan territory. It would not take long, once such traders had been admitted, for them to undermine the morale of that which had been Sparta, by spreading the money madness, and the promotion of luxury[376] and the creation of unnatural concern with sex, and body needs. Of this situation Polybius, as quoted by Humphrey Michell wrote the following:

  “As long as they aspired to rule over their neighbours or over the Peloponnesians alone, they found the supplies and resources furnished by Laconia itself, adequate as they had all they required ready to hand and quickly returned home whether by land or by sea. But once they began to undertake naval expeditions and to make military campaigns outside the Peloponnese, it was evident that neither their iron currency nor the exchange of their crops for commodities which they lacked, as permitted by the laws of Lycurgus, would suffice for their needs. These enterprises demanded a currency in universal circulation and supplies drawn from abroad, and so they were compelled to beg from the Persians, to impose tribute on the islanders, and exact taxes from all the Greeks. For they recognized that under the legislation of Lycurgus, it was impossible to aspire, I will not say to supremacy in Greece, but to any position of influence.”[377]

  The fact is however, Sparta, while following the Laws of Lycurgus had dominated Greece in more or less degree. As soon as she lost sight of the meaning and purpose of such laws, she became just another petty state; an agency for the subterranean control by international banking through manipulation of the silver and gold bullion basis of her currency; each man, concerned with his own need and greed, aimlessly following the pretty bubble which was the illusion of the banker’s “wealth.” The old order, and that which had given them strength and national morale, was soon destroyed through the promotion of foreigners and the lower castes, and the helots, who merely took the name but not the meaning; also by the stirring up of women towards rejection of their subordinate place in life, and therefore instituting insidious attack on the natural ord
er of the home, out of which is bred the natural order of life itself.

  The later age of Aristotle, with its hard and realistic facts as referred to by some writers, was no more realistic than the earlier age of Xenophon. Rather it was less so. It was the age of the triumph of those international interests whose arming and instigation of the Messenian helots in an earlier age had decided Spartans to accept that structure of law as advocated by Lycurgus, which meant surrender of so much ease of living, rather than become the same as most other Greek states, an alien money manipulators paradise, with, as Theognis of Megara put it: “Tradesmen reigning supreme and the bad lording it over their betters.”

  As the earliest finds of the clay facsimiles of precious metal coinage at Athens, seem to date around the middle of the fifth century B.C.,[378] it may be assumed that one way or the other, either through Spartans permitted to reside at Athens, or through those Spartan mercenaries who travelled the world seeking employment for their skill at arms, the lust for having, one man more than his neighbour, slowly became injected into them. Perhaps Spartan mercenaries, who always required to be paid in those international currencies of silver and gold, returning from abroad via Athens, had been inveigled into depositing their pay in such gold or silver, with the bankers of the Piraeus, with whom it might “grow” from interest; taking home the baked clay coins as evidence of their account, and thus evading contravention of the Spartan laws in respect to possession of gold and silver.

  With the resumption of the rule of international money power in later Spartan history, one of the most outstanding instances of that sickness rotting the fibres of their racial morale, was the tale of those Homoioi who seemed to have fallen in the social scale and were no longer able to take their places in those great messes, the syssitiones, the breeding places of that esprit de corps that was Sparta. Scholars give various reasons for these “disenfranchised” Spartans apparently known as the hypomeiones. The reason for their coming to be is however more than clear. They are the direct result of the power to discriminate, which is the natural outcome in favour of the banker, of that actual god-power he exercises once installed as local money creator.

  More than likely after the Peloponnesian War, and certainly after the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C., the reestablished bankers, following usual policy, would have taken care that certain families, who this caste of men instinctively realized might yet create opposition to them, were dispossessed by one means or another. With that banker created money as being now the necessary qualification for membership to the syssitiones, it was a small matter to make sure that such persons whose disenfranchisement they planned, never had enough.[379] Clearly in such later day, the syssition or mess charges, being assessed in silver money whose issue the bankers controlled, those to whom such alien bankers extended no favours, and therefore ultimately dispossessed through mortgage and foreclosure, not having any longer the wherewithal to pay, no longer belonged. Further, seeing their former helots raised up to place of honour and riches by bankers created wealth, and certainly by the reign of King Cleomenes III (228-219 B.C.),[380] actually sitting in their place in the syssition, little desire to retrieve such a distinctly lost cause remained.

  The Spartan, whether poor or whether rich (in land), in the days of the national currency had been the social equal of any other Spartan; however, as much as anything, the slow decay of the Spartan principle derived from a most outstanding omission in the constitution which was total lack of provision for the redistribution of wealth at certain definite intervals, and the cancellation of debt as in the Hebrew custom of the 49th year.[381]

  Needless to say, even in the days of the national currency, there must have been tendency towards economic inequality resulting from such omission;[382] but the rapid increase of such economic inequality after the return of the bankers, that certainly followed the “Great” Peloponnesian War, additional to furthering the breakup of the caste system that previously had obtained in Sparta in some degree, and wherein each man had known his place in the order of society, also caused a further breakup in the natural order of life of Spartan man as master of home and family.

  In that Spartan society wherein women had always known considerable freedom relative, say, to their Athenian sisters, the control of wealth however designated, passed substantially into the hands of women.[383] Concern for the growth of “Money,” no doubt, just as in this day, replaced care for their men, and concern for themselves as mothers of the race, and concern for the growth of their children.

  “Two fifths of the land and wealth had come into their hands, simply because lack of men left them as heiresses, and this wealth they used extravagantly, maintaining race horses which they exhibited at the Olympic games, costly equipages and fine clothes. They meddled in the affairs of state and brought undue influence upon the conduct of the government.”[384]

  In such society, this stratum of wealthy women have no respect for men as such, too often. While perhaps not classified as hetaerae, who all said and done, had served some useful purpose to men, they clearly lived public lives very much the same as the hetaerae.

  Such women, their heads full of figures and pride, would have served most usefully those alien money powers who ever have sought to further their purposes through corrupt and malleable persons. Women, rarely corrupt in the sense that a man may be corrupt, because of their natural need to shelter behind what seems to be strength, as arrogant Money Power would appear to them, are malleable. Their own Spartan men, either dead, and if not dead, completely confused with the new liberalization programme of the returned bankers, were virtually enslaved; therefore they turned for the protection they needed to what seemed to be the new strength, pudgy and gross though it may have been.

  Money Creators and the Political Control

  In their inception, so-called political parties were other expression of the principle of rule of tyrant or dictator. Though apparently instituted in opposition to each other, such societies, or groups, or even persons, representing such seemingly conflicting political interests, were the very natural outcome of complete usurpation of the essence of sovereign power, the god-force from on high that gave life to a people or state, through conspiracy in respect to interference with the issue of the unit of exchange. Such front organizations are the natural result of the existence in any such state or people, of semi-secret societies in one form or the other, religious or racial, alien by origin or otherwise, arrogating to themselves that privilege which formerly belonged to the god alone, of the creation of exchange units, abstract or otherwise. The only limit to the amount of such private issue, especially if abstract, i.e., as by transferable ledger credit page entry (indicated by the use of assignments or cheques) would be the limit dictated by caution against over-saturation of that money market, national or international being interfered with. Naturally it was usually born in mind that the (silly)goose that laid the golden eggs, must not be altogether destroyed, and care was taken that the real meaning of these activities[385] was deeply concealed for fear that ruler and people might come to realize the true nature of the forces at work in their midst. Each of these groups of persons in the case of so called political parties, or each of these persons in the case of tyrants or dictators, could not but be instrument for private money creative power.

  Such establishment of conflicting groups, each claiming to have the answer towards perfect government, and, in the case of a constitutional monarchy, each swearing allegiance to the monarch, now but paid servant of money power, or in the case of a republic, each swearing allegiance to a president, in reality an elective king raised up from the “People,” was a very efficient device of such private money creative power towards the maintenance of its own hegemony. Herein was venality and corruption enthroned. Such “Politicians” as turned to look a little too closely at the hand that fed them, promptly found their “Perks,”[386] or “Political Rewards,” cut off.

  Should any government begin to be restless, and unwilling to accept the
axiom that it should have no real say in that most serious matter of all, monetary emission, the line of communication from the god in heaven to the people, then it would be but a short time before private money creative power transferred its favours to the so-called opposition. Funds would be made available sufficient to guarantee under normal circumstances their winning the “Election” and their consequent assumption of the government. At the same time funds would be withdrawn from the “Political Party” previously in control of the “government”; which would very likely mean that, in the following confusion, men more “suitable” and “pliable” would force their way to the top; so that even if that particular government was reelected, private money creative power would have no further fears. The price was always continuance of those policies most needed by such private money creative power necessary for its own real purposes, and therefore the continuance of its hegemony.