by Oswyn Murray
This remarkable example of state provision of an economic tool raises important questions about the purpose of the institution and its early uses. Herodotus continues his sentence on the Lydians, ‘and they were the first to be traders’ (the word used is normally derogatory, and means something like petty retailers or middle-men); but early denominations are too large to serve for retail trade. The hypothesis that coinage was connected with large-scale trade is supported by the role of Aegina in its introduction; but in fact, though Aeginetan coins are found widely scattered throughout the east Mediterranean, they are not found in large quantities in any one hoard, except in the neighbouring Aegean islands. This relates to a general phenomenon, that, until the fifty century Athenian coinage, only coins of the area of Macedon and Thrace are used extensively outside the area of minting; the conclusion has been drawn that coinage did not in its origins and early use function to facilitate long-distance trade. But this conclusion does not quite follow: all coinage is at a premium (more highly valued) in its home area, where it is most readily accepted without question; there is therefore a natural tendency for coins exported not to be hoarded, but to remain in circulation and to drain back to the area of origin in the processes of exchange. North Greece is an exception because its economy was so primitive that coinage was irrelevant to it: silver was mined for export and merely stamped for convenience in the process; this explains why so many northern coinages were minted, even by quite small cities. I am not therefore convinced that trade plays as little part in the early uses of coinage as most modern scholars believe; for although it is true that coinage has little advantage over bullion to the foreign recipient, it has considerable accounting advantages for the merchant who deals in it.
It is in fact not so much as a medium of exchange, but as a unit of accounting, that coinage will have functioned originally; and this must be the primary explanation of the interest of cities in minting it. Government became more complicated in the sixth century, with the growth of payments on public works, to officials, soldiers and workmen, and receipts of fines, dues, taxes, state rents and other types of income. The coin, stamped with the official seal of the city, simplifies all such operations by standardizing them: efficient public accounting becomes possible. In particular it has been suggested that coinage was originally devised by the Lydians in order to enable the king to pay out regular sums to large bodies of men in receipt of standard amounts; and its swift acceptance in Greece is due to the fact that these men were Greek mercenary soldiers. The commonest Lydian denomination, found in a relatively large number of examples, has the value of around twelve sheep – perhaps six months’ or a year’s salary. But whatever the reason for the invention of coinage, there is no doubt that its widespread adoption facilitated the movement of goods and services in the international market of the sixth century; for even where coins were not understood, the concept of silver as a medium of exchange was introduced and became accepted. The exchange function of precious metals was sufficiently widely recognized to be embodied in a philosophical analogy of Herakleitos, describing the characteristics of fire, the ultimate constituent of the universe: ‘For fire all things are exchanged, and fire for all things, as for gold goods and for goods gold’. (Frag. 90)
By the mid sixth century there had developed in the Mediterranean a complex international market economy, involving the exchange of a wide variety of goods and services; in contrast to an earlier age, large-scale activity was now at least as important as the exchange of luxury items. Although it cannot of course be quantified, there existed a regular and profitable trade along recognized routes from the Black Sea to the western Mediterranean in raw materials such as metals, timber, foodstuffs (especially corn, but also commodities like dried or salted fish), wine and slaves, as well as in manufactured goods such as pottery or metalwork. Travel was easy, and men with recognized skills like craftsmen, doctors or poets moved freely from area to area. The Mediterranean economy was probably more unified and more advanced than at any period before the conquests of Alexander. Quite apart from its political implications, the disruption of this system by the Persian advance in the period from 546 to 480 was a serious and in some respects a permanent setback.
One important change in the Greek economy occurred during the archaic period. Like almost all Mediterranean and near eastern cultures Greece had always been a slave-owning society; but it does not seem to have been until the sixth century that slaves became important to the economy. The most explicit evidence for the phenomenon (though not the date) comes from the fourth century historian Theopompos of Chios:
The Chians were the first Greeks after the Thessalians and the Spartans to use slaves, but they acquired them in a different way. For the Spartans and the Thessalians clearly constituted their slave class out of the Greeks who had earlier inhabited the land which they now possess, the Spartans taking the land of the Achaeans and the Thessalians that of the Perrhaiboi and the Magnesians; they called those enslaved in the one case helots, in the other penestai. But the Chians acquired barbarian slaves paid for by purchase.
(Theopompos F.G.H. 115 Fragment 122)
Theopompos is clearly right to see the original slave economies in Greece as agrarian and created by conquest; such slaves had varied rights and a sense of national identity, which produced gradations of status ‘between slave and free’; and these are often better regarded as forms of oppression rather than slavery in the formal sense. It is the advent of chattel slavery which creates a strictly economic phenomenon, conforming to laws of supply and demand, with slaves given a fixed value by being bought and sold in the market, and therefore being treated as investment and in terms of their productive capacity, rather than as part of a social system. We must take it on trust that Chios was the first city to possess a significant labour force of this type; though in 494 she had the largest fleet in Ionia (p. 259), and Thucydides remarks at the end of the fifth century that Chios had the largest number of slaves after Sparta (8.40); it so happens that the only slave merchant whose name we know was a Chian – Panionios, dealer in eunuchs in the markets of Sardis and Ephesus, who suffered a fearful vengeance with his family at the hands of one of his victims in 481. It is specifically said that this branch of the trade was for the eastern market, and Herodotus clearly thought it repulsive (8.105).
The sixth century was the first period when trade routes in the Greek world were sufficiently organized, and the Greeks had the wealth and military power to create slaves in large numbers; to judge from later evidence they will have been drawn especially from northern areas, Thrace, Illyria and Scythia, and it looks as if the collection and supply was usually in the hands of native chieftains. It is probable that the number of slaves was at least as great in the more prosperous cities (such as Corinth, Aegina, Miletus – though not Athens) as it was in classical Greece. Two figures survive which probably refer to the late archaic period: Aristotle said that Aegina possessed 470,000 slaves, and another source attributes 460,000 to Corinth. But these figures (and the other figures given in this notorious passage of Athenaeus 6.272) are frankly incredible, and in the case of Aegina physically impossible. The problem is insoluble; such conclusions as can be drawn for the classical period suggest that the number of slaves in certain advanced cities may at least have equalled the number of adult citizens.
One aspect of the prosperity of archaic society is the amount of surplus skills, labour and wealth available for public works. The sixth century was the great age of temple building: it is not possible to compile a full list, but a recent count claims well over 80 certain examples. Of course such activity presupposes a religious motivation, but there is no sign that the sixth century was any more religious than earlier or later ages; most of the factors which contributed to this sudden outburst of temple building are secular.
The movement is one of experiment and competition. The temple of Artemis at Corcyra, erected about 580, was the first stone temple in Greece; by the middle of the century temples of con
siderable size were being erected: the temple of Apollo at Corinth (about 540), of limestone faced with stucco, was 50'×160' and its columns were monoliths 21' high; the temple of Apollo at Syracuse has much the same dimensions (55'×150'); the earliest temple at Paestum in south Italy (80'×178') is considerably larger. The first really large temple was that of Artemis at Ephesus, built in the middle of the century: it had already reached the limits of Greek building techniques, with dimensions of 171'×358'; at the end of the century, temple G at Selinus in Sicily, one of the largest Greek temples ever built, measured 164'×361', with columns 50' high and roof beams covering a single span of 38'. In this later period there are clear signs of overreaching, excessive display and inability to finish projects. The temple of Olympian Zeus at Akragas, roughly the same size as that at Selinus, took a century to finish; the temple of Zeus at Athens, begun by the Peisistratidai, was abandoned after their expulsion, and only finished by the emperor Hadrian six hundred years later; the (fourth) temple of Hera at Samos, begun by the tyrant Polykrates, was never finished. Transport of the stone was one of the major costs, and stone was usually therefore local: the western temples were all of local stone; in Greece itself the first temple to be faced in marble quarried in the islands was that at Delphi, and the first all marble structure was the little Athenian treasury at Delphi of about 490.
There are various factors involved. For the first time the wealth and skills for such large-scale enterprises became available; the absence of earlier buildings was brought home by the new example of Egypt. It was the tyrants who established state patronage of the arts in Greece: with them the competitive life style of the aristocracy was linked to the wealth of cities. Other aristocrats joined in, and so did non-tyrannical governments. The new importance of international festivals and shrines created an inflow of wealth and dedications from Greek cities and from oriental kings at sanctuaries such as Delphi, Olympia, Delos, Dodona and Branchidae.
Such works were an expression of tyrannical magnificence and of civic consciousness as much as of religious sentiment; but religious shrines benefited as well as cities. Delphi had risen to wealth and influence on the success of western colonization; by the end of the seventh century the shrine was so important that it could no longer be permitted to be partisan. About 591, in an obscure war known as the first Sacred War, three aggrieved groups, Thessalians, Athens under an Alkmeonid general Megakles, and Kleisthenes of Sicyon, ‘liberated’ the shrine and placed it under the protection of a religious league known as the Amphiktyones, ‘those who lived around’.
The oracle of course favoured those who could dedicate magnificent offerings, and was therefore an early supporter of tyrants and, by extension, of their followers the hoplites. When tyrannies fell, it was easy to emphasize the latter aspect, for instance to remove the name of the Kypselids from the treasury which they had built; this was the period of the famous Delphic rules, ‘nothing in excess’ and ‘know yourself’. The approval of Delphi became essential to any cause, from colonization to conquest or political reform.
Delphi has often been seen by modern historians as a source of rational advice or of political bias; that is to misunderstand the function of an oracle. The priests reduced to poetry the half-intelligible ravings of the inspired Pythia, a woman believed (as in many primitive societies) to have the gift of prophecy, ‘speaking the will of the god’; Herakleitos, who modelled his own style of utterance on the oracular tradition, says ‘the Sibylla with frenzied mouth speaking words without smile or charm or sweet savour reaches a thousand years with her voice through the god’ (Frag. 92). The answers of the oracle were expected to be difficult to understand or ambiguous: ‘the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign’ (Frag. 93). If, as sometimes happened, the questioner was misled by the answer, that reflected on his wisdom and not on the god. In rational terms the role of the oracle was to give the reassurance of divine blessing to the projects of man, in a world where belief was essential to action. There could be no mistakes, only misunderstandings; but even so the god would often look after his own. When Croesus king of Lydia received the reply ‘if he marches against the Persians he will destroy a great empire’ (Herodotus 1.53), he found that the empire was his own; but Apollo did not forget the many royal gifts of gold and silver that Croesus had lavished on his shrine: he created a myth in which the god himself had quenched the funeral pyre on which Croesus was to be burned alive, and established him as the honoured adviser of his enemy Cyrus.
Soon after the middle of the sixth century, the temple of Apollo was destroyed by fire, and contributions came from all over Greece. The contract for the rebuilding was finally taken over by the Alkmeonidai, in exile from Athens, who proceeded to complete it to a higher specification than required, in particular giving it a front of Parian marble instead of ordinary stone. It seems to have been generally recognized that this action lay behind the advice of the oracle to the Spartans to expel the Peisistratids from Athens: direct bribery of the priestess was even alleged (Herodotus s.62ff).
The story reveals how the very success of Delphi led to her decline: her assistance became too important, and caused men to commit acts which discredited the human agents of the god. About 490 King Kleomenes of Sparta bribed the priestess to declare his fellow King Demaratos illegitimate; Demaratos was deposed. When the facts were discovered, the priestess was deprived of her office and another priest was exiled; Kleomenes fled, and his horrifying death was attributed to his sacrilege (Herodotus 6.61ff). But no one recalled Demaratos – the god had spoken.
The stakes had become too high; caution was necessary. Delphi was wrong about Croesus’ power to defeat Persia; thereafter she habitually counselled submission at a time when Greeks wanted to be encouraged to resist. It was perhaps this consistent betrayal of Greece which caused contemporary politicians to become more rationalist, and to manipulate the oracle to their own ends. By the close of the archaic period she had lost much of her political power, though not her religious influence over individuals. And she still remained the repository of that tithe of booty which was the guarantee of divine acquiescence in military success; she became in Burckhardt’s words, ‘the monumental museum of Greek hatred for Greeks, of mutually inflicted suffering immortalized in the loftiest works of art’.
XIV
The Coming of the Persians
THE IONIAN GREEKS learned early the dangers of their continental position. The Cimmerians had inhabited the northern shores of the Black Sea from the Crimea to the Caucasus; just before 700, under pressure from the advancing Scythians, they were forced to migrate across the Caucasus into Anatolia, leaving only a small kingdom to survive in the Crimea itself. They were attacked and held off by the armies of Urartu; but by 675 they had overthrown the kingdom of Phrygia under King Midas of the golden touch in Greek tradition. Assyrian records show them causing continual trouble from the mid seventh century. The growth of the kingdom of Lydia under Gyges from about 678 also attracted the attention of the Cimmerians; in 652 Gyges was killed in battle and his capital Sardis was captured. Beyond lay the Greek cities of the coast; these had already felt the presence of Lydia when Gyges had massacred by treachery the horsemen of Colophon; but now they were faced with a nomadic migration. One of the most powerful cities, Magnesia on the Maeander, was destroyed completely; her rival Ephesus survived, and it was this war which produced the earliest extant war poet, Kallinos. Then the gods saved Ionia: Ephesian Artemis sent a plague; the terrified Cimmerians withdrew to Cilicia taking the plague with them, and ceased to be dangerous.
Pressure continued: the re-established Lydian kingdom became active especially under Alyattes (617–560). The territory of Miletus was ravaged for eleven years, until her tyrant Thrasyboulos came to terms about 610; the agreement was so favourable that its aim must have been to separate the most powerful city of Ionia from the rest. These were treated differently: Colophon and Smyrna were captured and sacked:
Pride destroyed Magn
esia and Colophon
and Smyrna, Kyrnos, and it will utterly destroy you too.
(Theognis 1103–4)
By now the Lydians had perfected the siege mound and the undermining techniques of the Assyrians against walled cities; and Croesus (560–546) had little difficulty in capturing first Ephesus, and then the other cities of the coast. Despite the earlier brutality of the Lydian conquest, by its end the Greeks had come to terms with the new masters. The Lydian kings themselves became deeply Hellenized: Gyges was said to have dedicated at Delphi, Alyattes certainly did, and the presents of Croesus both there and at other shrines were the most magnificent the Greek world had seen. The American excavations at Sardis have revealed quantities of Greek pottery; and there is good reason to believe that the mutual benefits of trade and mercenary service exercised a reciprocal influence on both sides even deeper than that resulting from the Egyptian connection.