Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.

• Explores the nature of money by examining the causes and consequences of the development of money in the first ever monetised society • Offers a new explanation for the invention of ‘philosophy’ by the Greeks of sixth-century BC Ionia • Introduces a new historical perspective on the isolated individual at the centre of Athenian tragedy

1. Introduction; Part I. The Genesis of Coined Money: 2. Homeric transactions; 3. Sacrifice and distribution; 4. Greece and the ancient near East; 5. Greek money; 6. The preconditions of coinage; 7. The earliest coins; 8. The features of money; Part II. The Making of Metaphysics: 9. Did politics produce philosophy?; 10. Anaximander and Xenophanes; 11. The many and the one; 12. Heraclitus and Parmenides; 13. Pythagoreanism and Protagoras; 14. Individualisation; 15. Appendix: was money used in the early near East?